All: I know this article intersects with touchy topics, but the personal experience and observations of the author make it interesting and different. Please respond on that level—the interesting and specific—rather than just to generics. Generic discussion is repetitive and usually turns vituperative, as people just crash into each other's pre-hardened positions like angry bumper cars.
All the authors observations ring true, and they all stem from one simple fact: China was a very poor country just forty years ago, and even today is only a middle income country.
The uncomfortable truth is a lot of the things westerners take for granted are, in fact, luxuries. Arts and creativity is a luxury. Freedom to pursue passion is a luxury. Compassion is a luxury. Self-esteem is a luxury. If you barely have enough food to feed your family, as a significant number of Chinese people were in the 60s and 70s, you cannot afford any of these.
China has grown richer at a remarkable rate, but the mentality shift can take generations.
I would focus more on current realities when seeking explanations, because the mentality can shift a lot in a single generation.
I'm from Finland. My grandparents were of a generation that knew poverty and hunger and fought in wars. They raised their families when the country was still poor, and food security was always at the back of their minds. My parents grew up in a country that was rapidly getting wealthier. Their generation took food for granted, but owning things was important to them, as it was something they could not have in their youth. For my generation, the country has always been wealthy, and we have always been able to take basic necessities for granted. Our focus has been in choosing what we want to do with our lives, as the world is open and there are many options to choose from.
Westerner isn’t an income class. For instance, I grew up in appalachia and also didn’t have food, clean water, heat, electricity, health care, clothing, or plumbing. But, I did have free speech rights, access to libraries, and friendships with other poor creative kids like me.
> and they all stem from one simple fact: China was a very poor country just forty years ago, and even today is only a middle income country.
Recent poverty is a factor, but I disagree that it's where these characteristics stem from. I've lived and worked in countries as poor or poorer than China, and I also lived 6 years in China (and not in an expat bubble) and the characteristics described in the article* are not directly related to an escape from poverty. (*which I largely agree with, though maybe less so the Dark World frame; instead I think instead Chinese have historically a different moral framework than Westerners. For example, being "clever" enough to do something that Westerners would consider wrong (stealing, cheating, etc.) and get away with it, is a sign of strength.)
In my view, Chinese behavior is pre-eminently impacted by filial piety, social appearances, and the fact that when you live in a country with 1.5 B people if you don't push and shove, and even step on a few hands and heads, you're not getting anywhere. And you _must_ get somewhere because of your parental expectations and the need to fulfill your responsibilities to care for your parents when they get old.
Added to that is the more recent development that the CCP has achieved a level of information and social control that other authoritarian countries could only dream of. It's very effective to a degree that Americans would find shocking. (The author's first point about the ubiquity of social media in China goes along with this, and has become a highly effective means of "guiding" public thought.)
I grew up in the third world. Agree with this comment.
Also my personal belief is that courtesy is a luxury born of abundance. I have observed how minor ‘scarcities’ in the advanced economies can surface behaviour that some would attribute to less developed places e.g. an unexpected slew of cancelled transit
Here in Germany, people are generally good at queuing in supermarkets. This does break down for a minute when a new checkout counter opens; people will rush past others to get into the new line without regards for others. There's this short feeling of breakdown in social norm, fear of getting left in the dust, so politeness and consideration take a backseat and the elbows come out.
In developing countries, including China, my experience has been that this is the standard, and people will act accordingly even if there is abundance. Cancelled transit is a good example as well, it interacts with a primal fear of ours of being left behind or drawing the short stick, even if rationally, it is pretty inconsequential.
I can imagine this can be hyper specific to the store itself, not as a generalization across an entire country.
To give more anecdata — Union Station in Toronto has trains that leave in all directions. The ones going East and West tend to form queues on the platform at rush hour. The train heading north-west to another city tends to form mobs that rush the door upon opening.
Lots of reasons why, but geography and SES may not factor as much. Could be something as simple as supply/demand of free seats.
Hm, this reminds me how the marshmallow experiment [1], initially thought to show differences in character, turned out to surface differences in wealth.
Pretty strong disagree. Compassion -- and humanity towards other humans -- isn't based on what you have. The degree to which you are able to act on your compassion and do something, yes, that's certainly limited by what you have. But not the compassion itself.
I've met many very poor people in very poor countries who had more compassion and humanity than rich people in rich countries.
I would add that just having a 60-70 hour work week for many jobs means a different lifestyle, even if you're comfortable financially.
Friend of a friend got hukou in Wuhan recently and picked up a crappy job as a convenience store clerk. 10 hrs/day, 3 days off a month. But! She can comfortably live off it in a major city with a studio apt and even save a bit. Doesn't even need roommates.
My counter argument though is how the elite class have a certain scarcity mentality and still holds on to these observations made in the articles.
In college, I dated a few Asian (Mainland) who all had similar mindset. Dating wasn’t about finding the right match but more about “upgrade your social face being accepted by foreigners”. It was shockingly weird at the beginning until the pattern was obvious. They were all wealthy (paying international tuition) I would think so the scarcity mindset you speak of seems like should have waned off at a local proximity (family or social circle).
That is the "mentality shift can take generations" part.
Those ladies may be part of the elite now. But remember their parents or grandparents went through the Great Chinese Famine where an estimated 15-60 million people died.
Much of Europe was dirt poor before the war. There were actual food riots in Amsterdam. The Netherlands didn't get sewers until the 1950s. Showers became mandatory only in the 1970s.
We take our decadence and degeneracy for granted but it is all new. There are people alive now who remember Christianity.
I'm actually quite disturbed to read that so many people believe compassion has anything to do with material satisfaction. Compassion isn't some bourgeois luxury, it's fundamental to any sort of well-being, be it individual or societal.
If it really came down to the famine, I'd ask why isn't this mentality seen in Bangladesh, who also lost around 5% of it's population to famine in the 20th century? They're some of the kindest, most welcoming people I've been around in the face of a poverty that China no longer knows.
So I'm having a hard time believing that TFA isn't completely off on this one, as I'd expect a society that had 2000 years of contact with Buddhism to have absorbed at least a little of the Buddha's teachings on karuna. Especially one whose main school was that of Mahayana and it's ideal of the Bodhisattva.
This is exactly true. I've seen people share what they have in poor rural South America and India. It seems common.
Japan, post war was desperately poor, but everyone shared what they had. A friend who grew up in rural China in the 60s-70s described very compassionate behavior. Communism is often born of necessity and not political will. Those who cheat and steal are ostracized, if not hunted.
It is during rapid transitions, and it seems during both growth and decline when hoarding and theft become rampant. In steady state, those that remain, work together.
If they grew up in Rural China and weren't telling you stuff about their experiences of "The Great Leap Forward" or "The Cultural Revolution", particularly the extreme amounts of selfishness one had to utilize to simply survive, they, like many people who have had to exist in destitute conditions, They're probably not telling you the whole story, and never will because they do not want to deal with the social judgements from people over actions they took to survive.
There's a good chance that for the survivors from that era, their parents almost certainly did some extremely evil things to survive.
You appear to have no real knowledge of Chinese history, perhaps as bad as that (not) taught in China. Around 1960 when the famine and related purges occurred the population was ~650M so even with the high end of 30-45M dead of starvation over 3 years, it's a few percent. It's horrifying to be sure, but it was concentrated (for political reasons they were exporting grain) in the west and central China where food was grown, while the major population centers were largely spared (still almost 1% died). So no, not every person alive in 1960 was involved in some sort of genocide, or even aware of it. The political elite of course suffered relatively little (until 60-80% of them were in turn purged less than 10 years later), but they were also (as usual) a tiny minority <3% of the population. This purge was called the Cultural Revolution also driven by Mao. Then came Deng, and now Xi. With some periods of relative political complexity in between.
Please study some history and stop assuming literally everyone is evil. That leads to the very expectations, political apathy, and actions that allow this kind of situation. It's unhelpful.
Go ask anyone from, say, Myanmar (especially Arakan state) what they think of Bangladeshi people. You might find that opinion of "They're some of the kindest, most welcoming people I've been around in the face of a poverty that China no longer knows" to not be so widely held.
Maybe you should ask Bangladeshi's what they think of the Rohingya people. It turns out that Myanmar is not the only country oppressing them and refusing to give them citizenship!
The tendency to want to group an entire race/people with opinions based on hundreds of experiences with them, let alone dozens or a few, is the same tendency in us that spawns racism and prejudice. Your experiences have no influence on the reality of "the goodness of a people".
I'm married to a Bangladeshi, so yes I'm very aware of the treatment of the Rohingya at a state and societal level. I have close Bangladeshi friends that have done humanitarian aide work with their communities in Cox's Bazaar. It's a horrible crises.
My comment was responding to the author's argument that compassion only arises when material needs are accounted for, that compassion is some middle class thing. They were arguing that Chinese culture doesn't emphasize it because of their history of war, famine, and poverty. I think that's a horrible misunderstanding of both compassion and Chinese culture, and was merely countering it with an example of a people that have also experienced a famine that had a similar mortality rate who display perfectly normal human levels of compassion and kindness despite that history. I then went on to conclude that the original writer is likely completely off on how they view Chinese culture, that compassion is fundamental to being human and has nothing to do with bourgeois material comfort.
We tend to want to think in binaries -- people are compassionate or not. People are welcoming or not. That's not how reality works though, it's more nuanced. I was in no way arguing that an entire community of people aren't capable of mistreatment of others. Of course they are. But can a people that have experienced a massive amount of trauma and poverty and loss capable of displaying compassion? Of course they are. Because compassion is a fundamental aspect of being human.
> No. These are virtues, not luxuries. You don't need a high income to be compassionate or have self-esteem.
It's not about you, it's about others around you. If they do not have a "high income" (or, in other words, materially comfortable life), you cannot expect them to be comfortable enough to be compassionate or have self-esteem. And then, if they don't, but you do, it's an easy recipe for your compassion to be exploited and your self-esteem to be perceived as danger. It's a self-leveling system.
It's not an individual matter, but a social one. Always has been.
And it's not specific to China - I see it in Poland, a relatively "we've been damn poor forty years ago" country as well.
This flies in the face of my own experience travelling all over the world, where the poorest people would offer me extreme generosity and not accept anything in return.
Maybe it's bias because I'm an "exotic" white guy in many areas and not just a random down on their luck average guy from their own region.
I've also been offered generosity by rich people, as well, but, I will generalize, that mainly came after I demonstrated some proof that I didn't actually need their generosity
Have you ever been to truly starving places? Not taking about poor countries, literally starving places, like, Syria in WWI. Where if you don't steal from your neighbor, your kids will die of hunger. That's the kind of environment where compassion is a luxury. A lot of China was like that _even if for a short time_ in the last century. That leaves deep scars.
Not a lot of the world is like that today, you'd have to go pretty far out of anything considered tourist-friendly to see conditions similar to Mao-induced famine.
There are definitely SOME aspects of generosity tied to abundance and some not. Some might offer you the cup of cleanest rainwater found in their plot of rubble and others might chase you away using the stolen phaser gun tucked under their clothing. Or maybe it's more influenced by inequality within the society rather than absolute material abundance.
> This flies in the face of my own experience travelling all over the world, where the poorest people would offer me extreme generosity and not accept anything in return.
orrrr maybe poor people you've encountered are poor exactly because they are generous in competitive environment - and non-generous became rich and successful
Maybe it's country dependent. I have seen what you describe in countries where christianity is the dominant religion and most people in those countries something like 70 to 80 percent identify with it. And religion in those places is most prevalent among the poor, so much so there is a direct relationship between poverty and religion, the more religious, the poorer.
Everyone who downvoted you are the type to step into another pile of dog shit the moment they finish scraping their shoes. Regressing into spirituality doesn't fix this. High trust paired with opportunity does.
not one person has called you out for consistently sounding like AI so I'll be that guy and cop the downvotes, in case a human is involved in the loop I will also respectfully provide an actual response - did you have a way or some evidence to back the possible insights contained in your strangely metaphored comment?
Hah, that's pretty funny. I expect to be downvoted on HN half the time, but since you asked I'll do you a favor and confirm I'm not AI. You might want to take a break.
Right back at you, I'm not sure what the deal is lately with some comments insisting on quotes or citations or "proof" of anything. To me, they seem like gambits by paid trolls. I'm just making observations from experience.
Something to ask yourself is where the honest truth is supposed to come from if it's always borrowed from somewhere else. People are free to make up their own minds.
One's compassion reservoir capacity is proportional to one's capacity to fulfill its own needs first. You fill your cup first before you pour into others.
Also, poor people produce art and are creative. Art and creativity are oftentimes reault of not being able to afford comfortable middle class boring life, having issues you deal with, needing to distract yourself from hopelessness.
Even historically, quite a few art or music styles came out of poor or disturbed communities before they got commercialized. It is as if upper middle class HN programmers tended to think that creativity or art is only when you do something expensive or take an expensive art class.
The communists in China actively tried to replace old virtue (it was barely alive in China pre-revolution anyway) with new virtue. New virtue was hollow, shallow, empty and fake.
It's amazing to me how ignorant this comment is. Someone is teaching you something about a culture you don't understand and you're chastising them (or condescending to an entire nation).
> No. These are virtues, not luxuries.
According to your particular ethics. Has it ever occurred to you that the ethics you have isn't universal but is simply an artifact of your culture?
Compassion and self-esteem are not artifacts of culture or ethics. They're intrinsic to humanity. The manner of expression of these virtues can vary among different cultures. The audience of these virtues can vary among different beliefs and ethical frameworks. But the virtues exist in every society.
I have to daily remind myself that people on here probably haven't had a single liberal arts class (like philosophy or anthropology) because they're stemlords.
> But the virtues exist in every society.
And also not too bright. brother you're literally commenting on your own response to a post about how such a virtue is potentially absent in some society
I'm only speaking from my own experience here. When I've seen stressed out people who are expected to believe in "virtues", they just become more dishonest to hide their bad behavior.
The bell curve of human behavior stays the same no matter what time or place.
In Greece the postwar generation was born in poverty after WWII and a civil war. But they created wealth, enough to live in relative luxury: multiple homes, ample available income and free time, holidays around the world. If you are willing to live, you will in the same generation. The current generation pays the cost of that expansion and that is a classic economic lesson.
> If you barely have enough food to feed your family, as a significant number of Chinese people were in the 60s and 70s, you cannot afford any of these.
This has also been true where I am from (formerly East Germany), yet we still had arts, creativity, freedom to pursue passion, compassion and self-esteem. We might have had only barely enough food to feed a family, but that didn't mean that we acted like animals.
> The uncomfortable truth is a lot of the things westerners take for granted are, in fact, luxuries.
This is supposed to be uncomfortable? Why? Most inter-national discussions here are about how their country is better because they have bigger houses, more toys, and how they can remain oblivious to how the rest of the world works because of how good their “soft” or “hard” power is at managing the rest of the world.
That sort of international comparison talk is usually more motivated by arguing that "my rich country is better than your rich country" than "my rich country is better than poor underdeveloped countries". Oftentimes it is a proxy argument for the best degree of government involvement in the economy and other policy questions.
This is China. People have been arguing about the progress of China relative to the West/USA for decades and decades. Just like they have been arguing over US/Europe.
I think this also leads to the most important observation of our time: progress is now much more difficult to measure and the control over the narrative is fierce.
This entire century of media has been an endless splitting of hairs and casting of doubts.
This one is interesting. I'm from Poland, and I'd argue that during very shitty communist times people had a whole lot more compassion than now, when the country is in a much better shape.
Severely competitive and hopeless environments will do a hell of a job on human compassion.
Read about the dehumanizing effects of concentration camps on individuals hiding food from their family or praying their father dies so they can get his food
Its arguable that our ability to build luxurious enough societies has allowed out compassion to flourish far beyond what is witnessed elsewhere in the state of nature
> Severely competitive and hopeless environments will do a hell of a job on human compassion.
True.
> Its arguable that our ability to build luxurious enough societies has allowed out compassion to flourish far beyond what is witnessed elsewhere in the state of nature.
Concentration camps and famines are not the 'state of nature'. A closer analogue would be tribal societies in the Amazon basin, Eastern Africa and the like. Constant hunger and scarcity are not the norm for well adapted human cultures, nor have the been for most of recorded history.
By state of nature I means the non human vilification life space.
Of course a concentration camp isn’t the state of nature
I’m saying human compassion far exceeds anything witnessed in the animal/plant kingdom. Some animals show affection for their offspring, but it usually doesn’t extend beyond that. There is no dog or lizard or tree version of mother Teressa
Concentration camps were created, engineered and run by rich people. Whatever lack of perfect compasion and fight for scraps you see inside, comparably rich people making conscious choice to create them, support them, work in them, profit from them have less of it.
I dont know what you mean there. It was just historical fact about who build them and run them.
They did not emerged as force of nature out of ground. They were intentionally and conciously build. And guards were well fed.
And in here, when you use inmates lack of compassion as example of powerty causimg lack of it, you absolutely should compare to compassion of builders and guards.
Which is why I think the whole premise of GP is kind of suspect. China has housed a highly-developed society - not just a civilization, but a contiguous, if evolving, social order - for longer than most of the rest of the world. Even what they consider backwoods and rural is basically urban by most historical standards.
These aren't the problems of a society rising out of a state of nature; as TFA states, "The narrative is that China experienced a “century of humiliation”". I think certain aspects of Chinese culture as we know it, writ-large, make more sense coming from people who weren't just recently struggling as a society, but who are well aware of how that condition compares to their historical one.
Say that all you want, make it a mantra if you like. But have you ever skipped a meal out of sheer poverty? Or might you be projecting ethics (ie aka Americanism)? Maybe we should actually cut them some slack.
I have. I know a lot of generous, compassionate poor people. I met loads of them in Honduras and Brazil and Belize. Compassion and generosity need not be a factor of economics.
The corollary to this of course is what happens to countries experiencing the reverse, a rapid decrease of passion and "luxury" for large swathes of the population.
I found reading the first chapter of Ai Weiwei's 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows quite depressing. It describes a woman who gave away or let her child die in order to take care of some more well off people's children, which I remember to be Ai's father or grandpa. Then goes on to describe what his dad went through during the Cultural Revolution. Needless to say, I stopped reading the book.
I'd like to argue that different generations of Chinese people might have drastically different characteristics, because of how quickly life changes here.
I'm a native Chinese person born around the new millennium, and some of the observations in this article seem to apply only to specific generations.
"Dark World thinking as described in Truth or Dare": I personally don't feel this at all. But this mentality does apply to many people over 70.Some of the elderly people I met are mean and selfish by today's standards, but considering they might have literally survived a starvation, this shouldn't be that surprising.
"Primacy of social reality, and of shame and “face.”: I don't know about this. Maybe because I grew up in this environment, I am used to the social norm and don't find it uncomfortable at all. Yet I haven't lived abroad for a long time, so I don't know how different it is somewhere else.
"Chinese social media is like American junk food.": Basically true. Social platforms can be atrocious, but there are rational and comfortable circles. They tend to stay low though, since popularity usually destroys them. But I'd argue that this is the same anywhere on the internet.
I (an American with a lot of interest in China) was playing doudizhu with some Chinese friends recently. It was agreed that the losers would have to kowtow to the winner instead of paying money. I was on the losing side and it meant nothing to me, while even in a private, joking setting it was apparently a very uncomfortable thing to have to do for my teammate. See also the general cultural attitude toward doing something embarrassing as a "punishment" for losing a bet or game, something fairly unknown in the US.
Great counterexamples! These are specifically part of the game, whereas in Chinese culture it seems to be more like "let's play a defined game with winner and loser, and in order to motivate you not to be the loser, we'll agree that the loser do something embarrassing." Like in the US when I would play recess games as a kid, if you lost, you just lost with nothing at stake. Also we're all in our thirties instead of kids playing truth or dare.
> Some of the elderly people I met are mean and selfish by today's standards, but considering they might have literally survived a starvation, this shouldn't be that surprising.
My grandfather survived starvation and much, much worse things during and after WWII (in Russian captivity). He died of old age a long time ago, but was a very kind and not at all selfish person.
The bit about why one would want to be a doctor. Money, status, approval... helping sick people (hysterical laughter). Is exactly how my millenial Chinese colleagues that came to North America to study in university are like.
