What does the average Chinese person think about North Korea? - by Falconetti
For the most part, for normies who don’t think too much about politics, it’s a joke that they don’t think much about, sort of like how it is for America.
There’s that faction of super left-wing (…are they left wing? I guess they are left wing?) people in China, who still think of North Korea as “our greatest ally and comrade, our brother in arms in the communist crusade!” and want them to take over South Korea or something, but they’re a minority. There’s that faction of super…anxious or maybe western-influenced people who are like, “Oh man, is China gonna become North Korea?” every time the government cracks down more on free speech.
But for the most part, the younger generation don’t tend to think about them. And the older generation just gets excited about the kitschy, fun experience of travelling back in time. I’ve heard it described from multiple different people who’ve been that, “It’s just like China back in the 50s!” Like, for the most part, they’re not horrified about the lack of technology/lack of food/strict control of free speech/, because they’re just like, “Wow! How nostalgic! It’s just like how I grew up!” And yeah, it turns out, no matter how shitty your childhood was, so long as it was a shared experience and you weren’t uniquely worse off, rose-coloured glasses will still make you really nostalgic for it.
And people are not worried at all about potentially offending someone and getting arrested by the North Korean secret police or whatever, because North Korea really goes out of its way to accommodate Chinese tourists. They must be really important to the economy. Or maybe China just sends way too much food over every year or something. My dad’s friend went on a trip to North Korea once a while back, and while he was there, my dad prank called him on his hotel room phone. They chatted for a while, and out of nowhere, my dad just suddenly went, “What? You’re gonna assassinate Kim Jong Un tomorrow!?” And then hung up. Nothing happened to his friend.
Because you’re basically in no danger of anything other than getting inappropriate photos deleted off of your phone, a lot of older people really do just see it as a giant 50s-themed amusement park.
More in the realm of personal experience, the sweatshop that my dad works at once tried importing a bunch of North Korean women to work the line, because they were cheaper than local Chinese labour. According to my dad, they gave up after several months and lost a whole bunch of money, because the people they managed to get from North Korea couldn’t read. And they’d never even touched a sewing machine before. They were having to teach these people everything from square one. Most of them didn’t know how to work a lunch card or flushing toilet. And it just ended up being way more trouble than it was worth. So they all got returned back to North Korea.
Somewhat niche: I knew for a while that China had a single time zone, but only just thought about what that would mean for western China. How does that work? - by Ani N
It doesn’t. Not really. I hear complaints from people in Xinjiang all the time, that because they have to work on Beijing time, they’re having to get up hours before sunrise to go to work. And when they get off of work, it’s still the middle of the day for them. And it really messes up their circadian rhythm. It really is ridiculous for a country that large to work on a single time zone. It just doesn’t get brought up much as an urgent problem that needs fixed, because Xinjiang usually has bigger problems to worry about.
What etiquette would a Chinese person moving to the US have the most trouble with? - OmgPuppies
I can only really talk about this from personal experience, because I live in a tiny town, and I don’t actually know that many Chinese people in America. But um…honestly, not a whole lot comes to mind. I don’t think there is a whole lot of etiquette in America when you’re just casually friends with people. I think the only thing that I had trouble with when I first came over and started going to university was habitually turning people down/offering to pay the bill. Like, a big group of my college friends would go out for food or something, and my instincts are just like, “You should lie about going to the bathroom so you can sneak off and pay the bill. Because if you don’t, then there will be a big politeness fight at the end about who gets to pay the bill, and you’re going to lose, because you suck at fighting.” It took me a while to get comfortable with the idea of splitting a check.
I also constantly, CONSTANTLY, entirely forgot to leave a tip. I still feel really bad for some of the servers who had me in those early days.
But the most disorienting thing for me, BY FAR, was the first Memorial Day I spent with my (American) husband and his family. Like, I was blown away first thing in the morning, because we all went, as a family, out to the graveyard. That was the first time in my life I’d been allowed to enter a graveyard, because women weren’t allowed to go in my hometown. It was considered a big privilege to be able to sweep our ancestors’ graves, and only the oldest son of a branch had that privilege. My MIL went all into the genealogy of her family on the drive, which was also wild to me, because that’s also information that’d only be given to the oldest son.
And then we got to the graveyard, and the whole process was just so…incredibly…casual? There was no solemnness like I was expecting. People really were just cleaning up the gravestones off-hand while chit-chatting with all the other family who’d shown up. There were these gravestones that weren’t standing up, they were just slabs set into the ground. And people would just casually walk over them. With their feet. And when my husband’s niece got tired of standing, she just straight up sat on a nearby gravestone. And nobody even paid attention.
Fucking wild, unimaginable stuff to me.
If any of that stuff happened in my family’s ancestral grave in my hometown, they would be beaten into the ICU.
As for the Confucius manga, I didn’t have time to read a whole lot of it, but I am instantly SOLD on the premise. I will consume all of this. It is amazing. I love every second of it. Thank you so much for bringing such joy to my life.
