114-571: Southwestern China ( Chinese : 西南 ; pinyin : Xīnán ) is a region in the People's Republic of China . It consists of five provincial administrative regions, namely Chongqing , Sichuan , Guizhou , Yunnan , and Xizang . Southwestern China is a rugged and mountainous region, transitioning between the Tibetan Plateau to the west and the Chinese coastal hills (东南丘陵) and plains to
228-469: A nucleus that has a vowel (which can be a monophthong , diphthong , or even a triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an onset (a single consonant , or consonant + glide ; a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone . There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where
342-457: A subject–verb–object word order , and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words , another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction , pronoun dropping , and
456-455: A Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian , a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions and
570-599: A Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese and Shanghainese ; if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority of Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (also called 台語 ; 'Taiwanese' ), Hakka , or an Austronesian language . A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and other languages of Taiwan in everyday speech. In part due to traditional cultural ties with Guangdong , Cantonese
684-462: A central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity. The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is 方言 ; fāngyán ; 'regional speech', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called 地点方言 ; 地點方言 ; dìdiǎn fāngyán ; 'local speech'. Because of
798-563: A compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua , based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin. Standard Chinese is an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore , and one of
912-714: A corresponding increase in the number of homophones . As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí in Standard Chinese: In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi . As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only
1026-579: A few major forms of state-owned enterprises in China today: The socialist market economy consists of a wide range of state-owned enterprises (SOE) that represent one form of public ownership. As of the end of 2019, China's SOEs represented 4.5% of the global economy. State-owned enterprises accounted for over 60% of China's market capitalization in 2019 and generated 40% of China's GDP of US$ 15.97 trillion (101.36 trillion yuan) in 2020, with domestic and foreign private businesses and investment accounting for
1140-412: A form of state capitalism, particularly after the industrial reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, noting that while the Chinese economy maintains a large state sector, the state-owned enterprises operate like private-sector firms and retain all profits without remitting them to the government to benefit the entire population. This model brings into question the rationale for widespread public ownership as well as
1254-458: A form of workplace democracy, with 80% of registered companies in China having them, including some private sector companies. Public ownership in the socialist market economy consists of state-owned assets, collectively owned enterprises and the publicly owned shares of mixed enterprises. These various forms of public ownership play a dominant role in the socialist market economy alongside substantial private and foreign enterprises. There are
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#17327646402061368-471: A full-blown capitalist economic system. In the past, although many enterprises were nominally publicly owned, the profits were retained by the enterprises and used to pay managers excessively high salaries rather than being distributed amongst the population. In 2020, the "commanding role" of the CCP over SOEs was cemented in law and SOEs have been required to have Staff and Worker Representative Congresses (SWRCs),
1482-576: A millennium. The Four Commanderies of Han were established in northern Korea in the 1st century BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as
1596-438: A reorientation to the southwest as its lagging development became increasingly seen as an impediment to growth. China's southwest development initiatives reflect an awareness that economic engagement is the most cost-effective way to decrease political unrest and remedy underdevelopment along this frontier. The diverse areas of Southwestern China carry strong regional identities and have been historically considered more rural than
1710-542: A secure reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty . As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate
1824-508: A similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin
1938-678: A single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family . Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese , of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min ), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese ), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese ). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with
2052-631: A unified standard. The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones dated to c. 1250 BCE , during the Late Shang . The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts dating to the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching . Scholars have attempted to reconstruct
2166-575: A variety of Yue from a small coastal area around Taishan, Guangdong . In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away from Guangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than
2280-602: Is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on the Pearl River , whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys. In parts of Fujian , the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible. Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials: Proportions of first-language speakers The classification of Li Rong , which
2394-709: Is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China , as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora . Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language . Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of
