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And precisely this mindset's why the US, yea West is decaying - instead of infinite striving for excellence, those raised here sit on past laurels and cope away anything better. Living without curiosity is comfortable lest you learn something new and convert everything around you into tech debt to work on - yet that comfort's disappeared, hence our entire community, formed around discussions of cost disease and cultural decline.
More glib, is America, are Americans really just better because of superior protestant-frontier culture - even though they lost their mandate and lack children to be replaced? What distinguishes Chinese in America from those in the PRC, home grown communists from foreign infiltrators, pedophiles from the heartland like Hastert and Foley from Afghan bachah-lovers and Pakistani groomers? REV Group closed factories and quintupled prices so an (inferior!) American firetruck costs a magnitude more than Chinese or even German vehicles, which our communities must pay for, our world is on fire, and you say nothing's wrong.
I don't understand your point here.
You're complaining about Americans being glib but your comment is one of the worst offenders I've seen in a while.
I think his point is that many Americans are watching China build an extremely impressive society almost from nothing and searching for excuses to explain Chinese achievement away rather than deciding they could learn a thing or two.
(It’s not ‘real’ growth, Chinese can only imitate, what about the consumer sector, etc.)
It is conceivable (though not certain) that the achievements of the West are not a reflection of a better philosophy or system of government but merely a temporary reflection of weakness in our competitors plus luck for us (finding a new continent, the renaissance, etc.). If so, if so, it would behoove us to get our act together and drop our certainty in our own systems ASAP.
It is also conceivable, and indeed quite certain, that civilizations can rise and decline, and this is only partially about essential qualities of the people, because genetics doesn't in fact explain 100% of the outcomes. That culture itself can rot. The West, I think, is genuinely an exceptional civilization, with very strong fundamentals. So was China, at one point of time. But China declined through unforced errors. So can the West. It's important to internalize just how advanced they were, and how far they have fallen.
From The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers:
Of all the civilizations of premodern times, none appeared more advanced, none felt more superior, than that of China. Its considerable population, 100-130 million compared with Europe's 50-55 million in the fifteenth century; its remarkable culture; its exceedingly fertile and irrigated plains, linked by a splendid canal system since the eleventh century; and its unified, hierarchic administration run by a well-educated Confucian bureaucracy had given a coherence and sophistication to Chinese society which was the envy of foreign visitors. True, that civilization had been subjected to severe disruption from the Mongol hordes, and to domination after the invasions of Kublai Khan. But China had a habit of changing its conquerors much more than it was changed by them, and when the Ming dynasty emerged in 1368 to reunite the empire and finally defeat the Mongols, much of the old order and learning remained.
To readers brought up to respect "western" science, the most striking feature of Chinese civilization must be its technological precocity. Huge libraries existed from early on. Printing by movable type had already appeared in eleventh-century China, and soon large numbers of books were in existence. Trade and industry, stimulated by the canal-building and population pressures, were equally sophisticated. Chinese cities were much larger than their equivalents in medieval Europe, and Chinese trade routes as extensive. Paper money had earlier expedited the flow of commerce and the growth of markets. By the later decades of the eleventh century there existed an enormous iron industry in north China, producing around 125,000 tons per annum, chiefly for military and governmental use—the army of over a million men was, for example, an enormous market for iron goods. It is worth remarking that this production figure was far larger than the British iron output in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, seven centuries later! The Chinese were also probably the first to invent true gunpowder; and cannons were used by the Ming to overthrow their Mongol rulers in the late fourteenth century.
[…]
But the Chinese expedition of 1433 was the last of the line, and three years later an imperial edict banned the construction of seagoing ships; later still, a specific order forbade the existence of ships with more than two masts. Naval personnel would henceforth be employed on smaller vessels on the Grand Canal. Cheng Ho's great warships were laid up and rotted away. Despite all the opportunities which beckoned overseas, China had decided to turn its back on the world.
[…] Apart from the costs and other disincentives involved, therefore, a key element in China's retreat was the sheer conservatism of the Confucian bureaucracy—a conservatism heightened in the Ming period by resentment at the changes earlier forced upon them by the Mongols. In this "Restoration" atmosphere, the all-important officialdom was concerned to preserve and recapture the past, not to create a brighter future based upon overseas expansion and commerce. According to the Confucian code, warfare itself was a deplorable activity and armed forces were made necessary only by the fear of barbarian attacks or internal revolts. The mandarins' dislike of the army (and the navy) was accompanied by a suspicion of the trader. The accumulation of private capital, the practice of buying cheap and selling dear, the ostentation of the nouveau riche merchant, all offended the elite, scholarly bureaucrats—almost as much as they aroused the resentments of the toiling masses. While not wishing to bring the entire market economy to a halt, the mandarins often intervened against individual merchants by confiscating their property or banning their business. Foreign trade by Chinese subjects must have seemed even more dubious to mandarin eyes, simply because it was less under their control.
