@Yankee, I'm going to be kind and assume that you are putting us on! If you're serious, how about explaining what you mean by reasonable?
@HFCampo: Actually, I don't think learning to speak Chinese is EXTREMELY difficult, though of course it's more difficult for those with totally unrelated mother tongues. I'm not saying it's easy either - the tones seem to be more difficult for some people than others, for one thing - but certainly the grammatical hoops that one has to jump through for Indo-European languages, Semitic languages and many others are much more difficult to negotiate than those for Chinese grammar. I also think it's easier to learn to speak Chinese if one also learns to read, at least a little - although the written language is indeed perhaps the most difficult - still, some knowledge of it is helpful, and I mean for speaking, not just for reading.
Anyway, the choice should not be that of either setting out for complete Mastery or Nothing - I know 2-3 foreigners in Kunming who seem to have looked at the language in this manner years ago and chosen Nothing, and they are still pretty much in the same bubble of virtual isolation from their surroundings as they were 10 years ago - can't say 4 syllables in a row - though they've long ago lost most of their awareness of the great vastness of life outside the bubble from their consciousness and assumed that their short-hand generalizations of life outside are more or less accurate.
Committee proposes renaming Kunming's Dongfeng Square
发布者I kind of liked the atmosphere around the old Workers' Cultural Palace, and I'm not seduced by the identification of tall buildings with 'progress'. As for the name - "what's in a name"? Perhaps the state might ease off a bit about presenting us all with the identities that they would like us to have.
Celebrating a Miao Christmas in Yunnan
发布者@ Tiger: as you say, for many societies. But the issue of wealth and power often seems to play a part in differing levels of religious attachment among different classes and subgroups within a 'people' as well, as well as in differing types and degrees of attachment.
Celebrating a Miao Christmas in Yunnan
发布者Religions from 'abroad' have been accepted all over the place for a long time - e.g., the acceptance of forms of Christianity by Germans, Ethiopians, Mexicans, etc. at different times in history. The idea of climate change is different, unless you want to categorize scientific methodology itself as a religious doctrine, which can lead to an interesting philosophical argument, but I don't think we ought to go into it here.
Getting Away: Descent into a giant Guizhou sinkhole
发布者Looks like some pretty challenging climbing - congratulations for having a go at it.
Celebrating a Miao Christmas in Yunnan
发布者@ octobersky: OK, but the fact is that religious beliefs change over time anyway, at least partially as a function of changes in material circumstances - e.g., rain gods are just not going to remain as important to people who, in their daily lives, are decreasingly reliant on rainfall. So I don't think it can all be seen as a simple matter of native-religion-appropriate/religion-from-outside bad - it's not simply some matter of 'brainwashing' imposed from the outside, since a real 'brainwash' would require complete control over local minds etc., which is always an impossibility, even with a lot more information control than any bunch of missionaries ever had.