Explainers

In the early hours of 22 April, AirAsia flight D7809 from Chongqing to Kuala Lumpur was delayed by an hour and a half. A Chinese passenger, irritated that the cabin crew had addressed her in English, erupted in the aisle: “I am Chinese. Why does he keep speaking to me in English? How can an international flight not even handle basic Mandarin?” The clip went viral. She was eventually escorted off the plane.

The incident is easy to dismiss as a matter of personal manners. But beneath the outburst lies a question worth taking seriously. Why is Mandarin, the mother tongue of 1.4 billion people, still not an international language, while English — issued from a damp island of roughly 70 million — has become the working medium of aviation, science, commerce and diplomacy? On the numbers alone, it ought to be the other way round. Answering the question requires walking back four centuries of accumulated history.

The story begins at the end of the sixteenth century. Before Shakespeare, English was a domestic dialect with little prestige; the courts, the church, the law and the universities all conducted serious business in Latin or French. From the 1590s onwards, however, the rapid output of Shakespeare’s plays, followed in 1611 by the King James Bible, supplied English with a literary canon and a written authority almost simultaneously. Shakespeare added thousands of words to the language; the King James Bible gave its rhythm and syntax a kind of liturgical gravity. A tongue once dismissed as coarse acquired the inner dignity of a literary language. Without that dignity, every later expansion would simply have been the imposition of a low-status vernacular on the world, with no cultural pull of its own.

Almost as soon as English had found its feet at home, it was already crossing the Atlantic. The Jamestown settlement of 1607 and the Mayflower’s landing at Plymouth in 1620 began something whose significance was not visible at the time. From the seventeenth century onwards, the law, education, commerce and religion of the entire eastern seaboard of North America were laid down in English. This step, prosaic in its own day, planted the most consequential seed of all: when the British Empire eventually declined, its successor would not need to learn a new language. The tongue had been pre-installed on a continent that would one day be larger than the empire that planted it.

What converted English from a cultural asset into economic infrastructure was the Industrial Revolution. From the late eighteenth century into the mid-nineteenth, Britain led the world into the age of steam, coal and the factory. By 1870, Britain accounted for roughly 30 per cent of global industrial output, and around a quarter of world trade was conducted under its flag. London became the financial capital of the world, and English with it became the working language of banking, accounting, insurance and shipping contracts. The language was no longer simply a vehicle of culture; it had hardened into commercial and technical hardware. Any country wishing to trade with the most advanced economy on earth had to acquire it.

Running in parallel was the global stitching of the British Empire itself. By 1920, the empire reached its territorial peak: roughly 35.5 million square kilometres, or nearly a quarter of the planet’s land surface, with more than 400 million subjects — close to a quarter of humanity. This was not a contiguous land empire but a maritime one, sprawling across North America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Australasia and the Pacific. English travelled with the navy, the missionaries, the merchant houses, the colonial bureaucracies and, above all, the legal codes; once installed, it embedded itself in courts, schools, newspapers and administrative records. When a single empire controlled a quarter of the land and half of the sea lanes, its language naturally became the default medium of long-distance communication.

The pivotal twentieth-century turn was the empire’s retreat and America’s rise. After 1945, Britain conceded global leadership, but the new hegemon happened to be the linguistic descendant Britain itself had planted three centuries earlier. This was not a succession; it was a relay between two states sharing the same tongue. The Bretton Woods system, the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Civil Aviation Organization, and later the internet and the technology industry — every major postwar international institution was designed and operated within the Anglosphere. English passed seamlessly from being the language of empire to being the language of the postwar international order, and its position acquired a second, institutional layer of reinforcement.

Mandarin’s failure to follow the same arc is not a matter of linguistic inferiority. It is a matter of historical timing. The Chinese imperial system was built around continental, inward-facing governance; even Zheng He’s seven voyages in the early fifteenth century never matured into sustained maritime expansion. While Western colonial powers were redrawing the world between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, China was sliding from the Opium Wars into more than a century of weakness that ended only with the reforms of the late 1970s. By the time China re-entered the world economy, the rules, the contracts and the operating standards had already been written in English. New entrants must first learn the existing system before they may take part in it.

