Meyerlemon
6d ago
Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. Can’t tell either way, and you should know better than I do. Or not. I certainly don’t interact with enough Americans to say anything.
You have weird conceptions of China, being one of the only people who refer to us as chinaman on this website (a bit old fashioned, and if you don’t mean ill I don’t really mind). Maybe it’s due to the lack of interaction, which I understand.
I don’t think our people are physically smaller than yours, and judging by how latinized Americans are and will be, its surely favoring us.
Meyerlemon
6d ago
Well I’m not sure if you’re good at estimating Chinese women’s age (I’m not with western women). I do think being voluptuous is nice, but that’s mostly aesthetics, and people are into all kinds of weird shit anyway.
Meyerlemon
6d ago
I think northerners tend to prefer people who are taller and more robust. Southerners from Shanghai, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu also have noticeably different tastes from Cantonese. They favor the “小家碧玉” type, smaller, more delicate, with a neotenous look, while Cantonese tend to prefer the “miss hongkong” style like my example 4 and 6.
Beauty standards across the country are a lot less diverse now than they were maybe 20 or 10 years ago to many’s dismay, probably because of social media. Now everyone like neotenous faces and slim figures. Southern cultural hegemony and its consequences. It’s a familiar pattern in China with northern political/military dominance paired with southern cultural take over.
Meyerlemon
6d ago
It’s shocking when I realized that westerners do like women we consider hideous, with high cheek bones and those eyes. I thought that’s some sort of humiliation ritual until I found out that they’re somewhat consistent on pornhub.
Meyerlemon
7d ago
She’s pretty, but I think she’s polished her look to be more appealing to Western audiences. Same with Zhang Ziyi.
What about the Japanese? Do they care for Chinese actresses? I feel like their tastes might overlap, but not be exactly the same. I know some Taiwanese actresses were or are popular.
Meyerlemon
7d ago
I do think our men and women look more alike than Westerners. Gender swapping has been a common plot line in Chinese novels and shows, going back more than a thousand years. The story of Mulan for example dates to around 400 AD and involves a woman serving in the army masquerading as a man.
She told me that, back home, the beauty standard is for women to be exceptionally thin and flat-chested, to the point that her classmates in secondary school teased and mocked her for her comparatively big boobs.
God knows how much I hate that trend. I don’t understand why some Chinese men like that candlestick woman look. They’re already borderline anorexic, and still somehow “fat”? Screw that.
Oh well, I guess selection pressure will take care of their obsession with small pelvises and lack of breast milk…
Meyerlemon
7d ago
Meyerlemon
7d ago
Different beauty standards strikes again. All three persons you listed…are solidly 3 in China.
Is there a website or something that lets Chinese/other EAsian and Americans/westerners score woman and man of different ethnicities? Fascinating..
I have a classmate who for many years has been considered by me a 2, basically a female but not a woman if I want to be mean (actually the moment I realized that I might be a school bully is when I remembered many years later how mean I was to her) and has never hooked up with anyone in China. Went to Germany and found a dude who looks like a Nazi poster boy. Beauty is in the eyes of beholder indeed.
Meyerlemon
8d ago
In the context of your country pursuing a costly and unpopular war in the Middle East AGAIN, threatening to destroy a civilization, doing flip-flops, wrecking the world economy, and threatening your own allies, I don’t understand what all this hand-wringing about China “winning them no friends” is about. Go find a mirror or something.
Meyerlemon
8d ago
My understanding is that the relationship between China and Myanmar is a bit complex. The Chinese government is somewhat supportive of the junta, invited the head to victory day military parade but refuse to call him leader of the country, etc etc. The junta in return helped catching A couple of gangsters and drug lords annd sent to China. And china sold weapons to the junta. But the northern separatists (kokang) are ethnic Chinese and was a splinter group of the indochina communist party, and had always received support from the Chinese. We’ve been funding both sides, a time honored tradition like how we sold weapons to GCC while buying sanctioned oil from Iran.
I’m not sure if nobody cared about “genocide” in Myanmar. Aung San suu kyi got her Nobel stripped. Some do care but they’re not in charge of their own country now.