I have dated a number of Chinese women, and had friendships with many men. I think these observations ring quite true, but I want to point out how a lot of these things are downstream of economic realities. Admittedly my age demographic targets my experience to 20 - 35 year old Chinese.
A lot has been said about outdated scarcity mindset, and those beliefs being difficult to shake in this thread. But honestly, I whole heartedly disagree. The mindset around these kind of Dark Triad behaviors, fixation on social standing and wanting to raise China up stem from the current day reality that China might be the MOST competitive society in the entire world, other then south Korea. To literally just get into a good school and have a good job requires competition and dedication that students here have to do to get into Harvard. And failure along any of the steps up towards these goals in most cases will simply not be recovered: you will be part of the permanent underclass. It is a death battle that takes up every waking moment of your entire life.
I one time was dating a civil engineer who had managed to go to school and work abroad in my country. When I described how I thought the act of helping people, even when your own future was uncertain was a primal act of human dignity and greatness, she began crying. We talked a little bit after as she calmed down, where she explained that she was upset to hear me even talking about helping strangers instead of myself of her. "My whole life has been competition. How can you think about anybody else". It was an eye opening moment to say the least.
The unfortunate thing is that resource and job scarcity I think is increasingly driving everywhere in the world to have more of these mindsets. While people often complain about mass immigration and demographics, at current pace I believe the world will be a lot culturally similar to China 20 - 30 years from now, simply because of economic realities. Especially in a truly AI future where there just aren't enough high paying jobs left for anybody but the intellectual and economic super elite.
> Your assumption that AI will lead to more scarcity is interesting. I believe that it, like most technologies, will result in more abundance overall.
"More abundance overall" could mean one guy with 1 quadrillion dollars of wealth, and everyone else with nothing.
Scarcity isn't just a function of quantity, it's also a function of distribution. Many people believe AI, like many technologies of late, will result in more inequality overall.
I think this article makes the same silly mistake most people do when analyzing other cultures: Overemphasis on national identity. I'm specifically speaking to point four here: I've got family in china, have visited for periods of months at a time, and don't see most people I've interacted with thinking about national identity or priorities mostly at all. Like people anywhere, they're wrapped up in their social lives, careers, and hobbies moreso than any kind of proving china or chinese people are this or that. The author calls out their own bias created by interacting with immigrants and internet culture, which I think will tend to form this lens
This is likely because as the author admits, their interaction with everyday Chinese is mainly through the Internet and cultural products, which has a significant bias.
Chinese government actively shapes the online discourse, so the messaging is already filtered. To make it worse, it meant people found out that the easiest way to silence your opponent is to brand them as anti-China, so you see a lot of pro-China virtue signaling. Finally, people also realized patriotism is lucrative.
An interesting recent phenomena is that regular Chinese people have figured out how to use AI to speak for them to make english language youtube videos. They are quite fascinating to watch, because you don't normally get such an unfiltered perspective. I think people feel safe posting these because nobody knows them in the west, whereas family, friends and govt. see Chinese social media. And of course youtube is banned in China.. Some of them make a few hundred bucks from Alphabet, this is a big deal.
Here are a few (check out the comments- working class people from around the world make contact):
Thank you for sharing these. I work with many Chinese people, but I am from a working class background. All the Chinese people I work with are of course the smartest and brightest and most fortunate, so it's difficult to get a sense for what working class Chinese people are like.
I enjoy these videos a lot, esp. if they are about history and engineering. Some of videos have really good production quality. I guess they are probably translated fron original WeChat etc. source material.
I was under the impression that AI was terrible for translating Asian languages (at least Chinese, Japanese and Korean) because it doesn't capture certain contextual nuances. Is it actually good now? Are there bilingual speakers who use it and vouch for it?
It’s extremely good. Chinese, Japanese, Korean. Had multiple instances of confusion because the counterparty thought I was actually a native speaker because we had only communicated over text. Both commercial and social contexts. Translation is now effectively solved.
Edit: I should add like all LLM usage, you need to prompt well. I also like to run the translation back through DeepL for a more traditional technology read on it and to identify any obvious issues.
Well I'm grouping these under AI- they have been around a while for sure, but maybe they have reached some kind of critical mass there: I'm imagining people on Chinese social media talking about it as a way to make money.
Also the text to speech is in their own voice. Some are using this as a way to help pronounce english (maybe there is some language training software available for this, I don't know).
I think this was a good read, but as a US citizen with no connection to China, it's hard to say. I imagine what this kind of post would sound like but in the reverse, someone in China commenting on these kinds of social dynamics for US citizens, and I can't help but think it'd be a pretty crude characterization of our reality.
I would have really liked it if the author offered their perspective of the US version of these dynamics in a more one-to-one way. It'd let me "calibrate" their characterizations based on how accurate their version of the US side of this is based on my experience.
Regardless, I do think this attempts to at least apply nuance to this kind of discussion, and, of course, the author made it clear that they're aware of the kinds of faults I'm describing, so at least there's that.
It's someone who isn't culturally Chinese commenting on Chinese culture to a non-Chinese audience with the framing of solving the problem of proselytizing "Rationalism" to Chinese culture.
I take it with the same grain of salt that I would any religious missionary describing another culture, or any of the "angry foreigner in China" Youtube accounts. It may be accurate to some degree, probably more correct than someone with no connection whatsoever to the culture, but is it clearly not impartial.
It's someone who isn't culturally Chinese commenting on Chinese culture to a non-Chinese audience with the framing of solving the problem of proselytizing "Rationalism" to Chinese culture.
This.
A person raised in the US since age 4 and citing internet sites like the Chinese equivalent to
RoyalRoad and Twitter as generalised examples of Chinese culture, nationalism and rejection of empathy should not in any way be taken seriously. Proselytising only enhances the disqualification, as does his endorsement of a complete misinterpretation of the Three Body Problem. There was a lot of xenophobia going on in that book and the positive characters were all Chinese.
I'm curious why you think that someone who left China at age 4 "isn't culturally Chinese": a child famously absorbs a great deal of culture from their parents and these particular parents grew up, married and had at least one kid in China.
And then they moved to America, and grew up in America, were educated in America, and spent a lifetime immersed in and influenced by American culture. That makes them culturally American. Theirs is a fundamentally different experience than having been raised in China and immersed in Chinese culture regardless of the influence of their parents.
Apart from being obvious given the facts, the author even admits this. So I'm curious why you believe them to be a liar regarding their own lived experience?
"something (grimdark power-scaling quasi-isekai fantasy) that likely appeals to Chinese netizens"
There's a huge amount of that stuff appearing as Chinese AI-created dramas.
Although there seem to be only about ten standard plots. ("Banished girl heiress returns from the countryside to rich family" is very popular. Some of the vertical dramas with that plot are so similar it suggests re-use of the same prompt. Incidentally, if you don't watch Chinese drama and want to, see "Princess Agents", the original. That's a pre-AI big budget project with good plotting and characters.)
The AI fear for China should be that people will have to leave their city job, and return home in shame to their village, and farm. AIs and robots do most of the city work. There are still rich, modern, cities. You're just outside them.
The drama version would start like this: An employee is called into their boss's office and told they are being replaced with an AI. They pack their belongings into a cardboard box (a cliche of Chinese drama) and walk out of the building. When they get home, a petty official visits them and tells them their hukou is being revoked for being unemployed. Then we seem them with a small suitcase getting on a green train, headed for oblivion in the countryside.
I do feel a certain sadness in isolation of China. I wish I could learn and experience the culture but it's seemingly hidden from us. The insecurity angle here if true is very enlightening.
I think of the absurdity of "RRR" or gangnam style those may embarass stuffy people but much like drinking does to social situations seeing the dumb of society actually humanizes you. I think it's also the reason american culture is so pervasive.
I have never experienced a chinese show, movie, song, or played a video game but have experienced the culture from most other countries in some form. Even average chinese food is barely chinese! It was only when I moved to bay area I had real chinese food. Even their history requires effort to learn about, it's there but the depth is harder to learn about than others.
It's so easy to boogyman a country when you know nothing about them. All of their direct neighbors cozying up with USA is evident of their failure to spread a relatable cultural narrative. From this perspective China is more like the socially awkward kid that says and does weird things on top of being rude.
Once, on a flight back from China I happened to sit next to an old Chinese man watching a serial drama show set about 150?? years ago in China. It was the best in flight entertainment I’ve ever had. He noticed me watching and offered an earbud. Tho my enjoyment was probably amplified by not really knowing what was going on.
I don't have any personal experience with this, but what's interesting to me is how similar a lot of this sounds to America. I'm not saying it IS the same as America, just that if there is a substantive difference I didn't get a sense of it
- Nationalism stemming from insecurity (I tend to notice the poorest, most desperate tend to be the proudest)
- "social death" - Is that not so different that being canceled or fear of being canceled? To me it seems very apparent that people who get ostracized on the national stage take a huge personal toll and have their personality changed for years.
- Also for the Dark World example he uses a Peter Thiel quote. I think optimism/trust/community is lower here now that a few decades ago. But I do agree that in tech jobs I've anecdotally seen more cutthroat approaches (e.g. refusing to share knowledge with a coworker) from other cultures more often.
> I tend to notice the poorest, most desperate tend to be the proudest
I think this is where folks go astray. There are tons of well-off or even wealthy people who love America, give to their churches, cheer on their kids at sporting events, and have what appears to an outsider as an unbelievably high amount of nationalism. It's not really the poorest, most desperate slice of society by any measure. Have you lived outside of a major city in the US?
Looking at the research it shows that subjects who self-identify as loving America can be preducted by best by being older, and political party, though not wealth at all.
So I don't really have any hard-data to justify my impression that it's uneducated blue-collar white men without much going for them that vociferously love america, maybe it's just country music that gives that impression, or the type of uneducated poor who enter the army with blind faith in our institutions, etc.
I'd love to see the data on age. The only clear data is that having children makes you more patriotic and conservative. Basically you have a stake in the future.
Now, people who are younger and urban tend to also be childless, but if you control for child bearing, you will get some eye opening stats. There is also a correlation with depression and the number of visits to therapists, but that could also be due to the loneliness of being childless in a major urban area.
Might also be due to parents with children being in greater need of a chinwag with a therapist or three but as a group mostly veering toward lacking both free time and spare cash.
No, it's childless people who see therapists more.
The axis is childlessness/more concerned with online social standing/less patriotic on one side, versus having kids/being more patriotic, fewer accounts of depression.
Much of the push for parasocial relationships is, I believe, the result of people not having kids to come home to but living life online. That also is responsible for the fear of "social death", e.g. online ostracism. People who come home to kids and grill with their friends on weekends don't particularly care about conforming to the beliefs of strangers online.
It seems like everyone is saying that the root cause is economic scarcity, but the Cultural Revolution's destruction of pluralistic status hierarchies deserves a large part of the blame.
Before the rev, your social standing in China could be judged by dimensionS (plural emphasized): lineage, academics, religion, business reputation, regional identity...
The Cultural Revolution tore each of those dimensions down, by design, for teh purpose of creating a new single dimension (politically sanctified identity).
The main issue with doing this to a Chinese culture, specifically, is that now the concept of face - already extremely important culturally - becomes basically everything. Every social interaction becomes zero-sum because there's only one thing to compete over.
In a pluralistic status culture, you can lose face in one domain and maintain it in another.
The Cultural Revolution removed that defensive buffer.
IN the past couple decades, China has added a second dimension, wealth. But it's hardly a real axis due to wealth being easily achievable through party alignment. In other words, the two dimensions are entangled. I doubt a principle component analysis would find them to be separate domains.
In any case, the younger Chinese generation who has access to global online subcultures, international credentials, professional specialization, etc., is recovering the pluralistic status axes. So... well, I could write my predictions, but that wasn't the point of my comment, so I'll end it here.
My prediction is that the pluralistic axes will come back to China, but they will be superficial and strictly controlled. The recovering axes will be aesthetic and consumptive such as fandoms, hobby subcultures, fitness, foreign credentials... They will give young people somewhere to hold face when the main ladder rejects them.
Notably, these axes will be different from the pre-1949 ones: lineage, religion, and reputation came from institutions that were alternative sources of authority. The 2021 crackdowns on fan clubs and gaming showed the state will regulate any subculture that starts organizing people outside the approved channels. So I expect a split: people with exit options (e.g., overseas degrees, foreign income, portable skills) get a real pluralistic status life, while everyone else stays on the single entangled axis, where competition likely intensifies as the pool narrows to those who cannot leave.
As this progresses, we basically just watch to see if any new axis produces its own gatekeepers not credentialed by the state. I'm guessing every one instead gets an official association within a few years of reaching noticable scale.
The purpose of the author writing this seems to be improving the effectiveness of Rationalists in persuading the Chinese on questions of AI safety.
Based on my experience, these kinds of cultural generalizations are interesting to talk about but as with many populations there is much more variance between people within the group than between groups. For example young urban Chinese do not put Mao posters up in their apartments. For older rural Chinese it’s almost universal. Therefore, it is much more effective to get to know individuals than to write to no one in particular.
Additionally, the question of how Chinese society looks in general is less important than how the decision makers think. You don’t need to convince average Chinese people. You need to convince the equivalent of a VP at Google.
Based on those two things, and especially because as far as I can tell the Rationalists have framed the entire thing as a sort of prisoner’s dilemma, the only way out is to build trust. And in my opinion the best way to do that is for Americans to meet Chinese people and for Chinese to meet Americans.
As a casual visitor: the nationalism point rings very true, everywhere, their nationalism is more about hurt national pride than anything.
The point about the cynical view however I disagree with. I don't think I have the correct words to explain this, but basically, unlike India, Korea and maybe to a certain point Japan, they distrust this kind of American, almost forced friendliness, cheerfulness and enthusiasm and see it as fake, which is very similar to how French, Belgians, Dutch or Germans feels sometimes (I know I did my first time around in California).
That's also the reason why out of all of Asia, I feel the best working with Chinese teams (Japanese too but I have more trouble with their English).
[Edit]: forgot the point about social shame: not untrue, but geographically limited to the more rural area in my casual observation. No one in Beijing takes themselves that seriously, but in poorer areas, pride and face felt more important.
I think the thing people miss is that American friendliness is a bit fake, just not malicious. It's built on our pastoral history, but has evolved into a way to smooth down the sharp edges of a very competitive society - especially when that pastoral mindset ran headlong into the immigration that made contemporary America what it is.
I'm hesitant to move further from TFA, but a brief one-shot: Among Boston people who returned after "trying" SV/SF/California, I repeatedly heard of struggling, amidst an unfamiliar ambient "friendliness" culture, to recognize social signals around "actual" friendship - was someone "really" interested in becoming friends, or were they merely performing "friendly". AI tells me this is called peach vs coconut, nice vs kind, guess vs ask cultures.
Similarly, someone (with no family connection to China) learned Chinese, later married into a family from/in China, and would describe "Chinese" culture. Someone else from China glossed their insights with a dismissive 'their friends are criminals [sic], and they're over generalizing from that subculture'.
So amidst country-level cultural themes, and regional variations, and generational differences (and gender, hukou, ethnicity, etc), and subcultural diversity, it's sometimes a challenge to tell what is which.
This rings true. I came to Philly from England in 2004. I'm an outsider, but I get by socially.
Philly does not have a good rep. Sometimes people from elsewhere voice ghetto, hooligan, or snobby-suburban stereotypes. (Whatever! The worst thing is how they say the words "crayon" and "water".)
But whenever I visit California it feels superficial and fake.
> I'm hesitant to move further from TFA, but a brief one-shot: Among Boston people who returned after "trying" SV/SF/California, I repeatedly heard of struggling, amidst an unfamiliar ambient "friendliness" culture, to recognize social signals around "actual" friendship - was someone "really" interested in becoming friends, or were they merely performing "friendly". AI tells me this is called peach vs coconut, nice vs kind, guess vs ask cultures.
My experience is that everyone from outside the Northeast thinks those of us from the Northeast are assholes, and we think they're all two-faced sociopaths.
The US is a big place. There isn’t one “American culture”. If someone in one part of the country says we should get drinks sometime they’re just saying a nice thing. In another part of the country, that means “this weekend”.
If my main consideration in an interaction with a stranger is to avoid its escalating to violence, I'm going to be polite, but I'm going to be a bit reserved, not enthusiastic or friendly.
In these discussions, non-Americans often describe Americans as always happy, which is another quality I'm going to tend to avoid showing in the hypothetical interaction with the stranger because if he is feeling bitter or resentful, my being happy might set him off.
Yeah, i totally get that, it's absolutely not malicious, i'm not sure it's even fake, maybe only a bit exagerated. But for an unaware person, it _feels_ that way, and i guess when American visit France or the netherlands, or, to go back to the subject, China, our reactions must feel weird.
That was jut to tell the author that i think he misread how Chineese are on this specific point. It wasn't a criticism of North Americans at all. Really, i think this is charming now (as long as we don't work together, then i will find this infuriating and bitch about it to my SO)
What I wonder based on this piece is how much the lived experience for someone in China differs from the view from outside — and the author admits that his is a "fairly narrow window," though certainly wider than mine. But when I visited China, I saw both the part that reflected popular ideas of what it's like there (based on what actually propagates to other countries) but also a part that felt like everyone was playing along with these aspects so as not to stick out.
Of course that may just be me projecting my own perspective onto them, but I did get the feeling that there is a performative aspect to the culture described in this article, and that whatever lies underneath it is likely, as in so many places, not really accessible to anyone who was not born and raised in a place.
> Most characters are Chinese, but even those who are not continue to mostly think and act in this similarly alien style.
No, most good characters in those books are chinese. I liked technical aspects of the book a lot, but on societal level there was quite a bit xenophobia up to including racism against white people.
Still interesting, maybe something akin to picking up some pulp novel from 1920s that had other races in stereotypical cartoon evil roles. Not something pleasant to read in 21st century for anybody with more modern values (where average typical Chinese stand on this I leave to them here, no idea).
This is laughably inaccurate. Author's information source is unreliable for a start (interactions with older generations, and depiction of lives in China in fictions and online media), which is already seeing China via funhouse mirrors. That perception is then filtered through a Western lens. What comes out is barely even recognizable.
Can you share some of what you know that is more accurate? I mean specific details, observations, experiences. That would be a better way to contribute, because the rest of us could learn something.
I'm not saying your critique is wrong, nor (more importantly) uninteresting. What makes it interesting is the second sentence, which—not by coincidence—is the most specific.
But do please edit out swipes like "This is laughably inaccurate" - this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, and your comment would be fine (if a bit too generic) without that bit.
it's unfortunately impossible for me to give you an accurate picture what China, its people, its politics, etc. is like. For starters, even though I believe my own perception is more accurate than the author's, I still have my own biases and am also only able to view it from my own limited perspective. But more fundamentally, it's just impossible for me to beam what's in my head directly into yours. If you live in China, >95% of what you encounter is going to be mundane, boring day-to-day stuff. So whatever I talk about, whatever I lend words too, is just going to be given undue weight in your mind and give you a distorted image.
So instead I just want to say, like, they are just human too, like you and me. We may do things somewhat differently, but deep down we are all the same, we all have to breath, we all have a heartbeat, we all need to eat and shit, and we will all die one day. Remember that, instead of trying to build a reductive caricature of what "Chinese people" is like. If you ever interact with a Chinese person, be sincere, compassionate, and curious, just like how you would interact with anyone.
Very strange post. I've spent 40% of my life in China. I think these comparisons are forced by someone who wants to make comparisons and find clear differences.
For social media, Xiaohongshu is about the same as international social media, except you don't have that very weirdest type of brainrot content.
I lived in China for years and returned there last summer for visit after 9 years and to sum it up what can probably describe China easiest for you despite the hype in media - prices and salaries are pretty much same as 9 years ago, can you imagine that in developing country?
Restaurant bill or job offers posted everywhere are basically same as 9 years ago and didn't changed, similar with real estate prices, in-laws bought investment apartment years ago, if they would sell it now, they would sell it at loss probably, similar thing with rents.
China is stucked in one place with less and less jobs for young people while there is less and less young people at same time (as share on whole population), sounds like deadly cocktail to me similar to Japan, the difference being Japan at least reached pretty developed status before getting into this status quo.
So much for the permanent GDP growth somehow not projecting into daily lives of Chinese.