…
This dislike of commerce and private capital does not conflict with the enormous technological achievements mentioned above. The Ming rebuilding of the Great Wall of China and the development of the canal system, the ironworks, and the imperial navy were for state purposes, because the bureaucracy had advised the emperor that they were necessary. But just as these enterprises could be started, so also could they be neglected. The canals were permitted to decay, the army was periodically starved of new equipment, the astronomical clocks (built c. 1090) were disregarded, the ironworks gradually fell into desuetude.
These were not the only disincentives to economic growth. Printing was restricted to scholarly works and not employed for the widespread dissemination of practical knowledge, much less for social criticism. The use of paper currency was discontinued. Chinese cities were never allowed the autonomy of those in the West; there were no Chinese burghers, with all that that term implied; when the location of the emperor's court was altered, the capital city had to move as well. Yet without official encouragement, merchants and other entrepreneurs could not thrive; and even those who did acquire wealth tended to spend it on land and education, rather than investing in protoindustrial development. Similarly, the banning of overseas trade and fishing took away another potential stimulus to sustained economic expansion; such foreign trade as did occur with the Portuguese and Dutch in the following centuries was in luxury goods and (although there were doubtless many evasions) controlled by officials.
In consequence, Ming China was a much less vigorous and enterprising land than it had been under the Sung dynasty four centuries earlier. There were improved agricultural techniques in the Ming period, to be sure, but after a while even this more intensive farming and the use of marginal lands found it harder to keep pace with the burgeoning population; and the latter was only to be checked by those Malthusian instruments of plague, floods, and war, all of which were very difficult to handle. Even the replacement of the Mings by the more vigorous Manchus after 1644 could not halt the steady relative decline.
One final detail can summarize this tale. In 1736—just as Abraham Darby's ironworks at Coalbrookdale were beginning to boom—the blast furnaces and coke ovens of Honan and Hopei were abandoned entirely. They had been great before the Conqueror had landed at Hastings. Now they would not resume production until the twentieth century.
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Is anyone saying China isn't in some of ways impressive? But except for maybe industrial might it's still no comparison. For example, many Chinese people joke that the Chinese dream is "becoming American". It's an unpleasant place to live for all but a few. Much like the Soviets it's a poor totalitarian dictatorship forcing money into key sectors at an unsustainable rate to keep pace with America. I'm not implying it will totally collapse like the Soviets by the way, but acting like a country with a $13k GDP per capita is a true peer to America in most ways is on its face pretty tough to swallow.
I have only ever visited China once but most of the people I spoke to (and the Chinese I have known outside China) were very proud of their country and not very interested in America.
This is the point being made above about glibness. China is rapidly developing industrial might, while America (plus Europe) looks an awful lot like a sclerotic mess with incredibly high costs, propped up by finance and an AI bubble. And faced with this, Americans claim that ‘actually, the Chinese want to be like us really’ and ‘Chinese growth is all an illusion so it’s not worth worrying about’*. Americans seem right now to be incapable of genuinely entertaining the proposition that the American way of doing things isn’t the only way or the best way.
*The latter claim may be true. Genuinely unsure.
Whereas one might as easily point out that huge amounts of Western economic activity are either self-sabotaging (wasting vast amounts of treasure and brainpower on finely-balanced legal questions, financialisation of the real economy) or fripperies and super stimuli (witness China heavily restricting video games).
Ultimately people didn’t want to be American or like Americans because of America’s culture and system of government, but because America was rich and powerful and they wanted to be rich and powerful too. Even for Americans themselves this is the case, I think: how many Americans would happily live in a third-world shithole economy as long as it was run faithfully in accordance with the American Constitution and Amendments? 10%? If America loses industrial might, they will lose a lot of other things in quick succession.
This is the same mistake we British made, incidentally: that the rest of the world looked up to us and came to be educated by us and copied our parliament because they liked us and respected our way of life. No. They respected Empire and when the Empire died so too did the respect.
I have spent a lot of time in China and more time with chinese expats in Asia and America. There is a subset of people who are absurdly pro-CCP, mostly party insiders and a subset of highly educated/succesful ultra-nationalists. These are the only people you will probably meet if you don't speak Chinese or another Asian language. Young people at large are very unhappy with the current state of corruption, know the wages there are awful, and furthermore know the youth unemployment rate is awful and rising. Of course, my sample set (so to speak) will be biased, (particularly the expat community in asia) but it's not a secret that the Chinese youth are being screwed over by the CCP intentionally depressing wages and an additional issue of huge unemployment. There is no more "the future looks brighter than yesterday" feeling in China now. Quite the opposite.
