problem_redditor
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I'm pretty skeptical of actual Chinese cultural exports leaking into the West, even as somebody who watched more Chinese-language films last year in Cinema than English ones. Bit of a disconnect with what's acceptable, plus the Chinese culture seems a lot more insularly-focused than like Korea actively trying to engender more widespread appreciation and adoption.
There's also the obvious geopolitical aspect behind this, with the international viewpoint of Mainland China being quite obviously contaminated by the fact that it's a major world power that straight-up does not want to be a part of the American international order and often shows off hostility towards it (and vice versa). Your average layman's knowledge of China gets mediated through all of these incentive structures and as a result it's still pretty much a summary of the worst that could be found, often taken out of context. China is often perceived as a Stalinist state with little to no cultural value, and stuff that comes out of there gets viewed with a sort of default suspicion.
This isn't limited to artistic exports, either. People seem capable of perceiving China only through the lens of its government. It's still very common for people to suggest that any kind of indigenously Chinese culture has been all but destroyed on the mainland because of the Cultural Revolution, that religion and culture is all but impossible under the totalising purview of the CCP, and maintained only on the fringes of the diaspora in places like Taiwan or Southeast Asia. Yet I’m a Malaysian Chinese who spent 16 years of my life embedded in that community, and yet in the span of two weeks in China, I saw a large amount of traditional religion and culture at least on par with what I saw in Southeast Asia; if it's anywhere close to dead in Mainland China then clearly my lying eyes deceive me. (There's also a clear absurdity with the idea that "Chinese culture" is this unified phenomenon that can be preserved via one tiny regionalised portion of emigrants primarily representing urban, coastal parts of Fujian and Guangdong which then hybridised significantly with foreign elements, but that's another thing entirely.)
So I would agree that China's public perception isn't close to being anywhere near positive yet; this is changing, but the international perception of China has a long ways to go before people stop seeing it as a scary authoritarian enemy-state.
I've just filled out the survey and left a pretty long comment with a bunch of pointers.
I would agree with this definition, and would also note that “conservative” is a trait that manifests in context dependent ways and increasingly maps less and less into the political right at all nowadays. As the left becomes more entrenched in institutions, the party differences in openness to experience has shrunk considerably, such that the relationship has now become very small. Progressivism becomes “conservative” once sufficiently mainstream; these terms were forged in a cultural context that no longer applies today, and were always to some extent incoherent groupings.
Increasingly you’re finding people whose constellations of beliefs mostly fit onto the US political right, and yet would also be the type to try out the Chinese bull penis hangover soup (I would). A huge portion of political conservatives today would actually be attitudinally liberal and have more in common with 1970s radicals than they would like to admit, whereas the opposite is true for progressives, some of whom would likely be part of the Moral Majority had they been born in the right time period. Anecdotally, in my family and all my friend groups, I’m most likely to swing highly right on issues, but am also most likely to go “this is different, how exciting” when encountering new experiences or ideas, to an extent that most people around me seem to find a bit intimidating, and am fairly certain that this general tendency towards taking nonstandard ideas seriously informs my political takes a lot.
problem_redditor
24d ago
Thanks for letting me know. Just made everything in the album public (instead of link sharing), should hopefully work now.
I’ve continued updating the photos in my China photo album. The rate of completion has slowed rather significantly because I’ve been busy and the amount of perfectionist pixel-picking I do has begun to tire me out very badly.
18 pictures are complete now, instead of just seven (I like to frame this as me nearing 20% of my target of 100 pics). Several photos have been removed and put under the chopping block for reediting, while some new ones have been added.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/204084770@N07/albums/72177720331609421/
I’m up for giving feedback on about as long a passage as you want (within reason).
As someone who’s tried to write sci-fi multiple times but got busy and bogged down in work (and also story-planning considerations), you’re doing better than 90% of us by having a completed manuscript. I have a good number of half-finished stories and plans for such collecting dust.
I'm kind of halfway on this. I'm not against the usage of LLMs as a brainstorming tool that helps one come up with alternative wordings for passages already written (in fact I have done this myself at times for specific awkward sentences I've written that frustrate me, though with massive renovations to the wording and structure of the passage to make it fit within the overall style of writing I'm prone to), writer's block is a very big problem and sometimes usage of LLMs to brainstorm various different grammatical structures can get the creative juices flowing again. There's a legitimate use for LLMs in writing and I don't inherently object to the usage of it in posts on TheMotte. It’s utilising LLM as a tool and not as a wholesale replacement for effort.