Once a language is embedded in global institutions, it generates powerful network effects. The International Civil Aviation Organization mandates English as aviation’s common language not out of cultural arrogance but because of a hard safety requirement: pilots and air traffic controllers operating in different languages risk collision. By 1997, around 95 per cent of papers indexed by the Science Citation Index were published in English, even though nearly half their authors were not from English-speaking countries. Roughly half of all websites today are presented in English. Every additional speaker raises the value of the language for every other speaker, locking English into a self-reinforcing loop. When an AirAsia steward replies in English to a Chinese passenger, he is not making a cultural choice; he is following an industry default.

The counter-evidence comes from a failed experiment in linguistic design. In 1887, the Polish ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof published Esperanto, deliberately engineered to be regular in grammar, predictable in pronunciation, politically neutral, and free of any national baggage. It was meant to become humanity’s shared second language. The design was elegant and remarkably easy to learn; it still has perhaps one to two million speakers. Yet across more than 130 years, Esperanto has never penetrated the aviation, scientific, financial or diplomatic system of any major state. The reason follows from everything above: a language without Shakespeare, without colonisation, without industry, without empire, without backing from international institutions cannot be lifted into lingua franca status by mere good design. International languages are not engineered. They are deposited by history.

For native English speakers, the consequences are richly favourable. They are born holding a globally accepted entry ticket: without learning a second language, they can plug directly into research, finance, commerce, academia and diplomacy. British and American universities draw the world’s brightest students and researchers; Hollywood, Anglo-American popular music and English-language technical documentation export both standards and culture at no marginal cost. The language is, in effect, a piece of historical inheritance that quietly pays a dividend every year.

Yet hosting the global lingua franca carries its own bill. English no longer belongs to Britain or America — non-native speakers now outnumber native ones by roughly three to one. The direction in which the language evolves is no longer set in London or New York but co-shaped by Singapore, India, the Nordics and East Asia. For Britain in particular, this entails a structural form of migratory pressure. If English is the gateway to the world economy, then Britain is one of the most accessible English-speaking countries on earth. Across student visas, work routes and asylum claims, this island of about 70 million carries population flows far out of proportion to its size, and the strains on housing, healthcare, public services and identity politics follow directly from that fact.

Seen this way, the Chongqing passenger’s anger is a collision between personal feeling and historical structure. She was not really arguing with a steward. She was arguing with an order built up since the late sixteenth century — out of literature, settlement, industry, empire and institutions — and now too entrenched to be undone by indignation. Linguistic hegemony has never rested on the elegance of a tongue or the intelligence of its native speakers. It rests on the fact that, at a particular point in history, one country happened to possess the pen, the ships, the guns, the factories and the capital, and happened to bequeath all of them to another country speaking the same language. If Mandarin is to chart a different course in the twenty-first century, it will not do so by demanding that the world learn Putonghua. It will do so only when China has institutions, technologies and cultural standards that the rest of the world chooses, of its own accord, to learn.

On 15 August 1992, Brian Deane scored five minutes into a match in Sheffield. It was the first goal in Premier League history, and almost nobody present understood what they were witnessing: the opening act of what would become the most commercially valuable sports league on the planet.

The Premier League was not born from prosperity. It was born from crisis. English football in the 1980s had reached its lowest point — riven by hooliganism, shamed by stadium disasters, and banned from European competition for five years following the Heysel tragedy of 1985. In the 1985–86 season, the top division played an entire campaign without a domestic television deal. It was against this backdrop that the clubs of the old First Division chose to break away from the Football Association, incorporate independently, and launch the Premier League in 1992.