And when I say "The Chinese dream is to become American." I say it because it is actually a phrase thrown around many circles in (at least South) China. I didn't create it myself.
This seems like a huge strawman to me. Americans aren't capable of ciriticizing themselves? Really? I mean, go just about anywhere and all Americans do is complain about America to the point of parody. Hell, if you want me to give you a list of my complaints about America I will gladly list them here, but they just won't be that America is poor with a government funneling people's money into a tech race that it's not fit to compete in. You have some fair points about the sclerotic bureacracy, but undoubtedly it's much more complicated than the popular meme of "China just gets things done and America/the West doesn't".
I would say 150+ years of mass immigration before American total hegemonic power suggests that people wanted to be Americans long before America was the all powerful hegemon it is now. However, I will admit a lot of that shine has worn off since America has become more and more like a European bureacracy laden all encompassing state. America is not as much the land of the free as it was, even if it's doing better than any other developed country I can think of.
EDIT: Let's also note that right now China is very poweful and nobody wants to become Chinese. Even me, somone who has an obsession with Asian culture and languages, who finds Chinese history very interesting, and loves parts of its (former) civilization would admit this.
But there is also a truth that people want to emulate winners, not losers. Britain and Europe at large are on large losing streaks to say the least.
Sure, people don't really care about "power" - but wealth? Already from the mid 17th century, America was more or less the wealthiest place in the world per capita and really broke away from Europe in the 18th century.
You have a point there.
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Modern Chinese are becoming less materialist, less pro-democracy and more nationalist, even as life satisfaction falls, so I really don't think they're attributing their woes to the CCP.
Isn't this pretty much an obvious conspiracy theory? They simply don't have enough high-paying white collar jobs for an enormous surge in overqualified university graduates. Why the hell wouldn't wages be stagnant if supply outstrips demand.
I think that's proving his point. Like, this kind of framing strikes me as deserving of very harsh criticism, it's basically barbaric gibberish. But it's part of your culture, your "civilization", such as there is.
I’m really not sure about the less materialist part, but definitely less pro-democracy and more nationalist. The rise in nationalism is actually a bit awkward for the party, because while it would love to derive (and is deriving) its legitimacy from Chinese nationalism, there’s always tension between nationalists and genuine believers of communism and that communism meme keep propagating inside of China. Honestly it would be nice if they just changed the name to avoid confusion, both internally and externally.
From your article:
I don't think that's actually measuring materialism anyways, but I guess there's different interpretations of what materialism means.
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No, it's just a simple economic policy to increase export driven growth at the expense of people's quality of life.
https://treasury.gov.au/publication/economic-roundup-issue-4-2012/china-prospects-for-export-driven-growth
https://www.paftad.org/files/34/01_YANG%20YAO_Growth.pdf
To be fair, China didn't invent this. Japan and Korea used similar policies to drive export led growth, but China's internal passport system is kind of unique (I think the soviets had a similar system, but the effects are quite different in an export led economy), and one of the largest barriers to wage growth.
This doesn't also cover the huge subsidies for industries that act as an indirect tax on local consumers.
The first is a 2012 article, and I don't see its relevance. Likewise for the second, it's some mush about export-led growth in principle.
I wonder if you've ever tried to check your claims with simple arithmetic and googling.
Chinese annual wages in manufacturing, far as I can tell, have increased 2.3x between 2013 and 2024. Similarly for all wages (2,38x). Chinese GDP in RMB grew by 2.37x, for a discrepancy of <<1% for all wages and 3% in manufacturing. Chinese labor productivity increased in lockstep with wage increases, resulting in flat pseudo-unit labor costs. Inflation was low and decreasing over most of this period, resulting in 2024 108K wage being worth ≈90K of 2013 RMBs, an increase in purchasing power of 93%.
The nominal hourly wage of an American worker, over the same period, grew 47%, and real purchasing power, owing to inflation, only ≈11%, while GDP grew 72%. Admittedly employment increased and so did total number of Americans, but that's of no consolation to individual worker.
Labor share or GDP:
USA = [58.8, 58.9, 59.2, 58.4, 58.2, 58.5, 59.1, 60.3, 58.6, 57.4, 57.1, 56.8]
PRC = [[47.5, 48.2, 49.0, 49.8, 50.3, 50.7, 51.1, 51.5, 51.8, 52.0, 52.2, 52.4]
What exactly is the theory for claiming that this is evidence of wage suppression in China? Why should they have already caught up if not for Xi's evil wage suppression to nefariously boost export competitiveness?
This presumes that subsidies are inefficient, rather than efficiently suppressing costs of living, which in China are indeed absurdly low.
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All points taken.