As such I do find there's an admittedly ill-defined threshold where something becomes too LLM for me to ignore and the sort of overly sanitised prose that LLMs are prone to shows through to the extent that the writing loses all personality and originality; it's the feeling that someone has just taken huge chunks of text from an LLM without giving any thought to tone or style. This post certainly exceeds that threshold for me.
Well I checked and that seems in line with some, limited, statistics: https://www.newsweek.com/campus-rapists-and-semantics-297463
That study is awful, please read this article explaining its bad methodology. They used a 5 point scale that indicated likelihood to engage in any given activity. The question that's usually focused in on as the source of this claim was like question 35 on a long quiz asking if you would force a woman to do something sexual, where a question about whether you would rape a woman had just been asked in the same quiz, creating the implication that this question was something different that wasn't rape and obviously making people want to give rape the lowest likelihood.
As to how that five-point measure got made into the 1-in-3 statistic? Anything that wasn't recorded as a 1 was taken as a "yes". This is frankly a ridiculous method of coding that data and inflates the percentage by a crazy amount. The answers provided on that scale were basically "No, Yes, Yes, Yes, or Yes." Also "the men in Edwards et al (2014) were in between two to seven times less likely to say they would rape a woman than kill someone if they could, depending on how one interprets their answers. That's a tremendous difference; one that might even suggest that rape is viewed as a less desirable activity than murder." I suppose we live in a murder culture too, then.
In other words, it's an incredibly sketchy study with such awful methodology that I can't help but regard it as being intentionally bad just to inflate the percentage.
It seems like we get these kinds of "men are sexual degenerates" posts semi-regularly, I've never found them particularly convincing, and this one's no exception. The major problem with your analysis is that it is, ultimately, an example of the Chinese robber fallacy, in spite of the atypical circumstances of this case. It is always possible to find examples of regional cabals of people who have helped to perpetrate or cover up a crime, but that does not make it an illustration or indication of larger society (I would also note that 50km around Mazan is a massive radius that features the city of Avignon, home to 487,000 people in its larger metropolitan area, and the arrondissement of Carpentras is itself home to 220,000 people; it is not particularly surprising to me that someone could find 72 criminals there over a period of nine years if they really tried). But here is an example of what one can write that follows the broad strokes of your comment, if so motivated:
This Valentine's Day, I am thinking about why the Thai penile-amputation epidemic has received so little attention, sparked so little discussion. This is the curious case of a rather hyperspecific form of crime that became oddly common in Thailand in the decade after 1970, where angry wives severed the penises of philandering husbands. I could not find a single mention of it on this site. You could claim this was an isolated incident that has no implications for society in general, that this is cherrypicking isolated cases and not reflective of an attitude that women have towards men generally. But series of interviews carried out with prominent Thai women revealed that they almost unanimously endorsed this method of retribution. It was to the extent that expertise in managing penile amputations has developed in Thailand, and that “I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat,” is a common joke and immediately understood at all levels of society.
This article notes about it: "In 2008, the Journal of Urology carried a retrospective by Drs Genoa Ferguson and Steven Brandes of the Washington University in St Louis, called The Epidemic of Penile Amputation in Thailand in the 1970s. Ferguson and Brandes conclude that: "Women publicly encouraging and inciting other scorned women to commit this act worsened the epidemic. The vast majority of worldwide reports of penile replantation, to this day, are a result of what became a trendy form of retribution in a country in which fidelity is a strongly appreciated value."" It was endorsed by female society at large, publicly, occasionally in a televised way (which suggests they expected no blowback for these viewpoints), and thus resulted in a rise in prevalence in Thailand.
In the West, such light-hearted endorsements have occasionally become apparent as well, and for far less than infidelities. The Catherine Kieu Becker case is only one example of that. On July 15, 2011, a popular CBS daytime television show titled The Talk discussed the news story of Becker who was charged with drugging her husband, tying him to the bed, and waiting until he awoke to sever the man's penis off with a knife. She then proceeded to throw the appendage into the garbage disposal before calling 911 and reporting the crime herself. The audience members along with the other hosts immediately after hearing the details and the supposed reasoning for the mutilation (the husband had asked for a divorce) responded surprisingly by laughing. One woman in the audience was heard saying, "That'll teach him" and the host found it amusing enough to repeat it so it could be broadcast. Sharon Osbourne, one of the hosts of the show, offered her opinion that she felt the crime was "quite fabulous" only after making a gesture with her hands mimicking what the severed body part would have looked like while being destroyed in the garbage disposal. In spite of the talk of how men find it hard to relate to women, men do not collectively laugh on TV about women being raped; I find it quite interesting that women are capable of making light and even excusing when this kind of mutilation occurs to men.
