How is it that many Chinese students are schooled in the west, and have access to all these books and thoughts, but then they don't exist when they go back home. There must be some significant cognitive dissonance between the two situations. I don't see how they can keep a lid on this long term.
You’re applying the wrong Western categories to Chinese people.
People think Chinese don’t have a religion, but they actually do and the God is China itself.
First, they all believe China needs to step up to its role in the World stage.
Second, the social pact in China is quite straightforward: you give up some useless rights that only weak westerners seem to be overly attached to, and you get in exchange growth, stability, safety, work and riches.
Chinese people that live by this social pact are genuinely happy people. They know about the data collection, they know about the limitations to the information but they don’t care as long as they feel safer, richer and on a prosperous path. Which, sadly, has been true for a while now, if you consider how many trillions of dollars the country has invested in R&D in the last 35 years.
All this while America has been gradually renouncing to their international role, or while even allies have come to reckon the instability America has been unleashing on so many regions of the world just by pretending to operate by the failed credo of “exporting democracy”.
Mix this and what the Chinese believe about their country’s place in the world and you’ll understand their perspective better.
The US and the US way of life are not the center of the free world anymore and haven’t been for a long time.
As a European, living in Germany, my only hope is in a third European way. Quite sad that Angela Merkel will be stepping down, she would have been the right leader to manage this for the entire EU.
I went to school with a lot of chinese people. Some of them went to school in the US full-time, and some of them just transfer students for a single semester. The latter group was much more likely to express nationalistic ideals. One girl told me that she didn't want to visit her aunt, who lived in the US, because the aunt supported the HK protesters. The former group didn't tend to have strong feelings one way or another; one person complained that there are no good horror movies from china because the chinese government has outlawed ghosts (and made fun of how ridiculous that was), but also used a VPN to get inside the GFW (yes, it goes both ways).
But even this bit of nuance I presented is a generalisation. It's vitally important, when speaking of trends in a group of people, to avoid superlatives. Because even if you're conscious that you're making a generalisation, other people might not be, and such statements have a tendency to radicalize people.
Yes, of course it’s a generalization. And of course there’s plenty of exceptions like what you said.
I also want to point out something that I wasn’t able to bring across. Chinese people are also generally able to criticize the party over many things, and they do. It’s just you don’t do that over overly-sensitive and controverse topics. Complaining about cultural decisions and mocking them? They do all the time, just be in Shenzhen for a couple of weeks and spend some time with locals... Criticizing the government over the HK situation? that’s a no no.
As a Russian, seeing how Russians perceive things, which I imagine is something of an analogue:
They don't believe our internal propaganda. That's why Russia and the like spend so much time hyping up where we don't live up to our ideals - it lets them sell the line that we're just as bad, just as corrupt, just as etc. but we either mouth the propaganda trying to get by, or we're dumb/gullible enough to fall for the propaganda.
My understanding of Chinese culture suggests there's also a strand of "they'd love us to be hamstrung by falling for their bullshit, so we don't seize our place in the world."
interesting, but Russians afaik don't get schooled overseas too much, like so many Chinese students spend years at overseas uni's, you'd think some of it would seep in. If not I'm very disappointed with the universities.
Edit: a world without dissent seems so ... pointless
> Chinese students spend years at overseas uni's, you'd think some of it would seep in. If not I'm very disappointed with the universities.
Don't you think that a big number of them go to the West with full knowledge of that?
Western education is still only affordable to a fraction of 1% of Chinese population, with many of them being CPC members themselves.
I had a curious case when I was studying in Canada: one very quiet girl, always wearing a tracksuit, always telling everybody her being a daughter of ordinary daylaborers who saved all their life to send her to the West.
She was one of few Chinese students we actually believed being who she claimed she was, and not a son/daughter of some elite, concealing family background. Then, by an accident, some son of a Chinese military officer outed her as a daughter of a 2 star general when he made advances on her.
The Chinese social-credit-score system (where people are, among other restrictions, not allowed to travel outside the country if they’re e.g. anti-authoritarian) is a formalization of a long-standing practice.
Over the years, many mainland-Chinese university students (and tourists!) have been granted the funds and visa-arrangements to visit these other countries, specifically because they were known to be “patriots” of China—and moreover, to demonstrate “faith” in the Chinese government in the face of evidence against its character.
Until recently, you could spot tour-buses of these folks often in Hong Kong tourist destinations. The tours were always led by mainland-Chinese tour-guides, never locals.