Meyerlemon
8d ago
Peaceful reunification has always been plan A. The official line has always been “we pursue peaceful reunification with maximum effort but never rule out the use of force” or something along those lines. The Communist Party has always talked with the Taiwanese KMT (Kuomintang, lit. Nationalist Party, the party that was defeated by the Communists and retreated to Taiwan) since Chiang Junior’s era about peaceful reunification. Xi met with then-Taiwanese president and KMT chairman Ma Ying-jeou in Singapore in 2015 and met again with KMT chairwoman Cheng Li-wun just a few days ago, which should be a step in the right direction. I think it’s one of the biggest happenings for cross-strait relations lately, but few seem to have heard of it in the West, partly because the other strait took their interest. Partly because Chinese positions on Taiwan was not imo rightly represented in western media, and the fact you think boots on the ground is plan A is pretty telling.
Also, PLA military advantage over Taiwan is a relatively recent development. Before the 2010s, the PLA navy and air force were weak, and their only edge against Taiwan was the PLA Rocket Force, which as you can see right now in Iran cannot force a complete defeat without boots on the ground.
I think it would be obviously stupid and tremendously tragic to do an Ukraine on Taiwan. I don’t want rockets destroying their (in my mind, our) civil infrastructure. I don’t want to destroy our cultural artifacts, and most importantly I don’t want to kill my own people, even if they don’t recognize themselves as my own people, which I think is something that could be changed without the use of force. They are 96% Han Chinese after all. There might be good reasons to have to do all of the above (the anti-secession law in China outlined a few things, including Taiwanese acquiring nukes) but it’s by no means plan A. I hope the KMT wins the next election (although I think it’s rather unlikely), and the temperature cools down a bit.
Meyerlemon
13d ago
I recommend you use the word “purged” to describe that situation. It’s the perfect Russell’s conjugation case. I fired my chief of staff, you kicked out your political commissar, he purged his deputy general.
Meyerlemon
18d ago
Neither President Harris nor President Trump means business. President Obama, who deployed THAAD in South Korea in 2016; President Bush, who sent planes to crash with a Chinese jet in the South China Sea in 2001; and President Clinton, who sent the seventh fleet to Taiwan during the third Taiwan strait crisis and bombed Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, they mean business.
You're too consumed by the American culture war to realize the Chinese leadership doesn't care much about what Milley said. No one in Beijing expects Americans to be soft-hearted regardless of what you say. It matters what you do. And of course removing assets from East Asia to supply the Iran missions (especially considering how little damage Iranian missiles have made) means less business than the other way around. And of course appointing DEI hires or reverse DEI hires in the military means less business too.
Meyerlemon
18d ago
Chinese patriots are trying to brainstorm some ways of shooting American top tier wonder weapons.
First of all the dude only has 100k followers which is nothing in China. Secondly he made that video because “shooting a plane” is a pun for fapping in Chinese. I’m picturing him transferring our precious masturbating techniques to Iranians. On onlyfans maybe?
Incidentally the PLA published a “how to shoot a plane” booklet during the Korean War. But I thought we had a population boom back when? Not when you waste your precious seeds right?
Meyerlemon
18d ago
The PLARF is its own branch for good reasons, reflecting the PLA doctrine to some degree annd also as a signal of how eagerly pursued ballistic missiles are. There’s a long history where China was “unable to produce a capable, modern navy or air force”, as recently as two or one decade ago, not too dissimilar to Iran, and the PLARF is part of why the Politburo could sleep well. Mostly because of the ICBMs of course, which you didn’t count here, but still.
I also think the PLA can chew a lot of gum without straining the economy or industrial base at all, unlike a heavily sanctioned economy that can barely provide freshwater to its capital.
In any case, I think it’s intriguing why the DoD estimate is so small. Israelis hype up Iranian stockpiles while DoD downplays Chinese capabilities. What gives? Few are serious about the risk of a real conflict, I’m afraid.
Meyerlemon
18d ago
Guess we need Iraqi voices here. I’m from a country that has the second (trending up) worst case of main character syndrome in the world, so what do I know about their suffering. I think I’ve been a bit reflexively dismissive of these cartoonishly evil portrayals of autocrats, since that hasn’t really been my experience with China for the most part. But I guess autocrats aren’t all the same.
Meyerlemon
18d ago
We did this on the belief that Chinese economic prosperity would converge them toward a liberal, democratic "end of history". This was all public policy, debated in the open, and the effect on China's economic and industrial growth is obvious.
