Reader question:

Please explain “sleeping giant”, as in “Chinese football is a sleeping giant.”

My comments:

China is a sleeping giant in many ways, but perhaps not in football.

In football, China has always been a minnow.

A dwarf, in other words, instead of a giant.

A giant, on the other hand, is a big man. In folk lore, a giant is a being with human form but superhuman in size and strength.

Strength is where Chinese football has been, still is, lacking.

Anyways, to say someone is a sleeping giant is to suggest this someone is big and strong, in fact, much stronger than any ordinary person is.

A sleeping giant, you see, is literally a giant that is deep in sleep. When he wakes up and does his thing, he will wreck havoc and show his power.

That’s the idea.

By the way, I once heard a South Korean friend say the same thing, along the same line – of Chinese football being in slumber. “When Team China wakes up,” he said, “it will shake the world.”

“When it wakes up”, that is. That is a good point.

Now, when exactly is that? Can anyone tell me?

I mean, where Chinese football is concerned, that “when” sounds like forever.

Oh, well, here are a few other examples of “sleeping giant” culled from the Internet:

1. Isoroku Yamamoto’s sleeping giant quotation is a saying attributed to Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto regarding the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by forces of Imperial Japan.

The quotation is portrayed at the very end of the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora! as:

I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.

The quotation is also featured in the 2001 film Pearl Harbor.

Although the quotation may well have encapsulated many of his real feelings about the attack, there is no printed evidence to prove Yamamoto made this statement or wrote it down.

- Isoroku Yamamoto's sleeping giant quote, Wikipedia.

2. Aside from getting a better handle on how methane might affect our future, scientists are also considering how we could prevent its release. One innovative approach is a scientific reserve in northeast Siberia known as Pleistocene Park, created by Sergey Zimov, director of the Northeast Science Station in Cherskii, Russia. In a bid to keep the permafrost frozen, Zimov is working to reintroduce animals that resemble Pleistocene megafauna and to restore the ancient steppe-grassland ecosystem. Steppe vegetation reflects more sunlight than the now-dominant forests and wetlands, reducing summer heat. In addition, animals trample down the snow when they forage, and the resulting denser snowpack provides greater insulation, allowing the ground below it to freeze much deeper in the wintertime, explains Zimov. "All we need to do to turn the current low-productivity ecosystems into high-productivity steppe is to bring in high enough densities of animals and then let them transform the ecosystem themselves," he says. The north Siberian plains contain some 500 billion tonnes of carbon stored as permafrost, so if they were to melt, says Zimov, "all this carbon would quickly be transformed to greenhouse gases." So far, Zimov and his colleagues have introduced horses, reindeer and moose, and they are hoping to bring in musk oxen, mountain goats and bison in the near future.

In a few other places in the world, including the Netherlands, methane gas escaping naturally from seeps is being captured and used as an energy source. Walter says that there is potential to apply this on a local scale in places such as Alaskan villages, thereby harnessing the natural gas and reducing the need to ship diesel fuels to remote locations.

But while such efforts at reining in methane march forward, energy prospectors are exploring how they might be able to tap vast stores of the gas on the sea floor — a practice that could potentially introduce sequestered gases into the environment. Rather than harnessing gases that are already escaping, this would involve mining gas hydrate reservoirs for energy. One such project between the US government and energy giant BP has begun modelling gas hydrates to determine whether the process is commercially viable. Other countries, including Japan, South Korea, China and India, are investing substantial amounts into similar research. The United States is believed to hold some 5,700 trillion cubic metres of gas hydrates — that's nearly 9,000 times the country's current annual natural gas consumption, making the resources potentially highly lucrative. But for their part, some climate researchers hope that methane clathrates will stay right where they are for a very long time. "It sounds to me technologically very difficult if not dangerous," says White. "This is a sleeping giant that should be left asleep."

For now, scientists are working quickly to answer pressing, yet basic questions, such as how much methane could be released as a result of warming, and when. "We first need sound science to use as a basis for understanding what the methane emissions are and how they may be changing right now," says Ruppel. In the meantime, how concerned should we be about the possibility of climate catastrophe resulting from methane? "It's probably safe to say that we don't know," says White. "But if there's a ticking bomb in the room, you'd like to know the possibility of it going off. The fact that it's there at all is unnerving."

