[FAQ Answer time! Thanks for all your questions! I would offer some essays like usual, but this month, there’s something I desperately already want to write about, so nyeh. Also, I apologise for posting this so early, in case there was anyone who hadn’t gotten their questions in yet, but I’ll be busy tonight and this is the only time I can get a post out today. I appreciate everyone’s enthusiasm and support~]
Yesterday’s post made me wonder, does Weibo have “does x per year count as middle class” or just Wage Discourse more generally regularly like us twitter does -- or perhaps a more interesting question: how is being ‘middle class’ viewed in china? Is it similar to the us where nearly everyone likes to think of themselves as middle class and it takes on an almost moral quality? The post the headline quoted said ‘normal family’ like it was not normal to be middle class, is that indicative of a general thought pattern or just a weird poster? —by dat Boi
It kind of technically does? But it’s a much less common and much less popular topic that “does x per year count as rich”. People are looking for how much money they need to make a year before they can be comfortable, lay back, stop trying so hard, and stop worrying about the future.
The idea is, a lot of people in China don’t think you count as “successful” unless you can be a comfortable family of four in a first line city, and that basically requires a large 3-bedroom unit in a good school district (which is going to cost you minimum eight figures), not to mention the astronomical figure that tutoring for children and eventually medical bills for old people add up to.
The average person in China, as far as I can tell, no matter how much they make, seems to think they’re lower class. Like, okay, actual billionaires are aware they’re wealthy. But people who make six figures a month still complain on the internet about how they can’t keep up with their mortgage. And a lot of bloggers have said that they’re basically just engineering stress and fearmongering on the internet in order to get views and clicks. Or this is actually just using the guise of complaining to show off, and get views because people like to follow rich people?
And all of this bombardment of information means that a lot of people seem to think that if they’re not making at least 200-300K a year, they’re not middle class, they’re poor. But the average income in China is just 42K a year, just like America. Chinese minimum wage is 20K a year, not that different from America again. If you ignore the outliers like the super remote rural villages that hardly have any outside contact, you see a societal economic demographic that’s not really that different from America.
So if people think that it takes a comfortable six figures a year to be “middle class”, then very few people really consider themselves middle class.
So many of the posts you translate refer to "sitting the month". I had never heard of that concept before but understand it has to do with a woman taking it easy after birth, eating special foods, not doing strenuous activity, etc. with lots of variations. How long has this been a cultural practice? Does it go back to ancient China or is it newer? Is it something that everyone does no matter what region they are from? Trying to get a more general understanding of the history and context for sitting the month. —by Falconetti
The first written reference to sitting the month is from Western Han Dynasty, over 2000 years ago, and it talked about sitting-the-month like it’s a well-established practice since at least early Qin Warring States era. So it’s definitely been a thing for longer than even China has been around. People do it no matter what region they’re from, but the specific practices can differ a lot based on region (and what foods would’ve been locally available). My hometown has a really big emphasis on eating a lot of eggs while sitting the month (presumably because that was the main form of cheap protein available to a peasant back in the day). I know more coastal areas emphasise eating a lot of fish. And over in Inner Mongolia, they emphasise eating a lot of lamb, and so on.
This has never been proven or anything, it’s just a historical theory. But some scholars say that sitting the month might have become such a popular cultural ritual because it actually worked in reducing infant mortality rate. The principles of “not going outside (where other people are)”, “not accepting visitors”, “only drinking and washing in water that’s been boiled” all contribute to limiting the spread of disease. And “eating lots of protein” can help with milk production back in a society when most peasants were pretty low on protein. It’s the sort of thing that’s too expensive for a family to keep up all the time, but maybe it was good for at least getting babies with no immune system past that crucial first month. Who knows?