FWIW what I’m basing my ‘Chinese’ reports on is:
a) various conversations with (mostly older) people in train stations etc. Maybe I am the victim of a sophisticated propaganda barrage designed to subvert visiting foreigners but if it can successfully hire/imitate retired professors of geology then it’s a very good program. I didn’t speak to younger people.
b) My Chinese co-workers in Japan. One of whom is a very good friend and left China to escape his overbearing extended family not Xi. He is mildly pro-China rather than anti-China or pro-America, but not to any silly extent.
Of course Americans are capable of criticising themselves. But in the main they seem to criticise themselves for not being American enough. For failing to live up to the American ideal, undermining American freedoms/rights, too much or too little immigration according to taste. Very few people apart from the largely-defunct pro-European movement are saying that maybe the American way of doing things is at best one system among many. Or for example things like, “maybe balance-of-power democracy and a system of rights defended by law is less effective than a single party run by engineers and a tightly controlled industrial policy” or “maybe basing our national mythology on having a revolution to avoid paying taxes and submitting to central authority encourages fractiousness and sectarianism”.
EDIT:
You do have to bear in mind who these people were, though. Overwhelmingly Irish, Italian, German and Jewish, with some Chinese. All people who had pretty good reasons (poverty or persecution or not wanting to live with the Prussians) for leaving their current country. I am sure they liked the idea of freedom but I think that the push factors were more pressing. And indeed Britain also got many of these people.
I would say a professor is exactly the kind of person who is usually vehemently pro CCP. Reliant on the state, succesful, obliged by his profession to be pro-communist, and so on. Using him as an example of Chinese opinion is kind of like saying "Well most Americans love leftist ideology, I talked to an HR manager from Microsoft and she said it's beloved by all her coworkers."
Now, maybe I went too far because there are still plenty of strains of people who love the CCP, but I do think, especially compared to ten to fiteen years ago there is a gloom about the future of China among the Chinese. Not only is the economy puttering along haphazardly, but people, especially educated people who don't have a stake in pretending the CCP is great, are aware that Xi broke the chain of succession and limited separations of powers the CCP had built for itself post Mao and that is deeply related to the problems China is facing at the moment.
I mean, that's not really true as evidenced by Catholic integralist Fuentes's rise, (the know nothings were right and letting all the Catholics in was a mistake). However, I just don't think any well reasoned person who has spent time in China can honestly say that a separation of power individual right defending republic is less worth living in or succesful than a single party totalitarian communist state. If you want to say living in Germany is better than living in America, I might snigger at you a little behind your back, but I'll hear you out. But the country with a 13k GDP per capita running a genocide in its far reaches with a straight line of succession back to the most disastrous dictator in human history? I mean...I'm trying to be nice here...but it's hard... It's one thing to say "America should have more industrial policy." (which is a discussion being had) and completely another to say "The American republic is worse in most or many ways than the CCP."
The largest ethnic makeup of America is by far German and British (including Scottish and English as one for simpliticty's sake), with Mexicans a recent distant third. Neither of these places were exactly the bottom of the barrel of the world at the time. America was just better. I also think fleeing persecution (EDIT: I should say restrictiveness instead of persecution (in a broad sense, not necessarily genocidal or even violent)) was and to a large extent still is a gravity pulling a lot of the world towards America. That's kind of what the sales pitch of joining a free country entails--freedom.
Why are we seriously entertaining this superficial think tanker nonsense? There was no separation of powers, there was a detente between oligarchic groups, Shanghai clique and Communist Youth League. China had never developed instintutionalized separation of powers, it was a system of informal customs of succession and balanced Politburo composition. The primary result of this was the viability of endless corruption under the veneer of "growth" from inflating the property bubble.
It's related in the sense that they had perverted Deng's "getting rich is glorious" edict into a permission for a Ponzi scheme that's now collapsing.
I maintain that the main issue is lack of humility. It's okay, you'll learn by degrees.
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Take your point re: different Chinese groups. Going to have to wait and see how that shakes out.
For the rest, I think it would help to make my perspective more clear. I am British as I said, and we’re in a mess, so the question of which role models we should look at is a salient one. America is clearly more prosperous than China now, but the direction of travel seems to be in a quite negative direction (I am not talking about GDP) whereas China seems broadly positive and improving except for the very serious issue of demographics.
The genocide against the Ugyurs is awful, but looks rather different when in the UK we have mass stabbings by Arabs on a monthly basis and polls find ~25% of the Muslim population is softly supportive of jihad. Just yesterday we welcomed a man to the UK who has called for the slaughter of all Zionists, and policemen, and says explicitly that he despises all whites. I would not like us to go as far as the Chinese but an explicit goal of ‘no Islamic culture in the UK’ pursued with vigour and the invasive surveillance of the CCP would be far better than what we have.