- A sleeping giant? Nature.com, March 5, 2009.

3. Marcelo Ebrard was the mayor of Mexico City from 2006 to 2012, the time when that city gained a reputation as a dynamic, sophisticated world capital, even while the country’s image as a place of dark and ever deepening crisis, corruption, and violence steadily worsened. He implemented numerous urban quality-of-life initiatives—a wildly popular bike-sharing program, an expansion of the rights of sexual minorities, a reduction of crime, and an attack on the air-pollution problem (an initiative in which the Clinton Foundation was involved). As Guillermo Osorno, a writer and editor of the Mexican digital journal Horizontal, told me in an e-mail, Ebrard also “gave the city a unique narrative as a progressive city as opposed to the conservatism and political backwardness in other areas of the country.”

Toward the end of his term, Ebrard, who is now in his late fifties, was widely regarded as Mexico’s President-in-waiting for the 2018 elections, and for many people that was one reason to feel a little optimistic about the future of the beleaguered country. And in 2011 he did, in fact, vie for the Presidential nomination of his Party of the Democratic Revolution, or P.R.D., before yielding to his mentor and predecessor as mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. However, in 2012, Mexico elected Enrique Pe?a Nieto, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or pri, as President, and he soon emerged as Ebrard’s most steadfast political enemy. After leaving office at the end of his six-year mayoral term, Ebrard served for two years as president of the United Nation’s Global Network on Safer Cities. Then, in 2014, he resigned in order to launch a failed bid for the presidency of the P.R.D., which since 2012 had been beset by numerous scandals and the perception that its new leaders had allied with the party with Pe?a Nieto. After that loss, Ebrard left the P.R.D. to contend for a congressional seat on behalf of the Citizens Movement, a small left-of-center political party, but was blocked by the country’s Electoral Tribunal. An onslaught of calumny, insinuation, and unproved accusations of corruption—none of which ever resulted in criminal charges, or even a formal investigation—was aired by rival politicians and in some of the country’s establishment media, driving Ebrard from the country. At first, Ebrard moved to Paris, where he worked as a consultant, mostly on urban issues. But as of this year, he has relocated to New York City. While few would rule out an eventual return to the Mexican political arena for Ebrard, he is no longer being spoken of as a potential 2018 Presidential candidate. For the past two years, he seemed to have completely removed himself from Mexico’s always treacherous political life, and was rarely even mentioned by the media.

...

But, for now, the challenge is to stop Trump. If he is elected, Ebrard said, then, as the candidate has repeatedly promised, there are going to be very harsh actions taken against those Latinos who lack legal documentation to be in the country. As has been widely written about, tens of thousands of families that contain a mix of documented and undocumented residents are at risk of being separated and destroyed. If Trump wins, Ebrard said, it’s going to mean that “you now have a society brought into being by xenophobic opinion, and that’s also going to have an impact even on those who are citizens. If your last name is Martínez, or because you speak Spanish, daily life is bound to become more difficult if you now have a political leader telling people that it’s all right, that it’s politically correct, to discriminate against people because of their origin, language, or what they look like, because that’s essentially what Trump is saying.”

Ebrard, like many others, thinks that the Mexican-American vote, and the Latino vote generally, was a sleeping giant that has been awakened, a hypothesis for which there may be evidence in early returns from Nevada. “Twenty-six million of what they call Hispanic—a complicated category anyway—are registered to vote,” he said. “If we suppose that seventy per cent are going to vote for Hillary, that’s a very important number in an election that’s probably going to be decided by no more than six million votes. This sleeping giant has discovered its own identity thanks to the risk to the entire community represented by el Se?or Trump. If it hadn’t been for the way that el Se?or Trump woke everybody up, it would have been much harder to motivate that vote into a contingent of twenty-six million people now registered to vote.”

Of course, I had to ask Marcelo Ebrard about Trump’s notorious wall. “The wall is a publicity scheme,” he said. “He, like Hitler, is a good communicator.”

- HOW A ONE-TIME POLITICAL STAR IN MEXICO ENDED UP CAMPAIGNING FOR CLINTON, NewYorker.com, by Francisco Goldman, November 6, 2016.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：張欣 編輯：丹妮）