there are likely to be many other valjd reasons for this than simply national pride/security/politics.
The Chinese public sector (not unreasonably) wants its computers to operate in Chinese; and handle documents in other languages used in border areas of the country. Win XP was only allowed in there on the condition it did so (around the same time many Western clients wanted it to work in other languages at least for document processing).
It managed about 80-90% of Chinese (I don’t unfortunately understand Chinese but can at least see if a site is showing what appear to be correct characters or mixtures of ??? and a binary number in a box).
At the time I was working for the British public services at DEFRA alongside two Indian and Pakistani chaps; the Indian said that all his emails from his home country had now started appearing; but the Pakistani pointed out a number of flaws in what looked (to me) like correct Punjabi/Urdu text.
As he is a devout Muslim and had also learnt the Koran in Arabic we experimented with cutting and pasting quotes of it into Word to see what would happen and whether it could be any good for teaching his kids; most of the links between characters were also badly mangled (he did point out the script for Allah had at least remained intact; it was apparently the only bit that they had got correct). #
Thus making this supposedly “multicultural” upgrade fairly useless – in just about every public sector office worldwide it wouldn’t be unusual for documents to be produced in more than one language and the web widely used to obtain such info.
Win7 might be slightly better in this respect but as far as different alphabets go I have only used it with Nordic languages and very occasionally with Russian text – Russian is difficult and my knowledge of it very basic.
More recently I set up a new Raspberry Pi and out of curiosity let it generate the whole worlds locales (there are a lot of them).
It did take some time but didn’t fill up the memory excessively – it would supposedly be possible to use this relatively small computer with just about all of the worlds languages and regional layouts.
It appears these locales are common to all Linux distros and can be easily added – unlike Windows where a program developed in Asia (which may start up in the developers language post-install) when run on a Western machine comes up with all the menus as “?????” which means even if the dev gives a hint to Western users to what to look for (even if its the menu to switch it to English) they cannot easily pass on this information.
