The China Thread

[Cooper]

I never saw anything as good as this and I went to Nanning once. Closest I had in Guangzhou in 2016 was Japanese all you can eat for 114 RMB and beer was extra. Similar price in Hong Kong.

It's like living in bizarro world watching the Canadian say at about 12.30 that Chinese don't drink as much as Westerners. What?? This is completely false. Chinese drinking culture is insane & lethal.

Things could not have possibly changed this much since I was there. Video was made in 2021. Was this some special price? I would expect the normal price to be twice that, like 150元 Beginning to doubt...

Hong Kong is more expensive than the mainland, and tier 1 cities like Guangzhou are also a bit more expensive than Nanning. That guy might be a bit grating, but he is not lying about the tab, his experience above is consistent with those of many other bloggers, for example this Midwestern expat paid $4 for a buffet lunch for her and her husband, $2 each:


Buffet lunch for $3 each:


She has a bowl of noodles for breakfast for 70 cents, drink included:

I have seen Western expats who made totally misleading videos before. I would have to see the restaurant bill and more of this guy's vids to get a fix on him.

The only bloggers who are blatantly and consistently lying are the rabidly anti-China types like Serpentza and his sidekick, and the Falun Gong cultist vloggers.

It's like living in bizarro world watching the Canadian say at about 12.30 that Chinese don't drink as much as Westerners. What?? This is completely false. Chinese drinking culture is insane & lethal.

Chinese drinking culture is more centered on after work company/business drinking with clients and employees, or late night outings, though perhaps in China not nearly as bad as in Korea or Japan, where the problem is worse, because corporate culture is more established there. You hardly see any hard drinking in family-style normal restaurants in China.

why is everything he says a dick measuring contest between China & Canada?

The guy is an expat from western Canada who used to live in Nanaimo, BC on Vancouver Island, a nice place by the water with good weather and lots of retirees that is way overpriced and where a buffet restaurant like the one he went to above would cost about 6 or 7 times with a drink, taxes and tips included, so from his perspective as a frugal retiree, it's understandable that he'd be a bit giddy about the deals he's getting in China.

I watched the normal, cheap Chinese restaurant food become lower and lower quality after 2008 in order to maintain a price point, but it still increased in cost as it became more adulterated and infused with gutter oil. Price point stayed low compared to the USA, but the quality of the cheap stuff does not compare.

Food quality has been going up consistently in China, that is undeniable. Quality of the ingredients is high, and they eat a better diet overall with a large variety of fresh vegetables along with copious amounts of meat and seafood, definitely much better diets than in N. America, better than in northern Europe and on par with France and southern Europe. They don't have to use gutter oil (which has been phased out from circulation over a decade ago through a biofuel recycling program) to make ends meet, there is a large supply of decent quality low-priced agricultural products including lots of local produce. Items like farm-raised duck grown in small local farms costs a fraction of the price of factory-farmed duck in the West, where it is considered a luxury.

>>>The thing that is very important and that you are missing here is that China being outside of the bankster monetary system, they are not subject to western-style fractional reserve inflation. Their purchasing power has steadily increased, people there have gotten progressively wealthier, contrary to what's happening in the West. This kind of experience is completely foreign to us, as we have lived in countries where the standard of living has consistently and steadily declined since the 1970s. A large part of this is due to the private central banking monetary system, where a large and mostly invisible tax is extracted on the public through a usurious monetary policy, where inflation is baked in. China, and Russia as well are mostly outside this system, and in those countries, the standard of living has constantly been rising and every generation since the 90s has gotten wealthier than the previous one, the opposite path we have been on.

That is why those perspectives from China are very relevant, and that is one of the main reason the deep state spends billions annually to try to blunt that message through propaganda outlets that span the gamut from Fox/Sky to the NYT/CNN to astroturfed outlets like Serpentza.

 

[Cooper]

It's dollar advantageous in the short term but in the long-term its less profitable. The goodwill of customers, employees, regulators and shareholders makes a huge difference over a multi decade period. Nobody understands this better than Warren Buffett. Chinese people don't think long term and neither does their government. If the Chinese government was thinking long term they would not have built bullet trains to small cities and ghost cities etc just to goose quarterly GDP figures and create employment. That is short-term thinking.