I imagine the same applies to foreign University programs, but with even stricter selection criteria, such that the students won’t need a handler.
(The “nice” thing about the social-credit-score system is that it replaces all this manual background-checking work with a default-allow system with continuous blackballing. China can now portray itself as a country that allows its citizens to travel freely, while only restricting “those with criminal intent”—while in practice allowing only the same people to travel that it otherwise would have under manual background-checking.)
> like so many Chinese students spend years at overseas uni's, you'd think some of it would seep in. If not I'm very disappointed with the universities.
A Chinese friend of mine has said that, nowadays, most of the overseas Chinese students are rich kids who didn't make the cut in the Chinese education system. They're less curious about the world than previous generations of Chinese students, and have more to gain from the current Chinese system, too.
My friend comes from one of those previous generations, was more curious about the world, and it still took her many years to get over the propaganda.
I'm not sure how to best say this within the bounds of Hacker News guidelines, but you come across as Chinese intelligence, posting to reduce fear of China. Or satire? If you have more nuanced discussion of why you turned Maoist, would be interested to understand. Also, people still relate to Mao in the west? I thought that would be similar to saying "Stalanist".
I live in a country where political affiliation has become so central to personal identity, and so bound up in our perception of "good" vs. "bad" morality, that you can't take a dissenting position on anything - not even for fear of government censure, at this point, but for fear of social censure. It's not even fear of current social censure - it's become clear with people willing to dig up old transgressions that you have to protect not only against currently popular ideology, but anything that might become ideology in the future.[1]
I happen to agree with you. I'm just responding to the subtext in your post that seems to imply that we still have freedom to dissent.[2]
[1] This is my reminder that I'm running late on my regular purging of social media accounts. To try to at least vaguely preserve my sense of anonymity, which I'm sure is much more illusory than real.
[2] I have to point out, given that this current strain of criticism is also politically polarized, that I am a liberal. I just happen to be of the generation of liberals for whom phrases like "free speech extremist" are a betrayal of so much of what we stood/stand for.
I think I live in a different country from you, though there is some of that here to, but yes democracy is going through a rough patch in spots, but it's better than the alternatives imho, you need a system that allows different points of view, there are a lot of them, and thats the only way things will improve, sure there is one system that is good at making factories and widgets, but its a pretty empty life imho.
There was a series of books I read many years ago - The Dorsai by Gordon R Dickson, in that humanity split off into a bunch of extremists and we all flew off to our own planets, religious extremists, scientists, soldiers etc, I keep thinking of that more lately, maybe we'll just have to wait for Musk, Bezos and Branson to build some more ships.
The people schooled in the West already have power, democracy would weaken their positions not strengthen them.
Plus democracy and other Liberal institutions (rule of law, equality, education, social engagement) are basically collapsing throughout the Anglo-sphere. Touring the ruins of the coliseum doesn't exactly make you want to live in antient Rome...
It's hard to reconcile the words in a textbook that says an authoritarian society is doomed to fail, then go home and watch rice paddies turn to skyscrapers in a generation. In a competition between academia and the real world, the real world always wins out.
Your comments are interesting (in this and other threads), as others have mentioned - authoritarian societies are good for those in authority - less so for the others. If the authoritarian society is so good, why is it necessary to disallow conversation? Surely if everyone was doing well, conversation would be encouraged - because everyone would be saying how well things are going. The assumption of any reasonable person is, that if conversation and dissent is not allowed then there must be a reason, otherwise what are they scared of?
The issue is that in China's case, authoritarianism has been good for both people in authority and the majority, as evidenced by increasing economic growth and standards of living. You could make a theoretical argument that if China was democratic, then everyone would be even better off. But people in China use India as a mirror since both countries had massive populations, were underdeveloped, and gained independence at roughly the same time. That's not a flattering comparison.
As for suppression of free speech, the attitude in China is much more pessimistic about the ability of free speech among the public to produce good governing decisions. There is a difference between speech that can be used to gauge public opinion, and speech that seeks to spur the public into taking rash actions. Currently, governing decisions are made behind closed doors by a group of elites that carefully deliberate their choices after taking public opinion into account. Free speech that attempts to sidestep this process by not just allowing people to air their grievances, but tries to rally people into pressuring the government and seizing the decision-making levers directly are suppressed. At the end of the day, it is an authoritarian system to tries to keep the existing holders of power entrenched. But when the current philosopher kings are doing so well, only a minority of people on the margins of society really want to rock the boat.