I once read an article by a fellow from China who said that for many centuries the country had a set of social norms from Confucianism and traditional Chinese culture. But he said this was all abolished during the Cultural Revolution. An example was traditional values stressed piety toward ones parents, but during the Cultural Revolution children reported their parents to the government, which often punished them harshly.
The fellow said that when the Cultural Revolution ended, the culture never went back to the old values, and didn't have anything to replace them. so since then it has been every person, or at least every family, for itself.
3. more accurate framing: replace dark world thinking with realism and frame liberal middle class western bubble with libtard delulu.
4. it's 2026, the sentiment have shifted from PRC insecure to PRC IS strong. Apart from national soccer eon of humiliation - a devils bargain to transfer all national failure into soccer, I think last 10 years has proven PRC/chinaman working twice as hard has paid off across domains. Chip on shoulder still remains, of course there's misguided netizen comment on foreigners in general, but even post china-maxxing general foreign perspective on PRC across domains is every bit as myopic and ridiculous.
The problem I see here is treating China as one people. It is a huge country with diverse population and many ethnic groups. They are not homogeneous even if I think Beijing would like to make it this way.
Also, saying that Chinese are this and that are the same as saying all Poles are drinking vodka and steal car in Germany stereotypes.
I wonder what would be a country which is good for autists (in the sense of this article). Probably (parts of) the US, but I'm wondering whether there is some non-trivial answer.
I think one of the biggest differences, that the author misses, is that China is a totalitarian state.
The average citizen is not who you need to convince. The national narrative is set from the top, disseminated through the Central Propaganda Department, and enforced.
It’s not a grass roots effort to sway national policy in China AFAIK - you’re trying to convince a small group of key people who have enough of their hands on the steering wheel of a totalitarian state.
Single party state still has elections. You still have to get the votes. You just don’t have 2 layers of voting (primary for party, then secondary between parties). The primary is the final election. I guess the confusion is where the intersection happens between bottom up voting and the top down appointees. Not too different from corporations… there is some merit based promotions from individual contributors, but at some point in the middle management , you get a bunch of yes men because of the top down control…
On a similar note, as a Frenchman, I felt somewhat closer to the Japanese described in "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" by Ruth Benedict than to the Americans, although the Japanese are the "aliens" from the point of view of that book.
On "Chinese nationalism as collective insecurity" note that I think even as late as early 2000, Chinese as a nation or civilization or as ethnicity is still looked down in US.
The OP is describing a low-trust culture. The US was a high-trust culture, but this is breaking down, and people don't realize how valuable that was and is in the process of being lost.
How does the non-anonymity of Internet use in China play into this? As I understand it, all logins on mainstream sites are "real name", tied to your government ID.
That ought to result in different social dynamics.
Aside from its portrayal of Chinese people as having a “collective insecurity” and a “chip-on-your-shoulder,” which are the only 2 parts that I agreed, this article’s depiction of Chinese people as a group is simply not true.
At its core, it is a kind of projection along the lines of: “I’m an enlightened, worldly Western person who is almost immune to propaganda, and Chinese people are a mixed bag, but overall they are xxx.”
This is not the social reality in China. As the author’s background indicates, this is the imagining of an American who moved to the States at the age of four and has some interest in China due to ancestry.
Just to give one example—because there isn’t enough space here, and I can’t be bothered to write out more:
> Here is the first verse of a popular children’s song: ...
And yet, in more than twenty years of my life interacting with people of different ages from all over China, I have never once heard of this supposedly “popular children’s song.”
After all this article is just another BS about “It is concerning how much China blablabla...” Actually, on _Social Reality in_ Chinese American is they consider those “Chinese Chinese” as basically gorillas, parading them in front of other European Americans as if to say: “Look, these Chinese Chinese are my ancestors! Let’s study them together—and just look at how much further we Chinese Americans have evolved compared with them.” It IS a fancy imagination for those who really don't know zero about what's the reality of the people in the GFW.
There’s a whole market for explaining other cultures to Americans wrongly but in terms that they can understand.
They’ll prefer to listen to that because this kind of communication is done using the language and concepts they understand. They’ll confidently and arrogantly tell other people what they are based on this „knowledge”.
> And yet, in more than twenty years of my life interacting with people of different ages from all over China, I have never once heard of this supposedly “popular children’s song.”
how often have you talked about your own childhood songs?
I could have agreed with argument "children songs are regional/vary family-to-family", but personal second-hand experience is definitely not it
In fact, the reason I know this can’t be any kind of “popular childhood song” is that all genuinely popular childhood songs have themes like “blow up the school,” “git rid of your mom and dad,” “skip school,” and kids’ dirty jokes. It’s the same all over China.
And we do talk about it often.
This “childhood song” example is completely out of step with China’s social reality, just as you can easily recognize at a glance “an old British poem” forged by an American.
One interesting thing about Chinese culture is what I'm calling "cultural diglossia". "Diglossia" by itself means coexistance of two languages. E.g. in the Arabic world, the language of the Quran is used in official documents, but the regular languages have drifted away from it.
In China this was also the case with the literary language (文言), but it went even further. You actually had to master it to advance in any official career. So a government official instead of, say, learning how to manage a city, had to learn the old philosophical texts written in a language nobody speaks. And they had to pass actual exams for that knowledge.
Now China has the Communist writings displacing these old philosophical texts. They are about as useful, and I don't think many people really care about them, but you have to show knowledge of them to advance in your career.
I don't think this is a _good_ pattern, it reinforces the belief that everyone around them is lying and that everyone's behavior is fake.
Some of them are just weird and have stories that are nothing like European fairy tales. For example, a story of a spirit befriending a man just to talk from time to time. And then the spirit had to eventually move to another location because it got a promotion. Just imagine the culture, where even your afterlife is going to be just as bureaucratic as your regular life!
Yeah I think it gives them the illusion of being more right than the average person even if those are just the same old confused thoughts you could expect from anyone.
Fair enough, but are we talking credit score or shaming by other users/citizen? Shaming and bullying people who are perceived as having done something wrong on-line is not unheard of in ‘the west’. I suppose it concerns famous people far more than your ordinary social circles, though.
One big disconnect the US has with China is that it's a putatively communist state running a hypercapitalist economy. So they frequently do capitalist stuff with that scary word "socialism" attached to it. Like introduce a fleet of pilot credit systems and calling it social credit.
Mix this phenomenon with US high school civics class and a few propagandists and you get the American view of "social credit score".
This is like the mirror image of the popular Chinese content of picking a few homeless scenes of the US and painting the whole image of US life experience from it.
Obviously, the author has deep engagement with the Chinese internet culture (the "junk food" part that I would avert), but the over generalization is comical.
Or maybe that's the point? The author is trying to be provocative? For someone with zero background of the Chinese internet culture, this could be a starting point (although an extreme one), but don't take this to represent the whole reality.
One example, the quoted book review of Three Body Problem draws the complete opposite conclusion that the aliens are Chinese. To anyone with actual Chinese culture context, they are obviously "Westerners".
<spoilers>
- Far more advanced technologies.
- The Trisolarians cannot lie, so that becomes the only advantage of humanity. -> Art of War
- The Trisolarians are blocking physical experiments to stop science and technology advancement. -> Entity list and export control. Huawei.
- The factions in human that supports the invasion. -> Evans hated humanity because of The Silent Spring, which is supposed to represent the Western self-guilt culture.
- The emaciated generation that failed at launching the mutually assured destruction device is an image of "Westernized" generation.
The overarching background of the book is a discussion of which direction that China should take after 1989 stopped the democratization process and drove the Western powers into hostility. The author Cixin Liu has a more or less social darwinism answer for that ("Dark Forest"). Not that he endorsed social darwinism, but that's the main theme of the book.
You've misread/misunderstood the book review. It's saying the exact opposite, and the same thing as you; that in the book, the aliens are more like westerners, and the humans Chinese.
The thesis as given - "The real aliens are the Chinese people" (note the 'real') - is saying that, to an American reading the book, the portrayal of the humans feels more alien than the extraterrestrial aliens, while the extraterrestrial aliens are closer to familiar western culture.
Chinese drama steals a lot from korean and japanese. I see them wearing got/god (from Kpop demon hunters) claiming it's part of Chinese culture. I've even seen ones where kimono is Chinese. I thought he was going to say it's junk food cuz we lost all history after Mao Zedong, and stole ideas from other countries.
Now you see Han-fu in chinese dramas.
Hanfu is made up shit, I tell ya, I never seen that shit until 15 years ago.
I had my g/f wear that in China, and chinese shooshed her cuz they thought it was either korean or japanese.
Saving "face" is just funny, because if you make someone lose face, they will sometimes even kill you (check out chines emedia for that)
The vast majority of peoples' actions are beneficent, or at least polite. Otherwise, nobody would even keep their cars on roads. Stores would keep all merchandise in locked displays (not just the expensive things where the rare thief causes too much damage).
The bad experiences stand out because that's how our minds are wired, and they're so uncommon as to be surprising.
In those 24 hours 1600 stores were looted, 1000 fires laid, firefights broke out, the mafia in little Italy hat to defend the quarter with barricades and arms, robbers were being robbed by other robbers, almost 4k people were arrested to the point where they had to be put into basements and gyms. That's one day without order. The bad experiences don't stand out because they're uncommon, they stand out because we all instinctively know we're one bad week away from eating each other. Which by the way given that this is a thread about China, happened in the living memory of some people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre
"In the massacre, methods of slaughter included "beheading, beating, live burial, stoning, drowning, boiling, group slaughters, disemboweling, digging out hearts, livers, genitals, slicing off flesh, blowing up with dynamite, and more".[1][8] In one case, according to official records, a person had dynamite bound to the back and was blown up into pieces by other people (so called "heavenly maiden scattering flowers", 天女散花)—just for fun"
I don't even think one needs to reach for extreme incidents to show the underlying animal nature of humans. From the far more mundane shopping frenzy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickle_Me_Elmo : "The scarcity of the new toy provoked a shopping frenzy. Two women were arrested in Chicago for fighting over the doll, while in New York City some people ran after delivery trucks hoping to get their hands on Elmo before it reached stores. ... Robert Waller, a clerk working at a Wal-Mart store in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, was among those injured by 'Elmo-mania'. During a Midnight Madness sale on December 14, Robert was unpacking the latest shipment of Tickle Me Elmo, when he became uncomfortably aware of a crowd of about 300 people watching him carefully. He opened a box, pulled out an Elmo - and the crowd stampeded down the aisle. Trampled, he suffered 'a pulled hamstring, injuries to his back, jaw and knee, a broken rib and a concussion'." It was supremely silly but the incidents of hooliganism across the U.S. were real.
Just want to say that this isn’t a fundamental problem. Because it’s not my experience :) Love my family, and we’ve survived on the generosity of complete strangers. My folks weathered unemployment in the 90s because some anonymous angel left an envelope of money at their door.
Without even checking your stats, every stat from tightly controlled territories is juked. Only fifth chief statistician under stalin held his position after four previous were educated on how to count with a firing squad. USSR "prevailed against imperialism" the same way, until it didn't.
But when it comes to owning a home in China, you can't do it - because you can't own the land, only lease it. So effectively, anything could happen with your home.
Then, construction in China is a pyramid scheme. Highly praised amount of infrastructure and empty ghost cities is an effect of that [0]. Combine that with rampant corruption (guanxi)[1] and culture of corner-cutting (chabuduo)[2], and you will end with bridges and multi-story buildings crumbling like sand, waiting to collapse at any moment.
All of that with an addition of aging population due to half-witted decisions of delusional, unchecked power (one child policy) leaves China with construction it wont be able to maintain, not even with immigrants, because of recent decisions of tribal nationalism[3][4].
Trends are saturated about China's prosperity and superiority. But if you want actual prosperity - you cant rely on algorithms alone.[5]
With your stats you imply that a person could feel safe owning a home in China. Could you feel safe accounting for all of that?
Kind of adjacent: Can somebody explain why the LW/EA/rationalist types all seem to be so ardently against China?
They're otherwise generally in support of doing the greatest good for the greatest number, at least ostensibly, so I wonder what it is about China -- which has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty domestically and is looking to export wealth abroad (most notably in the form of accessible "luxury" goods such as electric cars) -- that seems to trigger them so much.
China's political economy is also far more "rationalist" than anything you'll find anywhere else.
And yet I swear, and I'm not exaggerating about this in the slightest, that the average EA/LW poster hates China far more than the average /pol/ poster -- and is perfectly comfortable making sweeping generalizations where 1.4B Chinese are concerned. Guys like Scott Alexander rarely (if ever) have a good word for them; Zvi Moshowitz discounts and belittles every technological advance they make, despite otherwise being very fair; and you see what LW itself is like...
I don't understand where you're getting "hates China" unless that's a framing of "disapproves of the Chinese government on the whole".
I have seen Zvi pushing back against the narratives that open-weights models and Chinese ICs have caught up to the frontier. Was he wrong? But I can't recall any animus against Chinese people or their talent there.
It's rather obvious Zvi is biased if you consider the totality of his work on China (since Covid to the current AI boom), not only because of his statement of facts or his policy positions but rather his writing style, which betrays his view the Chinese are somehow not only technologically but morally inferior. And he expresses them with an emotional valence similar to his treatment of Trump.
They call themselves rationalists but they don't apply their own theories, they think permanent authoritarianism is as bad as human extinction. It's a predictable offshoot from their own west coast US ideological origins.
It is kinda weird when I think about. Surely Chinese style technocratic leadership and political system would be most efficient in reaching goals of those people. It probably should be the system to emulate. Instead of utter inefficient messes seen in other parts of the world.
Maybe they just are lot less rational and altruistic than they claim to be. With significant biases...
Pour any Rationalist article through a colander and what remains after the pseudo-intellectualism drain away is bog standard US right-wing ideology. That’s why.
One thing many Westerners get wrong about the PRC is assuming its economically monolithic, though I guarantee you that's the outcome of decades of Chinese messaging to the West. They want to appear unified, that they've done all these amazing things and everyone has benefited.
In reality, there's two separate economies within the PRC. Around 40% live in the modern world we see in images of China (skyscrapers, EVs, high-speed trains, etc.). Awesome stuff, to be sure, and that same environment has been engineered to track every single interaction you make with it. You must use Wechat; no exceptions. Say the wrong thing on the Internet? You might lose the ability to take long-distance train or airplane rides within China, let alone international travel rights.
The other 60% live with dirt floors, hand carts, and engage primarily in subsistence farming. (It's been about five years since I last looked up those stats, but it should be around the same.) The US has eliminated this level of poverty; having even access to an automobile is enough.
The PRC argues they're able to take care of all their people, but they're nowhere near out of the woods when it comes to food insecurity. Due to population and geographic realities, they simply cannot grow enough food to feed their own people, so importation is an absolute necessity. For this reason, "unlicensed" fishing fleets (no Chinese group larger than 20 people operates without de-facto government consent) sail across oceans to fish just outside a country's territorial waters.
The Chinese political economy appears to be rationalist, but few countries have more political dishonesty than the PRC. According to an old friend who extensively knows Chinese politics, there's three main political factions: pro-Xi reformers, anti-Xi old guard Communists, and everyone else. Their ability to disappear a political enemy without what we'd term "due process" is truly unheard of in the West. Local politics is arguably worse; bribery is how anything gets done, and local officials suppress incident fatalities because over a certain threshold (around 30), the higher-ups will shame them. In such a media-controlled environment, that's less difficult than you might think living in the West.
When you talk about exporting wealth with EVs, that comes with the understanding that the PRC has de-facto control of your vehicle. Most people dislike the idea of the PRC not only retaining all data gathered by your car but having remote access to disable or drive it. If that's alright with you, go right ahead.
Your "60% live with dirt floors and engage primarily in subsistence farming" claim is utterly indefensible. At the end of 2025, China’s population was 67.9% urban and 32.1% rural. Even in 2021 -- approximately when you say you last checked -- it was already 64.72% urban.
Also, and even more importantly, rural residence does not mean subsistence poverty. Look at stats on Chinese rural household possessions -- they're actually reasonably well-off. (e.g., >100 air conditioners per 100 households, whereas in France only ~25% of households have air conditioners!) Little surprise, then, that the World Bank credits China with lifting almost 800 million people out of extreme poverty.
Even if I grant your claim about food insecurity -- which is also fundamentally untrue, but not worth getting into -- how is it relevant? They need to import soybeans for animal feed, so they are evil?
You don't like them for some reason -- but I still don't get it, as the reasons you've put forth here make no sense and are flimsy, paper-thin.
Italy is at 56% overall -- and 27.3% "in small municipalities with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants" (i.e. rural dwellings) -- and they usually have brutal summers:
Point is, the Rural Chinese aren't pre-industrial dirt farmers. When it comes to things like air conditioners, cell phones, TVs (~100% of households), internet use, etc., they usually rank quite highly.
As such, "60% live with dirt floors, hand carts, and engage primarily in subsistence farming" is either a lie or shocking ignorance, plain and simple.
I guess had old data. Seems like about 30 years ago, it was 40/60 urban/rural but now is 60/40 urban/rural. Good for them!
The air conditioner point, while hilarious, is not really comparable because Europeans have the money to install them but are usually forbidden from fixed installs due to historical building preservation codes and other regulations. Europeans create that issue for themselves, like always.
On food insecurity, I'll point to this excellent (though slightly older) article about food production in the PRC (https://factsanddetails.com/china/cat9/sub63/item348.html). For a more recent perspective, I asked AI for an answer:
> While domestic production has grown to nearly 7.5 billion metric tons annually, the overall food self-sufficiency rate has declined from 94% in 2000 to approximately 66% in 2020. Consequently, China has become the world's largest agricultural importer, relying on global markets to supplement domestic production for a diversified diet.
So, yeah, food insecurity (perhaps better termed food supply insecurity, I'll admit), though that might change once they start experiencing population shrink over the next fifty years.
I dislike the PRC due to a complete, utter mistrust of their entire operating model. It's undeniable that their methods are worth examining to understand the exact reasons for their effectiveness in growing the overall standard of living, educational outcomes, infrastructure, and more, and I will readily acknowledge that. How the PRC achieved that success is by truly, genuinely only caring about itself, with marginal concern for the outcomes of anyone other than themselves ("themselves" being the political elite, not the People). For all the global discussions about transitioning away from fossil fuels, the PRC destroys that progress every single day with their energy policies.
Most Americans are completely unaware of the extent of corruption in other countries. There is ALWAYS work to be done here, but to even compare them is genuinely comical. The PRC is far, far, far more corrupt. When I say corrupt, I don't mean greasing wheels or backroom deals; that's how all political structures (governmental or otherwise) operate, and if you can't accept that, then don't get into politics. Corruption in the PRC boils down to structured, deliberate misrepresentations and omissions of facts to avoid shame and preserve a good appearance (some parallels exist here with the USSR). Nothing even like that exists in the West, and you would be naive or silly for believing it does. For primarily that reason, I dislike them.
PRC is far less likely to do something malign with my data or my vehicle than the US government and the conglomerate of monopoly business interests it represents.
What's your understanding of cross-border data flows and third-party doctrine?
Say data leaves the US and goes back to the PRC. Did you know it's actually easier (from a legal perspective) for the US government and its business interests to collect the data outside the country than inside? It's actually in the intelligence and industrial communities' best interests for data on US persons leave the country. My point is, even with your beliefs, you should very much dislike that PRC automotive data will leave the country.
Remember the OPM hack? Perhaps the data should have simply been given to the PRC, since they're better data stewards and have our best interests in mind (/s). Ultimately, PRC vehicles will be used for facial recognition, home address identification, employer identification, and more. If you think I'm being hyperbolic, consider that the PRC can locate any person inside their borders (at least within an urban area) within ten minutes.
You’re right regarding countries in the ‘free world’, but PRC has stricter data controls for industrial interests and the CIA’s human intelligence network was largely killed when Xi Jinping took power.