At the risk of being blunt here, this is a very dumb statement. The Chinese government has 50 year plans, the current one was set by Deng Xiaoping, who set his country on a path to modern industrialization from abject communist poverty. At the time he set that plan, China was poorer per capita than Haiti or Nigeria, parents in the West told their kids to finish their plates because "the children are starving in China"...

China had 10-yr plans whose objectives have been exceeded: global leadership in EVs, in AI, in semiconductors, pollution control, surge in energy production, decoupling from the US economy through the BRI, etc.

High-speed rail in China has been a huge success, paying off in externalities to their economies, with profitable routes like Shanghai-Beijing subsidizing smaller markets.

What is really pathetic is that our governments can't even build high speed rail along corridors where it would be very useful, like Melbourne-Sydney, Toronto-Montreal, London-Manchester-Liverpool, Boston-NYC-DC-Charlotte-Atlanta-Miami etc. This is due to the monetary system where the government has to borrow money at interest from private central banks that print it from thin air and collect dividends from the public both in direct interest payments and through inflation.

Real "short-term thinking" here is not being aware of this.

 

[Caduceus]

What is really pathetic is that our governments can't even build high speed rail along corridors where it would be very useful, like Melbourne-Sydney, Toronto-Montreal, London-Manchester-Liverpool, Boston-NYC-DC-Charlotte-Atlanta-Miami etc. This is due to the monetary system where the government has to borrow money at interest from private central banks that print it from thin air and collect dividends from the public both in direct interest payments and through inflation.

The automobile lobby in the US and Canada has had a stranglehold on all public transport since the 1950s to today.
This is why all the well established tram routes (streetcars) in cities all across the USA were torn out of almost all US cities in the 1950s and 60s and why public transport is so dismal all over the US till today.

Bus routes were allowed because car companies made the buses, but anything on rails was immediately blocked.

 

[FrancisK]

Chinese companies will revere you as their god for your next American dollar, they will do anything to please you and make you think you have a good relationship with them. To the point where it's silly the lengths they will go to kissing your ass. But as soon as there is a problem, as soon as they have to come a penny out of their pocket to fix a problem or make something right they will treat you like you insulted their entire family tree and kicked their dog. Makes no difference how many hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars worth of commerce you have done with them, they will treat you like you are trying to take their first born from them over the slightest thing if it costs them a dollar. Years back I had dryer balls manufactured by a chinese company under my brand name, they were a hot product for a while and while they were unfortunately very low profit they were also a very unproblematic easy sell and I moved a lot of them. My last container of them one of the pallets each bag had 3 dryer balls in it instead of 6, I reported it to the manufacturer asking him to just send me some extra balls on the next shipment and I'll pack them myself (total headache but no big deal it was just one pallet) and he treated me like I told him to cut his leg off and disown his grandmother. Made no difference how many containers of dryer balls I had purchased from him in the past, made no difference that I was working with him on branding some other products. The fact that he had to come out of what probably amounted to a few hundred american dollars if that out of his pockets was unacceptable, he acted like a dying victim talking to the person who just stabbed him. The dryer ball craze was coming to an end anyway they were slowing down a lot so that was it for me on those. I know multiple people who will echo this exact experience with Chinese companies.

Indians also do business in this way they just don't kiss up to you as much. I've always attributed it to a lack of common respect for their fellow man because of how they live in their home countries, on top of each other having to fight for every little thing without remorse.

I'm actually working on having a couple other products custom packaged and branded right now and I'm getting my ass kissed all over again, lets see how this one goes....

 

[Wutang]

The cleaning crew manager was non-Christian religious and most of the decent Chinese I knew were also religious, usually Christian.

I'm actually curious about this aspect - what's Christianity like in mainland China? I've met plenty of Chinese Christians here in the US but they tended to be non-mainland Chinese. The mainland Chinese I've met tend to be pretty secular and dismissive towards any sort of religious faith in general even if they keep around some "spiritual" practices.

 

[Read_Lives_of_Saints]

The mainland Chinese I've met tend to be pretty secular and dismissive towards any sort of religious faith in general even if they keep around some "spiritual" practices.

