Bingbong
10d ago
I live in the region and I'd say that I find Chinese culture more palatable and easier to get into the mindset of than Japanese/Korean culture. Considerably less stuffy/status-orientated, albeit maybe I'm hanging out with peasants and peasant-descendants. Vietnam also has more like... 'shocks' to it than Chinese in terms of interesting quasi-agricultural practices, but I'd also consider it more egalitarian and less nuance-based than what's going on in JP/KR
Bingbong
10d ago
The conditions on the ground for most Chinese are fine, plus the Chinese government does a lot to curtail a lot of the own goal stuff that is rife in the West with regards to homelessness and general antisocial behaviors. I'm confused why you think the average Chinese person is at some massive deficit to the average Westerner at this point.
Bingbong
10d ago
China only does what they do because of the manufacturing prowess, otherwise they'd be a pariah state.
If the West wants to bitch they might have to go back to actually manufacturing things apart from software and regulations.
Bingbong
10d ago
No, this is a wholly foreign identity, unavailable to outsiders.
I'm a fairly unabashed Sinaboo at this time in my life and I think this is a bit of an exaggeration, both since you're trying to distill a 'Chinese experience' when there's a fuckload of regional cultures even within the Hanosphere and since Chinese identity's probably proven more modular than most historically. China's taken in a plethora of random conquerors and borderers over the years, given them access to the language and some core cultural markers and generally gotten on with it.
I live in a Mandarin/Hokkien-speaking multigenerational household and family unit in SEA that'd probably be more 'Chinese' than a lot of mainlanders in terms of adherence to stuff like religious norms, dialect speaking and how they evaluate themselves culturally against the outside forces of their fellow citizens. I've got a passable command of the language and I'd consider Chinese culture a lot easier to get into than like Japanese.
Bingbong
10d ago
Exactly. I haven't been on a dating app in a few years due to finding a wife and settling down, but a good 30-40% of the dating pool is obese or very overweight in most places. Plainness is a thing but simply being able to see your feet as a girl is generally going to get you into the 7's tier in the modern dating market if you're just a mid. Also modern medicine/surgery/makeup means a lot of the stuff that'd mark you as 'plain' 100 years ago has been reasonably combatted in modernity whilst it's comparatively difficult to hide obesity in person.
Bingbong
10d ago
You can diet and exercise to be slim and as toned as necessary, but if you're horse-faced or just don't have that 'current standards of what constitutes attractive' features, it won't help. "Plain Jane" is a term, for a reason. It doesn't necessarily mean "short, fat, otherwise objectionable", mostly "not hot".
In 2026 I'd submit that just being not fat actually goes a long way even if you're a bit mid facially. Obesity and interesting bodymod decisions have reshuffled the attractiveness deck a fair bit from where it would have been 50 years ago.
Bingbong
10d ago
I feel like a lot of these population-level filtering attempts fail to capture the correlation between factors and therefore exacerbate the scarcity of certain attributes.
Bingbong
10d ago
How do you feel that balances with a much more explicit meme of filial piety versus the West? How does the average "4-2-1" grandchild in China feel about their obligations to their elders?
Decent amount of the elderly who don't have the familial support are the childless, plus it cuts both ways to a large degree where if you have failed to cultivate sufficient familial bonds to support you in your dotage there's less of a duty of care. I don't think the Chinese state is gonna necessarily let them rot/put a bullet in the head of 80 year olds, but it wouldn't shock me if there's a lot more push towards centralized affordable care compared to what the Western Democratic voting body will allow.
Also sheer longevity of people these days means that even the filial obligations aren't falling that far down. I just went to my Chinese diaspora wife's Great Grandmother's 100th birthday recently and she's got 10 of her 12 children still alive, though she's got about 150 descendants and their particular birthrate collapse is more '12->7->4->4' so less of an issue
Bingbong
10d ago
USA has far more interests in playing world police, anyways. If anything China's fairly deliberate about not taking over any of the 'USA must feed the entire world and defend it and yaddayaddayadda' roles that have developed over the last few decades.
Bingbong
10d ago
They've got a few decades left, but before long China is gonna be the world's largest nursing home.
They've got a large reserve of the undeveloped hinterland population plus the lack of a democracy means less of an issue with total boomer hijack creating the void that Western civilization is currently disappearing into. The average Chinese boomer has way less power to enforce their will onto the general population.