I think it's simpler to just say that some large fraction of women do not view sexually violent retribution against men as particularly heinous, and are very capable of endorsing these acts, committing it while justifying it to themselves as a method of revenge for perceived slights. This is the nature of women. The vast majority of women know just how vengeful women can be, and I have the sense that while women can empathise with other women, most of them simply struggle to empathise with harms to men. The women in question here had issues with their husbands, their husbands weren't satisfying their needs in one way or another, and as such they're capable of viewing it as a trivial matter when they do the deed.
Is this sentiment unhinged? Maybe it is, but it's where this kind of reasoning is capable of getting you. When looking at 8 billion people interacting over the course of decades, it will always be possible to find case studies that sound like prima facie convincing evidence for most any position. But that never stops people pointing at them as soldiers for whatever viewpoint they want to support and going "See? This proves [sweeping statement] about [significant proportion of the population]".
It's not irrelevant to the discussion, I just thought the vibe of the comment was funny and is the kind of unnecessarily-detailed comment about relatively mundane matters I like finding in TheMotte.
I don't cut my apples either, FWIW, since apples oxidise stupidly quickly (even just leaving them for 2-5 minutes causes light browning) and biting into a full apple is just satisfying in the way the slices aren't.
I virtually always prefer oranges. If I can cast my net wide here and include mandarin oranges in that definition, the best ones I've had were the tangerine cultivars in Jeju Island (hallabongs, cheonhyehyangs, etc), which were just sinfully sweet and almost honey-like, I haven't ever eaten an apple that can compare with that.
Also I have never seen someone talk about eating an apple in such an autistic way as this comment of yours.
Oh, jesus. Speaking of unasked questions, don’t even get me started about the very concept of the hive. We first see it being cultivated in rats, who seem to exhibit the same kind of behaviours that humans do once infected (convulsing, a subsequent desire to spread itself) and then it jumps to patient zero. This opens up a whole can of worms that somehow never gets explored in spite of its implications.
Does this mean there are rats in the hivemind now? Does the hive know everything the rats know as well and partially see the world through their perspective? Since there are estimated to be as many rats as humans in the world doesn’t that mean the hive mind’s perspective is half rat? Or do different species have their own hives? Why aren’t the coyotes and dogs featured in the show ever affected if the virus can effortlessly jump species? Surely at least close relatives such as chimpanzees and bonobos could be affected, etc.
The show has a million things like this that it doesn’t even seem the writers considered, and it makes it feel very sloppy. Also, is there a fuck pile featuring the most genetically fit individuals so the hive can continue to live on? I want to know these things way more than I want to see Carol crashing out for the three millionth time.
1: The Amazing Digital Circus (ongoing). I watched it all from episode 1-7 after hearing a lot about it, expecting to find nothing but mediocrity at best and brainrot at worst. But... I'm ashamed to say I like it. It's a weird mix between a Pixar movie and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.
There are some parts that feel unnecessarily fan-servicey (e.g. putting a character in a maid outfit temporarily), and the characters have one too many Ted Lasso-esque heart-to-hearts, but there are good character moments and in general it toes the line between absurd zoomer humour and existential dread quite well. Despite the fact that it's clearly not meant to be overly highbrow (and it isn't), there's also some surprising references hidden in all of the bullshit, such as a brief reference to Searle's Chinese Room which just gets played off as a gag. Overall, it's a pretty decent and fun watch, I see why it achieved internet fame. 7.5/10 enjoyment.
2: Pluribus (2025). Against my better judgement, I watched the season all the way through, and it was somehow more disappointing than the first 3 episodes made it out to be. Oh, this rant is going to be long and angry.
