One theme I've gotten out of reading here is how China seems like a low trust society.
There are so many posts about scams and problems. A government official may have stolen some funds, or screwed over a person in some rural district. A person's boss or teacher is awful or abusive. A bank or company is blatantly trying to steal from someone. Even in this update, there is the 'Never sign a blank piece of paper' and 'Missing 130K' which both seem like low-trust society problems.
This feels so different from a Western/rich perspective. For the most I part feel like government officials are well intentioned, businesses are not trying to scam me, and I can trust people I don't know. Is this just a consequence of being a middle income country rather than a rich one? Is it a consequence of the CCP and their style of governance? What do you think explains the constant barrage of posts whose moral is 'The world is out to get you - you have to protect yourself from greedy or corrupt government officials, businesses, etc?’ — by Jeremiah Johnson
There’s a lot of factors at play here. First, there’s the issue I’ve brought up before, where China has very few social safety nets, and that’s the primary reason why people have no sense of security. No matter how much money they make, they always feel the pressure to make more, because in the event of a disaster like getting cancer, there’s no upper limit of how much money they have to spend. You see posts frequently, of like, “You can’t lie flat with 6 million in savings—that’s nothing! A single sickness could take it all away!” So that makes people much more willing to break the law and scam people in order to get money.
This might seem like a middle income country problem, but actually, countries with the same or less GDP per capita than China usually has much better social safety nets. Malaysia has universal healthcare. Philippine’s minimum social security payments are double what China pays at its lowest tier. This is probably because China is one of the least democratic countries in the world (I think like bottom 4th?), so nobody bothers passing social benefits policies, because pleasing the populace does you nothing to advance your political career?
Another factor is that Chinese laws…might as well not exist? In order for laws to work, they have to be legible, consistent, fair, etc, and trying to fulfil all of these criteria involves taking a lot of power from the government. Some of China’s most well-known disastrous movements were never actual, real, written-down laws, and only remained a “policy” on paper, like the One Child Policy. Nobody wanted to write down, “If you have more than one child, the government can bomb your house.” and be held accountable for that. When the CCP wants something done, they hold a meeting where they make a declaration, “We have too much population. Someone should do something about that.” And it’s up to the people below them to figure out how to make that happen. So then, the next rank down goes, “We need less population. Go figure out how to make it happen.” And so it goes down, rank by rank, until you have a bunch of bottom-level enforcers on the streets who go around bombing people’s houses for harbouring pregnant women.
But the benefit is, if anyone ever objects or the decision becomes stupid in hindsight, the CCP can always shrug and say, “Hey, I just pointed out a real problem. It’s all those corrupt, stupid officials on the ground level who are screwing up our good intention.” You send a couple of people to jail, and nobody will bring it up again.
What policies do get written into law are deliberately written to be as vague as possible, so that officials have maximum freedom in what they’re allowed to do to achieve their KPIs. For example, during covid, it was illegal to “interfere with pandemic control measures”, but what exactly did that mean? What behaviour fell under that umbrella? It never went into detail. There was never a clear policy that if you were tested positive, this is how long you have to stay at home, this is what proof you need to be declared safe again, what measures businesses have to take to stay open, etc, etc. It’s just like China’s censorship policies too. You can’t “insult national heroes or leaders”, but what counts as an insult? It’s deliberately vague so that people over correct and do all the work in censoring themselves to make sure their works can still get posted.
That the combination of laws being vague and inconsistent, the government having no transparency, and public officials being paid way too little money means that there’s going to be a lot of corruption. It’s not easy to become a government official at all—you have to get through not just the Gaokao, but the civil servant exam too, and people spend tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands on tutoring classes. Often times, it took a whole extended family to support one person to get there. All that effort, all that time, all that money, just to get a job that pays 2-3K a month, where the government is late with your pay all the time? You suck dick and shell out bribes to get become a state governor (the third highest rank in the CCP), just to make 6K a month? If I was asked to design a system that maximised corruption, I don’t know if I could’ve done it better.
So this has created a society where people feel a lot of pressure to make money and laws are unclear and unpredictable, and judges will generally rule in favour of whoever has more connections/money. Of course it’s going to be low-trust. Why wouldn’t you scam people? Even if you get caught, you’ll have all the money you got from your victims to make sure you come out of the court case okay.
In grad school, about 40% of my classmates were international Chinese students, and despite my best efforts, I befriended exactly zero in two years. This was at a STEM program in New York about 5 years ago, but I've heard similar anecdotes from others. Are international Chinese students intentionally closed off to interactions with foreigners? Or do they arrive open-minded and wall themselves off after bad experiences? What's happening here? — by sam.oh
No, what’s happening here is that 40% of your class are Chinese. So, coming from the same background and culture, speaking the same language, having the same tastes in food, watching the same shows growing up, following the same celebrities, they’re going to have much more in common with each other than any New Yorker. So they’re going to naturally gravitate towards each other as friends, rather than try to make local friends. I think if there was that big a concentration of, like, Portuguese people, they’d probably gravitate towards each other too. Except Portuguese people probably speak better English, and might have still grown up watching Hollywood.
It’s not that they’re closed off to foreigners. It’s that there’s much easier targets to go after for companionship.
My son used to go to a daycare where there was another Chinese family (we live in a small town, so we were the only two Asians in the whole school). And every school event, the other kid’s mom would bee-line for me, just because it was more comfortable for her to chat in her mother tongue. And you only have time in your life for so many friends. If there are enough Chinese people in their lives to fill up all their socialisation time, then they’ll never reach out to befriend white people.