The founding logic was singular: broadcasting was the future. The league’s first television contract — worth £304 million across five seasons — was, at the time, the largest media rights deal in British sporting history. Rupert Murdoch understood its significance immediately. He later described sport as a “battering ram” for cracking open the global pay-television market. Three decades on, the Premier League’s domestic rights alone for the 2025–2029 cycle are valued at £6.7 billion; combined with international deals, the total exceeds £10 billion, reaching more than 200 territories and hundreds of millions of homes worldwide. Even the club that finishes last in any given season receives more than £100 million in television distributions alone. This is a machine that feeds itself.

In structural terms, the Premier League presents itself as an open competition. Each season, the bottom three clubs are relegated to the Championship, and three Championship clubs are promoted in their place. The Championship play-off final has accordingly been called the most valuable single match in football — the winner unlocking more than £170 million in additional annual revenue. Ninety minutes of football can alter the financial trajectory of an entire club.

Yet openness in design does not guarantee openness in practice. In 34 seasons of Premier League football, only seven clubs have ever lifted the title. Established clubs compound their financial advantages through the transfer market, while newly promoted sides frequently struggle to survive a single top-flight season. Leicester City’s 5,000-to-one title win in 2015–16 remains one of sport’s most astonishing upsets — precisely because it is the exception rather than the rule.

The league’s history does contain moments that transcend the financial logic. Arsenal’s 2003–04 squad completed an entire 38-game season unbeaten, a record that has never been approached. Shane Long scored the fastest goal in Premier League history in 2019, finding the net just 7.69 seconds after kick-off. Manchester City won four consecutive titles between 2021 and 2024, a feat unprecedented in the Premier League era — a reminder that sustained financial investment and elite management can produce a dominance that the promotion-and-relegation system alone cannot disrupt.

The Premier League’s footprint now extends well beyond sport. It contributes an estimated £3.6 billion in annual tax revenues to the UK government and supports more than 90,000 jobs directly and indirectly across media, hospitality, transport, and tourism. It is, in a meaningful sense, part of Britain’s economic infrastructure.

From a league scrambling for survival in the early 1990s to a global broadcast product reaching hundreds of millions of viewers every week, the Premier League’s trajectory demonstrates something that applies well beyond football: in modern industries, institutional design and commercial foresight often matter more than the quality of the product on the field. Television made the Premier League. The Premier League, in turn, reshaped how the world understands the game — and that cycle shows no sign of breaking.

The energy transition is not merely a matter of emissions reduction; it is also about costs.

In the era of renewable energy, low latitudes become competitive. The so-called Sunbelt encompasses Southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, India, Australia, the southern United States, and large areas of sub-Saharan Africa. These regions receive between 2,500 and 3,500 hours of sunlight annually, while many parts of Northern Europe receive only about 1,000 hours. Although the price of solar panels is similar globally, the output can differ significantly, sometimes by a factor of two.

The key to solar energy lies in capacity factors. The same equipment in India or North Africa generates far more output than in the UK or Germany. Over the past decade, the cost of photovoltaics has fallen by more than 80%. As equipment becomes cheaper, geographical advantages become apparent. If electricity prices can be kept between €20 and €30 per megawatt-hour in the long term, energy-intensive industries will naturally relocate. Sectors such as aluminum, steel, hydrogen, and data centers will not cling to high electricity prices.

A turning point emerges here.

In the era of fossil fuels, resources were concentrated in a few exporting countries. Solar energy, however, is widely distributed and tends to favor low latitudes. Many developing economies, previously constrained by energy shortages, now have the opportunity to turn the tide. India already has a manufacturing base and a large market. If coupled with stable and inexpensive green electricity, its attractiveness will increase further. Sub-Saharan Africa has long struggled with power shortages, but if photovoltaics and energy storage are deployed effectively, the threshold for industrialization will lower.

The global factory may not always be in East Asia.

Low electricity prices are the most compelling incentive. Capital will take notice. As energy costs comprise a higher proportion of total costs, geographical advantages become more pronounced. If Sunbelt countries can ensure the stability of their electricity supply and transparency in their systems, they could very well attract a new wave of industrial migration.

