The China Thread

[Read_Lives_of_Saints]

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

She's not a single mom.

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.

That's exactly what that kid was saying where I quoted him.

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.

But you're so intent on doing whataboutism with China and America that you initially had a completely different response to what the kid was saying. And Rebel Without a Cause to support the case that American parents are not involved with their children? I tutored a boy in Guangzhou, the only son of upper middle class parents, whose dad was a lawyer, and the 14 y.o. boy had almost no interaction with him (they rarely, if ever, spoke in the months I was his tutor) because the father was an involuntary alcoholic, a requirement of his job. To his credit, he hired me to give the kid some companionship.

My point is that neglect of children happens everywhere. At lease in America we make good movies about it? What's the Chinese equivalent? See below for the answer.

There are problems in every country, many of which are shared without much variation and can be found in many places, but some are unique to that particular place. China has a lot of entries in the second category and no matter how much insecure dick-measuring you want to do with America in every post, you can not change the fact that the CCP has done things and continues to do things that happen nowhere else.

Speaking of which, one of the worst things I ever saw in China was an upper middle-class Chinese couple, who lived in a luxury apartment on the edge of a park, where only the father worked sort of part time (doing what I could never discern), and who had their allotted one child when they were about 40. I do not know how common this became and I suspect, or at least hope, it was an outlier, but in 2006 they sent their child to boarding school at the age of 2. Two years old!

The kid spent 24 hr/day at the school for 5 days/week with two nights and one full day at home with its parents. They had invited me over for dinner and when I saw the toys and things I asked where was the kid, so they told me. I was more scandalized at this than I think anything I'd ever heard of before in my life and probably since. It was like something out of the Brave New World prequel.

Boarding school for older children is normal in China and the loneliness of the experience is a common problem, as is that of left behind children of parents who have to immigrate to the eastern cities for jobs, as documented in the film Last Train Home (2009), made in Guangzhou when I was there, about the despair of the eldest child of a couple who left their two children in rural Sichuan with their aging grandparents, while they went to work at separate factories in the Pearl River Delta around Guangzhou and Dongguan.

 

[Read_Lives_of_Saints]

Boarding school for older children is normal in China and the loneliness of the experience is a common problem, as is that of left behind children of parents who have to immigrate to the eastern cities for jobs, as documented in the film Last Train Home (2009), made in Guangzhou when I was there, about the despair of the eldest child of a couple who left their two children in rural Sichuan with their aging grandparents, while they went to work at separate factories in the Pearl River Delta around Guangzhou and Dongguan.

I doubt anyone is going to watch this film, but spoiler alert:

Spoiler: Last Train Home sad ending

The eldest child, the girl, was so distraught by being essentially abandoned and left on her own since a very young age because her grandparents were too old to give her any meaningful parenting, that she began to express her dissatisfaction when her parents came home for their only vacation during the Chinese New Year. The confrontation between her and her father led to the girl moving to Shenzhen to be closer to her mother, but the only thing that resulted was the kid became a KTV* whore at about the age of 15, which was common in those years until around 2016 in Guangdong.

This problem is not unique to China, but is probably more widespread there than in any other country as almost half the population, several hundred million people, must migrate to the eastern seaboard for work as part of a long-term plan to concentrate the rural population into the cities.

The reason that children are left behind is the hukou 户口 household registration system requires people to do things like register births or put children in school in the jurisdiction where they were born, so families can not simply move outright to those eastern cities where they have jobs. And while it is theoretically possible to change your hukou to a new place, it is extremely expensive (a year's salary for a single person) and not easily approved even if you have the money.

In addition to that, prior to around 2006-8, you could not even legally reside in some of these eastern cities where the jobs were located, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, without the hukou for those places, so the migrant workers had to live on the outskirts where enforcement was sparse, sublet illegally closer in, or live on construction sites. This is a massive problem unique to China.

As an example of the kinds of government controls that exist, Chinese people were not even allowed to visit Shenzhen without papers before 2004, but foreigners could.

*KTV is a Chinese karaoke bar that is usually a front for prostitution, drug dealing, and a myriad of other illicit activities. To his credit, Xi Jin Ping's administration cracked down on the brazen and open criminality of these fronts, which were also where Chinese business men are obligated to accompany their bosses, co-workers and clients on late night bacchanalian orgies with Chinese characteristics.

Most wives have to tolerate their husband's whoremongering, and often those husbands acquire young mistresses for whom they provide accommodations in apartment complexes dedicated to that niche. I "taught" some of them "English". These girls are called xiao san 小三, lit., "little three" (means a mistress, since she is supposed to be the third person in a relationship).

 

[Caduceus]

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.