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#17327646402062508-416: Is a majority state-owned enterprise that was forced to rely on equity markets whereas its employee-owned private sector competitor Huawei is viewed as a "national champion" and therefore received major state funding from state banks. Like their state-owned counterparts POEs are expected to follow state policies and are subject to CCP control, suggesting that the distinction between public and private ownership
2622-460: Is an ongoing process in China. As of 2017, the CCP has rejected the Singapore model of Temasek -style state investment companies for China's SOEs, where SOEs operate solely to maximize profits on a commercial basis. In particular, China maintains that centrally owned SOEs also pursue national and industrial policy objectives. As a result of recent reforms to increase profitability and unload debt,
2736-490: Is called either 华语 ; 華語 ; Huáyǔ or 汉语 ; 漢語 ; Hànyǔ ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example,
2850-465: Is limited to state-owned enterprises operating in strategic sectors, including research, education and infrastructure development plans. Compulsory planning outlines targeted outcomes and the supply of raw materials and financial resources needed. Contractual planning sets objectives and the overall means of achieving these goals and then negotiates with enterprises and local governments to establish detailed objectives and how resources are to be allocated to
2964-439: Is not a meaningful distinction to make for understanding China's economic model. As of 2015, state control and state-directed development (in both public and private sectors) is the overriding feature of the Chinese economic system that plays a more substantial role than the public ownership of assets. While the private sector has been accorded a role in the socialist market economy and has greatly increased in size and scope since
3078-603: Is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a morpheme , the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free , such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of
3192-445: Is only about an eighth as many as English. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate
3306-415: Is presented by the CCP as an early stage in the development of socialism (this stage is variously called the "primary" or "preliminary" stage of socialism), where public ownership coexists alongside a diverse range of non-public forms of ownership. In the CCP's view, China is not a capitalist country because despite the co-existence of private capitalists and entrepreneurs with public and collective enterprise,
3420-668: Is specifically meant. However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石 ; shí alone, and not 石头 ; 石頭 ; shítou , appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as 石膏 ; shígāo ; 'plaster', 石灰 ; shíhuī ; 'lime', 石窟 ; shíkū ; 'grotto', 石英 ; 'quartz', and 石油 ; shíyóu ; 'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes ( 字 ; zì ) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词 ; 詞 ; cí , which more closely resembles
3534-509: Is the economic system and model of economic development employed in the People's Republic of China . The system is a market economy with the predominance of public ownership and state-owned enterprises . The term "socialist market economy" was introduced by Jiang Zemin during the 14th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1992 to describe the goal of China's economic reforms . Originating in
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3648-489: Is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms, and names of political figures, businesses, and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD), based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary,
3762-501: Is used as an everyday language in Hong Kong and Macau . The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form. Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because
3876-500: Is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence. Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for
3990-552: Is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect on Hainan , Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan , and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong . Standard Chinese is the standard language of China (where it is called 普通话 ; pǔtōnghuà ) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it
4104-428: Is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics. The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia : as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while
4218-753: The Qieyun rime dictionary (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese , borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system
4332-792: The Chinese Civil War , parts of the Nationalist army retreated south and crossed the border into Burma as the People's Liberation Army entered Yunnan. The United States supported these Nationalist forces because the United States hoped they would harass the People's Republic of China from the southwest, thereby diverting Chinese resources from the Korean War . The Burmese government protested and international pressure increased. Beginning in 1953, several rounds of withdrawals of
4446-467: The DePaul University in 2006 reports that the Chinese economic system does not constitute a form of socialism when socialism is defined as a planned economy where production for use has replaced production for profit as the driving force behind economic activity, or when socialism is defined as a system where the working class is the dominant class which controls the surplus value produced by
4560-533: The Korean , Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean. Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in
4674-472: The Leninist model of centralized political control and a one-party state . Jiang Zemin originally introduced the term "socialist market economy" in 1992. He had coined the idea so that China could learn the lessons from capitalist countries without needing to discuss if the reforms are "socialist" or "capitalist." Jiang had asked Deng Xiaoping if he had approved of the term, which he did. The Đổi Mới in
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4788-710: The May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin ) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. The 1324 Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. Together with
4902-595: The National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it 普通话 ; 普通話 ; pǔtōnghuà ; 'common speech'. The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan. In Hong Kong and Macau , Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and
