12:05AM
The Chinese are coming! The Chinese are coming!
Tuesday, June 29, 2010 at 12:05AM 
Maddeningly inscrutable people! What could they possibly be thinking?
Old "Blueprint" citation said 100m Chinese tourists by 2020. Chart in this FT piece showed 50m by 2010, so right on target.
The Chinese have something to learn on touring: their tendency, just like when they emigrate, is to stay highly enclaved (one Balinese guide: "The problem we have is they come on package tours with their own guides, stay in their own hotels, and east in their own restaurants.")
Training-wheels, perhaps, for now, but getting them to branch out will be natural enough over time: they'll learn more foreign languages, and more of us will learn Chinese.
It is a common theme of great science fiction that someday, we'll all speak some Mandarin.
Reader Comments (2)
I think the next 'lingua franca' ..if its going to steer away from English/Mndarin ...will have to be based on some amazing Human interface gadget that just blows plain vanilla vocalizations off the page.
Some sort of Net based language ..like the internet...but that crosses the last metre, and seamlessly talks , across the net , with machines and humans of any linguistic caste.
A language bourne from isolation ( Mandarin) can't be the future.
An iphone developer somewhere in India is probably developing it right now without any idea of what he/she are doing.
"Ugly Chinese" tourist stereotype. Especially the older Chinese tourists...