As for Europe, the issue is more straightforward. Rather than forcing photovoltaics in areas with insufficient sunlight, it would be better to first unlock the potential of Southern Europe. There remains significant solar capacity in Spain, Portugal, Southern Italy, and Greece. Strengthening cross-border electricity grids to transmit excess power from the south to Central and Northern Europe is a pragmatic choice. Although the cost of high-voltage direct current transmission is not low, transmission losses are manageable, making it a one-time infrastructure investment.

As demand continues to rise, collaboration with North Africa can be considered based on circumstances. The Mediterranean is not far away. While political risks exist, energy diversification itself is a method of hedging against risks.

Energy has never been purely a technical issue; it is a combination of geography and systems.

The sun will not move, but industries will.

In the past, those who controlled oil wells held the advantage. In the future, those who harness sunlight will gain the upper hand. The question is not whether the sun is fair, but whether countries understand how to move towards it.

The lunar calendar is not a vague folk tradition but a system governed by clear astronomical rules. Its central question is singular: how to simultaneously track the moon and the sun, ensuring that months follow lunar phases while years remain aligned with the four seasons.

The historical evolution can be summarized. The ancient ‘Xia Calendar’ established the prototype of a system that began the year in the month of Yin. In 104 BC, the Western Han dynasty promulgated the ‘Taichu Calendar’, which first fully established a lunisolar calendar system that set the new moon as the start of the month and corrected the solar year with solar terms. In 1645, during the early Qing dynasty, the ‘Shixian Calendar’ was implemented, introducing Western astronomical calculation methods to derive new moons and solar terms based on actual celestial phenomena. Since then, the calendar has entered a phase based on precise astronomical calculations. The modern lunar calendar has developed along this technical trajectory.

The specific calculation methods are regulated by the ‘Compilation and Issuance of the Lunar Calendar’ (GB/T 33661-2017), implemented in mainland China in 2017. The principles are not mysterious and can be summarized in four steps.

First, the month is determined by the astronomical new moon. When the moon and the sun have the same ecliptic longitude and the moon’s surface is not visible from Earth, this moment is called the new moon. According to Beijing time, the day of the new moon is designated as the first day of the month. A synodic month averages approximately 29.53 days, so lunar months alternate between 29 and 30 days without a fixed pattern.

Second, the year is determined by solar terms. The Earth’s orbit around the sun creates 24 solar terms, with one term occurring every 15 degrees. Among these, 12 are ‘mid-terms’, such as the spring equinox, summer solstice, autumn equinox, and winter solstice. Mid-terms are crucial for correcting the calendar year.

Third, a month without a mid-term is designated as a leap month. Twelve synodic months total about 354 days, which is roughly 11 days shorter than the tropical year of about 365.2422 days. To prevent solar terms from advancing each year, the rule states that if there is no mid-term between one new moon and the next, that month is designated as a leap month, retaining the name of the previous month. On average, there are about 19 leap months in 7 cycles, but the actual determination depends on the celestial phenomena of that year.

Fourth, the eleventh month is determined by the winter solstice. The standard requires that the winter solstice must fall within the eleventh month of the lunar calendar. By calculating forwards and backwards from this point, it ensures that the first day of the lunar new year generally falls between late January and mid-February in the Gregorian calendar, maintaining the relative stability between the Spring Festival and the beginning of spring.

The logic of this entire system is clear: the new moon addresses the ‘month’ issue, mid-terms address the ‘year’ issue, leap months resolve the discrepancies between the lunar and solar cycles, and the winter solstice establishes the sequence of the year. The tools for calculation may have evolved from counting rods to computers, but the principles remain unchanged.

Thus, the lunar calendar is neither purely lunar nor purely solar; it is a lunisolar calendar based on astronomical observations. Its stability lies not in tradition but in rules.

Time originates from celestial bodies, and calendars merely translate celestial phenomena into human order. What appears complex is, in fact, the repeated application of a few clear principles.