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