At the end of the day, every society limits free speech in some way. The US sets that limit at threatening physical harm on specific individuals. China sets that limit at upsetting the status quo without going through the proper channels.
> Currently, governing decisions are made behind closed doors by a group of elites that carefully deliberate their choices after taking public opinion into account.
How do you know how carefully choices are deliberated and how much public opinion is taken into account if decisions are being made behind closed doors?
You don't. You just have faith that's being done, like you have faith that democracy will always produce the best outcome eventually.
Which of those two assertions above makes you more uncomfortable reflects the education system you went to, the society you grew up in, the people you interact with, and your sense of identity.
I'm reminded of how Greek city states all used to have their own deities, believed their deities would lead them to wealth and glory, and that war between cities would prove who had the more powerful divine protector. Swap out deities for government systems and the world doesn't seem to have changed all that much.
All other things being equal, a government that limits freedom of speech, freedom of speech, and is secretive will compare favorable to a government that does not try to hide its problems. We don’t have enough information to compare the authoritarian system with the liberal democracy.
In an uptrend comment you said:
> when the current philosopher kings are doing so well, only a minority of people on the margins of society really want to rock the boat.
There are interesting trade offs along of the spectrum of individualism and collectivism. It’s hard to talk about whether or not China has gotten that trade off right when information about the “margins of society” is suppressed.
I don't think anyone believes democracy will produce the "best outcome", just merely that it provides representation and roughly reflects the will of the people. The people can make terrible, ignorant short sighted decisions, see: Brexit, or Trump.
With speech suppressed, and a population trained to avoid unflattering expression, how do you suppose the group of elites behind the closed doors of their ivory tower are able to collect public opinion in order to take it into account?
Millions rounded up into concentration camps and butchered alive for organs would no doubt have a very different view of their plight than you do in this defense of Chinese nationalism and authoritarianism.
Citations very much needed for the absurd _millions_ of people in concentration camps being butchered alive for organs? I've done a lot of research into this topic and sans one far-right kook who extrapolated millions out of interviewing eight people, nobody suggests anything more than thousands of people in "re-education camps". Nothing about organ harvesting in said camps.
I'd urge you to investigate more yourself--and if you come up with a different answer please do update me.
If you did more than 5 minutes of Googling, you would have all the evidence you need. I dislike Chinese Shills, but I'll provide some links here.
There were millions of falun gong practitioners (focus on the "were" there). China started an organ program. You can't just take organs after a person dies. Only brain-dead people are viable candidates.
China can get an organ in a week or so (their record is 4 hours). The reason transplant lists are so long here is because you have to not only wait for someone to die in the approved way so their organs are usable, but they must also match. The intersection of these two things is very small. Such fast matching and delivery can only mean they have people pre-screened and waiting to die.
As to concentration camps, the camps are admitted by the Chinese government itself (claiming that everyone is there "voluntarily"). The locations of many have been pinned down. Furthermore, satellite imagery shows the break-neck speed at which new buildings are being erected and can be used for a quite accurate count of victims (especially when cross-sectioned with testimonials).
> And lawyers who have defended Falun Gong practitioners also reject allegations that those prisoners’ organs are being harvested.
> “I have never heard of organs being taken from live prisoners,” said Liang Xiaojun, who said he had defended 300 to 400 Falun Gong practitioners in civil cases and knew of only three or four deaths in prison.
>Jose Nuñez, head of the transplantation program at the World Health Organization, which collects information on transplants worldwide, says that in 2015 the number of foreigners going to China for transplants was “really very low,” compared with the traffic to India, Pakistan or the United States, or in comparison with transplant-visitor numbers in China’s past.
> Chapman and Millis say it is “not plausible” that China could be doing many times more transplants than, for instance, the United States, where about 24,000 transplants take place every year, without that information leaking out as it did when China used condemned prisoners’ organs.
I'd highly suggest taking a more critical approach to your media consumption over believing Western propaganda. The West would have you believe the Chinese are infants and cannot see the corruption of their own government. If Americans can see it in their own why can't other people?
> At the end of the day, every society limits free speech in some way. The US sets that limit at threatening physical harm on specific individuals. China sets that limit at upsetting the status quo without going through the proper channels.