Why should I remember or care about the OPM hack? I’m less concerned by fantastical stories or things ‘attributed’ to China than the things the US government does around the world in my name or to me directly at home which are beyond dispute.
eugh, I cannot state how much I hate broad, categorical psychological traits gettinng assigned to entire countries of people. that might come from the fact that people would ask me 'hey does your family do this' based on some Amy Tan movie they watched and me having to be 'yeah my family does not do that whatsoever, that's not all Chinese people'
I think part of this bias is due to not having any actual domestic, critical understanding of the home country culture and so you end up not applying the same analytical tools you'd use to analyze, for eg, why Youtube Shorts/IG Reels/etc took off here
some glaring examples from the essay:
> Chinese consumers already had a high tolerance for slop and AI content fit naturally into this ecosystem without ever triggering an uncanny-valley reflex.
yeah, this isn't due to some inherent acceptance of unreality, the massive volume of low-budget vertical 微短剧 (weiduanju) on Douyin and Kuaishou is driven by economic factors like digital ad-arbitrage [0]. most of these studios spend the vast majority of their budget on advertising with an incredibly small amount reserved for actual production and so you get AI filtered slop because it's cheaper than paying actors or make up artists or the whole supporting crew
plus, the CAC cracks down a lot more on cruddy micro-dramas than US regulators do on low-quality TikTok/YShorts/IG Reels content (ie not at all, ever)
> This basic message is inculcated throughout Chinese upbringing: push through and ignore physical discomfort, but attend to and be subject to social censure. It's okay to be buffeted by the elements, but if your grades are bad, you'll be too ashamed to face your parents.
this is again blaming individual psychological conditioning and not systemic forces. like in the US, managing reputation has to do with high-stakes institutional checkpoints, not an irrational preference for perception over physical reality. when the 高考 (gaokao) and your 户口 (hukou)[1] literally dictate whether or not you have access to housing, schools, and healthcare, you would of course focus your attention on grades and social standing. if there were other gatekeepers, the 'culture' would shift to focus there too
> Dark World thinking sees all virtue and kindness as pretense. Among many such tropes, a common derogatory trope is of women who act nice and innocent 白莲花 (white lotus) while being deceitful and manipulative on the inside. Chinese media creates trapped priors that people acting kind, altruistic, and pure are more likely to be evil."
this happened because they dismantled the 铁饭碗 (tiefanwan) [2]. the state basically dismantled the kind of sub-utopian socialist give-everything social programming (that certain propagandized Western leftists seem to believe are still in place) and let the market fully take over. when your universal safety net is gone, extending trust or finances to others who are economically incentivized to compete with you becomes a sub-optimal play. it's why 内卷 (neijuan or involution) is a widely discoursed about issue in Chinese society
also, it's very funny to see 白莲花 (white lotus) used... seriously here? in Chinese social media, that's a satirical term and positions the bailianhua as sanctimonious. it's not aspirational, it's like calling someone a Karen here
I keep reading this article and I keep getting more and more frustrated by it every minute lol
>Even among strains of nationalism, Chinese nationalism seems to be particularly chip-on-your-shoulder. My impression is that this kind of insecurity is less in your face, but still present, in younger Chinese today. It is concerning how much Chinese AI models catching up in the AI race is entangled with this national insecurity.
investment in domestic computing and foundation models is guided by industrial policy (科技自立自强) [0]. this isn't some kind of ego issue shared across 1+ billion people, it's literally policy set up by central planninng
> "My current hypothesis is that the locally optimal message to China is in the vein of “give us your autists who feel alienated by the monoculture,” but others may prefer a more conciliatory approach that directly appeals to the dominant culture."
the lived reality of Chinese neurodivergence is not some abstract thing that's fun to joke about. it's, instead, families carrying a child through an educational system that offers minimal specialized scaffolding, navigating intense social stigma, and absorbing the terror of what happens to a dependent adult when their aging parents die. instead of seeing this population as a recruitment pool of "hyper-logical code monkeys" waiting to be drafted into an American AI safety crusade, maybe think of them as people. otherwise you're no different from the people who are just calling them slurs
also, to describe Chinese culture as 'monocultural' is just wrong. a migrant worker on a factory floor does not share the same culture as a tech worker at Baidu - and neither of them share the same culture as a factory owner. there's also like a billion subcultural niches in China - lie flat 躺平 and letting it rot 摆烂 just to name two more popular ones. it's not as if the people there are stupid to knowing their culture is exploitative - the critique of 996 is widespread
It's clear that you know a ton about this, and your comment includes much interesting and specific information—that's great! But can you please edit out the swipes and putdowns? Everyone's perspective is limited, after all.
Generally it's not so good to silently edit a post in a way that deprives a reply of its original context. It's better to mark the comment as having been edited. Not doing so risks being disrespectful to the other commenter and to readers, and is even—the internet being what it is—sometimes used as a passive-aggressive trick to make a reply sound foolish after the fact.
I don't believe that was the intention here though—most likely paimapi was simply reacting to "can you please edit out the swipes".
And even if it were, we can cut some slack because (1) it sucks to get a moderation reply. We know it stings, despite applying every way we know to not come across that way; and (2) if the corrections make the comment into a more positive contribution to the discussion, we all win—especially when the comment has a lot of good information in it, which paimapi's posts do.
Btw, when we post moderation replies in that way, it's because of the good things in the comment, not the bad things. We have a different way of responding to all-bad comments.
> > Chinese consumers already had a high tolerance for slop and AI content fit naturally into this ecosystem without ever triggering an uncanny-valley reflex.
> yeah, this isn't due to some inherent acceptance of unreality, the massive volume of low-budget vertical 微短剧 (weiduanju) on Douyin and Kuaishou is driven by economic factors like digital ad-arbitrage [0]. most of these studios spend the vast majority of their budget on advertising with an incredibly small amount reserved for actual production and so you get AI filtered slop because it's cheaper than paying actors or make up artists or the whole supporting crew
> plus, the CAC cracks down a lot more on cruddy micro-dramas than US regulators do on low-quality TikTok/YShorts/IG Reels content (ie not at all, ever)
I'm not following your argument with this one. American production companies (which also use and are funded by advertising) also certainly care about their bottom line, and would cut the budget of "paying actors or make up artists or the whole supporting crew" as much as they could get away with. As you note, the reason they can't get away with cutting that stuff more isn't because they're regulated more in America. Rather, they can't cut more because viewers wouldn't tolerate it. What argument are you actually making about why Chinese companies getting away with the low-budget (low-quality) "slop" isn't the fault of the people tolerating it by watching?
As a Chinese person who has lived in the US for five years, I think the “normal-to-westerners” explanation of 圣母 is wrong. Kindness and good deeds are widely celebrated on the Chinese internet, and I am often moved by them.
Suppose a country leading in AI invokes safety concerns to demand that countries trying to catch up restrict their development, while continuing its own. Calling this 圣母 would criticize the perceived double standard and moralizing at others’ expense, not concern for humanity.
The term can be misused, but presenting it as evidence that Chinese people reject ordinary compassion reflects a prejudice and misleads readers.
> I’m a “first-generation” Chinese-American who moved to the States at the age of four.
That description itself is part of the point. “Chinese-American” is a very American way of framing identity: ancestry remains explicitly attached to nationality even when someone has spent essentially their entire conscious life in the United States.
If someone moved to the United States at four and then spent all of their formative years there, I would not automatically treat their perspective on China as meaningfully more “inside” than that of an ordinary American. They may have Chinese family, speak the language, retain cultural habits, and have much stronger personal ties to China than the average American, but their actual socialization - the schools they attended, institutions they dealt with, media they consumed, peer culture they grew up in, and political and social assumptions they absorbed was overwhelmingly American.
I’ve encountered the same pattern among people from my own native country who were raised abroad. Their connection to the country can be entirely genuine, while their understanding of contemporary life there is still largely mediated through parents, relatives, diaspora communities, occasional visits, and inherited cultural memory.
So if the subject is what present day China is actually like from the inside, I would give that perspective roughly the same evidentiary weight as that of a well informed American unless the person later spent substantial time actually living in China.
That says nothing negative about their identity. It simply means that ancestry and family background are not substitutes for having grown up inside a society.
What happened to the first comment that was posted here? I'm assuming it was removed because it was just a list of what I am assuming are a bunch of CCP censored terms and it didn't engage directly with the content; however, it caught my attention because I have never noticed previously a comment removed without a placeholder. Then again I suppose this why I don't see a bunch of removed spam posts.
If you're asking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937309, users flagged it. When a post gets a lot of flags relative to upvotes, HN's software kills the post (that's what "[dead]" means). Moderators sometimes also kill posts, but mostly they're killed by software.
Dead posts are removed from public view, but you can still see them by turning the 'showdead' setting on in your profile. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
You'll also see posts that don't deserve to be [dead] and for that we have something called vouching - also in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html ("What does [dead] mean?")
> Background: I’m a “first-generation” Chinese-American who moved to the States at the age of four. The beliefs in this essay are primarily drawn from interactions with my parents and their generation of immigrants, and from consumption of Chinese media (dramas, webnovels, games, and manhua) which are not necessarily representative of the realities on the ground.
There is plenty of American food that isn't "inauthentic slop inundated with additives and high fructose corn syrup", it's just happening in houses and in kitchens and not in chain restaurants or pre-made in grocery stores.
This is a common experience with any unfamiliar genre: it all looks or sounds the same at first, because the point of a genre is to express variation within a specific, familiar structure. As a newcomer, the structure dominates your perception, until you've exposed yourself to enough instances that you can filter out the common features and notice the details, which are where the actual creativity lies.
>"This is a common experience with any unfamiliar genre: it all looks or sounds the same at first, because the point of a genre is to express variation within a specific, familiar structure."
If it were a question of genre, sure I get that. But we're talking about effectively all commercial art at this point. It has nothing to do with "western superior" racism or anything like that. Japan does not have this problem at all, even though they invented the anime aesthetic.
Where is the Chinese Mario, Elden Ring, or Metal Gear? What studio is producing a truly original distinct visual language?
> Japan does not have this problem at all, even though they invented the anime aesthetic. Where is the Chinese Mario, Elden Ring, or Metal Gear? What studio is producing a truly original distinct visual language?
I live in Japan and I strongly disagree. The products you mention are the ones strong enough to get exported overseas, but within Japan itself you get a thousand manga/anime/dorama/idols/games per year that all look pretty much identical, everything feels extremely derivative.
The Chinese equivalent of a dive with a good band is not ultra-commercialized international content available through western syndicates. If you want to get an idea of how hard they'd be to discover, try listing the American cultural rebels you know of (that are actually rebelling from something, not commercializing a 40 year old punk style).
Why does everyone equate music with ultra commercialized crap? Why ignore the underground and alternative scenes? There is a fuck ton of alternative underground music and art. It's not hard to find.
That's kind of the point though. There are a ton of alternative underground music and art, but it's not popular and it's even less popular outside of the various countries from which it originates.
The same is true of Chinese culture. China has an unbelievably diverse range of music, film, theater, etc... but what gets exported to a Western audience is not going to be things like Beijing's underground punk and experimental noise scenes, Chinese shoegaze, Sichuan and Yunnan folk music, Mongolian throat-singing fused with metal, dozens of completely different regional opera traditions, underground queer cinema, or Sichuanese rap.
Westerners will mostly get the small slice of Chinese culture that is easiest to export, translate, market, and fit into familiar expectations about what "Chinese culture" is supposed to look like.
Take the Condor Trilogy, for example. It's not even underground or punk, it's a major cultural touchstone. Written more than 50 years ago, over 300 million copies sold, dozens of TV and cinema adaptations. And as far as I know, only the first part has officially been translated into English, and nothing into Spanish. Even the TV adaptations, some of which had several hundred million viewers in China, haven't been published in the West: I have watched some with fan subtitles, but they haven't been brought officially as far as I know.
If even such major works don't reach us, judging Chinese culture by what does reach us is nonsense.
I have no idea about Chinese pop culture, but it could be that for someone not familiar with it everything may be too unfamiliar for the differences to become appreciable.
For example I don't listen much electronic dance music (house, techno, trance etc), and whenever I end up in a club it sounds to me that its always the same loud thumping song playing. Those who go frequently do seem to find a lot of variation though.
While true, that probably says more about what you’re looking for at home. I could be wrong, maybe you’re really into the late pop fads, mass market tv events and all of that. To an extent this comes down to comparing an entertainment landscape you know how to navigate to find the stuff aimed at you, with a foreign one.
Western reality tv, procedurals, game shows, soap operas and so on are incredibly samey after all. BUT the other factor is that creative endeavors in China take place under a censorship regime. Some topics are safer than others, so the mainstream tends to be quite formulaic and focused on fantasy, sci-fi, or pseudo historical shows.
This reminds me of South Korea. IDK if its still a thing but apparently there was an official puffer jacket tier list and 90% of high school students wore 1 of about 8 different jackets.
I think you may want to interrogate why you feel this way a little more before you assign it to a "feature of Chinese culture." Frankly your comment comes across as aggressively ignorant.
Can you please not break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are? I realize it's frustrating—most of all when someone is lazily expressing a one-sided majority view (<-- not talking about the GP here, just in general), but it's necessary to wait until that surge of frustration subsides before posting, if we're to have the kind of discussion we're trying for (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
If you know more than someone else does, that's great—but in that case please share some of what you know, so we can all learn, and please do it without resorting to putdowns or swipes.
I know that takes more time and energy, but in this way you make an enduring positive contribution instead of an ephemeral destructive one. Curious conversation is fragile; it can't withstand many kicks and blows.
What exactly is a productive response to blatant racism other than calling it out? What constructive discussion does a variant of "all Asian people look the same" engender?
I would argue that shunning racism is productive for the commons. Instead it is the person calling it out who is being shunned. Wonderful.
The claim being made is so obviously, categorically incorrect that it falls apart within a single second of examination. For example: Hoyoverse, a Chinese company, produced Genshin Impact and Nodusfall, two games with completely different art styles. And yet, in typing this, I have already spent an order of magnitude more effort[1] than somebody professing their racist worldview is dignified to receive. I think the actual productive response is shutting that down. I mean, really. A billion people who can only produce one artstyle like a factory? The claim is so patently, obviously, intentionally racist and incapable of holding up to reality it's absurd.
I could spend an hour scrolling back through my Twitter likes and collecting links to a huge array of Chinese artists with divergent artstyles, but in doing so I would be doing nothing more than wasting my own time, because someone with such a flagrant disregard of reality to come to that conclusion in the first place isn't going to change their view based on being shown reality.
Whatever. I unfortunately have a compulsion to check this site, but I'll do my best to refrain from posting in the future, since your vision of the site is one where posting racist comments is welcome and calling them out is unwelcome.
> Hoyoverse, a Chinese company, produced Genshin Impact and Nodusfall, two games with completely different art styles.
And with that single sentence, you have provided a great counter-example. Had you included it in your first comment, you would have saved yourself yet another order of magnitude’s worth of words to type out and contributed to the culture here far more, no?
For what it’s worth, the original comment did not read as blatantly racist to me, though I see how one could read it that way.
All: I know this article intersects with touchy topics, but the personal experience and observations of the author make it interesting and different. Please respond on that level—the interesting and specific—rather than just to generics. Generic discussion is repetitive and usually turns vituperative, as people just crash into each other's pre-hardened positions like angry bumper cars.
It's fine, of course, to disagree; we just want conversation to stay in the key of curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I am Chinese living in America.
All the authors observations ring true, and they all stem from one simple fact: China was a very poor country just forty years ago, and even today is only a middle income country.
The uncomfortable truth is a lot of the things westerners take for granted are, in fact, luxuries. Arts and creativity is a luxury. Freedom to pursue passion is a luxury. Compassion is a luxury. Self-esteem is a luxury. If you barely have enough food to feed your family, as a significant number of Chinese people were in the 60s and 70s, you cannot afford any of these.
China has grown richer at a remarkable rate, but the mentality shift can take generations.
I would focus more on current realities when seeking explanations, because the mentality can shift a lot in a single generation.
I'm from Finland. My grandparents were of a generation that knew poverty and hunger and fought in wars. They raised their families when the country was still poor, and food security was always at the back of their minds. My parents grew up in a country that was rapidly getting wealthier. Their generation took food for granted, but owning things was important to them, as it was something they could not have in their youth. For my generation, the country has always been wealthy, and we have always been able to take basic necessities for granted. Our focus has been in choosing what we want to do with our lives, as the world is open and there are many options to choose from.
Westerner isn’t an income class. For instance, I grew up in appalachia and also didn’t have food, clean water, heat, electricity, health care, clothing, or plumbing. But, I did have free speech rights, access to libraries, and friendships with other poor creative kids like me.
> and they all stem from one simple fact: China was a very poor country just forty years ago, and even today is only a middle income country.
Recent poverty is a factor, but I disagree that it's where these characteristics stem from. I've lived and worked in countries as poor or poorer than China, and I also lived 6 years in China (and not in an expat bubble) and the characteristics described in the article* are not directly related to an escape from poverty. (*which I largely agree with, though maybe less so the Dark World frame; instead I think instead Chinese have historically a different moral framework than Westerners. For example, being "clever" enough to do something that Westerners would consider wrong (stealing, cheating, etc.) and get away with it, is a sign of strength.)
In my view, Chinese behavior is pre-eminently impacted by filial piety, social appearances, and the fact that when you live in a country with 1.5 B people if you don't push and shove, and even step on a few hands and heads, you're not getting anywhere. And you _must_ get somewhere because of your parental expectations and the need to fulfill your responsibilities to care for your parents when they get old.
Added to that is the more recent development that the CCP has achieved a level of information and social control that other authoritarian countries could only dream of. It's very effective to a degree that Americans would find shocking. (The author's first point about the ubiquity of social media in China goes along with this, and has become a highly effective means of "guiding" public thought.)
I grew up in the third world. Agree with this comment.
Also my personal belief is that courtesy is a luxury born of abundance. I have observed how minor ‘scarcities’ in the advanced economies can surface behaviour that some would attribute to less developed places e.g. an unexpected slew of cancelled transit
Here in Germany, people are generally good at queuing in supermarkets. This does break down for a minute when a new checkout counter opens; people will rush past others to get into the new line without regards for others. There's this short feeling of breakdown in social norm, fear of getting left in the dust, so politeness and consideration take a backseat and the elbows come out.
In developing countries, including China, my experience has been that this is the standard, and people will act accordingly even if there is abundance. Cancelled transit is a good example as well, it interacts with a primal fear of ours of being left behind or drawing the short stick, even if rationally, it is pretty inconsequential.
I can imagine this can be hyper specific to the store itself, not as a generalization across an entire country.
To give more anecdata — Union Station in Toronto has trains that leave in all directions. The ones going East and West tend to form queues on the platform at rush hour. The train heading north-west to another city tends to form mobs that rush the door upon opening.
Lots of reasons why, but geography and SES may not factor as much. Could be something as simple as supply/demand of free seats.
Hm, this reminds me how the marshmallow experiment [1], initially thought to show differences in character, turned out to surface differences in wealth.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
I have a nice example of this.
Growing up, I was used to cars honking all the time.
Not a thing in US suburbia.
One fine day, there was a gridlock because of people exiting a stadium after a fireworks event, lo and behold, honks all over the place from all cars.
I hate to have to confirm this but cycling in wealthy suburbs you get far less honking and agro
> Compassion is a luxury.
Pretty strong disagree. Compassion -- and humanity towards other humans -- isn't based on what you have. The degree to which you are able to act on your compassion and do something, yes, that's certainly limited by what you have. But not the compassion itself.
I've met many very poor people in very poor countries who had more compassion and humanity than rich people in rich countries.
I grew up in the USSR. The similarites are uncanny. Add fatalism and less elaborate linkage to imaginary history.
I would add that just having a 60-70 hour work week for many jobs means a different lifestyle, even if you're comfortable financially.
Friend of a friend got hukou in Wuhan recently and picked up a crappy job as a convenience store clerk. 10 hrs/day, 3 days off a month. But! She can comfortably live off it in a major city with a studio apt and even save a bit. Doesn't even need roommates.
This is a helpful insight.
My counter argument though is how the elite class have a certain scarcity mentality and still holds on to these observations made in the articles.
In college, I dated a few Asian (Mainland) who all had similar mindset. Dating wasn’t about finding the right match but more about “upgrade your social face being accepted by foreigners”. It was shockingly weird at the beginning until the pattern was obvious. They were all wealthy (paying international tuition) I would think so the scarcity mindset you speak of seems like should have waned off at a local proximity (family or social circle).
That is the "mentality shift can take generations" part.
Those ladies may be part of the elite now. But remember their parents or grandparents went through the Great Chinese Famine where an estimated 15-60 million people died.
Much of europe was dirt poor following the wars, a lot of people saw and caused a lot of social change during their lifetime.