That is, I am not saying that the American republic is clearly worse right now than the CCP. I am saying that I am not sure it is a good role model, and I am not sure how much it was being propped up by historical contingency. It may be that there are no good role models, and that we all take our turn in the great carousel of history, but I am not yet quite so black pilled.
I think that this is the wrong time period to look at. Yes, when America still had lots of empty space and a weak central culture, lots of people being restricted chose to go there and make a society for themselves. That time is over. America is settled, it has a central government with wide-ranging powers and a fairly strong culture both formal and informal. Now the question is not, “should we leave to the New World and start afresh?” it’s “should we go to America and become Americans?”. That is why I limited my analysis to Ellis Islanders and later.
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Without doxxing yourself, can you tell us when and where you were in China/East Asia? I feel this is one of the most important pieces of information when discussing the country. China in 2025, 2015, and 2005 are completely different places, and people’s views on the current state of the country, the outside world, and their own upward mobility differ dramatically. Without that context I find the discussion largely moot. I probably fit your description of the “well-educated, ultranationalist Chinese you find outside China”, although I’d describe myself as overeducated and only mildly nationalist. My social circle is obviously not representative of China as a whole, but at least within this overeducated slice of society, opinions about the Chinese state and future life prospects have changed substantially over the past two decades. During my childhood, among adults (and by osmosis among kids), there was a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction especially around corruption. As a kid, I remember adults constantly talking about “塞钱” (stuffing money) into police officers pockets to change a child’s name, birthday, etc. Corruption was absolutely rampant then. Ten years later to around 2015, when I was in university, tthe general sentiment at least in big cities had shifted a lot. There was a sense that the wind had changed, and unless you were very rich or very well connected, you couldn’t and shouldn’t expect things to work the old way. Gifting doctors money probably will get you a bed by the window but wouldn’t get you better treatment, police wouldn’t take bribes to change your kid’s name. Of course this wasn’t uniform across the country, corruption remained more prevalent in smaller cities, but the change was real. Other things like copy right also changed quite a bit. Gone were the days where I can find pirated movies on bilibili with a simple search, and now you’d need many layers of get-around to find those movies, although those are still out there if you try harder.
Another ten years later, here we are in 2025. The corruption issue is certainly not among the top things on people’s minds, which is why I think your information is at least 10 years out of date, especially the claim that “young people are very unhappy with the current state of corruption”. Young people simply have not experienced the level of corruption that will make them very unhappy with the current state of corruption. Xi's anti-corruption campaign created a shit ton of extra bureaucratic nonsense like asking dance club of elderly to fill fifty forms and only spend 20 rmb per person on their Chinese New Year gift purchase or what not, but by no means ineffectual. I think the top concerns on the average Chinese person’s mind today are wages, housing (which I actually think is a critical failure point of the country. housing price where I grow up increased 50 folds in 20 years), healthcare, and marriage/childcare. Corruption in China today is much more like corruption in the U.S. than in Nigeria: subtler, not a dominant factor in everyday life, but one that occasionally erupts into major scandals. I do agree that most young people think wages are bad and unemployment is bad, in a way not unlike the vibecession discussion in the US. But to be blunt it’s simply regarded to say that Chinese people by and large have not benefitted tremendously from the economic development, or better off than they were ten years ago. Claims that only a tiny fraction of people benefited from China’s meteoric rise, that only the “highly educated, successful ultranationalists”, or 富二代 who drives aston martin in Vancouver and driving up rent, or the red princelings, got their share, while everyone else was left behind, strike me as peak delusion if said by some Chinese youth and peak cope if from an American, NYT columnist or themotte frequenter. It’s just undeniable that a vast majority of Chinese people benefited materially from the CCP’s economic policies over the past two decades. Maybe one consider that to be only small achievement, but I disagree strongly. Or maybe we can do the usual “but at what cost” thing and I’ll even agree largely, but I don’t think that’s what you said.
As for “the Chinese want to be like Americans”, you’re not entirely wrong but you are still very mistaken. Again, there’s a clear progression in sentiment. Twenty years ago on Baidu Tieba, then the largest Chinese discussion forum, people requesting porn would often append “下辈子美利坚”, or “next life, America”, a pun implying a wish to be reincarnated in the US with a pun (坚means hard, as in harder penis) for a harder “weapon”. That kind of open and widespread worship of the U.S. (and, by extension, of whiteness. people even slapped “Made in Czechia” labels onto low quality chinesium as a supposed mark of superior quality) is nowhere near as common today. Those same people, I suspect, either turned into 反贼 (traitors, as pro-CCP pinkies 粉红 call them) or transitioned into 粉红 themselves. As a line from a Chinese movie goes, “they follow whoever wins”, and China has been doing a lot of “winning” lately, certainly less than those “winnologists” (赢学家, Chinese nationalists who crave winning) believe but more than enough for the mildly nationalists online to be 10x as vocal as they were before. Are people more pessimistic about their own future than a few years ago? Maybe, especially after the catastrophic handling of covid. But have they reverted to wishing everyone could be reincarnated as Americans? No. That era is gone. Maybe that’s a low bar, but a change is still a change.
