My very Reddit-influenced impressions about China circa 2016
My very Reddit-influenced impressions about China circa 2016
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Every building is a shoddily built hazardous death trap prone to collapsing at any moment
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Food and consumer products are full of toxic chemicals because no one cares
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Slavelike working conditions, insane working hours, suicide nets at factories
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Every citizen is spied on constantly, one wrong thought means they will be dragged off in the middle of the night by the secret police
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Arbitrary and nonsensical censorship of the media, to quote Mike from RLM on why Ghostbusters 2016 wasn't available in China "Your Communist government thinks the movie is witchcraft"
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LGBT people oppressed
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No regard for the environment, pollution everywhere, pristine nature destroyed to build empty ghost cities for no reason
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A dystopian inhumane culture where everyone hates each other and has no regard for human life. There were so many Reddit stories about how in China drivers double back to kill pedestrians they hit so they won't be held criminally liable or because people faking accidents for lawsuits is so common. Also people step over people having medical emergencies on the street for the same reasons
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Racist and jingoistic
Westerners: China has horrible working conditions and the people there work unreasonable hours!
Same Westerners:
I love Japan and occupied Korea.Arbitrary and nonsensical censorship of the media, to quote Mike from RLM on why Ghostbusters 2016 wasn't available in China "Your Communist government thinks the movie is witchcraft"
They actually banned the movie because it was cringe.
I'm curious about hexbears opinion on China's censorship. That's one thing that nobody, in good faith, could deny is prominent in China.
Do you all just think that's not a big deal for the perceived benefits?
i don't speak for every hexbear but here goes: Banning social networks like Facebook is good and I wish it would happen here. It's a cognitive hazard. Banning kids from playing online games during the week is also good. Grindy gacha games are another cognitive hazard.
China's limit on how many foreign movies it imports per year has allowed a domestic market of Chinese movies to flourish without their film industry being overrun by Marvel, Disney and whatever pseudo intellectual thing A24 makes that year. That's good.
Censoring cults like Falun Gong is good. Censoring medical misinformation is also good. China seems to have a better understanding that you shouldn't allow conspiracy theorists to spread whatever nonsense they want. Calls for freedom of press tend to go hand in hand with calls for private control over media apparatuses, which means you get things like media conglomerates run by people like Roger Ailes (FoxNews). The one that gets talked about the most by people outside of China is the Winnie the Pooh thing, which is bizarrely characterized as a personal vendetta Xi Jinping has or something, like he's a petty child raging at Mad Magazine for making a caricature of him. My understanding is there's a blanket ban on mischaracterizing members of the government, and I believe that's to prevent misinformation. The example a Chinese person gave me was some people might come under the idea Xi Jinping is affiliated with Disney somehow. Winnie the Pooh the character is not part of any broad censorship and this misconception came from my earlier statement about China only releasing a certain number of foreign films per year. I was in China in 2019 and saw people wearing Disney apparel with the character. They declined to release the 2018 Christopher Robin movie in theaters and that's when I remember this whole thing starting.
Personally speaking I think the ban on caricature is a little too much, since the former president Zemin was often caricatured online as a frog and no one cared. But it's their country and they can do what they want. however I think at this point the way westerners use the winnie the pooh thing borders on open racism, plus it's just old. get some new material, jesus christ. i've been hearing how Xi Jinping is a cartoon bear for like 6 years now. At least call him something more serious if you don't like him. Winnie the pooh is a delightful bear who eats honey out of a pot, how is that bad
Also VPNs work in China. I used one while I was there and could access any website no problem. It's a misconception that Chinese people are somehow unaware of the outside world or foreign culture. The average Chinese person has more awareness of global affairs than the average American because their education system is more robust. There also isn't any sort of widespread censorship on information about Tienanmen square in 1989. Chinese people know about it and have a variety of opinions. It's taught in schools.
As I understand it a big driver of "censoring" Western media/internet is because of market protectionism.
Also there's good reason to partition off China's internet beyond protectionism - if the West was exposed to the opinions of Chinese citizens regularly, the USA would claim that Beijing has a millions-strong army of 'cyber warriors' spreading 'Communist propaganda' when it's just people in China voicing and defending their opinion that they think the government's pretty good/don't themselves have any issues with it.
suicide nets at factories
it's kind of funny that this is used as a knock on other countries when every company in america is quite happy for you to die by suicide or otherwise on the job. we have a term in our vernacular for workplace suicides where the worker kills their coworkers while they do it
Looking at the bigger picture I hate realizing this sort of thing sometimes.
