这个节选，值得一读，道出了西方人的真实想法，其他的统统是扯蛋。

The size of China and its population

China is one of the largest countries geographically and has the largest population. India's population is nearly as large and growing faster - it will overtake China in a few decades. Already the Indian subcontinent as a whole has more than 1.5 billion inhabitants, more than China, which is still below the 1.4 billion mark.

However, India's population is divided along many lines. There are religious divides (Hindu or Muslim, to reckon only the two largest religions of the subcontinent), ethnic-linguistic divides (Indo-European in the north and Dravidian in the south), and "national" divides (the Bengalis, although Indo-European, stand out as a distinct nation). Dozens of official languages split the country. The result is a maze of many differences in India, whereas China looks quite unitary. About 95% of its population calls itself ethnic Han. Of China's other 55 ethnicities, only two create real problems to the largely Han state, the Tibetans and the Uighurs, who together make up only about 1% of the total population of China.

Chinese, linked by language and culture, are by far the single largest concentration of people in a limited area who share common roots and thus a common destiny. And they make up more than 20% of the world population - a mass that is both vast and compact enough to control the world. 

An alien civilization

From a Western perspective, no civilization is more distant and more different than that of the Chinese. The ancient Egyptians and Babylon soon merged with the Greek civilization that inspired and was integrated into the Roman tradition. The Persians were set apart, but were a constant enemy and threat to the Roman Empire. Islam is a religion of the same God of the Jews and of the Christians, who dominate Europe and the West. The Indian civilization remained further away, but it has been in contact with the West since the time of Alexander the Great; besides, it is an Indo-European culture: its pantheon and its earliest myths share the same ancient linguistic roots as the Greco-Roman world.

China is very different. It was isolated for the whole first millennium of historical development. Its earliest proven and massive foreign influence came in the 1st century AD, with the arrival of Buddhism from India. The religion moved only east and not west, finally almost disappearing from the subcontinent while evolving and thriving in China, thus making China even more odd compared with the West.

Its sing-song language, its ideographic script, its lack of religion in the Western sense, its lack of a systematic pantheon, even its use of chopsticks and not the hands (long before forks and knives became standard in the West) for eating made China distant from the West. Even without considering that China for centuries kept to itself and was not interested in joining the trade rush the Europeans started after the discovery of America, China was, and still is to Europeans and their descendants, the closest thing to Mars there is on Earth.

Furthermore, unlike other civilizations, such as the pre-Columbian American peoples or those in Africa, which were easily wiped out by the sophisticated onslaught of disease, crosses and gunpowder, China had a resilient civilization, hard to put down.

Still the civilization and its language are very hard for foreigners to learn. Western children need about six days to learn the basics of reading and writing through the alphabet. For the same task, a Chinese child takes six years - the whole Chinese primary-school system basically teaches a child just the basics of reading and writing.

A world so different becoming so important is objectively scary for those who are not Chinese.