It does pain me that many of my fellow countryman want to turn their cities into LED hellscapes, which in many minds signal “development”, a cargo-cult worship of I guess the American or their imaginary West with Chinese characteristics. Still, as many below have pointed out, the Chinese want to be like Americans not because your Americaness, but because you’re rich and powerful. To Americans, this distinction may seem unimportant, since being American is already synonymous with being rich and powerful. But I think it is not synonymous for most Chinese and when American economical gild fades you will see the distinction.
I’ve lurked on here for many years. My own social circle is a giant blue bubble, and this is one of the few places where I can read from a grayish-red slice of Americans who are thoughtful and articulate. Over time I’ve sensed a growing belief there that something is rotten in the US. Whatever their prescriptions for social illness, there’s a pervasive pessimism. Difficulty celebrating small wins (see the thread down below “small hiccups among decades of winning” re the OU placing the trans TA on admin leave); tech pessimism (more among general well-educated blue tribers, not here); cynicism toward government everywhere, but especially at home. Yet despite all this, most Americans on that forum still seem to believe that America, whatever she represents, is fundamentally great. They criticize her, but they also believe in her. I’d argue the Chinese are similar.
Why is it so hard to understand that, just as Americans can criticize America while loving and caring about it, the Chinese can do the same? Why assume that when they criticize the government for mishandling of covid, or flip-flop between one-child policy and infinite child policy, or letting real estate being a major source of local government income and get them hopelessly addicted to it, they are not simply voicing their concerns similar to red-blooded Americans, or like performative blue tribers ranting about silly shit, but are actually losing hope in CCP’s mandate of heaven and yearn for liberty and democracy? Why is it unthinkable that Chinese people, nationalist or not, mean what they say, not because they’re misled by the CCP, but because they’ve actually experienced the benefits of their country’s rise? Why default to cynicism when a much more straightforward explanation is available? I suspect the answer says more about Americans than it does about the Chinese.
I think we've had almost the exact opposite experience, although probably part of it is what kind of people I'm meeting now vs in 2017(ish).
A decade ago, I spent most of my time living in the pearl river delta (mostly Shenzhen) and the outlook on China and it's future was overwhelmingly positive. You're right that people were aware that there was a lot of petty corruption with people like the police, but the general sentiment was "Yeah, it's better to live in the UK or America, but China is getting better fast, there's so much opportunity, and my life will definitely be better next year than this year." In my experience that last sentiment is mostly gone. I've only spent a limited amount of time on the mainland in the past year, so now doubt I'm getting some bias, but even there the attitude among young people is "The job market is shit, wages aren't going up anymore, and I'll probably never be able to own a home/have a family/be as succesful as mom and dad." Which is a shocking change to see in such a short time. A lot of people also complain that the system isn't fair anymore. Like I said, the petty local corruption is one thing, but I heard a ton of complaints about things like a medical exam scandal (I might be misremembering) where a woman was let in who didn't pass (or something, I might be way off here) and a bunch of other scandals, often followed by comments like "This is why China is such a shit country." I never heard anything like that ten years ago. Even the people who wanted to leave wouldn't say something like that, but again, my sample set is quite biased. I can't speak Chinese well anymore, (not that I was ever great) so all my conversations are with people who can speak English or another East Asian langauge I'm fluent in. A lot of my experience with Chinese people is from dating, or people who I work with who I left for a variety of reasons, but even my limited experiences on the mainland had a completely different mood. There's still a lot of pride around China as a culture, kind of like America or Russia viewing itself as the center of the world, but not nearly as much about the current state of China. As an addendum, I do kind of get this sentiment all around the world recently though, so maybe it's a global phenomenon.
Now, back in 2015 I also spent some time in a couple small and mid sized cities (I forgot the names, frankly I've always been shit at remembering the names of things in Chinese) and it was like a different world. It wasn't really developed at all, the people weren't educated well (whereas I would say that the average person in Shanghai or Shenzhen is probably more educated than the average American) and their views of the world differed greatly as well. I suspect if I went there again I'd get a completely different experience and I have no idea what that experience would be.
So there's two things I think I should clarify here. First, when I say people are unhappy with corruption I mean something different from bribing the police or whatever. I see a lot of people complain about systemic unfairness or how Xi holding onto power is bad for the country (often using the "anti-corruption campaign" as an example of him hoarding power, which surprised me as an American considering I thought that was only a Western view)
Secondly, obviously China has improved a ton for most people. I think there is an unfortunate truth that people feel the acceleration in their standard of living much more than the standard of living itself. The so called "hedonic treadmill" is a huge factor in human psychology, and a lot of people in China seem to feel that their lives aren't getting better or maybe even getting worse, kind of like some poor people in America. I don't think either case is true (with exceptions) but I also do think the competition in life is much harder (in both cases) and expectations have become unsustainable (particularly in America, although China has absurd expectations in the dating sphere from what I understand).
