Calling a country a sick man has no relation to the sickness of their people but the trouble of their government. The Ottoman Empire was the sick man of Europe/Middle East referring to their collapsing empire. China might be the sick man of Asia if rumours of their massively slowing economy is true.
> Sick Man of Asia though was mainly referring to the opioid addicted Chinese population at that time.
Was it? I thought that it mainly referred to the weakness and dysfunction of the Imperial Chinese government, which was a major contributing factor to that.
Well is there an official source to decide on this matter? However, culturally I'm pretty sure my answer is what the majority of Chinese think. If you happen to have Chinese friends you can ask them as an informal poll.
> Well is there an official source to decide on this matter? However, culturally I'm pretty sure my answer is what the majority of Chinese think. If you happen to have Chinese friends you can ask them as an informal poll.
The Wikipedia article for the term several examples of the term being used to refer to other Asian countries without opium addiction problems, which wouldn't make any sense if the term was generally thought to refer to the "opioid addicted Chinese population at that time."
> But like the "sick man of Europe" term, it has also been used to refer to other Asian countries in the 21st century.
> For example, in an article entitled "The Sick Man of Asia" Michael Auslin refers to Japan, not China (writing in "Foreign Affairs", 3 April 2009).
> And in a 9 March 2018 article in "Consult-Myanmar" entitled "Myanmar No Longer the "sick man" of ASEAN - the Honour Goes To..." both Myanmar and Thailand are called the "sick man of ASEAN".
> In another example, in 2014 at the Euromoney Philippines Investment Forum 2014, President Benigno Aquino III of the Philippines publicly defended his country from being labelled as the new "sick man of Asia", citing a Japan External Trade Organization survey that showed "the Philippines as the second most profitable among ASEAN-5 countries, next to Thailand."[3] Reasons for the perceptions Aquino was refuting include its unequal prosperity and serious poverty, since from 2000 to 2006 its nominal income grew by 37% while its Gini coefficient only fell by 5%.[4] Another cause for the "Sick Man" label includes Filipino political corruption scandals such as the Priority Development Assistance Fund scam.
I'm pretty sure you're right when you refer to how Chinese people understand the term, but part of the problem is that I think that understanding is very specific to the Chinese cultural context.
The same wiki source in Chinese language though gives a completely different picture and with much more information and sources on how the terms is used in the last hundred year in Chinese language.
In the end it doesn't matter which entity did the speaker of this term intend to refer to. The recipients have their own judgement due to the culture they raised from.
> In the end it doesn't matter which entity did the speaker of this term intend to refer to. The recipients have their own judgement due to the culture they raised from.
But it does matter. Does an utterance mean what the speaker intended it to mean, or what the listener understood it to mean? The answer is both.
Say I speak a foreign language with very important message to an audience that doesn't understand this language at all. Nobody in the audience understood the message after I spoke. Does what I said matter? I would consider the communication has failed completely.
edit: But I guess WSJ wasn't speaking to Chinese. Anyway I can only see the misunderstanding deepens and deepens between U.S. and China. Language is one of the contributing factor. Western media is not incentivized to report truth but stories with most clicks. And it's hard for regular westerners to verify those stories without understanding Mandarin or talk to Chinese.
> For context, "sick man of Asia" is up there with the n-word and drawing pictures of Mohammad in terms of its ability to offend a group of people.
And it's one of those things that requires a lot of culture-specific sensitivity. The phrase really pushes Chinese buttons, but most of the world is not similarly sensitive to it.
Similarly, blackface is highly offensive in the US, but a skit in on one of China's state-run TV networks featured it a few years ago in it's very prominent New Year's gala program:
> For context, "sick man of Asia" is up there with the n-word and drawing pictures of Mohammad in terms of its ability to offend a group of people.
Yikes I'm sorry, no that's simply not true at all. When you can't even type the other word out you are referring to it's not in the same realm of conversation. What is this fascination of trying to control people's speech?
And I'm sorry, people should be able to draw Mohammad as they please. Someone's religion should have no bearing on someone's freedom of expression. Religion has become a cancer to our society.