Firstly, the pacing and themes: The series is hilariously slow-paced and spends a large amount of its runtime on expository scenes that primarily serve to illustrate the same handful of themes over and over again, you can see all of the plot developments from a mile away, and it covers all the bog standard fare for a sci-fi hive mind show (asking questions about the value of individualism vs collectivism, about if it's worth it if the cost of peace is one's selfhood and the loss of these valuable human things that arise from our attempts to reach out to each other, about if a person is ever really "independent", etc). I can't see it as treading much new ground in that regard, aside from the fact that it does so in a far more ponderous and soap-operatic manner than other science fiction. Perhaps this is uncharitable, but I also can't help but think that the people who actually think that the show adventurously breaks new ground are the pseudo-literary kind, the kind who would stay away from anything that they consider as pulp, and who genuinely believe that this concept is a new vehicle through which to tackle these philosophical themes because they would never be seen dead consuming genre fiction.
Secondly, the characterisation: Considering its fans tout it as a character study, there's noticeably little character development. Carol starts the season as a committed misanthrope seething with hatred and fear for the hive and what it represents, and... she ends the season as a committed misanthrope seething with hatred and fear for the hive and what it represents, after a brief period of wilfully deluding herself into believing that Zosia loves her. Pretty much the only dynamic that ends up changing is the newfound presence of Manousos at the end of the season. And most of Carol's (circular) character arc, far from redeeming her, seems to paint her as a worse character than you initially thought she was; initially it's possible to think of her as steadfastly principled in spite of her abrasive, aggressive nature, but the second she finds out that the hive can't convert her without her consent she immediately embraces pure hedonism, and goes so far as to have sex with a member of the hive (something she hypocritically criticises Koumba for doing earlier on in the show). The second she finds out again she can be converted by means of her frozen eggs, a plot point that makes zero sense for various reasons (including the fact that induced pluripotent stem cells can be made from virtually any bodily cell and germ cells are actually some of the worst candidates for stem cell creation due to the fact they only contain half the genome), she reverts to her original stance on the hive. It reveals that her opposition to the hive was not out of any kind of principle or selflessness, but out of her own self-interest. By the end of the season, I genuinely could not think of a single thing to like about her - she started out as a miserable Karen who you might have been able to argue had principles, and that argument gets eroded so heavily throughout the course of the season such that there isn't anything to like by the time the season is done. And she's so stuck in a holding pattern that the season leaves no room for her character growth.
Thirdly and finally, the visuals. In spite of an insane per episode budget of $15 million, many of the shots just look bad. There are multiple scenes that are clearly and obviously greenscreened: the rooftop scene in Episode 5 (which is so ugly it looks like a certain shot from The Room), as well as Kusimayu's conversion scene, Manousos and Carol's fight scene, and the scene with Carol and Zosia in "Thailand" in Episode 9 just look awful. And apparently the rooftop scene was by far the most costly scene in the show! Some other scenes were shot on location and look fine, but some scenes require such terrible VFX, are so expensive and yet are so irrelevant to the plot that it boggles my mind why they even attempted such a shot in the first place. Frankly, it's so obsessed with its cool visual concepts that it almost feels like the point of the story: Karolina Wydra flying a plane, the hive emptying out an entire supermarket and coordinating a large cast of extras to "fill it out" again, Carol's rooftop scene, etc; the show often feels like it's visuals-first and plot-second. There is so much pointless VFX and so much shooting across multiple continents with many extras, and that's a stark difference compared with Breaking Bad, which had little VFX, a small budget, minimal sets, etc, and managed a 10-13 month turnover between seasons. Meanwhile Pluribus is going to take a long time apparently despite being greenlit for a second season from the get-go. What does any of this actually ever get you?
In other words, I'm disappointed. I liked Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and had high hopes for this, but this isn't it. 5/10 enjoyment, basically the show equivalent of drinking water.
There are country- and culture-specific ones all over the internet.
For South Korea, there's Dale's blog; he's a Korean temple-obsessed autist who provides extremely exhaustive coverage of temples in South Korea, there are hundreds upon hundreds of posts where he talks about their history, provides photographs and rates them on a one to ten scale. He has also put together lists where he details the ones most worth visiting, such as this post and this post.
For China, Nick in China's youtube channel is a good resource. There are also twitter accounts devoted solely to cataloguing Chinese architecture, such as this one. Though researching China is not easy at all and I ended up having to go down Chinese sources sometimes - the Chinese government puts together rather exhaustive lists of culturally and historically important sites called the "Major Sites Protected for their Historical and Cultural Value at the National Level", and they're quite good. Here is the list for Shanxi province.
If you're interested in Greek and Roman sites, Scenic Routes To The Past is a good youtube channel for that. It's a travel channel run by Garret Ryan, who also runs the history channel toldinstone, and it's quite extensive in covering Greco-Roman historical buildings and remains while providing historical context.