Much of Europe was dirt poor before the war. There were actual food riots in Amsterdam. The Netherlands didn't get sewers until the 1950s. Showers became mandatory only in the 1970s.
We take our decadence and degeneracy for granted but it is all new. There are people alive now who remember Christianity.
We are neither degenerate nor decadent. As much as far right tries to drag us there, we are not there yet.
And accusations of "degeneracy" and "decadence" were there all the time anyway. We have centuries of those complains.
> Arts and creativity is a luxury. Freedom to pursue passion is a luxury.
Sure.
> Compassion is a luxury. Self-esteem is a luxury.
No. These are virtues, not luxuries. You don't need a high income to be compassionate or have self-esteem.
I'm actually quite disturbed to read that so many people believe compassion has anything to do with material satisfaction. Compassion isn't some bourgeois luxury, it's fundamental to any sort of well-being, be it individual or societal.
If it really came down to the famine, I'd ask why isn't this mentality seen in Bangladesh, who also lost around 5% of it's population to famine in the 20th century? They're some of the kindest, most welcoming people I've been around in the face of a poverty that China no longer knows.
So I'm having a hard time believing that TFA isn't completely off on this one, as I'd expect a society that had 2000 years of contact with Buddhism to have absorbed at least a little of the Buddha's teachings on karuna. Especially one whose main school was that of Mahayana and it's ideal of the Bodhisattva.
This is exactly true. I've seen people share what they have in poor rural South America and India. It seems common.
Japan, post war was desperately poor, but everyone shared what they had. A friend who grew up in rural China in the 60s-70s described very compassionate behavior. Communism is often born of necessity and not political will. Those who cheat and steal are ostracized, if not hunted.
It is during rapid transitions, and it seems during both growth and decline when hoarding and theft become rampant. In steady state, those that remain, work together.
If they grew up in Rural China and weren't telling you stuff about their experiences of "The Great Leap Forward" or "The Cultural Revolution", particularly the extreme amounts of selfishness one had to utilize to simply survive, they, like many people who have had to exist in destitute conditions, They're probably not telling you the whole story, and never will because they do not want to deal with the social judgements from people over actions they took to survive.
There's a good chance that for the survivors from that era, their parents almost certainly did some extremely evil things to survive.
You appear to have no real knowledge of Chinese history, perhaps as bad as that (not) taught in China. Around 1960 when the famine and related purges occurred the population was ~650M so even with the high end of 30-45M dead of starvation over 3 years, it's a few percent. It's horrifying to be sure, but it was concentrated (for political reasons they were exporting grain) in the west and central China where food was grown, while the major population centers were largely spared (still almost 1% died). So no, not every person alive in 1960 was involved in some sort of genocide, or even aware of it. The political elite of course suffered relatively little (until 60-80% of them were in turn purged less than 10 years later), but they were also (as usual) a tiny minority <3% of the population. This purge was called the Cultural Revolution also driven by Mao. Then came Deng, and now Xi. With some periods of relative political complexity in between.
Please study some history and stop assuming literally everyone is evil. That leads to the very expectations, political apathy, and actions that allow this kind of situation. It's unhelpful.
"Why isn't this mentality seen in Bangladesh"
Go ask anyone from, say, Myanmar (especially Arakan state) what they think of Bangladeshi people. You might find that opinion of "They're some of the kindest, most welcoming people I've been around in the face of a poverty that China no longer knows" to not be so widely held.
Maybe you should ask Bangladeshi's what they think of the Rohingya people. It turns out that Myanmar is not the only country oppressing them and refusing to give them citizenship!
The tendency to want to group an entire race/people with opinions based on hundreds of experiences with them, let alone dozens or a few, is the same tendency in us that spawns racism and prejudice. Your experiences have no influence on the reality of "the goodness of a people".
I'm married to a Bangladeshi, so yes I'm very aware of the treatment of the Rohingya at a state and societal level. I have close Bangladeshi friends that have done humanitarian aide work with their communities in Cox's Bazaar. It's a horrible crises.
My comment was responding to the author's argument that compassion only arises when material needs are accounted for, that compassion is some middle class thing. They were arguing that Chinese culture doesn't emphasize it because of their history of war, famine, and poverty. I think that's a horrible misunderstanding of both compassion and Chinese culture, and was merely countering it with an example of a people that have also experienced a famine that had a similar mortality rate who display perfectly normal human levels of compassion and kindness despite that history. I then went on to conclude that the original writer is likely completely off on how they view Chinese culture, that compassion is fundamental to being human and has nothing to do with bourgeois material comfort.
We tend to want to think in binaries -- people are compassionate or not. People are welcoming or not. That's not how reality works though, it's more nuanced. I was in no way arguing that an entire community of people aren't capable of mistreatment of others. Of course they are. But can a people that have experienced a massive amount of trauma and poverty and loss capable of displaying compassion? Of course they are. Because compassion is a fundamental aspect of being human.
> No. These are virtues, not luxuries. You don't need a high income to be compassionate or have self-esteem.
It's not about you, it's about others around you. If they do not have a "high income" (or, in other words, materially comfortable life), you cannot expect them to be comfortable enough to be compassionate or have self-esteem. And then, if they don't, but you do, it's an easy recipe for your compassion to be exploited and your self-esteem to be perceived as danger. It's a self-leveling system.
It's not an individual matter, but a social one. Always has been.
And it's not specific to China - I see it in Poland, a relatively "we've been damn poor forty years ago" country as well.
This flies in the face of my own experience travelling all over the world, where the poorest people would offer me extreme generosity and not accept anything in return.
Maybe it's bias because I'm an "exotic" white guy in many areas and not just a random down on their luck average guy from their own region.
I've also been offered generosity by rich people, as well, but, I will generalize, that mainly came after I demonstrated some proof that I didn't actually need their generosity
Have you ever been to truly starving places? Not taking about poor countries, literally starving places, like, Syria in WWI. Where if you don't steal from your neighbor, your kids will die of hunger. That's the kind of environment where compassion is a luxury. A lot of China was like that _even if for a short time_ in the last century. That leaves deep scars.
Not a lot of the world is like that today, you'd have to go pretty far out of anything considered tourist-friendly to see conditions similar to Mao-induced famine.
There are definitely SOME aspects of generosity tied to abundance and some not. Some might offer you the cup of cleanest rainwater found in their plot of rubble and others might chase you away using the stolen phaser gun tucked under their clothing. Or maybe it's more influenced by inequality within the society rather than absolute material abundance.
Yeah, but older rural people in China are often exactly like the post you're responding to, anyways.
The "white" privilege is pretty much all of it.
> This flies in the face of my own experience travelling all over the world, where the poorest people would offer me extreme generosity and not accept anything in return.
orrrr maybe poor people you've encountered are poor exactly because they are generous in competitive environment - and non-generous became rich and successful
Maybe it's country dependent. I have seen what you describe in countries where christianity is the dominant religion and most people in those countries something like 70 to 80 percent identify with it. And religion in those places is most prevalent among the poor, so much so there is a direct relationship between poverty and religion, the more religious, the poorer.
In my personal experience, religiosity correlates with the appearance of kindness but not the actual act of kindness.
100% spot on.
Everyone who downvoted you are the type to step into another pile of dog shit the moment they finish scraping their shoes. Regressing into spirituality doesn't fix this. High trust paired with opportunity does.
not one person has called you out for consistently sounding like AI so I'll be that guy and cop the downvotes, in case a human is involved in the loop I will also respectfully provide an actual response - did you have a way or some evidence to back the possible insights contained in your strangely metaphored comment?
Hah, that's pretty funny. I expect to be downvoted on HN half the time, but since you asked I'll do you a favor and confirm I'm not AI. You might want to take a break.
Right back at you, I'm not sure what the deal is lately with some comments insisting on quotes or citations or "proof" of anything. To me, they seem like gambits by paid trolls. I'm just making observations from experience.
Something to ask yourself is where the honest truth is supposed to come from if it's always borrowed from somewhere else. People are free to make up their own minds.
One's compassion reservoir capacity is proportional to one's capacity to fulfill its own needs first. You fill your cup first before you pour into others.
Why are tech millionaires, Kushners, Trumps, higher management so sociopathic then?
Because compassion is emotional and they are all emotionally vacuous.
Parent said it’s a requirement. You have the option to develop compassion once your needs are fulfilled.
If you are starving, you don’t even have that option. You need to prioritize your survival.
Also, poor people produce art and are creative. Art and creativity are oftentimes reault of not being able to afford comfortable middle class boring life, having issues you deal with, needing to distract yourself from hopelessness.
Even historically, quite a few art or music styles came out of poor or disturbed communities before they got commercialized. It is as if upper middle class HN programmers tended to think that creativity or art is only when you do something expensive or take an expensive art class.
The best cuisines in the world don't come from the wealthiest societies. In my opinion.
Maybe, the toxic environment will grind you enough until you don’t have these things anymore. And leaving the toxic environment is a luxury.
The communists in China actively tried to replace old virtue (it was barely alive in China pre-revolution anyway) with new virtue. New virtue was hollow, shallow, empty and fake.
you completely missed the point.
It's amazing to me how ignorant this comment is. Someone is teaching you something about a culture you don't understand and you're chastising them (or condescending to an entire nation).
> No. These are virtues, not luxuries.
According to your particular ethics. Has it ever occurred to you that the ethics you have isn't universal but is simply an artifact of your culture?
Compassion and self-esteem are not artifacts of culture or ethics. They're intrinsic to humanity. The manner of expression of these virtues can vary among different cultures. The audience of these virtues can vary among different beliefs and ethical frameworks. But the virtues exist in every society.
> They're intrinsic to humanity.
I have to daily remind myself that people on here probably haven't had a single liberal arts class (like philosophy or anthropology) because they're stemlords.
> But the virtues exist in every society.
And also not too bright. brother you're literally commenting on your own response to a post about how such a virtue is potentially absent in some society
You know what else is instinct to humanity? Survival.
If you can hardly find food or medicine, there is very little room left in your brain for virtues.
This is why religion was developed to help people cope. Society collapses quickly when there is scarcity.
We saw a small glimpse of that in COVID with people hoarding basic toiletries in US and leaving others in need hanging.
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> These are virtues, not luxuries
I'm only speaking from my own experience here. When I've seen stressed out people who are expected to believe in "virtues", they just become more dishonest to hide their bad behavior.
The bell curve of human behavior stays the same no matter what time or place.
In Greece the postwar generation was born in poverty after WWII and a civil war. But they created wealth, enough to live in relative luxury: multiple homes, ample available income and free time, holidays around the world. If you are willing to live, you will in the same generation. The current generation pays the cost of that expansion and that is a classic economic lesson.
> If you barely have enough food to feed your family, as a significant number of Chinese people were in the 60s and 70s, you cannot afford any of these.
This has also been true where I am from (formerly East Germany), yet we still had arts, creativity, freedom to pursue passion, compassion and self-esteem. We might have had only barely enough food to feed a family, but that didn't mean that we acted like animals.
> The uncomfortable truth is a lot of the things westerners take for granted are, in fact, luxuries.
This is supposed to be uncomfortable? Why? Most inter-national discussions here are about how their country is better because they have bigger houses, more toys, and how they can remain oblivious to how the rest of the world works because of how good their “soft” or “hard” power is at managing the rest of the world.
That sort of international comparison talk is usually more motivated by arguing that "my rich country is better than your rich country" than "my rich country is better than poor underdeveloped countries". Oftentimes it is a proxy argument for the best degree of government involvement in the economy and other policy questions.
This is China. People have been arguing about the progress of China relative to the West/USA for decades and decades. Just like they have been arguing over US/Europe.
I think this also leads to the most important observation of our time: progress is now much more difficult to measure and the control over the narrative is fierce.
This entire century of media has been an endless splitting of hairs and casting of doubts.
> Compassion is a luxury
This one is interesting. I'm from Poland, and I'd argue that during very shitty communist times people had a whole lot more compassion than now, when the country is in a much better shape.
I would say that compassion is not a luxury; it's a necessity for human society to operate.
Societies thrive when humans cut each other a little slack. They die when people are constantly looking for ways to take advantage of others.
Severely competitive and hopeless environments will do a hell of a job on human compassion.
Read about the dehumanizing effects of concentration camps on individuals hiding food from their family or praying their father dies so they can get his food
Its arguable that our ability to build luxurious enough societies has allowed out compassion to flourish far beyond what is witnessed elsewhere in the state of nature
Having less competitive/ruthless (sub) societies i.e. environments where one co-operates is what allowed us to get luxury not the other way around.
Yes, we agree.
Yeah I just realised re-reading your comment, I believe I must've meant to reply to someone else.
> Severely competitive and hopeless environments will do a hell of a job on human compassion.
True.
> Its arguable that our ability to build luxurious enough societies has allowed out compassion to flourish far beyond what is witnessed elsewhere in the state of nature.
Concentration camps and famines are not the 'state of nature'. A closer analogue would be tribal societies in the Amazon basin, Eastern Africa and the like. Constant hunger and scarcity are not the norm for well adapted human cultures, nor have the been for most of recorded history.
By state of nature I means the non human vilification life space.
Of course a concentration camp isn’t the state of nature
I’m saying human compassion far exceeds anything witnessed in the animal/plant kingdom. Some animals show affection for their offspring, but it usually doesn’t extend beyond that. There is no dog or lizard or tree version of mother Teressa
Concentration camps were created, engineered and run by rich people. Whatever lack of perfect compasion and fight for scraps you see inside, comparably rich people making conscious choice to create them, support them, work in them, profit from them have less of it.
This perspective is drenched in 2026 cliche. If that’s your grand take on concentration camps, you ought to touch literary grass
I dont know what you mean there. It was just historical fact about who build them and run them.
They did not emerged as force of nature out of ground. They were intentionally and conciously build. And guards were well fed.
And in here, when you use inmates lack of compassion as example of powerty causimg lack of it, you absolutely should compare to compassion of builders and guards.
> concentration camps
Concentration camps are an example of humans taking advantage of one another. Arguably, it's the ultimate example.
Yes, we agree on that.
Which is why I think the whole premise of GP is kind of suspect. China has housed a highly-developed society - not just a civilization, but a contiguous, if evolving, social order - for longer than most of the rest of the world. Even what they consider backwoods and rural is basically urban by most historical standards.
These aren't the problems of a society rising out of a state of nature; as TFA states, "The narrative is that China experienced a “century of humiliation”". I think certain aspects of Chinese culture as we know it, writ-large, make more sense coming from people who weren't just recently struggling as a society, but who are well aware of how that condition compares to their historical one.
Say that all you want, make it a mantra if you like. But have you ever skipped a meal out of sheer poverty? Or might you be projecting ethics (ie aka Americanism)? Maybe we should actually cut them some slack.
I have. I know a lot of generous, compassionate poor people. I met loads of them in Honduras and Brazil and Belize. Compassion and generosity need not be a factor of economics.
The corollary to this of course is what happens to countries experiencing the reverse, a rapid decrease of passion and "luxury" for large swathes of the population.
45, 47
I'd say it's more about the education. Your education prioritize loyalty to the nation/party more than loyalty to humanity and oneselfs.
Was the mentality different when Imperial China was rich, and will it change again as it becomes richer?
Who was rich in Imperial China? In most travelogues I've read about China in the 1800s, there was huge and deep poverty then too.
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Just like with most Empires, that wealth was heavily concentrated with the rich and powerful, a very small group of elites.
> wealth was heavily concentrated with the rich and powerful,
It still is.
I found reading the first chapter of Ai Weiwei's 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows quite depressing. It describes a woman who gave away or let her child die in order to take care of some more well off people's children, which I remember to be Ai's father or grandpa. Then goes on to describe what his dad went through during the Cultural Revolution. Needless to say, I stopped reading the book.
I'd like to argue that different generations of Chinese people might have drastically different characteristics, because of how quickly life changes here.
I'm a native Chinese person born around the new millennium, and some of the observations in this article seem to apply only to specific generations.
"Dark World thinking as described in Truth or Dare": I personally don't feel this at all. But this mentality does apply to many people over 70.Some of the elderly people I met are mean and selfish by today's standards, but considering they might have literally survived a starvation, this shouldn't be that surprising.
"Primacy of social reality, and of shame and “face.”: I don't know about this. Maybe because I grew up in this environment, I am used to the social norm and don't find it uncomfortable at all. Yet I haven't lived abroad for a long time, so I don't know how different it is somewhere else.
"Chinese social media is like American junk food.": Basically true. Social platforms can be atrocious, but there are rational and comfortable circles. They tend to stay low though, since popularity usually destroys them. But I'd argue that this is the same anywhere on the internet.
I (an American with a lot of interest in China) was playing doudizhu with some Chinese friends recently. It was agreed that the losers would have to kowtow to the winner instead of paying money. I was on the losing side and it meant nothing to me, while even in a private, joking setting it was apparently a very uncomfortable thing to have to do for my teammate. See also the general cultural attitude toward doing something embarrassing as a "punishment" for losing a bet or game, something fairly unknown in the US.
> doing something embarrassing as a "punishment" for losing a bet or game, something fairly unknown in the US.
Spin The Bottle? Truth or Dare?
Great counterexamples! These are specifically part of the game, whereas in Chinese culture it seems to be more like "let's play a defined game with winner and loser, and in order to motivate you not to be the loser, we'll agree that the loser do something embarrassing." Like in the US when I would play recess games as a kid, if you lost, you just lost with nothing at stake. Also we're all in our thirties instead of kids playing truth or dare.
What does kowtow mean here? Say the other person is better than them?
I assume they mean a physical, in-person card game, which would suggest it means bowing to the winner so that your head touches the ground.
> Some of the elderly people I met are mean and selfish by today's standards, but considering they might have literally survived a starvation, this shouldn't be that surprising.
My grandfather survived starvation and much, much worse things during and after WWII (in Russian captivity). He died of old age a long time ago, but was a very kind and not at all selfish person.
The bit about why one would want to be a doctor. Money, status, approval... helping sick people (hysterical laughter). Is exactly how my millenial Chinese colleagues that came to North America to study in university are like.
I have dated a number of Chinese women, and had friendships with many men. I think these observations ring quite true, but I want to point out how a lot of these things are downstream of economic realities. Admittedly my age demographic targets my experience to 20 - 35 year old Chinese.
A lot has been said about outdated scarcity mindset, and those beliefs being difficult to shake in this thread. But honestly, I whole heartedly disagree. The mindset around these kind of Dark Triad behaviors, fixation on social standing and wanting to raise China up stem from the current day reality that China might be the MOST competitive society in the entire world, other then south Korea. To literally just get into a good school and have a good job requires competition and dedication that students here have to do to get into Harvard. And failure along any of the steps up towards these goals in most cases will simply not be recovered: you will be part of the permanent underclass. It is a death battle that takes up every waking moment of your entire life.
I one time was dating a civil engineer who had managed to go to school and work abroad in my country. When I described how I thought the act of helping people, even when your own future was uncertain was a primal act of human dignity and greatness, she began crying. We talked a little bit after as she calmed down, where she explained that she was upset to hear me even talking about helping strangers instead of myself of her. "My whole life has been competition. How can you think about anybody else". It was an eye opening moment to say the least.
The unfortunate thing is that resource and job scarcity I think is increasingly driving everywhere in the world to have more of these mindsets. While people often complain about mass immigration and demographics, at current pace I believe the world will be a lot culturally similar to China 20 - 30 years from now, simply because of economic realities. Especially in a truly AI future where there just aren't enough high paying jobs left for anybody but the intellectual and economic super elite.
Your assumption that AI will lead to more scarcity is interesting. I believe that it, like most technologies, will result in more abundance overall.
> Your assumption that AI will lead to more scarcity is interesting. I believe that it, like most technologies, will result in more abundance overall.
"More abundance overall" could mean one guy with 1 quadrillion dollars of wealth, and everyone else with nothing.
Scarcity isn't just a function of quantity, it's also a function of distribution. Many people believe AI, like many technologies of late, will result in more inequality overall.
I think this article makes the same silly mistake most people do when analyzing other cultures: Overemphasis on national identity. I'm specifically speaking to point four here: I've got family in china, have visited for periods of months at a time, and don't see most people I've interacted with thinking about national identity or priorities mostly at all. Like people anywhere, they're wrapped up in their social lives, careers, and hobbies moreso than any kind of proving china or chinese people are this or that. The author calls out their own bias created by interacting with immigrants and internet culture, which I think will tend to form this lens
This is likely because as the author admits, their interaction with everyday Chinese is mainly through the Internet and cultural products, which has a significant bias.