 

[Cooper]

But you're so intent on doing whataboutism with China and America that you initially had a completely different response to what the kid was saying. And Rebel Without a Cause to support the case that American parents are not involved with their children? I tutored a boy in Guangzhou, the only son of upper middle class parents, whose dad was a lawyer, and the 14 y.o. boy had almost no interaction with him (they rarely, if ever, spoke in the months I was his tutor) because the father was an involuntary alcoholic, a requirement of his job. To his credit, he hired me to give the kid some companionship.

Rebel Without a Cause is exhibit A for social engineering on teenagers and young men, turning them into rebels against the established order: their parents, faith, country and traditional values in general. Incidentally, the Chinese went through a somewhat similar process in the form of the Cultural Revolution, which was obviously a lot harsher but whose ultimate goal of overturning traditional society was similar.

The students who rebelled on Tiananmen Square in 89 were primed and pushed by American NGOs and change agents, it was a color revolution. The father of modern color revolutions, Gene Sharp, was directing the student rebellion, he was in the thick of it:

In 1989, Sharp watched from the lobby of a Kentucky Fried Chicken in China’s Tiananmen Square as the People’s Liberation Army tanks rolled in, shooting at the student protesters.

My point is that neglect of children happens everywhere. At lease in America we make good movies about it? What's the Chinese equivalent? See below for the answer.

True. rebel Without a Cause was complete ((crap)), but the main theme of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, an American classic, was about the main character rescuing his upscale buddy Cameron whose father neglected.

I haven't seen that Chinese film, will check it out, I remember it got good revues, and it wasn't made by Serpentza types, it seemed like a genuine examination of the social dislocations around the Chinese rural/urban divide.

There are problems in every country, many of which are shared without much variation and can be found in many places, but some are unique to that particular place. China has a lot of entries in the second category and no matter how much insecure dick-measuring you want to do with America in every post, you can not change the fact that the CCP has done things and continues to do things that happen nowhere else.

Speaking of which, one of the worst things I ever saw in China was an upper middle-class Chinese couple, who lived in a luxury apartment on the edge of a park, where only the father worked sort of part time (doing what I could never discern), and who had their allotted one child when they were about 40. I do not know how common this became and I suspect, or at least hope, it was an outlier, but in 2006 they sent their child to boarding school at the age of 2. Two years old!

The kid spent 24 hr/day at the school for 5 days/week with two nights and one full day at home with its parents. They had invited me over for dinner and when I saw the toys and things I asked where was the kid, so they told me. I was more scandalized at this than I think anything I'd ever heard of before in my life and probably since. It was like something out of the Brave New World prequel.

Boarding school for older children is normal in China and the loneliness of the experience is a common problem, as is that of left behind children of parents who have to immigrate to the eastern cities for jobs, as documented in the film Last Train Home (2009), made in Guangzhou when I was there, about the despair of the eldest child of a couple who left their two children in rural Sichuan with their aging grandparents, while they went to work at separate factories in the Pearl River Delta around Guangzhou and Dongguan.

A lot of kids in boarding school tend to be from upscale but broken homes - divorced parents, stepmom/dad not too keen on their spouse's progeny etc. That is as true in China as it is in the West.

The CCP has put in place a program to develop rural area and move/create jobs closer to where a lot of the workers live. They also have laws in place to protect the locals, for instance restrictions on non-locals and wealthy urbanites buying up rural land houses.



Moreover, you can't really criticize their government for putting travel/residency restrictions on their cities, otherwise you would have had hundreds of millions of rural migrants settling in big cities, which would have collapsed under that extra weight. Same reasons why you can't have open borders in the US or West.

 

[Read_Lives_of_Saints]

Last Train Home (2009) documentary filmed mostly in the Pearl River Delta cities of Guangzhou, Dongguan, and Shenzhen in 2007-2008 is about migrant worker parents who left their two children back in rural Sichuan (or some other central province), so that Mom and Dad could take jobs in the factories of the eastern cities.

I lived in Guangzhou when this was filmed and was around the old Guangzhou Train Station exactly when the chaotic scene in this movie was recorded, which was in the middle of a severe winter storm that trapped over a million migrants, who were taking trains home for their only vacation during Chinese New Year, but were stranded for a week because the trains stopped.

The trains were not running because a freak ice storm in northern Guangdong and neighboring Hunan province had frozen the tracks and interrupted service for more than eight days. During the first three days, it was in the middle and upper 30's Fahrenheit (just above freezing temperatures), raining and windy. Perfect weather for pneumonia and the coldest winter I spent in over 10 years in China.

All those Chinese migrants, mostly working men, were stuck in the open area of the Guangzhou Train Station with no shelter or heat, and very little food. On the fourth day, the government decided it was better to shuffle them around in the subway rather than leave them out in the open where they could be photographed, so that's what they did for 4-5 days, just ride around on the subway, get off here and there for a while in large groups. I saw them out in the rain every day because my bus went right past.