I was not yet a Christian when I was in China, so my perspective at that time was very limited, but just as you said, most Chinese were atheist and dismissive, which is what they're taught. Many had basic ancestor worship/veneration with small shrines to their departed parents and they might stop into a temple once in a while and burn some incense, but that was about it.

They often questioned me this way:

mainland Chinese to me: Do you believe.......God?

me: Yes. Do you?

Chinese: No. I believe...myself. [then smiles widely at own cleverness]

As you probably know, in mainland China and Hong Kong all religion is controlled by the govt., but they do allow foreigners to worship amongst themselves very freely, although they're not supposed to proselytize. I saw a few categories of Christians in mainland China:

Local Chinese and Western (white) foreigners going to state approved services, which were usually vanilla Protestant gatherings in churches. There was an old Roman Catholic cathedral in the city that had some services, but I never attended them.

I went to a couple of Sunday services at a Protestant seminary on the outskirts of the big city where about 2/3 of the people were locals and 1/3 Western foreigners. It was a little more detailed than the minimalist churches in the middle of the city, it had hymns and prayers, but still a turn-off for me to go to Protestant services in the USA or China.

Sub-Saharan Africans went to Protestant services at big hotels in the middle of the city. There were some whites there, maybe 15%, you had to show your passport to get in if you looked local and were not black or white, and it felt like a lively, but minimalist American Protestant church with a congregation of several hundred, or maybe even a thousand people. This was the city in China with the largest population of Africans and these people had a very nice vibe and were energetic.

I knew a few locals who were going to small churches or house churches (unregistered) and they were really into praying for Israel was all they really told me.

I met several older Chinese who'd been taught English and Christianized by Western missionaries before Mao and they sometimes approached me in public. I didn't see that many over the years, but they were obviously different: friendly, a little sparkle in their eyes, a natural eagerness to speak to a white foreigner (other Chinese were often eager, but in a very weird way, like it was a compulsion).

I think a lot of the Chinese were naturally very thirsty for spiritual things, but their access was limited. They could do new fangled, derivative Buddhist stuff like Falun Gong, among many sects that sprang into existence in the early 80's because of Deng Xiao Peng's opening and reform. They could try Roman Catholicism run by the govt, Buddhism or Taoism run by the govt, or who knows what flavor of Protestantism run by the govt.

I was told that base pay for being a monk in a big city at the time was 6000 RMB/month, twice the entry level pay for a college grad with a good job.

There was a nice American family who'd been in China since Tiananmen and had established a successful business and a large Christian community center that they opened to everyone. It was a great place to have fellowship. The Africans found out they could come and play soccer there, but once word got out and the Africans were over-running the place, the police came to check passports one day and, because so many of the blacks fled due to over-staying their visas, the cops shut the whole place down for years. Not sure if they were ever allowed to re-open the fellowship building.

 

[Australia Sucks]

 

[Australia Sucks]

 

[Cooper]

She's wrong on several counts here, for example on the notion that Tibetan culture is closer to Indian than Chinese. Tibet is physically cut off from India by the Himalayas, and over its history has been part of the Chinese empire as early as the 13th century, under the Yuan dynasty 750 years ago, and then again from the 1700s on under the Qing dynasty. It's also a bit hypocritical of her to decry the sinification of Tibetan culture when this was done centuries before the US colonized Hawaii or even the Southwest, which was Spanish/Mexican up to the middle of the 19th century...

Nehru was a class act and a good leader for India, however the Indian borders he had inherited from the British empire expanded India's borders north into territories that historically were part of China. The British Indian Empire even included Burma and extended all the way to the Malay peninsula in the early 20th century. China had a historical claim to these lands and moved in in the early 60s were much more powerful than India.

The current southern borders of China are roughly the same as what they had in the 19th century under the Qing dynasty before they were invaded by the Brits/8 Nations with the Opium Wars:

Paine is also completely off the mark on Russia and the Ukraine war, her analyses are straight out of NAFO, she has full bore Putin derangement syndrome.

 

[Cooper]

^Very good presentation of the BoomerCon China POV with the Hoover Institute guy.