Also, this isn't for any specific destination, but Antiokhos in the West's twitter is generally a gold mine for fascinating historical sites. And if researching for a country you’re unfamiliar with, starting with the UNESCO world heritage list is never a bad idea.
So I'm making this with the disclaimer that the countries I have travelled to at this point include the following: Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Northern Italy (so, no Rome and Sicily), Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Vietnam, South Korea, and Northern China. Note I cannot comment on other areas like Egypt, the UK, Spain, Greece, Southern China, Japan, India, or Cambodia.
With all that out of the way here's my list of favourite historical things I've seen (that are not in China, if you include the China ones the list becomes a good bit longer). It's a small list of favourites because I'm picky.
1: Sainte-Chapelle, France. I need to provide the disclaimer that I was not generally very impressed by Paris - it was rather chaotic and seedy, far from the romantic vibe it attempts to cultivate in tourist adverts, and I hear things have only gotten worse since I visited. But Sainte-Chapelle is the one thing in the city I really think justifies travelling there, and it does so stunningly; it's a 1238 Gothic cathedral with a lower and upper chapel, the latter of which is covered from top to toe in stained glass depicting scenes from the Passion of Christ, Ezekiel and Job, Genesis and so on. When the light hits the chapel at the right angle the interior looks positively kaleidoscopic. It's a small chapel, it's not large at all compared to many of the others in Europe, but it's so good I would say that if you travel to any historic site in Europe you should make it this one.
2: Changdeokgung Palace, South Korea. This is a rather out-of-left-field one, I don't think most people would put the Seoul palaces on the top of their list, but I would. I even prefer it to the Forbidden City, to be honest, which I don't think is a popular opinion. I went here in winter and had the palace grounds almost entirely to myself. It's an elegant, mazelike early 17th century palace painted in bright red and teal, with a throne hall that's adorned with paintings of uniquely Korean iconography such as pear blossoms and the Irworobongdo five peaks. But what really sold this one for me was the hidden garden at the back of the palace that I don't think most people ever find their way to; you have to pay an extra fee to go there, but it adds a lot of depth to the experience. It's so big it represents 60% of the palace, it's full of very naturalistic garden design and gorgeously framed pavilions and ponds, it contains what used to be the Korean royal library, and it's also full of cats (supposedly they have been there ever since a Joseon Dynasty king became an inverterate cat lover, I'm not joking). It's worth it if you can see this one off peak season, it needs to be serene.
3: Mausoleum of Emperor Khai Dinh, Vietnam. Vietnam is one of the most overstimulating and chaotic places I've been to, it is not for the faint-hearted, but it's also got some incredible things. This mausoleum is by far the youngest historical site on the list, hailing from the early 20th century during the final tumultuous years of the Nguyen Dynasty, and it was built as the tomb of an emperor who was largely a puppet of the French. But it's on here largely because its architectural style is one of the most unique things I've seen, and you will never find it anywhere else in the world. It's an eclectic East-meets-West hybrid of French and Vietnamese architecture, and it doesn't do so by mixing in French and Vietnamese-styled structures into the same complex, rather the whole mausoleum looks like a perfect midpoint between the two disparate architectural styles. It also features more modern construction techniques such as the usage of concrete and steel, and somehow makes all of it work seamlessly. Elements like neoclassical pilasters, pillars and arches sit comfortably alongside reliefs and paintings of dragons, Asian tomb statues, carved Confucian sayings and porcelain mosaics. The dragon-and-cloud mural on the ceiling of the mausoleum is a particular highlight, it's quite incredible.
If including China, include the Great Wall, Yungang Grottoes, Shuanglin Temple, and Terracotta Army. There are a few others that nearly make it but don't. For example Venice might have made it on here, but ultimately I thought it was too touristy and shoulder-to-shoulder crowded for me to be able to truthfully say that it was experientially special for me. It was very beautiful but it also felt like being in an ant farm, which degraded the experience. I would still say to visit because it's Venice, you have to, but it still won't be on the list.
I'll end this with another disclaimer - other people probably won't agree with my list and this kind of thing is obviously rather subjective. Ultimately the best way to refine your travel list is to just research a lot.
China is definitely one of the best places in the world for ancient history, I’ve only made one trip there and yet it already contains more than half of my favourite historical sites. And this is coming from someone who’s travelled quite abundantly. Shanxi province, in particular, is probably the part of East Asia with the most preserved history.
