Meyerlemon
6d ago
The northeast/Manchuria/Dongbei region is also famous for people eating skewers and drinking baijiu outside. Though that could just be the recoil from the long depression of the local economy. Nobody has anything meaningful to work on, so you get more helpless chillers. I remember a year or so ago a small Dongbei town Hegang went viral on the internet because with 60k rmb you can buy a decent condo there, and petit bourgeois from Shanghai were shocked and pretend they want to move there. Of course almost none did because there’s nothing to do, and you’d better move to Yunnan and enjoy the warm weather, not the Siberian winter in Dongbei.
in light of Chinese philosophy arguably dwelling far more on the balance of work and play and relaxation than much western philosophy, historically speaking
What philosophy are you referring to? Daoism? That’s what people subscribe to when they get kicked out of the imperial court in good times, or when the country descends into total chaos for a hundred years. The actual bureaucrats and “upright citizens” despised that “folk” philosophy, basically calling it laying flat but in classical Chinese, and only when they were completely powerless did they find comfort in the heavily mystified Daoist philosophy/religion (which to be fair is quite different from what Laozi and Zhuangzi intended).
Meyerlemon
6d ago
Dongbei as a whole is depopulating rather quickly. And it doesn’t help that Anshan sits right between Shenyang and Dalian, where things are probably better.
Did you get time to visit your friends and so on? What percentage of them are still in Anshan? I mean it’s a running meme that Dongbeiren have all escaped to Beijing or even further to Hainan, but I don’t actually know what it feels like on the ground.
Hopefully that Tumen river port plan goes well with Russia and North Korea and can help the northeast to revive the industry, but I’m not holding my breath.
Meyerlemon
6d ago
What’s not normal I think is how the well-off people also feel miserable. It’s pretty normal and self-explanatory why someone who works 16 hours a day and lives in their cab feels unhappy, but it’s some weird social contagion when your average Peking graduate also feels miserable despite doing vastly better and objectively living a good life.
To some extent yes the country as a whole is miserable, or to be more accurate, more miserable than it should be imo. I long for the day my people can chill the fuck out and enjoy what we’ve built without all that irrational FUD.
Meyerlemon
6d ago
You can of course find similarly dilapidated parts in Dongbei/Northeastern towns like Anshan. But I do feel like the north is generally cleaner and less smelly overall. And I think this isn’t restricted to China either.
The south, eg Suzhou, Shanghai etc. has a famous “梅雨” (lit. plum rain) season where ambient humidity sits at 80% for something like three months each year. Mold grows in your home, on the paint, on your clothes, and there’s no escaping it short of constant dehumidification. Many buildings end up mold-covered and peeling for that reason.
Idk maybe seven? Northern Han, Southern Han (Yangtze delta), Southern Han (Pearl Delta), Sichuan/upper Yangtze Han, Tibetan, Mongolian, Uyghur.
I don’t think the government is pushing hard to merge all Han Chinese cultures into one. They’re all “accepted cultures” if you get the EU4 reference. Maybe less so for ethnic minorities but I don’t think there’s systematic effort root out those cultures (and to different degrees; Mongolians and Tibetans are accepted more than Uyghurs, but mostly all treated by the majority Han with indifference and ignorance), assimilation sure.
Edit: If we’re talking about only Han Chinese then maybe the Northwestern (Gansu, Ningxia, Shannxi, Shanxi) and southwestern (Guizhou, Yunnan, Guangxi) also counts, but their cultural output is significantly smaller than the others. Also Fujian, southern Zhejiang and eastern Guangdong are probably another cluster.
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