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.