You often refer to "Chinese eBay" or "an AskReddit question", and things like that - are you referring to a literal Chinese version of those websites, like china.ebay.com or something, or are these websites that are equivalent but completely independent? If so, what actual sites are they? - by gmt
I think I’ve covered in a previous Q&A before about the biggest Chinese sites, and what I tend to call them. For example, Chinese eBay is Xianyu. It works a little bit closer to Craigslist than eBay, because it’s not quite automated. You put up a listing, and then you still have to deal with people texting you and haggling and all that. But I think it gives a bit more context than just writing, “This happened on Xianyu the other day.”
Zhihu is Chinese AskReddit, and it originally started out like something like Quora. But nowadays, nobody is really using it for looking for answers to objective questions, and it’s really more of a platform for people to share personal experiences and fun stories, so I think AskReddit is a much better approximation to what it is and how popular it is in China.
I’ll also bring up Instagram a lot, but in China, it’s called Xiao Hongshu (literally “little red book”). I haven’t ever actually been on instagram, so I don’t know how close the comparison is, but it’s just the biggest platform for influencer ads in China. When tourist spots or restaurants or makeup brands go viral, it tends to go viral on Xiao Hongshu.
There’s also theoretically a Chinese 4chan called Hupu, which started as an internet board for sports, and is now known as the political extremist, male-dominated, Red Pill-filled section of the Chinese internet. But they’ve almost never really come up on weibo before.
What kind of books do chineses read? What books have to be read in school? What genre is more popular? Is western books popular? - by Luis
By the numbers? Shitty webnovels about wish fulfilment power fantasies.
Webnovels are an incredibly well-developed and large industry in China. Million of people attempt to make a living by writing novels online. It’s just as big a career path as becoming a youtuber in America or something. Women tend to congregate on Jingjiang, where they read romances about changing a bad guy because you’re special. Men tend to congregate on Qidian and read about crushing your enemies, seeing them driven before you, and hearing the lamentations of their women. And then there’s Haitang, where you can go read the same things, but now with sex scenes.
Okay, okay, I joke. There’s actually some remarkably well-written works in the realm of webnovels. I’m currently obsessed with a webnovel that’s kind of like HPATMOR, but set in Fallout and about sociology instead of rationality. It’s wonderful.
As for what books have to be read in school, the answer is textbooks. That’s all. There’s no other reading outside of textbooks. If there’s a particularly influential literary work, then they’ll cut out a particular passage of it and stick it in your textbook. Any other form of book will be confiscated if you try to bring it to school. When I was going to school, there were passages from famous western books in our literature textbooks, and I read a lot of random, out-of-context passages from a lot of the more famous of the world’s literary works without ever understanding where it came from.
Bt outside of school, western books don’t tend to get too popular until they get so big that they’re unavoidable. Like, Harry Potter is still huge in China. Lord of the Rings isn’t far behind either. But aside from household names in books, nothing else really gets that big in China. I think everyone’s too busy reading China’s own work.
As for exactly how webnovels work, I’m mostly familiar with Jingjiang’s system, where the first 15-30 chapters of the story is free, and after that, it’s a penny per every 100 words. You put money into an account on Jingjiang, and money gets deducted with every new chapter you open and read, based on that chapter’s word count. Logging in and paying and other activity gets you recommendation tickets, that you can use on the books you like, and the books that get the most tickets get promotional spots on the front page to draw more people to them. I’m not sure how much of a cut the author gets versus the platform, but if you actually make it as an author and get a degree of popularity, you’ll get offered a steady contract where you get paid a base salary every month so you have some sense of stability.
Pretty much every single TV show and maybe even movie to have come out of China in the past 10 years has been based on a webnovel IP. And if you get a production crew to buy out your book, then you’re looking at a payout of minimum a couple hundred grand. I hear rumours that The Untamed was bought from Mo Xiang Tong Xiu for 6.5 million RMB, for example.
I was surprised to learn that Chinese people are more-or-less unanimously pro-choice, given that generally Chinese culture is not great on women's rights. Are there other areas in which China is more liberal than people might expect? - Emma
Well, pro-choice is an explicit government position from the CCP, so if there are people who are against it, you’re not going to be able to hear their voices. And the CCP is. Um. A lot more pro-choice than most pro-choice people would even be comfortable with. I have a hard time describing their position as…liberal. Like, in my home province of Shandong, during the one-child policy days, we famously tried to go above and beyond the call of duty, and go for a “100 days with no babies” achievement.
And to get that achievement, they were grabbing pregnant women off the street to force abortions on, even when they’re 39 weeks along. I heard rumours that even if you go into natural labour on your own, they’ll come in and terminate a to-term baby to prevent a birth that could fuck their numbers up. Even if this was your first child, and you legally had a right to it by the one-child policy. Like, China really isn’t pro-choice. China is just pro-abortion. Whether you want one or not. It’s kind of explicitly a lack of women’s rights.