I think you're drawing a long bow on this one - if thoughts aren't allowed to be discussed, then they effectively don't or can't exist. If a society is healthy then it can't be afraid of its constituents having a conversation, the rational limit is to prevent someone from coercing someone else with their conversation - through threats of violence. If these conversations aren't allowed, then how can the governing elite take public opinion into account? If public opinion is just the allowed conversation, you can see how easily the allowed conversation could become twisted and exclude more and more people. For instance if you asked the Uyghur people how things were going you'd probably get a different conversation, these people are Chinese citizens as well aren't they?
> But when the current philosopher kings are doing so well, only a minority of people on the margins of society really want to rock the boat.
Is this true? How do you know they're doing well if no one is allowed to criticise them, in democracy it was learnt many years ago that when things go wrong its best to chuck out the one managing the place and get someone new. Again, if things were going so well and everyone was so happy, then the rulers shouldn't be afraid to ask the people who are governed if they agree. If the rulers point to one metric - the ability to buy and produce widgets, then you can quickly imagine a situation where the opinion of those producing the widgets is irrelevant, they will just have to work all day every day to produce widgets because widget production is up, the widget producers are just expendable commodities.
> Surely if everyone was doing well, conversation would be encouraged
CCP encourage very open discussion on anything except political issues. While presumably one day that won't work, because absolute power brings absolute corruption. How long until that happens and backfires, it's not clear.
I imagine the effects will take some time to filter through, but yeah, a generation of the Chinese elite being schooled in the west seems likely to have a pretty profound impact. I suppose this is part of the west's gambit in being so open to international students generally.
On the other hand, the Chinese community at universities in my city includes many who don't speak English or try to interact with the locals. There are paper mills designed to get people through the English language requirements if they can pay the right price, the worst of which appear to do nothing but basic hellos and thank yous. It seems unlikely that the majority of Chinese students will have westernised to any great extent, going on what happens here.
But it's the elite that is educated in the West. Much like Saudi Arabia's elite that spends time in Europe as diplomats (aka "party without needing to obey laws"), they are not the ones who suffer under the system, the elite usually is just fine with authoritarian systems, they stand to profit.
The British and German elite also intermingled because the world wars, it's not enough.
Basically, if the masses don't know about the either country, and the elites are tempted by power (it's nicer to make the propaganda than receive it, plus their economic prospects are better in China) and knowing they don't have to fight in wars themselves, it's not good enough.
Also, as much as I truly believe in the west's values of free speech and democracy, one needs to understand the fundamental pessimism and decline of the US vs the optimism and ascension of China. Oh, and the use US absolutely could not win a non-nuclear war against China, for example.
There are other democracies besides the US, and they're all doing fine in general. Our PM recently pointed out in a speech [1], that maybe the US couldn't beat them alone, but Aus, Japan, Phillipines, India, Indonesia, Korea and the US could probably have a good shot at it, all countries China is picking fights with, not that I think its likely, just saber rattling - there's no profit for China in a war, just loss of customers.
Edit: personally I think it more likely they'll just raise the bamboo curtain again - they don't seem very interested in any sort of cultural interchange.
There's been a huge fight with Australia - I was wondering if its known in other countries, Australia said there should be an international investigation into the origin of the coronavirus, a fairly reasonable expectation. The result - has been a disproportionate attack - tariffs applied to Australian exports, Students advised not to study in Australia, Australia has decided to double defence spending, and sell stuff to other countries where possible.
Japan is having similar disputes as Philipines and Indonesia.
I once tried having a conversation with a girl from Beijing, while in Canada, about political freedom. She told me that China is "too big" for democracy or federalism, and that they wouldn't be able to "control" the people.
I think the cultural valley is deeper and wider than you could imagine; at least when it comes to the wealthier people who get to travel for school.
Then beyond that, there is Chinese exceptionalism, far more fervent and irrational than any common form of American exceptionalism, and good old cynical greed (or the equally-pernicious, but less cruel, wishful thinking).
> I once tried having a conversation with a girl from Beijing, while in Canada, about political freedom. She told me that China is "too big" for democracy or federalism, and that they wouldn't be able to "control" the people.
IIRC, that's one aspect of the anti-democracy propaganda: democracy's great but the Chinese people aren't ready for it, so the firm hand of the CCP is necessary to keep the country from falling apart.
The people that come here are usually well-off middle class to wealthy elites and keep to their own groups. Based on this year alone they probably go back thinking China's model is better.