5016-545: The Sino-Soviet split when Soviet soldiers on the border of Mongolia and China threatened to close the Gansu corridor , which would have left Tibet as the only reliable Chinese route to Xinjiang . During the reform and opening up era, China began to look more seriously towards integrating its southwest regions. China's increased focus on trade-led development and its transition to a socialist market economy helped trigger
5130-540: The Socialist Republic of Vietnam later adopted the concept. Following its implementation, this economic system has supplemented the command economy in the People's Republic of China, with high growth-rates in GDP during the past decades having been attributed to it. Within this model, privately owned enterprises have become a major component of the economic system alongside the central state-owned enterprises and
5244-600: The Soviet Union , adapted to the cohabitation with a globalized capitalist system. In the late 1970s, then- paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and the CCP leadership rejected the prior Maoist emphasis on culture and political agency as the driving forces behind economic progress and started to place a greater emphasis on advancing the material productive forces as the fundamental and necessary prerequisite for building an advanced socialist society. The adoption of market reforms
5358-478: The oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c. 1250 BCE . The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period , Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun , a rime dictionary , recorded
5472-596: The phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at
5586-404: The " iron rice bowl " system of job security in the late 1990s. During Deng's 1992 Southern Tour , Deng promoted the ideological basis for the socialist market economy, stating his view that "[p]lanned economy does not equal socialism and market economy does not equal capitalism. Socialism can have market mechanisms as well, and government planning and market are both economic means." In 1993,
5700-673: The 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian , records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai , a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases, and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific, and technical terms. The 2016 edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian , an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words. Socialist market economy The socialist market economy ( SME )
5814-558: The 1990s, the private sector does not dominate the Chinese economy . The exact size of the private sector is difficult to determine in part because private enterprises may have a minority of their stock owned by state entities and because of different classification standards used for classifying enterprises. For example, in the first quarter of 2016 the National Bureau of Statistics of China reported fixed investment by private firms at 35%, and by wholly state-owned SOEs at 27%, with
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#17327646402065928-438: The 1990s. SOEs are much larger in size and fewer in number, with central government-owned SOEs clustered in "strategic sectors" including banking, finance, mining, energy, transportation, telecommunications and public utilities. By comparison, provincial and municipal level SOEs number in the thousands and are involved in almost every industry including information technology and automobiles design and production. State sector reform
6042-456: The 1994 Company Law. Additionally, the boundary between public and private enterprises have blurred in China as many publicly listed firms are under mixed ownership by various state and non-state entities. Additionally, private sector firms that operate in industries targeted for growth often receive favorable loans and preferential government treatment while SOEs in non-strategic sectors might be exempt from subsidies. As an example, ZTE Corporation
6156-425: The 33% national corporate tax rate) to attract foreign investment. Julan Du and Chenggang Xu analyzed the Chinese model in a 2005 paper to assess whether it represents a type of market socialism or capitalism. They concluded that China's contemporary economic system represents a form of capitalism rather than market socialism because: (1) financial markets exist which permit private share ownership—a feature absent in
6270-705: The 8th and 9th centuries CE and the Dali Kingdom in 10th and 11th centuries CE. The region was largely pacified and incorporated into the Ming domain. In the 13th century CE, the Yuan dynasty expanded its frontiers to include the Tibet plateau , which now defines China's current southwest frontier. In the 18th century CE, control of the Tibet Plateau area was important in the Great Game confrontations between
6384-501: The CCP issued its "Decision on Issues Related to the Establishment of a Socialist Market Economy System." In the wave of reform thereafter, one goal was to separate SOE management from government and to empower a select group of SOEs with special property rights and autonomy. In 1994, China devalued the renminbi by 33 percent as part of socialist market economy reforms. Some scholars have described China's economic system as
6498-415: The Chinese economic reforms initiated in 1978 that integrated China into the global market economy , the socialist market economy represents a preliminary or "primary stage" of developing socialism . Some commentators describe the system as a form of " state capitalism ", while others describe it as an original evolution of Marxism , in line with Marxism–Leninism similar to the " New Economic Policy " of
6612-428: The Chinese economic system is based on commodity production, has a role for private capital and disempowers the working class, it represents a capitalist economy. Classical Marxists believe a socialist commodity economy (or a socialist market economy) is contradictory. Other socialists believe the Chinese have embraced many elements of market capitalism, specifically commodity production and privatization, resulting in
6726-472: The Chongqing experience with municipal state-owned enterprises enabling high social expenditure alongside low taxes and extremely high rates of growth as validation of the socialist market economy model. The Chongqing model used state enterprise profits to fund public services (including housing), providing the main source of public finance and enabling Chongqing to lower its corporate tax rate (15% compared to