Though I will say if you ever go, brush up on that Mandarin Chinese, that will be an obstacle. Barely anybody speaks anything but Sinitic languages and it's likely you'll have to use a translate app at many points. Also, be flexible, be tolerant and don’t take shit too seriously. This is good advice for travelling anywhere, but China in particular has a tendency to induce culture shock.
Thank you, that's very flattering. The Great Wall picture is one of my favourites of the entire trip, I devoted about an entire day to getting all the colours right.
There's another photo I really want to work on involving a vendor perched on a plank on the side of the wall, far above the valley below, but I've been holding off because it'll probably involve yet another marathon editing session.
It was exceptional. Not always an easy travel, but the immense sense of age and scale you get in China is just unparalleled anywhere else in East Asia. There's also a whole lot of culture and it's not difficult at all to find active religious and ritual practice (Yonghe Temple in particular had so many chanting monks inside its halls).
I keep meaning to write a longform post about it but just get busy and sidetracked. Someday soon, maybe.
Been trying my hand at proper photo editing this week. Over Christmas I took thousands of shots in RAW format, whittled them down to a chosen hundred, and am now only starting to edit them properly. I've been taking it quite seriously, checking the histogram as I go along for dynamic range, trying to do proper colour balancing, and so on. It's quite surprising how long it takes; it's not uncommon for me to spend hours on a photo before I'm satisfied.
Here is an album of my completed photos thus far. There's not much there yet due to how time-consuming the process is; currently I have seven photos down, with ninety-three more to go.
Agreed on the high quality of the fruit (and poor quality of the meat). Didn't try any mangoes in Vietnam, but the pineapples and coconuts I had there were so very fresh. Fresher than anywhere else I've been. I had at least one coconut every day with my meal and it didn't matter where I went - regardless of if it was a sit-down restaurant or some tattered stall on the side of the street they were delicious.
I very consistently had a good time with Vietnamese desserts, which was unexpected. I was a big fan of the che when I was there, and there's a gigantic variety of these sweet soups; there's even one featuring a savoury pork dumpling (che bot loc heo quay) that actually kind of works in spite of the flavour contrast.
Never been to Cambodia, though Siem Reap is a destination I've had on the backburner for a while now.
It's funny, you just listed the main Vietnamese dishes/drinks I would really consider a must-try. Vietnamese coffee is truly incredible albeit a bit sweet (though understandably so given the use of Robusta), and southern-style banh mi is the only food I tried that I would call great. I only had a short layover in HCMC when I went, and I'm very glad I ventured into the city just for that one banh mi stall.
I suspect I would have liked Vietnamese food more had I spent more time in southern Vietnam; the more south I went, the more flavourful the food became. I'm typically more accustomed to heavily-spiced food, and much of northern Vietnam seems to enjoy food that's perhaps even blander than Cantonese cuisine.
The answer to this hugely depends on what "Chinese food" we're talking about here.
China has a ridiculous number of regional cuisines, so many in fact that one attempt to categorise them all identifies 63 cuisines. Throughout the trip I was only able to scratch the surface of only 3 cuisines in that list - Beijing, Shanxi and Central Shaanxi food, and they're quite different from the mostly Cantonese-inspired (and increasingly Sichuan-inspired) Chinese food in the West. It's different enough that all of these cuisines barely feature rice as a staple grain since it doesn't grow well at all in the desolate and harsh climate of the north.
Shanxi food is by far my favourite - the dishes there are very vinegar-heavy, and it's something the province specialises in. The vinegars there are made from sorghum, barley, and peas, and they're ridiculously varied and malty and deep in flavour (I actually got to see some being actively fermented the traditional way in an old Ming/Qing dynasty building). Every restaurant in the region will provide a variety of vinegars to pour onto each dish, as well as a large pot of chilli oil. The food in this province is flavourful and hearty, and many of these dishes aren't well represented outside of China, I highly recommend it. Though there are dishes that some laowai should maybe avoid unless particularly adventurous - I saw dishes featuring rabbit head being served in places like Datong, which I imagine would turn off a large number of Westerners.
On the other end of the spectrum, Beijing food is not all that fantastic. I find that their dishes tend to lack depth and flavour, and while I wasn't hugely excited for the cuisine there in the first place I was still surprised at how little I cared for it. It's not bad at all, but their flavour preferences don't excite me. Peking duck is still good though, and another thing that I really enjoyed there was their jianbing, a sort of savoury stuffed crepe popular in that part of China.