Do you think the cachet of studying abroad has changed in the last 5 years? — by sam.oh
Oh, definitely. It used to be that studying abroad in general was an impressive thing. You could go to any college overseas and come back to China and get good work and have people be impressed and think you’re really accomplished. But workplaces have wised up a lot in the last decade or so, and realised there are plenty of barely accredited diploma mills overseas too. Now, you have to actually go to a prestigious university overseas to get a good job.
Doesn’t stop a lot of Chinese people from flocking to overseas universities anyways, though, because a student visa is one of the easier ways for Chinese people to get out of China and maybe look for a way to stay overseas.
Is the average Chinese person as virulently anti-Japanese as some of these posts suggest? — by sam.oh
No, I don’t think so. I think the average Chinese person barely has time to think about Japan between their 996 work schedule and their family. They’re not going to like Japan by any means, but I think it’s still a minority of people who actively hate Japan. It’s just that this sentiment is particularly popular on the internet, because that’s sort of where people go to vent their frustrations at life anyways, and Japan is an acceptable target. You definitely won’t get censored or attract haters for being angry at Japan.
Japan remains the most popular vacation destination for China, with a huge growth of tourism to Japan in this year in particular because of the yen exchange rate.
What's the contemporary attitude about the low birthrate in China among young people? — by sam.oh
It ranges a bit. There are vindictive people, who see staying childfree as the lowest cost/most effective way to protest against the government, a cornerstone of the laying flat movement. There are celebratory people, who think all of China’s troubles are because there’s too many people, and we can get more social benefits if we had less population like developed countries. There are uncaring people, who figure if Japan and Korea has low birth rates and they’re doing fine economically, then China will do fine too. Or at the very least, if it becomes a problem, there are plenty of tools in the CCP’s toolbox that they can use to fix it. Like, eventually, you won’t be able to become a civil servant unless you have 3 kids or something. There’s also frustrated people who very much want to have kids, but just feel like they can’t afford it, and they’re just as stressed out about the ageing population problem as they should be.
The general attitude seems to be, “What do I even get out of having kids? Having someone to take care of me in old age? You can’t depend on that anymore in this day and age—my parents still need to give me money so I can get by. To pass down my bloodline? What does that even matter? So someone will burn me money in the afterlife? I’ll just burn my grandma some money and ask her to hold onto it for me. And to have a kid, I need to go through pregnancy, labour, taking a hit to my career, staying up all night breastfeeding, taking care of a toddler, helping them with their homework, supporting them through university, and helping them find a job? That’s just not worth it. If it’s really that important to the government for me to have babies, then they can pay up until it becomes worth it to me.”
Is Taiwan a common tourist destination from Mainland China? — by sam.oh
It’s among the top five tourist destinations, I’m pretty sure, but it’s not nearly as popular as Japan. It’s just as much of a hassle to go to Taiwan as to go to Japan—you still need to apply for a visa and everything, they just call it by a different name so they can pretend Taiwan isn’t its own country. But Taiwan is a lot smaller than Japan. Based on my experience, you can more or less check out all the major tourist attractions in two weeks time. So a lot of people feel like they’ve been to Taiwan once, they saw what there was to see, and now they want to go somewhere else.
I've seen several of your posts mentioning watermelons as something very desirable. Are watermelons expensive in China? Are fruits in general expensive like in Japan? — by TonyZa
Normal, ordinary watermelons are about 5-6 RMB a pound, depending on where in the country you are, so about 30 RMB per watermelon. Compared to 4 USD for a watermelon at Walmart, that does seem pretty expensive, but TO BE FAIR. China’s watermelons really do taste better than what you can get in Walmart. I think this is because farmer’s markets are a much bigger and more common thing in China? What you get from farmer’s markets are always better than what you get in Walmart.
Fruits are expensive in general, but to be fair, they only started getting expensive lately. Even basic fruits, like apples and bananas are reaching the highest price they’ve ever been. People talk about having “fruit freedom” as a financial goal.
Coming from a family of fruit farmers, from what I know, I think this is mostly because of climate change? The weather’s been really fucked for three years in a row now. Last year, my hometown was hit by the worst drought in 20 years. This year, we’re getting hit by the worst flooding in 20 years. I really love our local cherries, and last year, there just wasn’t a crop at all. The entire harvest was ruined by drought.
I don’t know if this is a problem that can be fixed? But at least culturally speaking, fruits aren’t traditionally considered to be “expensive” at all. People are still in a lifestyle habit of eating a lot of fruit, so the price hike is really noticeable. But if the climate ever settles down and production gets stable again, I think prices will drop. Fruit isn’t a fancy, artisanal thing like you see in Japan. It’s supposed to be a household staple that you have hanging out on your coffee table at all times.
How does it seem the us election is being spun in China? Especially after the debate, did the state push a bunch of clips of Biden looking senile? — by doomguy
You know, before I saw this question, I’d forgotten the US election was even a thing until now. There’s been no coverage at all in China. They’re not even making memes about Trump being the first convicted President.
I think the general CCP propaganda push is that, “It doesn’t matter who gets into office, US policy won’t change. They still consider us their biggest threat, they’re going to continue trying to sanction us as hard as they can, and America’s still a dying empire on its last legs. We don’t need to worry who the US President is, because they’re all just Jewish puppets. All we need to focus on is making EVEN MORE ELECTRIC CARS until we win this race. “
Thanks Molly. I hope you rested well after your trip.
"We don’t need to worry who the US President is, because they’re all just Jewish puppets. All we need to focus on is making EVEN MORE ELECTRIC CARS until we win this race." <- HILARIOUS