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'Return to the right track' - Taiwan tells China to 'face reality' and respect election results (www.france24.com)

submitted 10 months ago by tardigrada@beehaw.org to c/news@beehaw.org

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Voters spurned Beijing's repeated calls not to vote for Lai, delivering a comfortable victory for a man China's ruling Communist Party sees as a dangerous separatist.

Lai Ching-te of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) vowed to defend the island from China's "intimidation" and on Sunday the island's foreign ministry told Beijing to accept the result.

"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs calls on the Beijing authorities to respect the election results, face reality and give up suppressing Taiwan in order for positive cross-strait interactions to return to the right track," it said in a statement.

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[–] vexikron@lemmy.zip 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I actually had a tankie tell me that Chinese is not actually a bunch of what us Americans would actually more properly call different languages altogether, when I told a story about a friend I knew from Hong Kong, speaking Cantonese and a little a English, had to actually go through me (Cantonese, English, capable of translating Cantonese to Vietnamese, but not Mandarin, because my phone waa bugging out), and a nearby Vietnamese shopkeep (Vietnamese, some Mandarin) to communicate to someone who only spoke Mandarin, and effectively nearly no English.

We did this comical routine of my friend typing Cantonese into my phone, translating it to Vietnamese, then to Mandarin via the shopkeep, then to the Mandarin speaking woman, then all the way back the other way, for about 20 minutes, to have a conversation that probably could otherwise have been had in 3 minutes.

There are in fact many regional /dialects/ of Chinese (beyond just Cantonese) that are actually so different that it is very common that one who can only speak one /dialect/ cannot actually communicate nearly at all with someone who knows only a different /dialect/.

I am putting /'s around dialect because actually a growing number of translators who know one or many of these /dialects/, as well as English, think it is more accurate to describe them as being different languages to those who speak English.

Anyway, yeah, had a tankie chew me out for pointing this out and call me a 'gusano', which is incredible because this is an insult popularized by Castro against counter revolutionaries.

I am an anarchist, and gusano is Spanish for maggot or worm.

It was truly a ludicrous exchange.