Calvino 1959 wrote a new joke when he was in the United States: optimists are learning Russian, pessimists are learning Chinese. Please ask the experts to explain.

Calvino is my favorite writer. This sentence means that in a big cultural country like the United States, there are two views: first, the western culture represented by the United States will definitely defeat Russian culture and other cultures and become the mainstream and dominant in the world; Second, China culture will replace American culture and become an important force of world culture. Therefore, it is optimists who think that western culture will dominate the world, but they are also logocentrists. However, due to the unpredictable trend of China culture and the fear of great power, they are afraid that China will replace them as the mainstream of culture, so the ideological motivation of westerners to learn Chinese is very subtle and complicated. This is not an abuse of China culture, but a reflection of our ancient civilization's fear and crisis awareness of modern civilization and the speed of development. I think our attitude towards this should be to be an internationalist, but our foothold lies in the position of nationalism.