6840-565: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet . English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien 茶 ( tê ), dim sum from Cantonese 點心 ( dim2 sam1 ), and kumquat from Cantonese 金橘 ( gam1 gwat1 ). The sinologist Jerry Norman has estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though
6954-612: The Nationalist forces and their families were carried out. In 1960, joint military action by China and Burma expelled the remaining Nationalist forces from Burma, although some went on to settle in the Burma-Thailand borderlands . Western strategies to contain China in the 20th century CE included intervention in the Tibet plateau until almost the mid-1970s. Tibet became an increased area of concern in China's southwest after
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#17327646402067068-576: The Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges and some SOEs adopted mixed ownership structures where the central government and various other state entities—including state banks, other SOEs, provincial and local governments—own varying degrees of the firm's listed shares alongside foreign and private shareholders. The result has been a highly diffuse form of public ownership where state-owned enterprises are owned by various different government entities, agencies and other state-owned enterprises. This makes gauging
7182-483: The Shenzhen municipal government has proposed using their state-owned enterprises to finance a social dividend-type of system for its residents. Chinese economist Cui Zhiyuan argues that James Meade's model of liberal socialism is similar to China's socialist market economy and can be used to make sense of the model. Meade's model of market socialism involved public ownership of firms with independent management - with
7296-570: The State Planning Commission being reformed into the National Development and Reform Commission in 2003. Indicative planning and industrial policies have substituted material balance planning and play a substantial role in guiding the market economy for both the state and private sectors. The planning system consists of three layers, with each layer using a different planning mechanism. Compulsory planning
7410-495: The aim of delegating more authority to SOE managers. SOEs at all levels shifted their primary focus to profitability and shed their social welfare function of providing social services and benefits to their workers in what was known as the " Iron Rice Bowl " system. The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) was formed in 2003 to oversee the management of the large centrally owned state enterprises. Modern SOEs are operationally very different from those in
7524-471: The applicability of the descriptor "socialist", and has led to concern and debate regarding the distribution of state profits. Others have labeled it " party-state capitalism ." Starting in 2017 as part of its state-owned enterprise reform program, the central government began to encourage state-owned enterprises to start paying dividends to the government. Other reforms have transferred state-owned assets to social-security funds to help finance pensions, and
7638-518: The bulk of the remainder belonging to non-wholly state funded limited liability corporations. The 1993 CCP decision overhauled the organization of China's planning apparatus. Planning was not abolished, but instead reframed as one of three key mechanisms of macro-economic control, along with fiscal policy and monetary policy. Chinese administrators were instructed to plan for markets and to absorb major market trends (both domestically and internationally) into multi-year government programs. In 2003,
7752-569: The chairman of the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council , China's socialist economic system is underpinned by the foundational role of public enterprise: Public ownership, as the foundation of the socialist economic system, is a basic force of the state to guide and promote economic and social development and a major guarantee for realising the fundamental interests and
7866-506: The collective/township village enterprises. The transition to a socialist market economy began in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping introduced his program of socialism with Chinese characteristics . Initial reforms in decollectivizing agriculture and opening the economy to foreign investment in the late 1970s and early 1980s later led to large-scale radical reforms, including corporatization of the state sector, partial privatization of some enterprises, liberalization of trade and prices and dismantling of
7980-494: The common prosperity of the majority of the people… The state owned economy has taken a dominant place in major trades that have a close bearing on the country's economic lifeline and key areas, and has propped-up, guided and brought along the development of the entire socio-economy. The influence and control capacity of SOEs have further increased. State owned economy has played an irreplaceable role in China's socialist modernisation drive. Other Marxist analyses point out that because
8094-555: The core provinces of Sichuan, Chongqing, Yunnan, and Guizhou, in addition to the Tibet Autonomous Region . Portions of Southwestern China, including the land that is modern day Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan, were incorporated into China in 230 BCE by Qin dynasty emperor Shi Huangdi . Independent states would continue to exert influence within the region, with notable examples being the Nanzhao Kingdom in
8208-399: The different spoken dialects varies, but in general, there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more polysyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which
8322-484: The difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect , lect , vernacular , regional , and variety . Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the morphology and also to the characters of the writing system, and phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules. The structure of each syllable consists of
8436-815: The east. Key geographic features in the region include the Hengduan Mountains in the west, the Sichuan Basin in the northeast, and the karstic Yungui Plateau in the east. The majority of the region is drained by the Yangtze River , which forms the Three Gorges in the northeast of the region. The narrowest concept of Southwestern China consists of Sichuan , Chongqing , Yunnan , and Guizhou , while wider definitions often include Guangxi and western portions of Hunan . The official government definition of Southwestern China includes