I once asked a Chinese citizen I was working with this question. The response was that it's important for the Chinese government to censor the internet for the masses because the masses are dumb and will believe anything they read. However it wasn't important to censor the internet for smart people because smart people aren't susceptible to harmful information. So when he was in the west on uncensored internet or at home using a VPN, that wasn't a problem for China because he's smart.
Western societies believe freedom of speech is the root of all that is good in the world. Healthy discussion leads to good governance leads to wealth, power, and status.
China believes freedom of speech is just a leaf on the tree. Wealth, power, and status are the roots of a society that can weather the chaos of dissent. Dissent is like a source of entertainment to keep people distracted to be sprinkled strategically where people are too well fed to uproot the system. So of course wealthy and tech savvy costal urbanites are given more leeway on censorship than a poor farmer in the interior.
> Western societies believe freedom of speech is the root of all that is good in the world.
That’s not the case for all western societies. Talking for the ones I’m the most familiar with, neither Germany, nor France, nor Switzerland is based on freedom of speech as the root of what is good and they have a good amount of legal and social rules regulating speech. As far as I’m aware only the US, and maybe British classic liberalism are that focused on freedom of speech as the most import concept.
As a free speech advocate living in Europe I can tell you that’s not really something people embrace easily in that part of the world.
The free exchange of ideas is still held as enlightenment value. Having some limited exceptions to the rule does not negate that. The US has them too, see hate speech or the thing about shouting fire in a theater.
Freedom of thought and expression are articles in the charter of fundamental rights.
Arguably the tradeoffs made when different fundamental rights conflict are different, but they're still held as fundamental rights.
> The US has them too, see hate speech or the thing about shouting fire in a theater.
America has limits on free speech, but those aren't them. "shouting fire in a theater" came from a SCOTUS case about protesting the draft not being free speech; that was thankfully overturned decades ago. And America doesn't have hate speech laws like Europe. Libel/slander isn't protected though.
My point is that you're talking about US specific concepts. But your initial comment was about "western societies" as if they are one bloc. I can tell that a bunch of so called western countries aren't that concerned protecting free exchange of ideas as soon as you start to make people feel uncomfortable. Freedom of speech is mostly a US obsession (not saying that's bad, I personally would like more of it in Europe), here we have whatever we consider to be reasonable and decent speech as a criteria for what is acceptable.
Isn't the trouble with that though you have to know beforehand what is correct? I think that is the advantage of free speech, you get to debate the issues in public, sure fox appears ridiculous to many, but there are many that agree with the fox arguments, I have learnt a lot about how other people think, and their point of view from following their positions (I'd like to think anyway). I feel that only by stressing a system can you build a stronger one, the current stressing has perhaps gone too far at the moment, but without the opposing forces of creation and destruction will anything new and stronger be created? That is the risk of creating something new I think - there's the risk of going to far, like its probably easier to just have a nice fixed hierarchy with everyone performing 100% efficiency in their assigned role, but is that the way to growth?
Evidence, not exactly. It's more like society standing up against it.
Instead of government censorships, platforms are taking matters into their own hands.
While there was a lot of protest to "not act against Trump".
There seems to be no protest of acting against Trump. So, objectively, it would mean a big majority is anti-Trump.
And the voters that remain are probably used to switching platforms because of hate-speech. That's why it probably goes unnoticed and they don't focus on it too much.
Just a sentiment though. But I see no evidence/logic against it
i see... i would really like to beleive it, personally
just about everyone i know under 50 is sick of trump and people like him, but i wonder sometimes if im just in a bubble... which is why i was curious, thanks
To be honest, I'm not sure if I'm in a bubble. Didn't had the problem before ( Belgium), some people truelly believed for a while that Trump was good for the US. But all of them seem to have changed their opinion.
I believe it's easier when people start to see how dumb he is, for not "supporting" him anymore.
I'm not sure if it's me, since it's the first time they all changed their opinion in a reasonable short time ( 6 months ). I haven't followed up on my brothers business relations about this subject, I'll try soon though.
Also, I think I'm pretty objective. But I'm having similar doubts as you. So I think that's good?
Because they see things from a completely different angle, different cultural background, and obviously pre-seeded with what the CCP wants them to see as the truth.
Because really, consider in how many ways the west does not practice what it preaches. Look at how big corporations abuse capitalism, work against customer rights through lobbying. Look at the whole "right to repair" debate. There is plenty of stuff you can pick out and primarily report on on Chinese news. For example, every time there is even just a small protest of black people somewhere in the US, you can be sure it's on CCTV.