Chinese government actively shapes the online discourse, so the messaging is already filtered. To make it worse, it meant people found out that the easiest way to silence your opponent is to brand them as anti-China, so you see a lot of pro-China virtue signaling. Finally, people also realized patriotism is lucrative.
An interesting recent phenomena is that regular Chinese people have figured out how to use AI to speak for them to make english language youtube videos. They are quite fascinating to watch, because you don't normally get such an unfiltered perspective. I think people feel safe posting these because nobody knows them in the west, whereas family, friends and govt. see Chinese social media. And of course youtube is banned in China.. Some of them make a few hundred bucks from Alphabet, this is a big deal.
Here are a few (check out the comments- working class people from around the world make contact):
https://www.youtube.com/@kangkanginchina7
https://www.youtube.com/@Chineseruralareas
Anyway, I view this as one of the more positive uses for AI.
Thank you for sharing these. I work with many Chinese people, but I am from a working class background. All the Chinese people I work with are of course the smartest and brightest and most fortunate, so it's difficult to get a sense for what working class Chinese people are like.
Ah, I think the origin of this video style is "Zaza in China"- or at least he's the most successful at it.
https://www.youtube.com/@zazainchina
He is also a vlogger in China making videos in English, but his don't use AI.
(Not about this particular channel)
I enjoy these videos a lot, esp. if they are about history and engineering. Some of videos have really good production quality. I guess they are probably translated fron original WeChat etc. source material.
Translation software and text-to-voice has existed for many years, why does AI make this any different?
AI is easier, faster, better, and deeply widespread
I was under the impression that AI was terrible for translating Asian languages (at least Chinese, Japanese and Korean) because it doesn't capture certain contextual nuances. Is it actually good now? Are there bilingual speakers who use it and vouch for it?
It’s extremely good. Chinese, Japanese, Korean. Had multiple instances of confusion because the counterparty thought I was actually a native speaker because we had only communicated over text. Both commercial and social contexts. Translation is now effectively solved.
Edit: I should add like all LLM usage, you need to prompt well. I also like to run the translation back through DeepL for a more traditional technology read on it and to identify any obvious issues.
They likely use Chinese models which work much better in capturing those nuances.
Yes e.g. Qwen
Well I'm grouping these under AI- they have been around a while for sure, but maybe they have reached some kind of critical mass there: I'm imagining people on Chinese social media talking about it as a way to make money.
Also the text to speech is in their own voice. Some are using this as a way to help pronounce english (maybe there is some language training software available for this, I don't know).
I think this was a good read, but as a US citizen with no connection to China, it's hard to say. I imagine what this kind of post would sound like but in the reverse, someone in China commenting on these kinds of social dynamics for US citizens, and I can't help but think it'd be a pretty crude characterization of our reality.
I would have really liked it if the author offered their perspective of the US version of these dynamics in a more one-to-one way. It'd let me "calibrate" their characterizations based on how accurate their version of the US side of this is based on my experience.
Regardless, I do think this attempts to at least apply nuance to this kind of discussion, and, of course, the author made it clear that they're aware of the kinds of faults I'm describing, so at least there's that.
It's someone who isn't culturally Chinese commenting on Chinese culture to a non-Chinese audience with the framing of solving the problem of proselytizing "Rationalism" to Chinese culture.
I take it with the same grain of salt that I would any religious missionary describing another culture, or any of the "angry foreigner in China" Youtube accounts. It may be accurate to some degree, probably more correct than someone with no connection whatsoever to the culture, but is it clearly not impartial.
It's someone who isn't culturally Chinese commenting on Chinese culture to a non-Chinese audience with the framing of solving the problem of proselytizing "Rationalism" to Chinese culture.
This.
A person raised in the US since age 4 and citing internet sites like the Chinese equivalent to RoyalRoad and Twitter as generalised examples of Chinese culture, nationalism and rejection of empathy should not in any way be taken seriously. Proselytising only enhances the disqualification, as does his endorsement of a complete misinterpretation of the Three Body Problem. There was a lot of xenophobia going on in that book and the positive characters were all Chinese.
I'm curious why you think that someone who left China at age 4 "isn't culturally Chinese": a child famously absorbs a great deal of culture from their parents and these particular parents grew up, married and had at least one kid in China.
And then they moved to America, and grew up in America, were educated in America, and spent a lifetime immersed in and influenced by American culture. That makes them culturally American. Theirs is a fundamentally different experience than having been raised in China and immersed in Chinese culture regardless of the influence of their parents.
Apart from being obvious given the facts, the author even admits this. So I'm curious why you believe them to be a liar regarding their own lived experience?
Chinese American is not native Chinese. They are two distinct cultures.
"something (grimdark power-scaling quasi-isekai fantasy) that likely appeals to Chinese netizens"
There's a huge amount of that stuff appearing as Chinese AI-created dramas. Although there seem to be only about ten standard plots. ("Banished girl heiress returns from the countryside to rich family" is very popular. Some of the vertical dramas with that plot are so similar it suggests re-use of the same prompt. Incidentally, if you don't watch Chinese drama and want to, see "Princess Agents", the original. That's a pre-AI big budget project with good plotting and characters.)
The AI fear for China should be that people will have to leave their city job, and return home in shame to their village, and farm. AIs and robots do most of the city work. There are still rich, modern, cities. You're just outside them.
The drama version would start like this: An employee is called into their boss's office and told they are being replaced with an AI. They pack their belongings into a cardboard box (a cliche of Chinese drama) and walk out of the building. When they get home, a petty official visits them and tells them their hukou is being revoked for being unemployed. Then we seem them with a small suitcase getting on a green train, headed for oblivion in the countryside.
I do feel a certain sadness in isolation of China. I wish I could learn and experience the culture but it's seemingly hidden from us. The insecurity angle here if true is very enlightening.
I think of the absurdity of "RRR" or gangnam style those may embarass stuffy people but much like drinking does to social situations seeing the dumb of society actually humanizes you. I think it's also the reason american culture is so pervasive.
I have never experienced a chinese show, movie, song, or played a video game but have experienced the culture from most other countries in some form. Even average chinese food is barely chinese! It was only when I moved to bay area I had real chinese food. Even their history requires effort to learn about, it's there but the depth is harder to learn about than others.
It's so easy to boogyman a country when you know nothing about them. All of their direct neighbors cozying up with USA is evident of their failure to spread a relatable cultural narrative. From this perspective China is more like the socially awkward kid that says and does weird things on top of being rude.
Once, on a flight back from China I happened to sit next to an old Chinese man watching a serial drama show set about 150?? years ago in China. It was the best in flight entertainment I’ve ever had. He noticed me watching and offered an earbud. Tho my enjoyment was probably amplified by not really knowing what was going on.
I don't have any personal experience with this, but what's interesting to me is how similar a lot of this sounds to America. I'm not saying it IS the same as America, just that if there is a substantive difference I didn't get a sense of it
- Nationalism stemming from insecurity (I tend to notice the poorest, most desperate tend to be the proudest)
- "social death" - Is that not so different that being canceled or fear of being canceled? To me it seems very apparent that people who get ostracized on the national stage take a huge personal toll and have their personality changed for years.
- Also for the Dark World example he uses a Peter Thiel quote. I think optimism/trust/community is lower here now that a few decades ago. But I do agree that in tech jobs I've anecdotally seen more cutthroat approaches (e.g. refusing to share knowledge with a coworker) from other cultures more often.
> I tend to notice the poorest, most desperate tend to be the proudest
I think this is where folks go astray. There are tons of well-off or even wealthy people who love America, give to their churches, cheer on their kids at sporting events, and have what appears to an outsider as an unbelievably high amount of nationalism. It's not really the poorest, most desperate slice of society by any measure. Have you lived outside of a major city in the US?
I don't live in a major city.
Looking at the research it shows that subjects who self-identify as loving America can be preducted by best by being older, and political party, though not wealth at all.
So I don't really have any hard-data to justify my impression that it's uneducated blue-collar white men without much going for them that vociferously love america, maybe it's just country music that gives that impression, or the type of uneducated poor who enter the army with blind faith in our institutions, etc.
I'd love to see the data on age. The only clear data is that having children makes you more patriotic and conservative. Basically you have a stake in the future.
Now, people who are younger and urban tend to also be childless, but if you control for child bearing, you will get some eye opening stats. There is also a correlation with depression and the number of visits to therapists, but that could also be due to the loneliness of being childless in a major urban area.
Might also be due to parents with children being in greater need of a chinwag with a therapist or three but as a group mostly veering toward lacking both free time and spare cash.
Lot of room to speculate.
No, it's childless people who see therapists more.
The axis is childlessness/more concerned with online social standing/less patriotic on one side, versus having kids/being more patriotic, fewer accounts of depression.
Much of the push for parasocial relationships is, I believe, the result of people not having kids to come home to but living life online. That also is responsible for the fear of "social death", e.g. online ostracism. People who come home to kids and grill with their friends on weekends don't particularly care about conforming to the beliefs of strangers online.
> No,
Read carefully, I didn't disagree.
> it's childless people who see therapists more.
Possibly because they have more free time and disposable income.
As I said, there's a lot of room for speculation, probably best to avoid sweeping generic explanations based on keyhole PoVs.
Maybe in the specific domain of corporate america.
In everyday life the description in the article is nothing like what I imagine America to be.
It seems like everyone is saying that the root cause is economic scarcity, but the Cultural Revolution's destruction of pluralistic status hierarchies deserves a large part of the blame.
Before the rev, your social standing in China could be judged by dimensionS (plural emphasized): lineage, academics, religion, business reputation, regional identity...
The Cultural Revolution tore each of those dimensions down, by design, for teh purpose of creating a new single dimension (politically sanctified identity).
The main issue with doing this to a Chinese culture, specifically, is that now the concept of face - already extremely important culturally - becomes basically everything. Every social interaction becomes zero-sum because there's only one thing to compete over.
In a pluralistic status culture, you can lose face in one domain and maintain it in another.
The Cultural Revolution removed that defensive buffer.
IN the past couple decades, China has added a second dimension, wealth. But it's hardly a real axis due to wealth being easily achievable through party alignment. In other words, the two dimensions are entangled. I doubt a principle component analysis would find them to be separate domains.
In any case, the younger Chinese generation who has access to global online subcultures, international credentials, professional specialization, etc., is recovering the pluralistic status axes. So... well, I could write my predictions, but that wasn't the point of my comment, so I'll end it here.
Actually, would you elaborate on your last point? This perspective is interesting and I'm curious how you see things progressing.
Sure.
My prediction is that the pluralistic axes will come back to China, but they will be superficial and strictly controlled. The recovering axes will be aesthetic and consumptive such as fandoms, hobby subcultures, fitness, foreign credentials... They will give young people somewhere to hold face when the main ladder rejects them.
Notably, these axes will be different from the pre-1949 ones: lineage, religion, and reputation came from institutions that were alternative sources of authority. The 2021 crackdowns on fan clubs and gaming showed the state will regulate any subculture that starts organizing people outside the approved channels. So I expect a split: people with exit options (e.g., overseas degrees, foreign income, portable skills) get a real pluralistic status life, while everyone else stays on the single entangled axis, where competition likely intensifies as the pool narrows to those who cannot leave.
As this progresses, we basically just watch to see if any new axis produces its own gatekeepers not credentialed by the state. I'm guessing every one instead gets an official association within a few years of reaching noticable scale.
The purpose of the author writing this seems to be improving the effectiveness of Rationalists in persuading the Chinese on questions of AI safety.
Based on my experience, these kinds of cultural generalizations are interesting to talk about but as with many populations there is much more variance between people within the group than between groups. For example young urban Chinese do not put Mao posters up in their apartments. For older rural Chinese it’s almost universal. Therefore, it is much more effective to get to know individuals than to write to no one in particular.
Additionally, the question of how Chinese society looks in general is less important than how the decision makers think. You don’t need to convince average Chinese people. You need to convince the equivalent of a VP at Google.
Based on those two things, and especially because as far as I can tell the Rationalists have framed the entire thing as a sort of prisoner’s dilemma, the only way out is to build trust. And in my opinion the best way to do that is for Americans to meet Chinese people and for Chinese to meet Americans.
As a casual visitor: the nationalism point rings very true, everywhere, their nationalism is more about hurt national pride than anything.
The point about the cynical view however I disagree with. I don't think I have the correct words to explain this, but basically, unlike India, Korea and maybe to a certain point Japan, they distrust this kind of American, almost forced friendliness, cheerfulness and enthusiasm and see it as fake, which is very similar to how French, Belgians, Dutch or Germans feels sometimes (I know I did my first time around in California).
That's also the reason why out of all of Asia, I feel the best working with Chinese teams (Japanese too but I have more trouble with their English).
[Edit]: forgot the point about social shame: not untrue, but geographically limited to the more rural area in my casual observation. No one in Beijing takes themselves that seriously, but in poorer areas, pride and face felt more important.
I think the thing people miss is that American friendliness is a bit fake, just not malicious. It's built on our pastoral history, but has evolved into a way to smooth down the sharp edges of a very competitive society - especially when that pastoral mindset ran headlong into the immigration that made contemporary America what it is.
> American friendliness
I'm hesitant to move further from TFA, but a brief one-shot: Among Boston people who returned after "trying" SV/SF/California, I repeatedly heard of struggling, amidst an unfamiliar ambient "friendliness" culture, to recognize social signals around "actual" friendship - was someone "really" interested in becoming friends, or were they merely performing "friendly". AI tells me this is called peach vs coconut, nice vs kind, guess vs ask cultures.
Similarly, someone (with no family connection to China) learned Chinese, later married into a family from/in China, and would describe "Chinese" culture. Someone else from China glossed their insights with a dismissive 'their friends are criminals [sic], and they're over generalizing from that subculture'.
So amidst country-level cultural themes, and regional variations, and generational differences (and gender, hukou, ethnicity, etc), and subcultural diversity, it's sometimes a challenge to tell what is which.
> unfamiliar ambient "friendliness" culture
This rings true. I came to Philly from England in 2004. I'm an outsider, but I get by socially.
Philly does not have a good rep. Sometimes people from elsewhere voice ghetto, hooligan, or snobby-suburban stereotypes. (Whatever! The worst thing is how they say the words "crayon" and "water".)
But whenever I visit California it feels superficial and fake.
> I'm hesitant to move further from TFA, but a brief one-shot: Among Boston people who returned after "trying" SV/SF/California, I repeatedly heard of struggling, amidst an unfamiliar ambient "friendliness" culture, to recognize social signals around "actual" friendship - was someone "really" interested in becoming friends, or were they merely performing "friendly". AI tells me this is called peach vs coconut, nice vs kind, guess vs ask cultures.
My experience is that everyone from outside the Northeast thinks those of us from the Northeast are assholes, and we think they're all two-faced sociopaths.
I mean there's a reason for the term Masshole, having lived there for several years, but at the same time, it's just a stereotype.
Most users on /r/AskAnAmerican don't seem to consider American friendliness fake:
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/ehe25w/why_a...
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/1k7sfbv/so_w...
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/1nq71lc/why_...
The US is a big place. There isn’t one “American culture”. If someone in one part of the country says we should get drinks sometime they’re just saying a nice thing. In another part of the country, that means “this weekend”.
In a cowboy society where everyone is armed, it pays to be polite.
I don't think that's it.
If my main consideration in an interaction with a stranger is to avoid its escalating to violence, I'm going to be polite, but I'm going to be a bit reserved, not enthusiastic or friendly.
In these discussions, non-Americans often describe Americans as always happy, which is another quality I'm going to tend to avoid showing in the hypothetical interaction with the stranger because if he is feeling bitter or resentful, my being happy might set him off.
Yeah, i totally get that, it's absolutely not malicious, i'm not sure it's even fake, maybe only a bit exagerated. But for an unaware person, it _feels_ that way, and i guess when American visit France or the netherlands, or, to go back to the subject, China, our reactions must feel weird.
That was jut to tell the author that i think he misread how Chineese are on this specific point. It wasn't a criticism of North Americans at all. Really, i think this is charming now (as long as we don't work together, then i will find this infuriating and bitch about it to my SO)
What I wonder based on this piece is how much the lived experience for someone in China differs from the view from outside — and the author admits that his is a "fairly narrow window," though certainly wider than mine. But when I visited China, I saw both the part that reflected popular ideas of what it's like there (based on what actually propagates to other countries) but also a part that felt like everyone was playing along with these aspects so as not to stick out.
Of course that may just be me projecting my own perspective onto them, but I did get the feeling that there is a performative aspect to the culture described in this article, and that whatever lies underneath it is likely, as in so many places, not really accessible to anyone who was not born and raised in a place.
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> Most characters are Chinese, but even those who are not continue to mostly think and act in this similarly alien style.
No, most good characters in those books are chinese. I liked technical aspects of the book a lot, but on societal level there was quite a bit xenophobia up to including racism against white people.
Still interesting, maybe something akin to picking up some pulp novel from 1920s that had other races in stereotypical cartoon evil roles. Not something pleasant to read in 21st century for anybody with more modern values (where average typical Chinese stand on this I leave to them here, no idea).
This is laughably inaccurate. Author's information source is unreliable for a start (interactions with older generations, and depiction of lives in China in fictions and online media), which is already seeing China via funhouse mirrors. That perception is then filtered through a Western lens. What comes out is barely even recognizable.
Can you share some of what you know that is more accurate? I mean specific details, observations, experiences. That would be a better way to contribute, because the rest of us could learn something.
I'm not saying your critique is wrong, nor (more importantly) uninteresting. What makes it interesting is the second sentence, which—not by coincidence—is the most specific.
But do please edit out swipes like "This is laughably inaccurate" - this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, and your comment would be fine (if a bit too generic) without that bit.
it's unfortunately impossible for me to give you an accurate picture what China, its people, its politics, etc. is like. For starters, even though I believe my own perception is more accurate than the author's, I still have my own biases and am also only able to view it from my own limited perspective. But more fundamentally, it's just impossible for me to beam what's in my head directly into yours. If you live in China, >95% of what you encounter is going to be mundane, boring day-to-day stuff. So whatever I talk about, whatever I lend words too, is just going to be given undue weight in your mind and give you a distorted image.
So instead I just want to say, like, they are just human too, like you and me. We may do things somewhat differently, but deep down we are all the same, we all have to breath, we all have a heartbeat, we all need to eat and shit, and we will all die one day. Remember that, instead of trying to build a reductive caricature of what "Chinese people" is like. If you ever interact with a Chinese person, be sincere, compassionate, and curious, just like how you would interact with anyone.
Very strange post. I've spent 40% of my life in China. I think these comparisons are forced by someone who wants to make comparisons and find clear differences.
For social media, Xiaohongshu is about the same as international social media, except you don't have that very weirdest type of brainrot content.
The author responded to one of the comments on the OP by saying:
"this was exactly the sort of missing latent context I was hoping to elicit from the community with my poorly-informed post"
Perhaps you could provide more missing latent context?
there is nothing to add because TFA is "not even wrong".
Can you recommend a better starting point on this topic?
if you want to get a sense of what China is like, you can look at how China talks about itself: https://chinaonchina.com/
news from Chinese media, translated into English.
I lived in China for years and returned there last summer for visit after 9 years and to sum it up what can probably describe China easiest for you despite the hype in media - prices and salaries are pretty much same as 9 years ago, can you imagine that in developing country?
Restaurant bill or job offers posted everywhere are basically same as 9 years ago and didn't changed, similar with real estate prices, in-laws bought investment apartment years ago, if they would sell it now, they would sell it at loss probably, similar thing with rents.
China is stucked in one place with less and less jobs for young people while there is less and less young people at same time (as share on whole population), sounds like deadly cocktail to me similar to Japan, the difference being Japan at least reached pretty developed status before getting into this status quo.
So much for the permanent GDP growth somehow not projecting into daily lives of Chinese.
Stable housing prices are not the problem you think they are.
not if you experience salary cuts which are now quite common in China
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I once read an article by a fellow from China who said that for many centuries the country had a set of social norms from Confucianism and traditional Chinese culture. But he said this was all abolished during the Cultural Revolution. An example was traditional values stressed piety toward ones parents, but during the Cultural Revolution children reported their parents to the government, which often punished them harshly.