8550-910: The economic base and the super-structure, the productive forces…and the economic base generally play a principal and decisive role. Whoever denies this is not a materialist. — Deng Xiaoping , "On the General Program of Work for the Whole Party and the Whole Nation" (1975) After the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) and the ousting of the Gang of Four from power in 1976, Deng Xiaoping (paramount leader from 1978 to 1989) refocused China's efforts on economic growth and on finding an economic system compatible with China's specific conditions. However, in doing so he remained committed to
8664-501: The economic literature on market socialism; and (2) state profits are retained by enterprises rather than being distributed among the population in a social dividend or similar scheme, which are central features in most models of market socialism. Du and Xu concluded that China is not a market socialist economy, but an unstable form of capitalism. Another analysis carried out by the Global Studies Association at
8778-475: The economy. The Chinese economy also does not constitute socialism in the sense of widespread self-management or workplace democracy . The study concluded that as of 2006 capitalism is not the dominant mode of organization either and China instead has a partially pre-capitalist agrarian system with almost 50% of its population engaged in agricultural work. In 2015 Curtis J. Milhaupt and Wentong Zheng classified China's economic system as state capitalism because
8892-576: The end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection , and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui , Tang , and Song dynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by
9006-413: The first one, 十 , normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by the addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable
9120-491: The form of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections —it possesses no tenses , no voices , no grammatical number , and only a few articles . They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood . In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as 了 ; le ; ' PFV ', 还 ; 還 ; hái ; 'still', and 已经 ; 已經 ; yǐjīng ; 'already'. Chinese has
9234-403: The former being required to distribute a higher proportion of their profits as dividends. Dividend payments are set to rise from 5–15% to 30% by 2020. Privately owned enterprises (POEs) are recognized as one of the components of the socialist market economy alongside state, collective and individually owned enterprises. The private sector has played an increasingly large role since the adoption of
9348-565: The government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas . Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family , together with Burmese , Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif . Although
9462-411: The government reported the profits of central government-owned SOEs rose by 15.2% in 2017. Despite becoming increasingly profitable, SOEs in China have not paid dividends to the state, causing some analysts question the rationale for public ownership in the first place. As part of SASAC's ongoing reforms, SOEs will now be encouraged and required to pay a higher portion of their profits as dividends to
9576-516: The imperial powers of Russia, Britain, and China. After the warlord governments of China's Republican era replaced the Qing dynasty , government policy towards the southwest largely became one of inaction. The Second Sino-Japanese War prompted the Nationalist government to focus increasingly on state-building tasks in the southwest. The city of Chongqing served as the capital of Chinese resistance to imperial Japanese expansion. After their defeat in
9690-436: The incorrect assumption that "market economy" is the core idea, a more appropriate translation would be "market economy within the Chinese socialist system." In Marquis and Qiao's view, this alternative translation better reflects the subordination of "market" to "socialist system." Marxism holds that, within the contradictions between the productive forces and relations of production, between practice and theory, and between
9804-586: The language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into
9918-528: The late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji , and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters called hanja is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses
10032-568: The market as an integral part of socialism whereas proponents of the socialist market economy view markets as a temporary phase in development of a fully planned economy. Cui Zhiyuan traces the theoretical foundations of the socialist market economy to James Meade 's model of liberal socialism in which the state acts as a residual claimant on the profits generated by state-owned enterprises that are operated independent of government management. Writing for English-language readers, academics Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao state that to avoid
10146-455: The more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabic words , especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonetic erosion : sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including
10260-401: The more developed eastern regions of China. Rapid development since the late 1970s has helped transform many parts of the region with modern advancements. In the early 21st century, Southwestern China contained 50% of the country's ethnic minority population which, in turn, formed 37% of the region's population. Han Chinese migration has been largely concentrated in the urban centres, while
10374-425: The mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language. There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with
10488-583: The nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable. In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/ , /n/ , /ŋ/ , the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ , and voiceless stops /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , or /ʔ/ . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/ , /ŋ/ , and /ɻ/ . The number of sounds in
10602-538: The other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin , Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin , Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan . All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic . The earliest attested written Chinese consists of