Bingbong
11d ago
The religiosity has been loosened a fair bit in the last decade or two, but you're also definitely not allowed to be obnoxiously proselytizing and there's been a certain slow surge back towards it. 'Traditional Chinese Religion' has probably been preserved better over in parts of Southeast Asia amongst the Chinese diaspora due to a lack of cultural revolution plus different cultural pressures. Malaysia, for instance, has a roughly 30% Chinese population in a Muslim majority country who have held strongly to a lot of their Chinese cultural markers partly out of a desire to actively stand out from the Malay ethnics.
Social credit score doesn't function like how you think it does, plus atleast stops all of the relentless own goaling of Western society where social defectors can essentially run around doing whatever they like for an unlimited amount of time. I'm personally willing to take the tradeoff of occasional oppression of protestors in exchange for cracking down on homeless and drug users in some sort of functional way.
Bingbong
11d ago
Weibo is worse than Twitter, Taobao is worse than Amazon, Baidu is worse than Google, Wechat is worse than WhatsApp etc
Have you extensively compared these yourself? They're engineered in different ways to suit different tastes but unilaterally proclaiming Wechat worse than Whatsapp is tricky when there's a ton more stuff running through Wechat and it's kind of developed its own niche.
Bingbong
11d ago
Meh. They're atleast productive and have some sort of longterm vision about this stuff. 'Genocide' is a tad strong about the Uyghur but they seem to be the only non-Islamic country to actually figure out how to moderate a population instead of creating a longterm cancer. They're improving some of their behavior on the environmental issues, most of Tier 1 China is shockingly clean and non-polluted.
Bingbong
11d ago
The Western media's been nosediving in quality since the rise of wokeness, though. I'd prefer 20 year old Western highlights against current China stuff, but right now it's essentially Tiktok noise v Tiktok noise for a lot of casual media. I watched more decent quality Chinese films last year than I did Western ones, albeit maybe 2025 was just a bad year for Western Film.
The Chinese system isn't perfect but reigns in antisocial random battle encounters on public transport and seems to be trending in the right direction.
Bingbong
11d ago
I live in the region and have been to China a bunch of times recently.
It's not a perfect society but also seems to be less keenly attuned to shooting itself in the foot than most Western countries at this point, and conditions on the ground have improved a ton in recent years. I personally much prefer going to China to Japan for a bunch of reasons, as controversial as some people will inevitably find that. There's a reasonably competent system in place with longterm goals that doesn't get easily derailed by ridiculous screeching or idpol.
Bingbong
11d ago
It appears that there are some Somali visa overstayers (thought that's not really impacting the core issue that much) but it functions to keep the issue alive in the public's minds.
Bingbong
11d ago
I think the Trump base just likes to feel like something's actually done, and both sides are happyish to dance around the cheap labor manufacturing/agricultural illegals in the South for as long as possible since there's too many competing interests. However stuff like the Somali fraud (Yes they're mostly legally in the country) is relatively easy optics for ICE to go after since it's very very very hard to defend their actions
Bingbong
11d ago
There's just a lot of complexity in US immigration. Many, possibly most, of the "undocumented" are in fact highly documented with extensive paper trails.
Exactly. Actual honest to god 'carried into the country by a coyote or completely undetected and stayed completely off the radar' cases are rare especially above the Mexican border states.
Bingbong
11d ago
Essentially this, yeah. Box-ticking for the sake of bureaucracy isn't going to just be solved
Bingbong
12d ago
First, undocumented immigrants are, not to put too fine a point to it, undocumented.
Completely undocumented immigrants that entered the country secretly are actually a decent minority plus the whole sanctuary city setup means that there's a natural impulse to cluster into certain areas.
Bingbong
12d ago
Exactly. Enforcement in Blue Areas is noisier since the local power structures are trying to actively resist ICE participation, meaning that ICE needs more boots on the ground instead of just picking up those who are already collected.
Also people are conflating illegal immigration with 'coyote land border crossings', there's a ton of people who are just visa overstayers and originally entered reasonably.
Bingbong
12d ago
Will the compliance layer not just adapt to this and expand, though? Lot of the things that AI does effectively are more structural constraints than absolute requirements.
Bingbong
14d ago
Couldn't this potentially align with the immense Somali autism rate in Minnesota and struggling children of certain diaspora being more likely to be diagnosed with medical issues to explain their academic issues?
I've travelled to China a bunch. I'm not gonna pretend I've been to the Tier 7 Sulphur mines to hang out, but the vast majority of Tier 1/2/3 places I've been are perfectly functional cityscapes which are generally cleaner, more pleasant and better developed than the equivalent in the West. You're also vastly overstating the degree of control the Chinese state imposes on low-medium civil whining
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