China gets mocked for suicide nets(and like no one even questioned if it was real or not) but the US legit has workplace shootings that often end up with suicide.
I'm still mad about how ridiculous the "communism is bread lines" train of thought is because we have food banks, soup kitchens and church food based outreach in our great United States of America. If food insecurity is a symptom of a failed state well guess the fuck what? And that's not even covering the fact that Russia has breadlines during and after the transition to capitalism after the USSR was desolved. So again it was a direct result of how bad capitalism is at food security.
"Under capitalism only the poors need to visit food banks, but under Communism even respectable middle class people like me would need to wait at breadlines"
But it’s just like squid game which makes it more wholesome chungus
wasnt the suicide nets from a building owned by a taiwanese company?
i don't see how that's relevant if the PRC sets the labor standards and building codes, tbh
My Western country university had to put up suicide nets and barriers in the atrium of its newest building because at least two students tried to jump off after an exam.
I said shit like "I'd never want to study abroad in China because I might get my organs stolen" for WAYYY to long as a teen without anyone calling me out
Fuck, I forgot the organ stealing thing
To add to the irony, Canada is actually the global center of the illegal organ trade.
It’s mostly Indians selling their organs to rich westerners in Canada so of course the narrative the west perpetuates is exactly the opposite of reality.
this is the crap the falun gong peddles
Gimme your liver
Because the only people who could call you out probably still think that
Permanently Deleted
Every building is a shoddily built hazardous death trap prone to collapsing at any moment
There was someone from one of the other instances telling me this a couple weeks ago.
Buildings aren't built on the cheap and collapse in capitalist Florida like the Surfside collapse, not to mention the most high profile shitty building collapse in WTC 1&2&7 which should have survived plane crashes and fires.
When I mentioned some neighborhoods I'd worked on that were 5~ years old where 80% of the million dollar homes were experiencing interior water damage because the construction crews were paid by the Sq foot, they replied "That's just a few contractors". But in China it's everywhere.
Ah, beat me to it. Oh well, I'm just going to go ahead and pile on
censorship
I'm actually a bit salty about this because some of the Chinese webnovels (guilty pleasure) I've read got banned when they were halfway through for unclear reasons.
Even in China it's still out-of-touch old men who choose what is not allowed to be posted
Yeah, those censorship laws do feel a bit extreme as an outsider. But censorship as a general rule can be extreme and silly on petty stuff while letting some weird or unethical shit pass. It's kind of fun to study even offhandly what passes as taboo in different parts of the world.
yeah i recently watched a video of a guy interviewing japanese women on relationship related questions, and he asked a lot of girls if they think its ok for their bf to go have sex with other women. they said yes, but only for prostitution (??). the reasoning is that they see it as his needs not being met, not cheating, cheating is bad if they dont pay the woman. thats definitely taboo here lmao
a lot of the comments were malding over the japanese not being american style neocons over this
Watching a western movie in China and certain scenes being two seconds long because there was some sensitive subject mentioned/shown and the censors just cut it without bothering whether the movie now makes sense or not
Also every Chinese movie with themes of police/government corruption is not set in mainland China but in a "Chinatown" in a fake country in SE Asia, that looks exactly like China and every character speaks perfect mandarin but there's token street signs or ads in faux thai/vietnamese
I blame the stuffy boomers
Also people step over people having medical emergencies on the street for the same reasons
As if this doesn't happen in the USA multiple times a day
You should tell us what changed your mind so we can hopefully improve our tactics when talking to other frontpage Redditors. Not that I'm on the site anymore but I talk to them IRL all the time
I wasn't really a capital R redditor. I mainly hung out on some anti-alt-right and anti-GamerGate subs
I ended up finding the chapo sub and liking the snarky and acerbic tone
Was girl Ghostbusters really in 2016? Bah god, I would have accepted like 2018 or 2019 but time really do be flowing.
That all does describe America pretty well though
Do American factories have safety nets, or is it simply cheaper to hire a new worker?
no , safty net is a unheard concept in these forsaken lands. real man embrace the ground !
No need. In America, suicidal workers take themselves out at home instead of on the clock.
LA FUMÉE, VOL. 1 NO. 4 - According to the SRV's Ministry of Information, the programme has been a tremendous success. Public support stands at 87%, and youth obesity and alcoholism rates are down 12% and 7% respectively.
LOGIC - This is the SRV we're talking about. If you think those are the real numbers there's probably a guy who wants to sell you a bridge in La Cherte.
You missed "it is illegal to save someone who is drowning"
There were so many bizarre beliefs like this