10716-407: The party retains control over the direction of the country. However, many scholars consider the Chinese economic model as an example of authoritarian capitalism , state capitalism or party-state capitalism . Proponents of this economic model distinguish it from market socialism as market socialists believe that economic planning is unattainable, undesirable or ineffective and thus view
10830-404: The rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain . Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects were spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spoke Taishanese ,
10944-552: The related subject dropping . Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers. However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for
11058-509: The relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic . Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones. Without
11172-427: The remaining 60%. Ninety-one (91) of these SOEs belong to the 2020 Fortune Global 500 companies. Beginning with the 1978 reforms, in the 1980s during the industrial reforms state enterprises were gradually corporatized and transformed into joint-stock corporations with the state retaining either full or majority ownership of their shares. By the early 2000s, most major SOEs in non-strategic sectors were listed on
11286-730: The rural areas are still predominantly made up of minority populations, including the Zhuang , Miao , Yi , and others. Inhabitants of Southwestern China primarily speak a dialect of Mandarin Chinese known as Southwestern Mandarin . This variant uses the same written language as Mandarin but is only approximately 50% mutually intelligible with Standard Chinese . As of 2012, there were approximately 260 million speakers of Southwestern Mandarin. Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')
11400-517: The six official languages of the United Nations . Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters , largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of simplified characters has been promoted by
11514-561: The slightly later Menggu Ziyun , this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects. Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as 官话 ; 官話 ; Guānhuà ; 'language of officials'. For most of this period, this language
11628-413: The state acting as a residual claimant to the profits generated by its enterprises, but without exercising control rights over the management and operations of its firms. This model has the advantage that the state would have a source of income independent of taxation and debt, enabling a reduction of the tax burden on individual incomes and the private sector while promoting greater equality. Cui points to
11742-403: The state directs and guides all major aspects of the Chinese economy—including both the state and private sectors — while not collecting dividends from the ownership of its enterprises. They noted that Chinese state-owned enterprises and privately owned enterprises shared many similarities with respect to state subsidies, proximity to state power and execution of government policy objectives. Within
11856-556: The state sector, the emphasis was more on government control than on the ownership of assets. Proponents of the socialist market economy compare it to the New Economic Policy in 1920s Soviet Russia that introduced market-oriented reforms while maintaining state-ownership of the commanding heights of the economy . The reforms are justified through the belief that changing conditions necessitate new strategies for socialist development. According to Li Rongrong , in 2003
11970-453: The state, with some state-owned assets being transferred to social security funds to help finance pensions for China's aging population. This is part of a broader reform effort of restructuring the state sector to become a source of finance for public services. As part of the SOE reform goals outlined in 2015 by SASAC, SOEs are to be classified as either commercial or public service entities, with
12084-623: The tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English. Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compounds . In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿 ; kūlong from 孔 ; kǒng ; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to
12198-547: The traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include 汉堡包 ; 漢堡包 ; hànbǎobāo ; 'hamburger', 守门员 ; 守門員 ; shǒuményuán ; 'goalkeeper', and 电子邮件 ; 電子郵件 ; diànzǐyóujiàn ; 'e-mail'. All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages : they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in
12312-612: The true size and scope of the state sector difficult, particularly when SOEs with mixed ownership structures are taken into account. In 2013, the public sector accounted for 30% of the number of firms in China, but 55% of assets, 45% of revenue and 40% of profits. In 1996, China implemented a comprehensive series of industrial reforms termed " Grasping the large, letting go of the small ". These reforms involved closing unprofitable state enterprises, merging smaller enterprises and privatization of other small-to-medium enterprises. Centrally owned SOEs were reformed into joint-stock companies with
12426-512: The use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese, along with the neutral tone, to the syllable ma . The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words: In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be " checked tones " and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such: Chinese
12540-452: The words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters , but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until
12654-517: The written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese . Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period . Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of written vernacular Chinese with
12768-453: Was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. In the 1930s, a standard national language ( 国语 ; 國語 ; Guóyǔ ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation,
12882-485: Was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half
12996-542: Was seen to be consistent with China's level of development and a necessary step in advancing the productive forces of society. This aligned Chinese policy with a more traditional Marxist perspective where a fully developed socialist planned economy can only come into existence after a market economy has exhausted its historical role and gradually transforms itself into a planned economy, nudged by technological advances that make economic planning possible and therefore market relations less necessary. The socialist market economy
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