He claims that NATO "accidentally" bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade (time stamped link) :


NATO did not "accidentally" hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 - it was 100% intentional. US bombers dropped 5 bombs smack on the roof of the Chinese embassy, which was a detached stand-alone building in the middle of a large empty city block:

1 stray bomb in a busy city while trying to hit a nearby target is one thing, but 5 bulls eyes on a structure like this is no accident, those were laser-guided bombs on a designated target.

This guy is a historian, not an economist, and a heavily biased one at that. His assessments of the Chinese economy are almost as bad as that on the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. This is like analysts claiming that the Nordstream pipeline bombing was not done by NATO, pure gaslighting.

He also claims that
-the Chinese are dissatisfied at their government, which isn't true. The level of dissatisfaction in most western countries is far higher, mostly because living standards and purchasing power are rising in China, and declining in the West.
-China is a communist system, while it has a market-driven, competitive economy in cutting edge industries like automobiles, electronics, semiconductors, AI etc.

 

[eradicator]

Yo phone linging

 

[Steady Hands]

Yo phone linging

This is definitely gonna be my new ringtone.

MP3 locked 'n loaded - press/right click to download:
View attachment Your Phone Linging.mp3

My last ringtone was not nearly as hilarious, just a bit more subtle:



Okay, back to more important things now:

 

[Read_Lives_of_Saints]

This was such an informative interview and gives proper context to a lot of the China shill talking points about the commies raising so many people from poverty.

 

[Read_Lives_of_Saints]

Here's a very concise and accurate answer from a local to the question of whether or not China is a utopia.


I am Chinese. Born and raised in a small city. Lived in semi-T1 and T2 cities*.

It is most definitely NOT a utopia. (Speaking of utopia, isn't Finland the happiest country on earth? Maybe a better question is: is Finland a utopia? The answer is probably still no.)

A lot of good things have been said about China, so I'll just talk about some of the negatives.

Family values are fucked-up here.

Blood-relation is seen as undeniable closeness and obligation, and parents (esp. those over 40) treat their children as property (at least to an extent). Or rather, as an investment.

Growing up in a Chinese household feels like being a child soldier. I must go to war with my peers and try to come out on top. If I succeed, it's because my parents are such great educators; if I fail, it's because I am such a hopeless loser.

You are not supposed to question your parents (at least until recent generations). You are supposed to be their loyal servant even when they abuse you emotionally, rob you of your dreams, and say the meanest insults to your face.

Plus, these people have no SELF and no LIFE. They ONLY feel alive when they get involved in someone else's life, usually that of their child or a relative. They know no boundary and are intrusive as hell. They will plan your entire life without your consent (unless you fiercely fight back).

Things have obviously gotten better with the newer generations. And in big cities, people tend to be a bit more liberal. Still, if you are Chinese, at least part of your extended family fanatically believe in this kind of traditional cult-ish non-sense and will give you as much headache as the relationship (between you and them) allows.

This is the side of China that doesn't show in those Vlogs you watch. After all, we are not gonna show you our family implosions when you ask us for directions at West Lake. You'll have to marry into a Chinese family to experience this shit.

On the balance, China is a good country. I enjoy living here. But many people are suffering quietly because someone close to them is abusing them in the name of love. (And in the name of Confucius)

*[editor: semi-Tier 1 cities are places like Chengdu, Tianjin, and Wuhan. Tier 2's are smaller cities you probably haven't heard of, like Xiamen or Wenzhou (infamous for its scalding hotpot attacks).]

 

[RedLagoon]

This was such an informative interview and gives proper context to a lot of the China shill talking points about the commies raising so many people from poverty.

Could you give us a synopsis please as I just don't have the time, thank you.

 

[Cooper]

Could you give us a synopsis please as I just don't have the time, thank you.

A lot of good things have been said about China, so I'll just talk about some of the negatives.

Family values are fucked-up here.

Blood-relation is seen as undeniable closeness and obligation, and parents (esp. those over 40) treat their children as property (at least to an extent). Or rather, as an investment.

