In Java, why does type casting of a character to an integer NOT extend the sign bit

Question

In Java a bitwise operation causes type casting to integer and also causes sign extension. For instance the following is expected:

byte b = -1;
System.out.println(b >> 1);//-1

In Java chars are encoded in UTF-16 and each unit is represented with 2 bytes.

char c = 0xFFFF; //I assume now the sign bit is 1.
System.out.println(c >> 1);//32767 ???? WHY

I was expecting -1 instead of 32767. Why is the sign not extended during the type cast before the bitwise operation is applied? Any ideas?

Answer 1

Because char is unsigned - 0xFFFF really has a value of 65535

Answer 2

It works like that because of widening primitive conversion that is performed on shift arguments. Namely there's no information loss, including the sign of the type being converted.