It’s all a little bit silly in the modern day, when eggs are like a couple bucks a dozen and and every family has access to hot water showers though :P
As an American how will I know (outside of mainstream manipulative media) if China is truly getting ready to forcibly take back Taiwan? What steps would be obvious to an outsider ( who’s obsessed with military and all history) looking in at the country that they are preparing for some sort of “action” — Ethan Martinez
Um…I’m not sure? As a Chinese person, I just kind of keep an eye on the propaganda. If China was really going to go to war with Taiwan, the most important thing they need is popular support for that kind of military action. So there’s gotta be a ramp up of propaganda beforehand building up hostility towards Taiwan. Like, at least right now, China’s propaganda is all in the direction of, “What are you talking about? Taiwan totally is a part of China.” And the side effect of this kind of propaganda is that the average Chinese mainlander who doesn’t pay that much attention to military or politics really does feel like Taiwan is just another province of China. Attacking Taiwan and causing thousands of deaths minimum on both sides would be just as mindblowing and unpopular as the US sending in armed military to randomly slaughter people in Alaska or something. Like, that’s our people? You can’t just kill your own people?
But Chinese propaganda over on the Chinese internet is hard for an American to keep track of >.> other than just keeping an on eye this substack Ahem. But honestly, I would be highly, HIGHLY surprised if the Chinese government and military isn’t absolutely riddled with American spies and America doesn’t already have backdoors on China’s state computers. So, I think America’s gonna know maybe a couple minutes in if anyone really made the decision to fully ramp up in preparation for a war against Taiwan, and they’ll probably do something about it in response? And that might make it onto the news?
I’m sorry, I’m really not a military sort of expert, so I can’t say exactly what that action is gonna look like. I’m just absolutely confident that the CCP doesn’t have its shit together enough to prevent all spy infiltration. I don’t even know if such a thing is possible or has ever been accomplished.
Can you explain more about China's opinions of its neighbors, both nationally and as nationalities? (i.e. what is the general sense China has of Vietnam, and what is the messaging about their relationship as countries? Are there common opinions or stereotypes about Vietnamese people?)
“Vietnam has really good food and a lot of very nice scenery and hiking. It’s a fantastic place to go take a vacation if you’re working with a budget.” I don’t think China pays a whole lot of attention to Vietnam beyond its tasty food and cheap tourism. Chinese people tend to be pretty generically, noncommittally friendly towards Vietnamese people. They have pretty much the same attitude towards Malaysia and Indonesia. Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand are all considered, “poor and full of crime and scary, don’t go.” With Thailand also having questionably achieve meme status for having lots of transsexuals and making a lot of homoerotic TV shows for Chinese shippers, since Chinese TV censors won’t allow it domestically.
Singapore is like, “Tiny, and exceedingly snooty, but there’s a ton of business opportunity there.” And Philippines is like, “Where Hong Kong gets its nannies from, also they’re crazy about drug dealers even for Chinese standards.”
Random question, how good are digital language courses and apps that are targeted at Chinese people? If you'd want to learn say English, Spanish, or German, as a person from China, would you have excellent resources available for that? — by Max
Absolutely. But it’s not because the courses themselves are programmed well, because they’re not. It’s because labour is super cheap in China, and you can buy just about anything on Taobao. If you want to learn Spanish, you can find a Chinese person who already has a university degree and whatever qualifications in Spanish to give you one-on-one tutoring on Taobao. And the same goes for just about every fairly common language out there. And Duolingo just isn’t going to compare to a real person tutor. And because of the population size, it’s also very easy to find highly-active communities of people trying to learn whatever language it is, so you can join and practice and consult off of each other.
It’s partially how I went about learning English back in the day once I got a grasp of a basic vocabulary.
Way back when, you wrote: "How can you tell if a nation is China? If a population is Chinese? By the fact that they wear their clothing right lapel over left."
Two questions: First, I don't understand why this is so important - what's the cultural significance?
Second, most of the pictures I've seen are what I'd describe as "left lapel over right". But I've seen other places describe it the same way you did. Is this being described from the viewer's perspective? Is it about which side of the body the lapel ends up being tucked into the belt on? Before reading your blog, I was mostly familiar with this from Japanese and Korean martial arts, and they do the same thing, what I'd describe as left-over-right, and both got it from China, and it's really quite convenient if you have swords at your right hip, or you're holding paper (or something thin) in your right hand and want to tuck it into your chest like a big pocket. I'm very confused by this! — Moon Moth
Well, obviously, it’s not so important nowadays, because everyone just wears T-shirts and jeans. But for a long time, that was a very quick and easy and extremely visible short hand for, “I am also educated in the values of Confucius and share a cultural identity with you.” It’s the same idea in the modern day of building a national identity out of common holidays and common memes and common music, movies, and history.