Growing up in a Chinese household feels like being a child soldier. I must go to war with my peers and try to come out on top. If I succeed, it's because my parents are such great educators; if I fail, it's because I am such a hopeless loser.


You are not supposed to question your parents (at least until recent generations). You are supposed to be their loyal servant even when they abuse you emotionally, rob you of your dreams, and say the meanest insults to your face.

Plus, these people have no SELF and no LIFE.

It looks to me like a very weak case against Chinese culture, coming from the left, ironically. His criticism is built on the notion that family bonds are oppressive, it smacks a bit of liberal postmodern individualism, made by a guy who apparently did not get along with his parents and has built up resentment against his own culture, looking up to postmodern western culture as liberating.

This guy is really pushing the kind of anti-traditionalist cultural marxism that has been at the root of Western cultural rot, see the movie Rebel without a Cause, a highly influential film made in the 1950s by ((Elia Kazan)) aimed at teenage Boomers, inciting them to rebel against a society at a time of incredible plenty and a healthy heritage American social fabric in order to subvert the moral order and replace a Christian society with the youth-driven sex/drugs/rock 'n roll narcissistic nihilism.

That movie was the strong opening salvo in what was the most extensive and successful social engineering program in the West, the shaping of the Boomer mindset and subversion of the traditional Christian order.

1950s teen icon James Dean beating up his father in "Rebel without a cause"

Ironically enough, that type of resentful attitude was the impetus for the communist revolutions in the West (France in 1789, Russia in 1917 etc), the banking/merchant class spreading resentment against traditional values among the goyim and using these angry, resentful youthful gopnik types as their army to overturn Christian monarchies.

And just as ironically, the CCP leadership is keenly aware of this dynamic, here is once again a review of "America Against America", the book written by Wang Huning, the #3 leader in the CCP totem pole today and the leading Chinese intellectual this century. In this book he analyses modern American culture based on his long travels in the US as a visiting academic at Berkeley, Chicago and Columbia, here is a review of this book:

"The end of the family means the end of America: a Chinese perspective.

Wang Huning, a close advisor to Xi Jinping and a top-ranking member in the Communist Party of China spent a year traveling across America and documenting its conditions in a book called America Against America. He maintained an objective and open view towards Western democracy and capitalism, emphasizing the importance of leaving dogmatism behind to seek truth among facts.

The last chapter was dedicated to the primary issues threatening the future of America. The first and most important point he noted was the disintegration of the family. He also went on to talk about the drug crisis and spiritual crisis. I highlight the main points below:

1. Individualism is valued above the family.
Even within the family, the individual takes priority over the family as a whole. Husband and wife maintain private lives from each other, something not common in China, and the privacy of the parent and child is maintained over a cohesive and shared environment between all. An example of this today is the child adopting a completely unique identity in school, protected by liberal teachers. Another example, in the opposite direction and specifically noted by him, is keeping babies in different rooms as early as possible, for parents to maintain their own independence.

2. Children are encouraged to be independent and leave home as early as possible while maintaining little bonds with parents. As a consequence, many old people remain alone and subject to seek elderly care from outside of the family.

3. Aside from very rich families, families tend to not care who their child dates or marries.
In fact, the families are expected to not have any say in this.

4. The loose family structure has also resulted in what he called "stray youth."
These youth do not participate in larger family problems and tend not to feel an obligation to take part in resolving familial issues. The comfort of the individual is exalted over duties towards family. For this, they become strays without any organic ties to the world.


The current western attacks on China are mostly from the left, stressing do what thou wilt individual rights - freedoms like feminism, homo agenda and fake minority liberation movements that are similar to BLM (Tibet, Uyghyrs) in opposition to traditional values. That's why Taiwan today is ground zero for the LGBT program in all of Asia (along with Tel Aviv), and the main criticism against Chinese state culture above boils down to criticism of local traditional family values.

 

[Cooper]

On a lighter note, Australian food vlogger goes through Beijing traditional breakfast offerings and makes a stop at a figurine shopkeeper who sculpts bobblehead-like tiny heads of clients, the same way portrait artists sketch tourists. His rendition of the vlogger's parents is strikingly good, done in 10min each, for $13. I would imagine the same process done by bobblehead manufacturers in the US must take several days, if not weeks, and cost over $1,000:



Chinese people have a high level of skilled craftsmanship. It is the reason why Apple's phone inspection failure rate in China is 1% while that rate in India is 15%, and also why they, along with the Koreans and Japanese, excel at fields like chip manufacturing.