I want to remind people once again that neither your government nor mine is a single entity with coherent, unified beliefs. I do miss the era when Americans with a positive vision wanted to bring peace and prosperity everywhere, even if sometimes wrongheaded or naive. I think that’s noble and admirable, and I wish my government could be as outward-facing as yours to bring more positive vision to the world, and I thank Americans deeply for that vision. But the main driver behind those policies was that Americans benefited dramatically from "helping" Western Europe through the Marshall Plan, "helping" Japan rebuild with loans and subsidies, and "helping" China reform its command economy. It was a fair trade, and you agreed to the terms. You have bigger guns too and I’m not sure if those countries were able to resist.
Reneging 50 years later and saying "we’ve been fooled/ripped off!!!" - you’ve got yourselves to blame, sorry. How about you give back those benefits you reaped all those years too? Same with the NATO situation these days.
To my knowledge, none of those countries actually experienced "carpet bombing" in anything even approximating the way Japan and Germany did in WWII.
You most certainly did carpet bomb North Vietnam, if the term carpet bombing means anything. The Korean War too, I’m not counting them here because it’s a human tragedy caused by China, not because of the initial war, but you did carpet bomb them nonetheless. Not even going to provide source here because it’s easily google-able.
Meyerlemon
18d ago
I think in cases like this, it might be worthwhile to put asterisks next to those numbers. I agree that you shouldn't just go by pure vibes, but at some point you should also avoid citing authoritative sources that are obviously implausible or highly unlikely to be true, which I think applies here. I don't think anyone should just hallucinate "China has 5k IRBMs" without citing sources, but I also don't think an estimate that puts the PLARF's stockpile below the IRGC's, which itself might be an underestimate, is worth repeating without nuance just because it has the DoD's stamp on it. I also think there are good reasons to believe the IDF's estimate on Iranian missile stockpiles is likely more trustworthy than the DoD's on China, given how thoroughly infiltrated the Iranians seem to be.
Do I have better numbers? I wish I do, but here, DoD again:
In 2021, the PLARF launched approximately 135 ballistic missiles for testing and training. This was more than the rest of the world combined, excluding ballistic missile employment in conflict zones.
Missile launches are harder to hide than missiles and launchers, and that might provide a better estimate maybe, no idea how.
Meyerlemon
18d ago
On a quick Google, DoD estimated last year that China has around 1,300 MRBMs and 300 launchers and only about 550 IRBMs and 300 IRBM launchers, adding 50 of each since 2024.
You do realize these numbers are comparable or even smaller than the estimate for Iranian stockpiles by IDF, don't you? It's almost funny. I surely hope Americans are not running their war plans with these estimates.
Meyerlemon
18d ago
It’s a fantasy that Americans love to indulge in. Like how they “allowed” China to grow. Highest prevalence of main character syndrome, happens to both libs and magas.
Meyerlemon
18d ago
I don’t even know if Iraq now is better than Saddam. You can’t do control experiments with reality and who know what Baathism will become today.
Meyerlemon
18d ago
I agree, that’s one more reason why they shouldn’t claim to nuke Japan into the first world. They’re almost there already before ww2.
Meyerlemon
19d ago
I didn't say Americans did nothing either, and there's no need to lecture me on the existence of GHQ and such. I said Americans, especially Americans today, should stop claiming other countries' hard earned achievements as their own. If anything the fraction of positive externalities America brought to those countries should be attributed to those apt politicians of yesteryear, and your country sure have changed a lot.
That’s because when the Chinese empire divides (usually along the Yangtze River) the seats of major southern successor states are usually in the Yangtze Delta, almost never in the Pearl River Delta (except for Sun Yat-sen’s brief governance from Guangzhou, which reflect the shift of gravity within China in the late imperial era until now). The “southern dynasties” almost invariably choose to rule from Nanjing or Hangzhou. It’s customary to call that part of China “the south”, meaning mostly the region south of Yangtze.
Cantonese and Hokkien are more clannish and, yes, pretty easy to distinguish. But I do think northerners and the “southerners” in the Yangtze Delta are also easily distinguishable, from the way they look or accent or mannerism. One of those in-group sensitivity things I guess.
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