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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   22033 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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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.

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 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.

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".

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.

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.

I would say 150+ years of mass immigration before American total hegemonic power

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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:

To measure the level of postmaterialist values, we adopted Inglehart’s 12-item measure in the WVS. Respondents in the survey were asked to prioritize the 12 value-laden choices. Among these choices originally designed by Inglehart and his associates, six are considered post-materialism-oriented values: more say on job, more say in government, freedom of speech, less impersonal society, ideas count more than money, and more beautiful cities. The other six are deemed materialism-oriented values: maintain order, maintain stable economy, economic growth, fight rising prices, fight against crimes, and strong defense forces.Footnote21 We follow Inglehart’s approach and create an index of postmaterialist values ranging from 0 to 6.

I don't think that's actually measuring materialism anyways, but I guess there's different interpretations of what materialism means.

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.

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 doesn't also cover the huge subsidies for industries that act as an indirect tax on local consumers.

This presumes that subsidies are inefficient, rather than efficiently suppressing costs of living, which in China are indeed absurdly low.

Look up the savings rate for China vs the US to see where wage suppression comes into play. The government forces large amounts of money into capital investments instead of wages which shows up in the data as a high savings rate.

This is economically illiterate. Citizens can's save nor invest what they don't earn. You're confusing two separate lines of China Criticism. Wages and thus real income, as I've shown, are growing just fine and proportionately to GDP. Savings rates are genuinely high on the level of private citizens, precisely because they do not trust or cannot access investment channels (other than housing, which is collapsing).

I'm an economist. I know what I'm talking about lol. Many national saving rates include both private and public investment. Maybe I should've clarified, but what I said is a pretty basic irrefutable fact.

I think you are, first of all, insufferably smug. @Amadan is this report-worthy? I don't know. I think it's bad manners to say something like this without providing a citation. I am not an economist and it's timesome [auspicious typo] to deal with not even Eulering but an appeal to its possibility.

Anyway, I was talking of actual household savings. You said:

Look up the savings rate for China vs the US to see where wage suppression comes into play. The government forces large amounts of money into capital investments instead of wages which shows up in the data as a high savings rate.

IMF 2018:

https://www.imf.org/en/-/media/files/publications/wp/2018/wp18277.pdf

Household savings in China have been trending up since the early 1990s and peaked at 25 percent in 2010 and moderated slightly in recent years. Globally, household savings have been falling (from 14 percent of GDP in 1980 to about 7 percent today). The diverging trend has led to an increasing gap between China and the rest of the world. At 23 percent of GDP, today China’s household savings are 15 percentage points higher than the global average and constitute the main drivers of higher national savings in China.

In the 1990s. China’s corporate savings were relatively low and comparable to the global average. They surged in the 2000s, resulting in an increasingly large gap compared to those of other countries. After the GFC, this gap narrowed significantly, reflecting both the decline in China’s corporate savings and the rise elsewhere. Currently, China’s corporate savings are in line with the global average.

Government: Fiscal savings have been volatile over time, and, on average, constitute only a small portion of national savings. In the past, the fiscal savings level was similar to those of other countries, but in recent years, China’s fiscal savings3 have been higher than the global average, reflecting high capital spending

Quantitatively, demographic shifts alone account for half of the rise in household savings, suggesting that it has been the most important driver

Chinese households save more at every income decile, but the gap is largest at the bottom. Compared to other countries, the household savings rate is higher at every income decile, but the gap is particularly large for the poor.12 In many countries, the savings rates for the bottom 10–20 percentiles are often negative, indicating that substantial social transfers are used to support the basic consumption. In China, however, the savings rate for the poor is still positive and quite high at 20 percent. This points to inadequate social transfers, a lack of progressivity in taxation, and a limited social safety net

etc. So yes there is a state capital spending component, but the main story of the divergence with global trends, as of 2018, was literally private household savings. Maybe you have some newer data.

No, "smug" is not against the rules.

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.

This seems like a huge strawman to me. Americans aren't capable of ciriticizing themselves? Really?

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:

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

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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."

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.

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.

Xi broke the chain of succession and limited separations of powers the CCP had built for itself post Mao

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.

that is deeply related to the problems China is facing at the moment

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.

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...

I maintain that the main issue is lack of humility. It's okay, you'll learn by degrees.

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.

Separation of powers is essentially a stalemate of different groups, whether formalized or otherwise.

No, it matters enormously whether "powers" are actually meritocratic public institutions with legible functions, or just semi-criminal patronage networks that compete over spoils. Kooperativ Ozero and Benoi Teip are not "powers" in the Western sense, they're clans or mafias. You're kind of trivializing one of the biggest things the West has going for it, here.

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.

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 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.

I disagree with a lot of this, but I'll say this to try to clarify something about America and it's culture--

You say that the Germans and British came to America at a time when it had a weak central culture and less central government, but that's sort of the defining feature of America even to this day. I think people don't realize that there was never and still isn't really a central culture in America. There were the blue bloods who ran everything from the end of the civil war until FDR, but they were always a minority, just by far the most succesful and powerful one and they more or less don't exist now.

Likewise, American federal government just doesn't reach the levels of power even in its current form as basically any other developed nation. The % of GDP it spends is like half the average, and its actual physical reach in the world is very limited. I remember I had a conversation with a British friend saying that Trump would've won the election in 2020 if he had done a national lock down during Covid. I ignored the comical lack of understanding of the American view of Covid and government overreach, and plainly stated that the federal government didn't have that power and would have no way to enforce it. This sort of basic lack of understanding of American federal power doesn't seem to reach people oversees when they consume American media and it colors everything they think about it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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 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’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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

expectations have become unsustainable (particularly in America, although China has absurd expectations in the dating sphere from what I understand).

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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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