The fellow said that when the Cultural Revolution ended, the culture never went back to the old values, and didn't have anything to replace them. so since then it has been every person, or at least every family, for itself.
3. more accurate framing: replace dark world thinking with realism and frame liberal middle class western bubble with libtard delulu.
4. it's 2026, the sentiment have shifted from PRC insecure to PRC IS strong. Apart from national soccer eon of humiliation - a devils bargain to transfer all national failure into soccer, I think last 10 years has proven PRC/chinaman working twice as hard has paid off across domains. Chip on shoulder still remains, of course there's misguided netizen comment on foreigners in general, but even post china-maxxing general foreign perspective on PRC across domains is every bit as myopic and ridiculous.
Judging by performance in true team sports (except women's v-ball) one might argue US is slightly ahead in the collectivism, culturally speaking..
Is chips a true team sport? I would guess, no.
If the post is censored in your region: https://nonograph.com/on-social-reality-in-china-10-03-2026
The problem I see here is treating China as one people. It is a huge country with diverse population and many ethnic groups. They are not homogeneous even if I think Beijing would like to make it this way.
Also, saying that Chinese are this and that are the same as saying all Poles are drinking vodka and steal car in Germany stereotypes.
I wonder what would be a country which is good for autists (in the sense of this article). Probably (parts of) the US, but I'm wondering whether there is some non-trivial answer.
Take the test:
"Am I German or Autistic?" [1]
[1] https://german.millermanschool.com/
I think one of the biggest differences, that the author misses, is that China is a totalitarian state.
The average citizen is not who you need to convince. The national narrative is set from the top, disseminated through the Central Propaganda Department, and enforced.
It’s not a grass roots effort to sway national policy in China AFAIK - you’re trying to convince a small group of key people who have enough of their hands on the steering wheel of a totalitarian state.
Single party state still has elections. You still have to get the votes. You just don’t have 2 layers of voting (primary for party, then secondary between parties). The primary is the final election. I guess the confusion is where the intersection happens between bottom up voting and the top down appointees. Not too different from corporations… there is some merit based promotions from individual contributors, but at some point in the middle management , you get a bunch of yes men because of the top down control…
Weird to talk about these traits like Chinese cynicism and generational trauma without even mentioning the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
That would be interesting, but probably require exposition of the perception within China of China's history.
Interesting !
On a similar note, as a Frenchman, I felt somewhat closer to the Japanese described in "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" by Ruth Benedict than to the Americans, although the Japanese are the "aliens" from the point of view of that book.
The idea that we need to "pause AI" is itself horribly life denying, evil, and wrong.
I don't care about the rest of the China discussion, but I really hope China simply accelerates and doesn't get screwed by "pause" rhetoric.
On "Chinese nationalism as collective insecurity" note that I think even as late as early 2000, Chinese as a nation or civilization or as ethnicity is still looked down in US.
And cynically I think they still are.
The OP is describing a low-trust culture. The US was a high-trust culture, but this is breaking down, and people don't realize how valuable that was and is in the process of being lost.
"Low trust culture" is becoming a racist trope.
How does the non-anonymity of Internet use in China play into this? As I understand it, all logins on mainstream sites are "real name", tied to your government ID. That ought to result in different social dynamics.
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I noted that some of the points made were not even wrong ...
Aside from its portrayal of Chinese people as having a “collective insecurity” and a “chip-on-your-shoulder,” which are the only 2 parts that I agreed, this article’s depiction of Chinese people as a group is simply not true.
At its core, it is a kind of projection along the lines of: “I’m an enlightened, worldly Western person who is almost immune to propaganda, and Chinese people are a mixed bag, but overall they are xxx.”
This is not the social reality in China. As the author’s background indicates, this is the imagining of an American who moved to the States at the age of four and has some interest in China due to ancestry.
Just to give one example—because there isn’t enough space here, and I can’t be bothered to write out more:
> Here is the first verse of a popular children’s song: ...
And yet, in more than twenty years of my life interacting with people of different ages from all over China, I have never once heard of this supposedly “popular children’s song.”
After all this article is just another BS about “It is concerning how much China blablabla...” Actually, on _Social Reality in_ Chinese American is they consider those “Chinese Chinese” as basically gorillas, parading them in front of other European Americans as if to say: “Look, these Chinese Chinese are my ancestors! Let’s study them together—and just look at how much further we Chinese Americans have evolved compared with them.” It IS a fancy imagination for those who really don't know zero about what's the reality of the people in the GFW.
There’s a whole market for explaining other cultures to Americans wrongly but in terms that they can understand.
They’ll prefer to listen to that because this kind of communication is done using the language and concepts they understand. They’ll confidently and arrogantly tell other people what they are based on this „knowledge”.
People ITT are loving it and enjoying it.
This is the ultimate colonialism.
> And yet, in more than twenty years of my life interacting with people of different ages from all over China, I have never once heard of this supposedly “popular children’s song.”
how often have you talked about your own childhood songs?
I could have agreed with argument "children songs are regional/vary family-to-family", but personal second-hand experience is definitely not it
In fact, the reason I know this can’t be any kind of “popular childhood song” is that all genuinely popular childhood songs have themes like “blow up the school,” “git rid of your mom and dad,” “skip school,” and kids’ dirty jokes. It’s the same all over China.
And we do talk about it often.
This “childhood song” example is completely out of step with China’s social reality, just as you can easily recognize at a glance “an old British poem” forged by an American.
One interesting thing about Chinese culture is what I'm calling "cultural diglossia". "Diglossia" by itself means coexistance of two languages. E.g. in the Arabic world, the language of the Quran is used in official documents, but the regular languages have drifted away from it.
In China this was also the case with the literary language (文言), but it went even further. You actually had to master it to advance in any official career. So a government official instead of, say, learning how to manage a city, had to learn the old philosophical texts written in a language nobody speaks. And they had to pass actual exams for that knowledge.
Now China has the Communist writings displacing these old philosophical texts. They are about as useful, and I don't think many people really care about them, but you have to show knowledge of them to advance in your career.
I don't think this is a _good_ pattern, it reinforces the belief that everyone around them is lying and that everyone's behavior is fake.
And since we're talking about culture, I highly recommend this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Tales_from_a_Chinese_S... - it's a series of short fantasy stories written around 400 years ago.
Some of them are just weird and have stories that are nothing like European fairy tales. For example, a story of a spirit befriending a man just to talk from time to time. And then the spirit had to eventually move to another location because it got a promotion. Just imagine the culture, where even your afterlife is going to be just as bureaucratic as your regular life!
Fresh grocery is a luxury. It really tastes much better. It’s the same in America too.
Try it out.
Less wrongers have this grating way of using pseudoscientific language that just comes across as extremely pretentious.
Yeah I think it gives them the illusion of being more right than the average person even if those are just the same old confused thoughts you could expect from anyone.
"Social death" is a common thing on Chinese social media apparently, shame-based virtue
I assume it runs deeper, but that doesn’t feel all that foreign compared to the US, does it?
There's nothing like that in the US, not by any measure.
The whole reason you have entrepreneurs in the US is because people DON'T judge for you failing. You can always start again.
Pretty sure we judged the heck out of Juicero, Theranos, and WeWork on this very website.
Not simply for failing though. Obviously there were other factors.
Right, but Elizabeth Holmes already has investors lined up for her next attempt to revolutionize medical testing.
Fraud is generally considered shameful, not being an entrepreneur
I don't know, I think it does, US social media is rather shameless, there's certainly no national social credit score or anything
Fair enough, but are we talking credit score or shaming by other users/citizen? Shaming and bullying people who are perceived as having done something wrong on-line is not unheard of in ‘the west’. I suppose it concerns famous people far more than your ordinary social circles, though.
The US has 3 national credit rating agencies.
One big disconnect the US has with China is that it's a putatively communist state running a hypercapitalist economy. So they frequently do capitalist stuff with that scary word "socialism" attached to it. Like introduce a fleet of pilot credit systems and calling it social credit.
Mix this phenomenon with US high school civics class and a few propagandists and you get the American view of "social credit score".
This is like the mirror image of the popular Chinese content of picking a few homeless scenes of the US and painting the whole image of US life experience from it.
Obviously, the author has deep engagement with the Chinese internet culture (the "junk food" part that I would avert), but the over generalization is comical.
Or maybe that's the point? The author is trying to be provocative? For someone with zero background of the Chinese internet culture, this could be a starting point (although an extreme one), but don't take this to represent the whole reality.
One example, the quoted book review of Three Body Problem draws the complete opposite conclusion that the aliens are Chinese. To anyone with actual Chinese culture context, they are obviously "Westerners".
<spoilers>
- Far more advanced technologies.
- The Trisolarians cannot lie, so that becomes the only advantage of humanity. -> Art of War
- The Trisolarians are blocking physical experiments to stop science and technology advancement. -> Entity list and export control. Huawei.
- The factions in human that supports the invasion. -> Evans hated humanity because of The Silent Spring, which is supposed to represent the Western self-guilt culture.
- The emaciated generation that failed at launching the mutually assured destruction device is an image of "Westernized" generation.
The overarching background of the book is a discussion of which direction that China should take after 1989 stopped the democratization process and drove the Western powers into hostility. The author Cixin Liu has a more or less social darwinism answer for that ("Dark Forest"). Not that he endorsed social darwinism, but that's the main theme of the book.
</spoilers>
You've misread/misunderstood the book review. It's saying the exact opposite, and the same thing as you; that in the book, the aliens are more like westerners, and the humans Chinese.
The thesis as given - "The real aliens are the Chinese people" (note the 'real') - is saying that, to an American reading the book, the portrayal of the humans feels more alien than the extraterrestrial aliens, while the extraterrestrial aliens are closer to familiar western culture.
Chinese drama steals a lot from korean and japanese. I see them wearing got/god (from Kpop demon hunters) claiming it's part of Chinese culture. I've even seen ones where kimono is Chinese. I thought he was going to say it's junk food cuz we lost all history after Mao Zedong, and stole ideas from other countries.
Now you see Han-fu in chinese dramas.
Hanfu is made up shit, I tell ya, I never seen that shit until 15 years ago. I had my g/f wear that in China, and chinese shooshed her cuz they thought it was either korean or japanese.
Saving "face" is just funny, because if you make someone lose face, they will sometimes even kill you (check out chines emedia for that)
I can’t take seriously expatriates speaking for a country they don’t live in. It’s not specific to author, just a general rule.
The corrupting influence of communism. CCP replaced human moral code with something demonic, and everything else followed.
> Dark World thinking as described in Truth or Dare – a deep cynicism about human nature. People are by default out to get you.
This is largely correct across cultures.
“Trust is a luxury I can’t afford.” - Cormega
Your best friends will screw you over for fun.
Your friendly boss will lie to your face.
Family members have no issue with ripping each other off once money is on the line.
How many probate attorneys eat well because siblings need to sue each other ?
I don’t even think it’s a matter of capitalism or economics.
Something is off about humanity at a fundamental level.
The vast majority of peoples' actions are beneficent, or at least polite. Otherwise, nobody would even keep their cars on roads. Stores would keep all merchandise in locked displays (not just the expensive things where the rare thief causes too much damage).
The bad experiences stand out because that's how our minds are wired, and they're so uncommon as to be surprising.
>Otherwise, nobody would even keep their cars on roads.
that's exactly what happens when state power vanishes. It's always fun to recall historical events, in 1977 when New York lost power for 24 hours (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977...)
In those 24 hours 1600 stores were looted, 1000 fires laid, firefights broke out, the mafia in little Italy hat to defend the quarter with barricades and arms, robbers were being robbed by other robbers, almost 4k people were arrested to the point where they had to be put into basements and gyms. That's one day without order. The bad experiences don't stand out because they're uncommon, they stand out because we all instinctively know we're one bad week away from eating each other. Which by the way given that this is a thread about China, happened in the living memory of some people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre
"In the massacre, methods of slaughter included "beheading, beating, live burial, stoning, drowning, boiling, group slaughters, disemboweling, digging out hearts, livers, genitals, slicing off flesh, blowing up with dynamite, and more".[1][8] In one case, according to official records, a person had dynamite bound to the back and was blown up into pieces by other people (so called "heavenly maiden scattering flowers", 天女散花)—just for fun"
I don't even think one needs to reach for extreme incidents to show the underlying animal nature of humans. From the far more mundane shopping frenzy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickle_Me_Elmo : "The scarcity of the new toy provoked a shopping frenzy. Two women were arrested in Chicago for fighting over the doll, while in New York City some people ran after delivery trucks hoping to get their hands on Elmo before it reached stores. ... Robert Waller, a clerk working at a Wal-Mart store in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, was among those injured by 'Elmo-mania'. During a Midnight Madness sale on December 14, Robert was unpacking the latest shipment of Tickle Me Elmo, when he became uncomfortably aware of a crowd of about 300 people watching him carefully. He opened a box, pulled out an Elmo - and the crowd stampeded down the aisle. Trampled, he suffered 'a pulled hamstring, injuries to his back, jaw and knee, a broken rib and a concussion'." It was supremely silly but the incidents of hooliganism across the U.S. were real.
Most of society only exists due to abundance.
We see people fight over Black Friday deals. God help us if there was an actual food shortage.
Just want to say that this isn’t a fundamental problem. Because it’s not my experience :) Love my family, and we’ve survived on the generosity of complete strangers. My folks weathered unemployment in the 90s because some anonymous angel left an envelope of money at their door.
I saw my family self destruct because a certain someone didn’t want to work.
That’s eviction #1.
You can see the hate and xenophobia coming out. When times are tough people need someone to blame.
This is not a forum where sympathy for Queensbridge is the standard.
Nas has had quite a few solid VC exits. These worlds cross paths often.
You can make the exact same list about positive actions.
And these positive actions happen 100x more often, at least.
But indeed, nobody is perfect
Millenial home ownership
China: 76%
USA: 36%
Everything else is bullshit if you're homeless, whatever metric you can think about to refute my post, it's worthless if you're homeless.
Without even checking your stats, every stat from tightly controlled territories is juked. Only fifth chief statistician under stalin held his position after four previous were educated on how to count with a firing squad. USSR "prevailed against imperialism" the same way, until it didn't.
But when it comes to owning a home in China, you can't do it - because you can't own the land, only lease it. So effectively, anything could happen with your home.
Then, construction in China is a pyramid scheme. Highly praised amount of infrastructure and empty ghost cities is an effect of that [0]. Combine that with rampant corruption (guanxi)[1] and culture of corner-cutting (chabuduo)[2], and you will end with bridges and multi-story buildings crumbling like sand, waiting to collapse at any moment.
All of that with an addition of aging population due to half-witted decisions of delusional, unchecked power (one child policy) leaves China with construction it wont be able to maintain, not even with immigrants, because of recent decisions of tribal nationalism[3][4].
Trends are saturated about China's prosperity and superiority. But if you want actual prosperity - you cant rely on algorithms alone.[5]
With your stats you imply that a person could feel safe owning a home in China. Could you feel safe accounting for all of that?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWDty6iNcgA
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/ub6lwn/what_is_the_c...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUaYNhzEq_E
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Jilv0b27m4
[5] https://www.firstpost.com/world/tiktok-manipulates-content-b...
interesting read
Kind of adjacent: Can somebody explain why the LW/EA/rationalist types all seem to be so ardently against China?
They're otherwise generally in support of doing the greatest good for the greatest number, at least ostensibly, so I wonder what it is about China -- which has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty domestically and is looking to export wealth abroad (most notably in the form of accessible "luxury" goods such as electric cars) -- that seems to trigger them so much.
China's political economy is also far more "rationalist" than anything you'll find anywhere else.
And yet I swear, and I'm not exaggerating about this in the slightest, that the average EA/LW poster hates China far more than the average /pol/ poster -- and is perfectly comfortable making sweeping generalizations where 1.4B Chinese are concerned. Guys like Scott Alexander rarely (if ever) have a good word for them; Zvi Moshowitz discounts and belittles every technological advance they make, despite otherwise being very fair; and you see what LW itself is like...
I don't understand where you're getting "hates China" unless that's a framing of "disapproves of the Chinese government on the whole".
I have seen Zvi pushing back against the narratives that open-weights models and Chinese ICs have caught up to the frontier. Was he wrong? But I can't recall any animus against Chinese people or their talent there.
It's rather obvious Zvi is biased if you consider the totality of his work on China (since Covid to the current AI boom), not only because of his statement of facts or his policy positions but rather his writing style, which betrays his view the Chinese are somehow not only technologically but morally inferior. And he expresses them with an emotional valence similar to his treatment of Trump.
They call themselves rationalists but they don't apply their own theories, they think permanent authoritarianism is as bad as human extinction. It's a predictable offshoot from their own west coast US ideological origins.
Yes, exceptionalism.
Authoritarianism is bad, except for when I do it (to protect you).
Expecting rationality from rationalists is like expecting objectivity from Ayn Rand.
Did you just make that one up? It's pretty good!
I don’t recall seeing it anywhere.
It is kinda weird when I think about. Surely Chinese style technocratic leadership and political system would be most efficient in reaching goals of those people. It probably should be the system to emulate. Instead of utter inefficient messes seen in other parts of the world.
Maybe they just are lot less rational and altruistic than they claim to be. With significant biases...
Pour any Rationalist article through a colander and what remains after the pseudo-intellectualism drain away is bog standard US right-wing ideology. That’s why.
Bog standard right-wing ideology is pretty light on kindness and empathy.
One thing many Westerners get wrong about the PRC is assuming its economically monolithic, though I guarantee you that's the outcome of decades of Chinese messaging to the West. They want to appear unified, that they've done all these amazing things and everyone has benefited.
In reality, there's two separate economies within the PRC. Around 40% live in the modern world we see in images of China (skyscrapers, EVs, high-speed trains, etc.). Awesome stuff, to be sure, and that same environment has been engineered to track every single interaction you make with it. You must use Wechat; no exceptions. Say the wrong thing on the Internet? You might lose the ability to take long-distance train or airplane rides within China, let alone international travel rights.
The other 60% live with dirt floors, hand carts, and engage primarily in subsistence farming. (It's been about five years since I last looked up those stats, but it should be around the same.) The US has eliminated this level of poverty; having even access to an automobile is enough.
The PRC argues they're able to take care of all their people, but they're nowhere near out of the woods when it comes to food insecurity. Due to population and geographic realities, they simply cannot grow enough food to feed their own people, so importation is an absolute necessity. For this reason, "unlicensed" fishing fleets (no Chinese group larger than 20 people operates without de-facto government consent) sail across oceans to fish just outside a country's territorial waters.
The Chinese political economy appears to be rationalist, but few countries have more political dishonesty than the PRC. According to an old friend who extensively knows Chinese politics, there's three main political factions: pro-Xi reformers, anti-Xi old guard Communists, and everyone else. Their ability to disappear a political enemy without what we'd term "due process" is truly unheard of in the West. Local politics is arguably worse; bribery is how anything gets done, and local officials suppress incident fatalities because over a certain threshold (around 30), the higher-ups will shame them. In such a media-controlled environment, that's less difficult than you might think living in the West.
When you talk about exporting wealth with EVs, that comes with the understanding that the PRC has de-facto control of your vehicle. Most people dislike the idea of the PRC not only retaining all data gathered by your car but having remote access to disable or drive it. If that's alright with you, go right ahead.
Why lie, though?
Your "60% live with dirt floors and engage primarily in subsistence farming" claim is utterly indefensible. At the end of 2025, China’s population was 67.9% urban and 32.1% rural. Even in 2021 -- approximately when you say you last checked -- it was already 64.72% urban.
Here's Chongqing, China's largest city by population (~31M): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOjZPCeZzGw
You'll agree that it's by no means a slum.
Also, and even more importantly, rural residence does not mean subsistence poverty. Look at stats on Chinese rural household possessions -- they're actually reasonably well-off. (e.g., >100 air conditioners per 100 households, whereas in France only ~25% of households have air conditioners!) Little surprise, then, that the World Bank credits China with lifting almost 800 million people out of extreme poverty.
Even if I grant your claim about food insecurity -- which is also fundamentally untrue, but not worth getting into -- how is it relevant? They need to import soybeans for animal feed, so they are evil?
You don't like them for some reason -- but I still don't get it, as the reasons you've put forth here make no sense and are flimsy, paper-thin.