Then consider that most Chinese students going overseas are from the big cities, often from families doing well. There are government programs that sponsor studying abroad for students from rural areas, but they make up for only a small share. So you have students from the big cities, living a modern and happy life. And they get here and see that in some areas of everyday convenience, we've already fallen behind. They see China making progress every day, while the west is stagnating, having a lot of obvious internal and structural problems. They see the most powerful country in the world lead by a crazy orange clown being the main source of entertainment on Twitter. Not the prime example for the pros of a democracy.
And then you show them all the stuff that's censored in China, and how the CCP is evil, and how you got freedom of speech and they don't, and they look at how everything is going well back home and just shrug.
So you might conclude they are just brainwashed and don't realize it, but they pretty much think the same about you. The image of China we get presented in mainstream media is horribly biased as well.
In general you need to realize that most people from most countries are pretty content with how things are going. Even though it's not perfect, it's what you've accepted as being normal, since you grew up with it.
Speaking as charitably as possible, comments like these indicate to me that the poster has never been to China and has no idea about the actual conditions there. If you just step outside the select few favored economic zones you will see a very different, much lower, standard of living that accounts for the vast majority of the land area. Granted the last time I was there was about eight years ago, but taking a bus from Taicang to Kunshan for instance, on the Eastern coast just out of Shanghai, I rode through villages that didn't even have electricity. People were carrying jugs of water on their heads and walking barefoot through dirt roads like it's 1200 BCE. I doubt much has changed for those people in eight years.
Even in the cities, is it safe to drink the water yet or use ice cubes? Or are we still having a refreshing cup of boiling hot tea at lunchtime on muggy 35 degree summer days?
Is there toilet paper in the public restrooms yet in the tourist districts in Nanjing? Please let me know if things have changed so I can update my image of China that's informed by direct first hand experiences.
It's absurd to suggest that everything is just hunky dory in China or attempt to establish an equivalence between living conditions in China and the United States, or any developed Western nation; so much is obvious to anyone who has spent even one day in a representative median location in both. When videos depicting the real situation are easily available to view on Youtube, it crosses the line into irresponsibility and maybe even propagandism.
> Granted the last time I was there was about eight years ago, but taking a bus from Taicang to Kunshan for instance, on the Eastern coast just out of Shanghai, I rode through villages that didn't even have electricity.
Speaking as someone who’s travelled extensively in the region, I’d say you might have been there 28 years ago, not eight. I heard there are still extremely poor villages without electricity scattered in godforsaken places (e.g. deep in mountains), but those tend to be hard to get to in the first place, there’s no way you can simply stroll through one on the way from one city to another.
> even in the cities, is it safe to drink the water yet or use ice cubes? Or are we still having a refreshing cup of boiling hot tea at lunchtime on muggy 35 degree summer days? Is there toilet paper in the public restrooms yet in the tourist districts in Nanjing? Please let me know if things have changed so I can update my image of China that's informed by direct first hand experiences.
People don’t drink tap water afaik. The population in general don’t like cold/icy water anyway, so I was told. I’ve met many people who drink hot/warm water/tea from an insulated water bottle all day, even in the summer. The majority of “water fountains” (for lack of a better word) seem to only serve hot or warm, although there’s no technical reason they can’t serve cold, so I attribute it more to cultural differences. Anyway, I never had problems getting cold drinks myself.
Toilet paper: a (small?) fraction do, you need to bring your own or purchase outside for most. I heard there are initiatives to roll out free toilet paper to more public restrooms.
Anyway, drinking directly from tap or having free toilet paper in public restrooms don’t seem to be necessities, so those don’t contradict gp ether way, while your 1200 BCE claims sound highly dubious to me (I bet I have both longer and more recent experiences than you do, and I’ve travelled to every place you mentioned minus the no-electrcity villages).
China is still mostly a "bring your own toilet paper and soap" country.
The idea that there should be free toilet paper and soap in every bathroom is just not widely accepted in China. Even in Taiwan, a lot of public bathrooms don't have toilet paper. When you ask people why, they generally respond that people would steal the toilet paper / soap.
I expect that some day, the central government will announce that every bathroom must have toilet paper and soap, and then it will be rolled out very quickly. But that day hasn't come yet.
Have you thinker about why there is not toilet paper in public restrooms?
Turns out there is multitude issues, but at the core: the country is still poor. There simply isn't enough fund to support the Western style public facility.