I think this is quite a different phenomenon from what I experience. I know what you mean though, and this sort of weird fetishization of white people, and things like hiring a white guy to stand in front of your business to look cool is completely gone (thankfully).
I've known enough Chinese to realize that most of them don't particularly understand or admire American culture, and those who lived in America are included. It's quite difficult for a hedgemonic culture like those seen in America or China (Russia and Japan have this as well) to leave their cultural bubble. There are exceptions though, much like I'm would like to think I'm an exception as an American who really loves learning about and partaking in other cultures (particularly those types which totally dominate their own media and social spheres). I'm an absolute American chauvinist, but I'm aware of the cultural differences that exist. Somehow, that seems very rare.
I think you're completely right, but it's more complicated than that. I will say that I left this place for a long while for a reason--it's not really reflective of the American reality. This forum is full of loons who spend too much time online. While the average discourse on here is much more well reasoned and articulate, reason detached from reality won't get you anywhere. It's like people arguing about the shadows in Plato's cave. The level of discourse being higher here hides the fact that this place is pretty detached from reality, much like reddit except reddit is obviously full of clowns who can't rub two brain cells together.
I think you're right. I don't think most Chinese yearn for Democracy. I do think the way Chinese propaganda and information in general is propagated plays a huge role in how I judge Chinese people's opinions though. I'm not laboring under the delusion that Americans aren't propagandized in some way, but the difference between the information Chinese people consume and American people consumer is largely this--Americans get told what they want to hear, no matter how stupid it is. Chinese people get told what the government wants them to hear, no matter how stupid it is. I have some illustrative examples (particularly pertaining to Chinese views on Japan) but I don't really want to get into it because I don't think I've ever had a productive conversation about it with a Chinese person.
Anyways, I appreciate the effort you put into this post. Most certainly you have more experience with Chinese public opinion than I do, but I'm mostly shocked by how different it seems than it did 10 years ago. It's interesting that your experience is kind of the opposite, even if I think we're talking about different examples.
We indeed have very different experiences. I think there’s a decent chance that I’ve met and talked to more Chinese people than you, but of course we all live in our respective bubbles. Even so, I think it’s almost impossible for an expat, Chinese language skills notwithstanding, to experience society the same way a native speaker does, much like how I experience the US now. It’s absolutely true that a large number of people are dissatisfied with the current state of the economy and with their own upward mobility in China. I also agree that more people now will say online or in person, “The job market is shit, wages aren't going up anymore, and I'll probably never be able to own a home/have a family/be as succesful as mom and dad.” especially the part about never owning a home because that is probably true (although the housing bubble has deflated a bit much to my aunties' dismay). Housing prices are one of the biggest concerns for Chinese people in general. That said, I think it’s mistaken to say this kind of thinking wasn’t more prevalent 10 or 20 years ago.
I was born and raised in a tier-1 city, and back then uncles and aunts never hesitated to say the country was shit and hopeless, that their lives were miserable, that the Communist Party was corrupt as hell, and to go on wild rants about officials abusing power in every imaginable way. Everyone I knew who had the means to migrate at least tried. There were relatively high level government officials who went on a government trip, landed in NYC, and disappeared into the greasy streets of Flushing, maybe doing the dishes somewhere in greasy Chinese restaurants. That alone is very different from 2025. Obviously the desire to migrate doesn’t depend solely on how shitty your home country is. But I think pessimism was much, much more widespread one or two decades ago than it is now, among the educated and uneducated, among the old and young. It’s just harder to see before because people can voice their pessimism to an expat in broken English in 2024, whereas people from the same slice of society in 2015 would have less change to talk to foreigners. That suggests a sampling bias might be at play here. But of course, despite being Chinese myself I’m still limited to my own social circles which is by no means representative, although I'm not even sure what representative means for a country with 1.5 billion people.
