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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17534 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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I live in the Sinosphere and have the Mandarin skills of a trained monkey and/or determined 5 year old. I admire Chinese culture a lot and I try to visit the Mainland a couple times a year for random meanderings.

I'm pretty skeptical of actual Chinese cultural exports leaking into the West, even as somebody who watched more Chinese-language films last year in Cinema than English ones. Bit of a disconnect with what's acceptable, plus the Chinese culture seems a lot more insularly-focused than like Korea actively trying to engender more widespread appreciation and adoption.

What counts as the Sinosphere? My impression would be Singapore and Taiwan, leaving aside mainland China. I'd struggle to describe Korea or Japan or most of SEA with that moniker, anymore than France and Germany are part of the Anglosphere. You don't need to dox yourself, I'm genuinely curious as to what counts.

Sinosphere in common parlance includes Korea, Japan, and Vietnam i.e. anywhere that Literary Chinese was at one time the language of high culture.

Restricting it to areas that speak Chinese today would indeed only leave Mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, and parts of Malaysia and Burma.

I think you could expand it a bit. Still some quite Chinese areas of Thailand/Indonesia even if they copped more out-and-out oppression. Plus enclaves around the world of varying degrees.

As I understand it Thailand forcibly assimilated the Chinese so now everyone pretends not to notice that all the rich are Chinese (although some assimilation did occur, a lot of intermarriage etc, certainly much moreso than with affluent overseas Chinese anywhere else in SEA).

The Thai-Chinese population is the largest diaspora population in the world, but previous iterations of the government essentially forced a bunch of surname changes and as much integration into broader Thai culture as possible. I think the intermarriage rate is higher for Thailand due to religious compatibility being easier than with Indonesia/Malaysia's muslim majorities since that's frequently a huge sticking point in actually formally marrying in those countries.

Religion is very relevant, especially in Malaysia, but the Chinese are still endogamous in Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines despite substantial non-Muslim, non-Chinese populations in each of them.

Singapore has roughly the same base as Malaysia? I'm the white husband of a Malaysian Chinese woman and I receive considerably less side-eye at family gatherings than the Malaysian Indian husband of a distant cousin. There's pretty considerable color bias there which IMO doesn't really factor in as much with Thais who are still seen as part of the broader East Asian fraternity.

Even the passport bro Chinese boomers on the hunt for second-wife/mistresses from Malaysia and Singapore will generally go Thailand, Vietnam (admittedly Viet-Chinese as much as possible), Laos or whatever before they'd ever touch an Indian.

Indian women don’t really out marry at particularly high rates, the culture is more sexually conservative in any case. The main place one even sees particularly visibly promiscuous Indian women is probably the West where there is some second/third onward generation assimilation. India also has an extremely high gender imbalance, especially in the north, and a very strong continued tradition of true arranged marriage that has survived longer and stronger than almost anywhere else in the world.

Working class Thai, Filipino, Viet, even some Chinese and Japanese women married to blue collar or lower white collar white men are not uncommon in Western/Northern Europe and North America. But if I think about the not insignificant number of couples I know with an Indian woman and a white man, every single one is some kind of second gen PMC Indian woman and PMC white guy of the JD and Usha or “we met in medical residency” type. I think it’s hard to say that Indian women are undesirable when - outside of this small slice of the diaspora - they don’t appear to seek intermarriage the way many other Asian women do.

Ethnic SEAsians are pretty distinct from Chinese/northeast Asians ime; yes, there are plenty of swarthy Chinese but broadly speaking ethnic Indonesians or Malays and ethnic Han or most other Chinese, assuming the same dress and no other identifying markers, seem pretty easily distinguished, at least that’s my impression.

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