And TBH, public rest room improvement has nothing to do with democracy anyway. In US, there isn't the public rest room in the same definition as China anyway...
>there’s no way you can simply stroll through one on the way from one city to another
Maybe! I could be wrong. My memory has been degrading for eight years and the situation has hopefully been improving! I'd go try to retrace the journeys I took on Google street view, for my own edification and yours, but of course, it's unavailable for China.
> Speaking as charitably as possible, comments like these indicate to me that the poster has never been to China and has no idea about the actual conditions there.
Ah yes, start off by constructing a straw man.
> If you just step outside the select few favored economic zones you will see a very different, much lower, standard of living that accounts for the vast majority of the land area.
and here we go. OP was talking about students specifically, and I explicitly pointed out from what kind of background they come, and how that makes them perceive the west. It seems you got personally offended by that reality.
> Granted the last time I was there was about eight years ago
Eight years is an eternity in China. I've been there almost every year since 2009 and did a lot of traveling and boy do things change.
> I rode through villages that didn't even have electricity. People were carrying jugs of water on their heads and walking barefoot through dirt roads like it's 1200 BCE. I doubt much has changed for those people in eight years.
Of course that still exists all across China. You don't turn a country of a billion into a first world country over night. But what even the guy in the most remote village sees is progress being made. They see what life in the big cities is like and want to live there; not in the west, because it seems on par at best.
> Even in the cities, is it safe to drink the water yet or use ice cubes?
It's funny how you try to invalidate my post with specific anecdotes that you think prove China is inferior to your home country. But I'll play along: No, tap water isn't drinkable anywhere in China. But it doesn't seem to bother them too much since apparently it had been like this forever and it seems possible to get used to buying bottled water or just boiling it. I'd go as far as saying there are far more important things China has to fix internally.
> Or are we still having a refreshing cup of boiling hot tea at lunchtime on muggy 35 degree summer days?
Ah yes, the superior western way of drinking cold beverages during summer. Not that it actually makes you sweat more...
> Is there toilet paper in the public restrooms yet in the tourist districts in Nanjing?
Please let me know if things have changed so I can update my image of China that's informed by direct first hand experiences.
The way I read your whole comment, I think it's more comfortable for you the way it currently is.
> It's absurd to suggest that everything is just hunky dory in China
Which brings us back to our straw man. I never said that!
> or attempt to establish an equivalence between living conditions in China and the United States, or any developed Western nation
Which I didn't do either; again this was from the perspective of a middle-class-or-higher student from a tier 1 or 2 city.
> so much is obvious to anyone who has spent even one day in a representative median location in both.
You can't just go to China for a couple days and think you've seen it all. And you should talk to locals, which is already hard in the cities if you don't speak Chinese. Again younger people with higher education background are your best bet for English. For the rural parts, travel with a native speaker. If you don't understand what makes people tick you can easily brush everything off as stupid/wrong/backwards.
> When videos depicting the real situation are easily available to view on Youtube
Sure you can selectively pick the stuff that floats your boat and make a judgement about how a nation of one billion people feels about the state of their country. That perfectly closes the loop to my initial post about Chinese media portraying the west in a very biased and filtered way, and vice versa. Obviously you can choose to do so yourself on YouTube. There's channels depicting China as the worst communist gulag possible as well as ones that make it out to be paradise. If you feel like it you can subscribe to one side and call it a day.
> it crosses the line into irresponsibility and maybe even propagandism.
Should be deleted as fake news. At least it's not censorship then.
Yes, the orange man hasn't helped the argument, and yes I've noticed a lot of the press (Murdoch in particular) is producing a continuous stream of anti china sentiment lately. To many oligarchs are controlling too many conversations I'm feeling lately. I can imagine many Chinese who grew up in the china of the 50's and 60's and find themselves in charge of the country now see only chaos when they look at us.
Oh, not just students. Most of my colleagues are ethnic Chinese folks who were born or raised in the West, schooled there and then they returned to China.
On a few occasions that I have a chance to talk politics with them, they says that democracy to them means gridlock, racism, Trump, Brexit, white supremacy.
They support the Singapore / China model because of the apparent stability, wealth, getting things done quickly, and various other reasons, such as feeling more "at home" among the Chinese community.
They still keep a UK/US passport though, just in case.
Tragedy of the commons. It's perfectly fine when an authoritarian government makes other people sacrifice for the good of the nation I associate with. But when I have to make sacrifices suddenly I'm not home. Very human thing to be.