I think I may have unintentionally conflated petty corruption with large-scale corruption, but I’m not sure ordinary people really distinguish between the two. The Chinese government and the communist party is perceived as a single entity, and every societal ills or benefits get attributed to this amorphous whole without much distinction. It’s unclear to me whether petty corruption or nationwide scandals have eroded public trust more, and if I have to guess I think petty corruption by their proximity to people actually mattered more in public discourse. That said, we can talk about large scandals. I think I know what you’re referring to with the medical exam scandal. That level of scandal honestly wouldn’t even register in people’s minds in 2015. Back then, corruption scandals were things like the Sanlu milk scandal where a milk powder company bribed the equivalent of Chinese FDA to avoid testing and added melamine to infant formula, causing development defects in thousands if not millions of kids, or the minister of railways taking bribes in the tens of millions and may or may not involved in covering up a major accident, or Bo and Xi’s political struggles and purges. Kids of corrupt officials at that time didn’t even need to take medical exams; they could go wherever they wanted (and many times they don't want to go to any college in China anyways, and instead smuggle their wealth to Canada to buy up properties). People simply knew this. In that sense I actually see an improvement. Today’s major scandals are much less serious, and many serious scandals that blow up today actually happened many year ago. What you’re observing, I mean the complaints from Chinese people, largely stems from the solidification of social strata in China. After a period of explosive growth, it’s now much, much harder for people to change their fate through the usual (or unusual) channels. There is simply no means for a commoner to be as rich and resourceful, like they could after the reform until maybe 10 years ago. That understandably makes people feel like shit, and that their life "won't be better than their parents". But I think this reflects a society that has progressed and then stratified. And the stratification issue is hard to solve anywhere.
As for using anti-corruption campaigns to purge political enemies, this has literally been a thing since antiquity. It’s not surprising at all for any Chinese person to talk about, whether pro (except the rabidly pro government loons of course) or anti-government. Certainly nothing western about it at all.
I actually think this is a much bigger issue for China. Not only in the dating market. The Chinese government cannot derive its legitimacy purely from ideology, like Mao did from communism, or the imperial Chinese from the Mandate of Heaven, or the elective democracies from the votes of people. It of course derive its legitimacy from Chinese nationalism, but since it is a government that proclaims itself one thing (communism) but act like another, there is always a level of 名不副实, a mismatch between name and reality that makes people from both side question its sincerity. It instead has to deliver real, material things to satisfy the Chinese populace, and that to me is quite inefficient. And if expectations become unsustainable it threatens their very source of legitimacy. I'm not sure how they will solve this issue and it will be interesting social experiment if I'm not a participant.
My understanding of American society doesn’t come from this place alone. Most of it comes from interacting with actual Americans. Though, as I’ve admitted, that sample is heavily blue. In those blue social circles, the sense of societal illness often feels even stronger and more paranoid than what I see here. Sure, this place has its share of lunatics, like those single-issue posters, or agitators who want to see everything burn for no good reason, but in my opinion it’s still saner than most of my coworkers (and redditors, of course, curse that place) who are otherwise normal people but hold crazy beliefs about society, about the economy, about politics, about dating market, about everything really. Both this forum and American public discourse are detached from reality, but I think the latter is more detached, to the point that parallel spiritual societies form within the same physical space in America. The three past elections and the intensifying culture wars are, to me, evidence that detached online shitposting really does shape the physical world. I’d call myself a Chinese nationalist, but I see no obvious reason for conflict between China and the US. In fact I see more reasons why both countries should exist, to serve as alternatives and mirrors for each other’s societies. It would be a shame if either of these social experiments failed spectacularly.
I guess we have to agree to disagree here. The Chinese people absolutely get told what they want to hear, and your people absolutely get told what your government want you to hear, although the messages are becoming more and more incoherent because of the giant chasm between the two parties.
That rubs me the wrong way because it assumes too much, so I’ll gladly tell you what I think about Japan at length and make this less “productive.” Because of my experience in the US, I’ve developed a more pan-Asian identity than the average Chinese person. I hate how irrational and bloodthirsty some of my fellow countryman can be toward Japan. After all in my mind they’re basically us with extra steps. I see Japanese people as part of my cultural brethren, like a set of concentric circles, China at the center, Taiwan in the second layer, Korea and Vietnam in the third, and Japan in the fourth, but still firmly within what I perceive as the broader Chinese cultural sphere. An unfortunate chain of events led to the breakup between China and Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of which could have been avoided, but that’s history now. I don’t like how Japanese people remain oblivious to China and its development, while still retaining a holier-than-thou attitude toward my people (and the Koreans for that matter, which really tells you how delusional they are in my mind). But I also don’t care all that much. I think things will correct themselves over time, since the center of gravity in East Asia has always tilted toward China, and late 19th/early 20th century is in many ways an anomaly.
If that fits your stereotype, fine. But I doubt it does. The average Chinese person wants to firebomb Tokyo and claim all Japanese culture as their own. I see us more like humans and chimps: both evolved from ancestral chimps, parallel, related, but not the same. That makes me a chauvinist maybe but not fascist.
I have very mixed feelings about my country, probably not so different from how many Americans feel about the US today. But I have patience and believe things will get better, even if slowly. There are many things I loathe and wish were different, and I try to do my part, however small, to improve them. I hope that adds an n = 1 to your sample of Chinese people.
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