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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9924 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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So there is a question that has been gnawing at me for the longest time: is PRC... Good? I mean:

  1. wildly economically succesful with a dynamic tech sector
  2. conservative and nationalistic population, proud of its' culture and heritage - this is the big one tbh, even the more liberal side of the population doesn't seem that bad, none of that self-hatred of the West
  3. technocracy - yeah, they may not be AS meritocratic as they advertise, and personal connections play a huge role, but comparing their officials to whatever the hell Western politicians are doing is not favorable to the latter
  4. willing to forego some comfort and economic progress for the sake of national power and sovereignity (as a European, seeing how our societies prefer to bend over looking for outside help instead of taking the harder route of building capacity for assertivness - yeah, China seems really vindicated right now)

I mean, there are obviously some tough things to get over (the whole free speech thing, how they handled COVID with safetyism that would make many in the West blush, all the other usual stuff), but genuinely, honestly... Following the news from China for a few years, I really can't help but envy the Chinese. Take down the communist iconography and I think that many on the right would see it similarly to Japan.

The aesthetics of communism, all that block red, a disdain for ornamentation, those ugly 50s modernist busts of Marx and Lenin and Mao that still adorn so many state and party buildings, the straight-out-of-the-USSR party poster design that you still see everywhere in China, including increasingly in Hong Kong, is unaesthetic.

Nevertheless, the Chinese are remarkably capable civilization builders. In Hong Kong and Singapore, tempered by an appropriately small but sufficiently punchy Anglo Saxon influence and so freed from both the worst ancestral and communist impulses, they achieved true heights of civilization that stand to this day as some of the most pleasant and well-run places on earth.

The main problem with China is not China, it is that we cannot become Chinese. Perhaps that is a sadness in and of itself. To answer @DaseindustriesLtd ‘s question, Americans can see themselves as white Russians, and I think on some distant level we can even imagine ourselves in the Malthusian squalor that is India (I suppose Sonia Gandhi showed it was possible). But Chinese? No, this is a wholly foreign identity, unavailable to outsiders.

I feel far closer to being Chinese than Indian just in ethnic/biological terms etc. But culturally? The PRC's partial deracination makes it easier than before! And well, Chinese culture seems easier than e.g. Pakistani (I mean this as closer than India, because of Abrahamic religion etc.)

What is it about Chinese culture that feels so foreign, especially in comparison to Indian culture? I think I sort of understand what you mean, but at the same time I don’t really. Is it the aesthetics, the language, the level or form of religiosity, the way of thinking, or the collective memories people share? And do Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese cultures feel equally foreign to you?

I live in the region and I'd say that I find Chinese culture more palatable and easier to get into the mindset of than Japanese/Korean culture. Considerably less stuffy/status-orientated, albeit maybe I'm hanging out with peasants and peasant-descendants. Vietnam also has more like... 'shocks' to it than Chinese in terms of interesting quasi-agricultural practices, but I'd also consider it more egalitarian and less nuance-based than what's going on in JP/KR

No, this is a wholly foreign identity, unavailable to outsiders.

I'm a fairly unabashed Sinaboo at this time in my life and I think this is a bit of an exaggeration, both since you're trying to distill a 'Chinese experience' when there's a fuckload of regional cultures even within the Hanosphere and since Chinese identity's probably proven more modular than most historically. China's taken in a plethora of random conquerors and borderers over the years, given them access to the language and some core cultural markers and generally gotten on with it.

I live in a Mandarin/Hokkien-speaking multigenerational household and family unit in SEA that'd probably be more 'Chinese' than a lot of mainlanders in terms of adherence to stuff like religious norms, dialect speaking and how they evaluate themselves culturally against the outside forces of their fellow citizens. I've got a passable command of the language and I'd consider Chinese culture a lot easier to get into than like Japanese.

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