Something that really unexpectedly blew me away when I was in China was their yoghurts. Nai pizi and suannai are less sour than Western yoghurts and way more texturally satisfying, and in Shanxi province they come in weird flavours such as sea buckthorn and vinegar (I am not joking when I say it works; some vinegars in Shanxi are downright caramelly in flavour and actually complement the taste of yoghurt really well). They run circles around Western yoghurts all day, and being back in Australia now I can no longer find them anywhere, something which I am extremely disappointed by. In addition, China also has the most comforting drinks - their coffee is good, their tea is super fragrant, and their soy milk is downright delectable. I don't even like soy milk usually, but the Chinese really know how to do it right.
All this is to say that overall I really liked Chinese food (it was certainly way better than Vietnamese, come at me), and I don't just think it's as good as western MSG slop, I think it's often better. But food in China is far from a singular cuisine, the dishes in different parts of the country are nothing alike, and it's not really possible to say whether real Chinese food is "good" or "bad" without specifying which Chinese food we're talking about.
Not really, for a few other reasons - for example there's a pretty distinct lack of homelessness and drug addiction in Chinese cities, and the country is extremely safe, which actually makes it feel rather non-dystopic compared to many Western cities I've been to (which are often very visibly riddled with these problems). The country also doesn't feel very totalitarian compared to many other one-party states of its ilk, it is surveilled but police presence isn't heavy and you can generally travel quite freely. I would not call China third-world as a whole, I'm unsure where I would slot it within that definition because it's not really easy to categorise along that axis.
There are elements that you can pattern-match to a Hollywood dystopia (like having to scan your bags when you enter the subway), but as a whole China doesn't feel "low-life" or dystopic as much as it feels contradictory. People love trotting out extremely polarised and sensationalised views of China - people will either say it's "living in the future" or that it is a CCP hellhole that's about to collapse, but I don't think what I saw actually matches either view particularly well. I think people can come to these conclusions because they focus in on aspects that already confirm a preexisting view - there are things that it's extremely good at, and there are areas where it lags. In general it seems the Chinese government and people have a very different view of what their country should look like, as opposed to the West.
I just got back from a December trip to northern China. It's a country that's modernised in a very non-Western way, such that it appears like a weird cyberpunky juxtaposition of hypermodernity coexisting with third-world elements - the streets are very clean, robots in hotels deliver stuff to your door, face recognition for check-in and boarding is a thing in some airports, the whole country uses pretty much only payment apps, etc, but the AQI can be bad, the public toilets are dirty, taxis and some train stations smell like cigarette smoke, nobody speaks anything but Mandarin (or some other Sinitic language), there are touts who will try to sell you shit, and so on.
Personally, I think it's an amazing destination. I would go back in a heartbeat if I could. I have so many superlatives for it, and I won't forget being almost completely alone on the Great Wall with mist rising over the surrounding mountains like some Chinese ink painting, or stepping into an ancient grotto cave the size of a cathedral with thousands of religious carvings covering every square inch of its walls, or suddenly encountering a colourful festival in the streets of a Qing dynasty walled town. There is an astounding amount of history and culture there, I think it boasts by far the greatest density of genuinely historical stuff in Asia.
I have a travel report lined up and pictures to upload, but I'm suffering from severe jet lag and am too lazy to do that right now.
This is the kind of thing that has stopped me from travelling to Japan thus far, in spite of travelling through the rest of the East Asian sphere. There's nothing I can't stand more than being crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with other tourists when travelling, and it degrades the experience so heavily I would rather not go. I have also heard from other family members who have travelled there that the tourist numbers are unbearable, which doesn't give me confidence. Everybody and their mother wants to travel there and seems to view it as the premier East Asian destination; travel is at least part-fashion, and Japan seems to be in vogue at the moment.
Having grown up in Asia, this kind of feels a bit like being a Canadian and seeing everyone suddenly wanting to go to Calgary for some reason. In my opinion, there are other places in the continent that are equally as beautiful and cultural without being swarmed with tourists, that in fact are undertouristed, and that actually need the income to assist with preservation; I would rather visit these instead of an already-overtouristed country that is so aggressively swamped with people that the tourism is probably contributing to xenophobia in Japan at this point. It's to the point that I would feel complicit in a sort of vandalism.
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