Much of Europe has historically had an oceanic climate and not much need for air conditioners.
Italy is at 56% overall -- and 27.3% "in small municipalities with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants" (i.e. rural dwellings) -- and they usually have brutal summers:
> https://www.istat.it/en/press-release/household-energy-equip...
> https://www.idealista.it/news/finanza/casa/2026/07/26/406719...
Point is, the Rural Chinese aren't pre-industrial dirt farmers. When it comes to things like air conditioners, cell phones, TVs (~100% of households), internet use, etc., they usually rank quite highly.
As such, "60% live with dirt floors, hand carts, and engage primarily in subsistence farming" is either a lie or shocking ignorance, plain and simple.
I guess had old data. Seems like about 30 years ago, it was 40/60 urban/rural but now is 60/40 urban/rural. Good for them!
The air conditioner point, while hilarious, is not really comparable because Europeans have the money to install them but are usually forbidden from fixed installs due to historical building preservation codes and other regulations. Europeans create that issue for themselves, like always.
On food insecurity, I'll point to this excellent (though slightly older) article about food production in the PRC (https://factsanddetails.com/china/cat9/sub63/item348.html). For a more recent perspective, I asked AI for an answer:
> While domestic production has grown to nearly 7.5 billion metric tons annually, the overall food self-sufficiency rate has declined from 94% in 2000 to approximately 66% in 2020. Consequently, China has become the world's largest agricultural importer, relying on global markets to supplement domestic production for a diversified diet.
So, yeah, food insecurity (perhaps better termed food supply insecurity, I'll admit), though that might change once they start experiencing population shrink over the next fifty years.
I dislike the PRC due to a complete, utter mistrust of their entire operating model. It's undeniable that their methods are worth examining to understand the exact reasons for their effectiveness in growing the overall standard of living, educational outcomes, infrastructure, and more, and I will readily acknowledge that. How the PRC achieved that success is by truly, genuinely only caring about itself, with marginal concern for the outcomes of anyone other than themselves ("themselves" being the political elite, not the People). For all the global discussions about transitioning away from fossil fuels, the PRC destroys that progress every single day with their energy policies.
Most Americans are completely unaware of the extent of corruption in other countries. There is ALWAYS work to be done here, but to even compare them is genuinely comical. The PRC is far, far, far more corrupt. When I say corrupt, I don't mean greasing wheels or backroom deals; that's how all political structures (governmental or otherwise) operate, and if you can't accept that, then don't get into politics. Corruption in the PRC boils down to structured, deliberate misrepresentations and omissions of facts to avoid shame and preserve a good appearance (some parallels exist here with the USSR). Nothing even like that exists in the West, and you would be naive or silly for believing it does. For primarily that reason, I dislike them.
PRC is far less likely to do something malign with my data or my vehicle than the US government and the conglomerate of monopoly business interests it represents.
What's your understanding of cross-border data flows and third-party doctrine?
Say data leaves the US and goes back to the PRC. Did you know it's actually easier (from a legal perspective) for the US government and its business interests to collect the data outside the country than inside? It's actually in the intelligence and industrial communities' best interests for data on US persons leave the country. My point is, even with your beliefs, you should very much dislike that PRC automotive data will leave the country.
Remember the OPM hack? Perhaps the data should have simply been given to the PRC, since they're better data stewards and have our best interests in mind (/s). Ultimately, PRC vehicles will be used for facial recognition, home address identification, employer identification, and more. If you think I'm being hyperbolic, consider that the PRC can locate any person inside their borders (at least within an urban area) within ten minutes.
You’re right regarding countries in the ‘free world’, but PRC has stricter data controls for industrial interests and the CIA’s human intelligence network was largely killed when Xi Jinping took power.
Why should I remember or care about the OPM hack? I’m less concerned by fantastical stories or things ‘attributed’ to China than the things the US government does around the world in my name or to me directly at home which are beyond dispute.
eugh, I cannot state how much I hate broad, categorical psychological traits gettinng assigned to entire countries of people. that might come from the fact that people would ask me 'hey does your family do this' based on some Amy Tan movie they watched and me having to be 'yeah my family does not do that whatsoever, that's not all Chinese people'
I think part of this bias is due to not having any actual domestic, critical understanding of the home country culture and so you end up not applying the same analytical tools you'd use to analyze, for eg, why Youtube Shorts/IG Reels/etc took off here
some glaring examples from the essay:
> Chinese consumers already had a high tolerance for slop and AI content fit naturally into this ecosystem without ever triggering an uncanny-valley reflex.
yeah, this isn't due to some inherent acceptance of unreality, the massive volume of low-budget vertical 微短剧 (weiduanju) on Douyin and Kuaishou is driven by economic factors like digital ad-arbitrage [0]. most of these studios spend the vast majority of their budget on advertising with an incredibly small amount reserved for actual production and so you get AI filtered slop because it's cheaper than paying actors or make up artists or the whole supporting crew
plus, the CAC cracks down a lot more on cruddy micro-dramas than US regulators do on low-quality TikTok/YShorts/IG Reels content (ie not at all, ever)
> This basic message is inculcated throughout Chinese upbringing: push through and ignore physical discomfort, but attend to and be subject to social censure. It's okay to be buffeted by the elements, but if your grades are bad, you'll be too ashamed to face your parents.
this is again blaming individual psychological conditioning and not systemic forces. like in the US, managing reputation has to do with high-stakes institutional checkpoints, not an irrational preference for perception over physical reality. when the 高考 (gaokao) and your 户口 (hukou)[1] literally dictate whether or not you have access to housing, schools, and healthcare, you would of course focus your attention on grades and social standing. if there were other gatekeepers, the 'culture' would shift to focus there too
> Dark World thinking sees all virtue and kindness as pretense. Among many such tropes, a common derogatory trope is of women who act nice and innocent 白莲花 (white lotus) while being deceitful and manipulative on the inside. Chinese media creates trapped priors that people acting kind, altruistic, and pure are more likely to be evil."
this happened because they dismantled the 铁饭碗 (tiefanwan) [2]. the state basically dismantled the kind of sub-utopian socialist give-everything social programming (that certain propagandized Western leftists seem to believe are still in place) and let the market fully take over. when your universal safety net is gone, extending trust or finances to others who are economically incentivized to compete with you becomes a sub-optimal play. it's why 内卷 (neijuan or involution) is a widely discoursed about issue in Chinese society
also, it's very funny to see 白莲花 (white lotus) used... seriously here? in Chinese social media, that's a satirical term and positions the bailianhua as sanctimonious. it's not aspirational, it's like calling someone a Karen here
[0] https://36kr.com/p/3547915143655305
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324106192_China%27s...
[2] https://www.routledge.com/The-Individualization-of-Chinese-S...
I keep reading this article and I keep getting more and more frustrated by it every minute lol
>Even among strains of nationalism, Chinese nationalism seems to be particularly chip-on-your-shoulder. My impression is that this kind of insecurity is less in your face, but still present, in younger Chinese today. It is concerning how much Chinese AI models catching up in the AI race is entangled with this national insecurity.
investment in domestic computing and foundation models is guided by industrial policy (科技自立自强) [0]. this isn't some kind of ego issue shared across 1+ billion people, it's literally policy set up by central planninng
> "My current hypothesis is that the locally optimal message to China is in the vein of “give us your autists who feel alienated by the monoculture,” but others may prefer a more conciliatory approach that directly appeals to the dominant culture."
the lived reality of Chinese neurodivergence is not some abstract thing that's fun to joke about. it's, instead, families carrying a child through an educational system that offers minimal specialized scaffolding, navigating intense social stigma, and absorbing the terror of what happens to a dependent adult when their aging parents die. instead of seeing this population as a recruitment pool of "hyper-logical code monkeys" waiting to be drafted into an American AI safety crusade, maybe think of them as people. otherwise you're no different from the people who are just calling them slurs
also, to describe Chinese culture as 'monocultural' is just wrong. a migrant worker on a factory floor does not share the same culture as a tech worker at Baidu - and neither of them share the same culture as a factory owner. there's also like a billion subcultural niches in China - lie flat 躺平 and letting it rot 摆烂 just to name two more popular ones. it's not as if the people there are stupid to knowing their culture is exploitative - the critique of 996 is widespread
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209580992...
It's clear that you know a ton about this, and your comment includes much interesting and specific information—that's great! But can you please edit out the swipes and putdowns? Everyone's perspective is limited, after all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
huh what swipes? at whom? This didn't strike me as inflammatory or abrasive at all.
The comment has since been edited.
Generally it's not so good to silently edit a post in a way that deprives a reply of its original context. It's better to mark the comment as having been edited. Not doing so risks being disrespectful to the other commenter and to readers, and is even—the internet being what it is—sometimes used as a passive-aggressive trick to make a reply sound foolish after the fact.
I don't believe that was the intention here though—most likely paimapi was simply reacting to "can you please edit out the swipes".
And even if it were, we can cut some slack because (1) it sucks to get a moderation reply. We know it stings, despite applying every way we know to not come across that way; and (2) if the corrections make the comment into a more positive contribution to the discussion, we all win—especially when the comment has a lot of good information in it, which paimapi's posts do.
Btw, when we post moderation replies in that way, it's because of the good things in the comment, not the bad things. We have a different way of responding to all-bad comments.
okay that sounds pretty fair actually and I can get behind that. Thanks for taking the time to explain.
> > Chinese consumers already had a high tolerance for slop and AI content fit naturally into this ecosystem without ever triggering an uncanny-valley reflex.
> yeah, this isn't due to some inherent acceptance of unreality, the massive volume of low-budget vertical 微短剧 (weiduanju) on Douyin and Kuaishou is driven by economic factors like digital ad-arbitrage [0]. most of these studios spend the vast majority of their budget on advertising with an incredibly small amount reserved for actual production and so you get AI filtered slop because it's cheaper than paying actors or make up artists or the whole supporting crew
> plus, the CAC cracks down a lot more on cruddy micro-dramas than US regulators do on low-quality TikTok/YShorts/IG Reels content (ie not at all, ever)
I'm not following your argument with this one. American production companies (which also use and are funded by advertising) also certainly care about their bottom line, and would cut the budget of "paying actors or make up artists or the whole supporting crew" as much as they could get away with. As you note, the reason they can't get away with cutting that stuff more isn't because they're regulated more in America. Rather, they can't cut more because viewers wouldn't tolerate it. What argument are you actually making about why Chinese companies getting away with the low-budget (low-quality) "slop" isn't the fault of the people tolerating it by watching?
As a Chinese person who has lived in the US for five years, I think the “normal-to-westerners” explanation of 圣母 is wrong. Kindness and good deeds are widely celebrated on the Chinese internet, and I am often moved by them.
Suppose a country leading in AI invokes safety concerns to demand that countries trying to catch up restrict their development, while continuing its own. Calling this 圣母 would criticize the perceived double standard and moralizing at others’ expense, not concern for humanity.
The term can be misused, but presenting it as evidence that Chinese people reject ordinary compassion reflects a prejudice and misleads readers.
I’d take this with a very large grain of salt.
> I’m a “first-generation” Chinese-American who moved to the States at the age of four.
That description itself is part of the point. “Chinese-American” is a very American way of framing identity: ancestry remains explicitly attached to nationality even when someone has spent essentially their entire conscious life in the United States.
If someone moved to the United States at four and then spent all of their formative years there, I would not automatically treat their perspective on China as meaningfully more “inside” than that of an ordinary American. They may have Chinese family, speak the language, retain cultural habits, and have much stronger personal ties to China than the average American, but their actual socialization - the schools they attended, institutions they dealt with, media they consumed, peer culture they grew up in, and political and social assumptions they absorbed was overwhelmingly American.
I’ve encountered the same pattern among people from my own native country who were raised abroad. Their connection to the country can be entirely genuine, while their understanding of contemporary life there is still largely mediated through parents, relatives, diaspora communities, occasional visits, and inherited cultural memory.
So if the subject is what present day China is actually like from the inside, I would give that perspective roughly the same evidentiary weight as that of a well informed American unless the person later spent substantial time actually living in China.
That says nothing negative about their identity. It simply means that ancestry and family background are not substitutes for having grown up inside a society.
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What happened to the first comment that was posted here? I'm assuming it was removed because it was just a list of what I am assuming are a bunch of CCP censored terms and it didn't engage directly with the content; however, it caught my attention because I have never noticed previously a comment removed without a placeholder. Then again I suppose this why I don't see a bunch of removed spam posts.
If you're asking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937309, users flagged it. When a post gets a lot of flags relative to upvotes, HN's software kills the post (that's what "[dead]" means). Moderators sometimes also kill posts, but mostly they're killed by software.
Dead posts are removed from public view, but you can still see them by turning the 'showdead' setting on in your profile. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
If you turn 'showdead' on, please don't forget that you did! As your last sentence implies, turning it on means signing up to see a ton of dreck. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
You'll also see posts that don't deserve to be [dead] and for that we have something called vouching - also in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html ("What does [dead] mean?")
> On social reality in China
> Background: I’m a “first-generation” Chinese-American who moved to the States at the age of four. The beliefs in this essay are primarily drawn from interactions with my parents and their generation of immigrants, and from consumption of Chinese media (dramas, webnovels, games, and manhua) which are not necessarily representative of the realities on the ground.
But the CIA pays well, isn't it ? /s
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Chinese people find American food disgusting: inauthentic slop inundated with additives and high fructose corn syrup.
Europeans feel exactly like this as well. And as an American who's lived in Europe for decades, I couldn't agree more.
There is plenty of American food that isn't "inauthentic slop inundated with additives and high fructose corn syrup", it's just happening in houses and in kitchens and not in chain restaurants or pre-made in grocery stores.
That's the thing, in US it's really hard to find a middle ground.
It's either healthy organic vegan, or junk.
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This is a common experience with any unfamiliar genre: it all looks or sounds the same at first, because the point of a genre is to express variation within a specific, familiar structure. As a newcomer, the structure dominates your perception, until you've exposed yourself to enough instances that you can filter out the common features and notice the details, which are where the actual creativity lies.
>"This is a common experience with any unfamiliar genre: it all looks or sounds the same at first, because the point of a genre is to express variation within a specific, familiar structure."
If it were a question of genre, sure I get that. But we're talking about effectively all commercial art at this point. It has nothing to do with "western superior" racism or anything like that. Japan does not have this problem at all, even though they invented the anime aesthetic.
Where is the Chinese Mario, Elden Ring, or Metal Gear? What studio is producing a truly original distinct visual language?
> Japan does not have this problem at all, even though they invented the anime aesthetic. Where is the Chinese Mario, Elden Ring, or Metal Gear? What studio is producing a truly original distinct visual language?
I live in Japan and I strongly disagree. The products you mention are the ones strong enough to get exported overseas, but within Japan itself you get a thousand manga/anime/dorama/idols/games per year that all look pretty much identical, everything feels extremely derivative.
The Chinese equivalent of a dive with a good band is not ultra-commercialized international content available through western syndicates. If you want to get an idea of how hard they'd be to discover, try listing the American cultural rebels you know of (that are actually rebelling from something, not commercializing a 40 year old punk style).
Why does everyone equate music with ultra commercialized crap? Why ignore the underground and alternative scenes? There is a fuck ton of alternative underground music and art. It's not hard to find.
That's kind of the point though. There are a ton of alternative underground music and art, but it's not popular and it's even less popular outside of the various countries from which it originates.
The same is true of Chinese culture. China has an unbelievably diverse range of music, film, theater, etc... but what gets exported to a Western audience is not going to be things like Beijing's underground punk and experimental noise scenes, Chinese shoegaze, Sichuan and Yunnan folk music, Mongolian throat-singing fused with metal, dozens of completely different regional opera traditions, underground queer cinema, or Sichuanese rap.
Westerners will mostly get the small slice of Chinese culture that is easiest to export, translate, market, and fit into familiar expectations about what "Chinese culture" is supposed to look like.
And what reaches the West is surprisingly little.
Take the Condor Trilogy, for example. It's not even underground or punk, it's a major cultural touchstone. Written more than 50 years ago, over 300 million copies sold, dozens of TV and cinema adaptations. And as far as I know, only the first part has officially been translated into English, and nothing into Spanish. Even the TV adaptations, some of which had several hundred million viewers in China, haven't been published in the West: I have watched some with fan subtitles, but they haven't been brought officially as far as I know.
If even such major works don't reach us, judging Chinese culture by what does reach us is nonsense.
Because we have a push-based knowledge culture that encompasses only what someone is willing to pay an advertisement channel to tell you.
I have no idea about Chinese pop culture, but it could be that for someone not familiar with it everything may be too unfamiliar for the differences to become appreciable.
For example I don't listen much electronic dance music (house, techno, trance etc), and whenever I end up in a club it sounds to me that its always the same loud thumping song playing. Those who go frequently do seem to find a lot of variation though.
While true, that probably says more about what you’re looking for at home. I could be wrong, maybe you’re really into the late pop fads, mass market tv events and all of that. To an extent this comes down to comparing an entertainment landscape you know how to navigate to find the stuff aimed at you, with a foreign one.
Western reality tv, procedurals, game shows, soap operas and so on are incredibly samey after all. BUT the other factor is that creative endeavors in China take place under a censorship regime. Some topics are safer than others, so the mainstream tends to be quite formulaic and focused on fantasy, sci-fi, or pseudo historical shows.
Is that really any different to Hollywood and western pop songs?
This reminds me of South Korea. IDK if its still a thing but apparently there was an official puffer jacket tier list and 90% of high school students wore 1 of about 8 different jackets.
Social games that drive conformity.
I think you may want to interrogate why you feel this way a little more before you assign it to a "feature of Chinese culture." Frankly your comment comes across as aggressively ignorant.
To me China seems much more diverse than the US.
Might I direct you to the popular American culture? The US comics for a long time were _required_ to be pre-AI slop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority#1954_Cod...
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Can you please not break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are? I realize it's frustrating—most of all when someone is lazily expressing a one-sided majority view (<-- not talking about the GP here, just in general), but it's necessary to wait until that surge of frustration subsides before posting, if we're to have the kind of discussion we're trying for (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
If you know more than someone else does, that's great—but in that case please share some of what you know, so we can all learn, and please do it without resorting to putdowns or swipes.
I know that takes more time and energy, but in this way you make an enduring positive contribution instead of an ephemeral destructive one. Curious conversation is fragile; it can't withstand many kicks and blows.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What exactly is a productive response to blatant racism other than calling it out? What constructive discussion does a variant of "all Asian people look the same" engender?
A productive response would be one that doesn't, if repeated, lead to the destruction of the commons (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
The issue is the kind of community we're trying to have here. In deciding what counts as a good contribution, that has to be the high order bit.
At a minimum, one thing that requires is not punishing people for being wrong. We're all wrong, after all.
I would argue that shunning racism is productive for the commons. Instead it is the person calling it out who is being shunned. Wonderful.
The claim being made is so obviously, categorically incorrect that it falls apart within a single second of examination. For example: Hoyoverse, a Chinese company, produced Genshin Impact and Nodusfall, two games with completely different art styles. And yet, in typing this, I have already spent an order of magnitude more effort[1] than somebody professing their racist worldview is dignified to receive. I think the actual productive response is shutting that down. I mean, really. A billion people who can only produce one artstyle like a factory? The claim is so patently, obviously, intentionally racist and incapable of holding up to reality it's absurd.
I could spend an hour scrolling back through my Twitter likes and collecting links to a huge array of Chinese artists with divergent artstyles, but in doing so I would be doing nothing more than wasting my own time, because someone with such a flagrant disregard of reality to come to that conclusion in the first place isn't going to change their view based on being shown reality.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
Whatever. I unfortunately have a compulsion to check this site, but I'll do my best to refrain from posting in the future, since your vision of the site is one where posting racist comments is welcome and calling them out is unwelcome.
> Hoyoverse, a Chinese company, produced Genshin Impact and Nodusfall, two games with completely different art styles.
And with that single sentence, you have provided a great counter-example. Had you included it in your first comment, you would have saved yourself yet another order of magnitude’s worth of words to type out and contributed to the culture here far more, no?
For what it’s worth, the original comment did not read as blatantly racist to me, though I see how one could read it that way.
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Please make your substantive points without putdowns or attacks, not matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
You may not owe cartels better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If the Chinese are smart—and I assume they are—then they'll just kick those EA cranks out.