And there are plenty of people who are uncomfortable with abortions, like my grandma. She’s really upset about them, and the only fight she’d ever had with my mom was when my mom got accidentally pregnant with my youngest brother and didn’t want to keep him. They had a huge fight over it, and even so, my grandma couldn’t say that she didn’t want it to happen because she thought abortions were wrong. Even though she’s expressed at times how terrible it is, that when they do late-term abortions, the baby doesn’t actually die. You’re basically just inducing a premature birth, and then the hospital just ties a plastic bag around its head and leaves it in a corner to pass away.
But that’s official government policy. And not just any government policy—one that the government has spent a lot of time and effort backing. What are you gonna say? That the government is wrong? That they’re doing immoral things? Do you wanna go have a cup of tea at the police station?
Pretty much the only angle you can try to advocate from is that abortions are damaging to a woman’s body. And try to push for contraceptives really hard. (Except I also hear from people’s anecdotes that IUDs are really low-quality in China? At least, back in the day when they were mass-installing them in women all over the country, a lot of people had trouble with their IUDs breaking inside them.)
I would say that China is, for the most part, shockingly None of My Business when it comes to LGBT issues though. Like I’ve said before, nobody cares what you’re doing unless you’re their daughter/son. All the way back in the 70, MTF celebrity dancer Jin Xing got a sex-change operation in China. And her parents were okay with it, so nobody else cared. And she’s basically went her entire career without being misgendered, without people asking about her private parts in interviews. Everyone’s just like, “I mean, if her mom doesn’t care, then why should I care?” And she was massively popular for the longest time before getting cancelled (for calling out corruption in the entertainment industry).
Like, I wouldn’t call them tolerant. Because chances are, they would never, in a million years, support their own child getting a sex change operation. They’re very likely to send their own gay children into an abusive conversion camp or whatever. But so long as you can get support from your own parents, you don’t have to worry about much from society.
Why are so many Chinese things so copy-paste? Chinese takeouts that aren't affiliated with each other have nearly identical menus. Sometimes they literally use the same menu printouts, with the same pictures and decor and everything. Different companies on Amazon sell the same Chinese product, often using the same photograph. I once bought two similar backpacks. They were different enough materials-wise that I assume they must have been produced at different factories. But, other than the material they were made of, and the size, everything on them was exactly the same: the way they synched closed, A weird inside pocket, how all other pockets were arranged, etc. This uniformity across restaurants and goods is unlike Italian restaurants where no two are exactly alike, or shoes produced in two different Indian swearshops. - by MoreOn
Because it’s easy and it’s cheap, and there’s not much of a point in putting a lot of effort in if you’re going to be making more or less the same amount of money. A couple of months ago, there was a big scandal where a government official was caught taking a walk with his mistress, and in the video, she was wearing this bright pink dress. And within hours, there were literally hundreds of stores on Taobao selling the exact same dress.
To be fair, this is more of a problem in fashion, where coming up with different designs is the most expensive part of the job. Why invest that much in your own design work, when you can just rip someone else off, and make tons of money by selling it a little bit cheaper than him, right? Why risk a new design when you can just copy off of whichever celebrity outfit is blowing up all over the internet?
The restaurant thing isn’t much of a problem in China itself. Every restaurant does tend to be pretty different (unless it’s in a chain, obviously). I think American Chinese food isn’t really meant to taste good, the same way McDonalds doesn’t taste good. It’s about having a measure of certainty in what you’re going to get, what it’s going to taste like, and how fast it’s going to arrive on your table. People who eat American Chinese aren’t the experimental type.
But even in my tiny rural hometown, there’s a lot of very different and interesting restaurants. (Can you imagine, we just got our own first vegan place? My grandma is baffled that after years of working hard so people can afford to eat meat whenever they want, they’re not wanting to eat meat anymore.) It is a joke, though, that the only Chinese food Americans know about is Kungpao Chicken.
I heard that Chinese car parts manufacturers often reverse-engineer whatever car parts that aren't outsourced to them, and build bootleg cars for sale in China. So there's a ton of rebranded cars that look exactly like Mercedes or BMW. Is that true? And if so, is that legal? - by MoreOn
I’m not totally sure, because to be honest with you, all cars look exactly alike to me. They’re all car-shaped. The same way I can’t identify trees, because they all look like trees. But I can tell you that no, it’s not legal. It’s totally against the laws. But those laws will never be enforced.
The Chinese government used to actually care about stopping knockoffs, back in the day. But with Xi’s administration, not only has he stopped that, it seems like he’s going out of his way to punish people who report knockoffs. There’s been a lot of high profile cases of someone suing a knock off company for selling fraudulent goods, or even just reporting knock offs to the police, and then getting arrested for extortion or “disturbing the public peace” themselves, and getting actual prison sentences of 7-10 years. So now, nobody tries to shake the boat anymore, and businesses are getting away with all kinds of plagiarising each other’s designs.
😂
“You should lie about going to the bathroom so you can sneak off and pay the bill. Because if you don’t, then there will be a big politeness fight at the end about who gets to pay the bill, and you’re going to lose, because you suck at fighting.”
Hahahaha too real, you should see my elders still fighting over the bill. I'll never get over how I never have to do that in the west / with westerners.