 

[Read_Lives_of_Saints]

It looks to me like a very weak case against Chinese culture, coming from the left, ironically. His criticism is built on the notion that family bonds are oppressive, it smacks a bit of liberal postmodern individualism, made by a guy who apparently did not get along with his parents and has built up resentment against his own culture, looking up to postmodern western culture as liberating.

This guy is really pushing the kind of anti-traditionalist cultural marxism that has been at the root of Western cultural rot, see the movie Rebel without a Cause, a highly influential film made in the 1950s by ((Elia Kazan)) aimed at teenage Boomers, inciting them to rebel against a society at a time of incredible plenty and a healthy heritage American social fabric in order to subvert the moral order and replace a Christian society with the youth-driven sex/drugs/rock 'n roll narcissistic nihilism.

Gotta disagree with your entire take. The young man's description of how Chinese parents treat their children is straight up accurate and not some kind of marxist analysis, and he also puts it into an overall positive light of liking his home country of China, which is good to hear.

My experience in China teaching students of all ages for over 10 years and in every kind of school (but not the "high school from hell"), as well as being friends with other teachers, both foreign and native, included stories of the abuse they received from their family, as well as from their teachers, and I hope his comment is indicative of a positive trend in child-rearing, which is one of the areas of Western culture that should be emulated 100% , except for the excessive praise. The total absence of abuse, replaced with patience, is a major improvement in human society that the West has introduced.

What Chinese people told me frequently was that their parents emotionally and physically abused them as a way to create in them an emotional and mental dependency in the child on the parents so that the parents could eventually depend on the children to take care of them in their old age. This model of child-rearing is from the pre-1979 one-child policy years where parents would browbeat at least one, if not two or three of their children mercilessly, in order to guarantee at least one of them being incapable of forming a proper bond with the opposite sex and therefore being the kid who never leaves the house.

The actual stories of the mental and physical abuse were exactly what the reddit poster explained: telling you (often screaming) to your face how worthless you are, sometimes done in tandem in mini struggle sessions with both parents. When they were allowed to have multiple children, they would sometimes designate one as the golden child who would not be abused, but then abuse all the others, or designate one as the object of most of the abuse and then be less cruel to all the others.

This paradigm exists to some extent in Western societies as well, but not as commonly or to the extremity of how the Chinese apply it on a regular basis. It is the norm in mainland China. You've heard of tiger moms and this is where it comes from and in China often results in suicides at school because many Chinese go to boarding schools. There's no way to get accurate statistics on how many children kill themselves in school, but I heard about it a LOT, and unlike Foxconn, who was kind enough to install suicide nets in its iPhone factories in Shenzhen, Chinese boarding schools don't do that.

After 1979 and the one-child policy, a different phenomenon arose called "little emperor syndrome", where another extremity of treatment for the only child went in the other direction, where their only child was severely spoiled by their parents and two sets of grandparents, and this created negative effects as well. Those children are cruel to the other children and difficult or impossible to manage in a classroom.

 

[Read_Lives_of_Saints]

Could you give us a synopsis please as I just don't have the time, thank you.

I will if you say one positive thing about Shiloh Hendrix.

 

[Cooper]

^Probably not a good idea to bring up a single mom in a discussion about family values.

The "tiger mom" characteristic you are criticizing here is common across all east Asian cultures. I had a classmate in college who was a straight A student from Taiwan, he said that his father would beat him through high school with a belt if he had anything lower than an A. Another classmate, from Korea, worked every evening and all day on weekends at his parents' restaurant, and was so overworked there that studying on late nights was like a vacation to him.

Yes from my cultural perspective, this kind of parenting is over the top, but these people are the product of a very different culture, shaped over millennia by unique local historical and geographical factors.

But you know what's much worse than that? An absent father, or self-centered parents who don't support their kids. And unfortunately these types of profiles are not uncommon today.