Are you talking about it from the POV of the wearer in terms of left over right? I always go by what it looks like from the viewer’s POV, yeah. It’s just easier for my brain to handle. But just to clarify—traditional Chinese clothing layer lapels the same way that kimonos do.
How well does Chinese medical insurance do for an average middle class city person? Average villager? What happens if the person with insurance breaks a leg, for example? What about if they need some exotic drug or procedure? — by MoreOn
So theoretically speaking, if you have a job, you’re supposed to get medical insurance with that job, exactly how it works in America. Except instead of different insurance companies, there’s just the one government insurance that every employer is supposed to be buying for you (except there’s a different government insurance policy in every state, so it can vary by a little bit based on region). In reality, unless you work for the government itself, private corporations follow these laws as much as they follow laws about how they have to pay you overtime—not at all. The reason people so desperately want a government job and see that as the end all and be all career is because government jobs actually follow labour laws. Aside from western companies with a regional headquarters in China, I’ve never heard of any workplace that actually pays all the insurance and social security and overtime that they’re legally supposed to.
So if your company doesn’t pay it, or you’re a contracter/self-employed/whatever, then you have to pay into insurance on your own, about 2000 a year. If you’re in rural areas, there’s favourable policies sometimes that might lower it to just a couple hundred a year.
Just like American insurance, there’s a certain amount of money you have to pay before insurance kicks in. And then it only pays a certain percentage of the bill. And there’s a certain amount of money past which they don’t pay. So for example, if you need an appendectomy, and it’s 10K, then insurance doesn’t cover the first 1500, and it doesn’t cover anything after 7900. And it covers 80% of the money between 1500 and 7900. So your final bill would look something like $5120 covered by insurance, $4880 out of pocket for you. All of these numbers can vary based on region, but on average, you’ll end up paying about 50~% of the bill out of pocket for just about any normal, routine procedure.
But if you want fancy upgrades, like doing a minimally invasive surgery where you just have a tiny one-inch scar, then that might be 3K extra, and that’s not covered by insurance, because it’s not strictly necessary. It just makes the incision look prettier. Similarly, there’s all kinds of surgeries that China will absolutely do on you with local anaesthesia or just an epidural, instead of full general anaesthesia, if you really want to save a little bit of money.
Also, government healthcare will only cover up to 200K. Once you’re past that point, it’s all out of your own pocket. So most Chinese people still recommend that you still need your own commercial health insurance to give better coverage than the government gives, and that’s another couple of thousand a year.
If you’re a farmer in the countryside, you’re technically supposed to also be able to pay into government insurance, but as far as I can tell, that hasn’t actually really been rolled out all over the country yet. At least, in my local area, people don’t have any government insurance, and the local government more or less explicitly said to just rely on your savings. Our local hospital isn’t really equiped to do anything other than deliver babies and give out vaccines anyways, though.
There’s a lot of exotic drugs that aren’t covered by insurance, especially a lot of cancer drugs—that’s why cancer is known for being such a particularly expensive illness in China. I remember a year back or so that some medicine for breast cancer got on the news for costing 115K per round of treatment, and it’s completely not covered by government medical insurance at all. There’s also hardly any coverage of any kind of mental health treatment too.
So, really, to get proper coverage, you absolutely need commercial health insurance too. But that has its own issues, mostly because insurance companies are well known for being frauds—they take your money, and then declare bankrupty and disappear, and don’t actually provide any coverage. It’s very hard to find reliable commercial health insurance, and there’s very little public education resources available about how to go about it, or even that it’s necessary to begin with. A lot of Chinese people don’t realise how little government insurance actually covers until they’re slammed by the bill.
How much can Chinese food labeling be trusted? Is it common to dilute a product with something cheaper and never label it? I was warned against Chinese honey, because supposedly much of it is diluted with high fructose corn syrup. If done right, it's really hard to tell real honey from diluted honey. Is there any truth to this? — by MoreOn
Oh my god, I have no idea. I mean, like, people generally do trust Chinese food labelling, because what are you gonna do otherwise? Not eat? But then, once every couple of years, some big famous brand gets on the news for having dangerous levels of something or other in their food, or lying about their ingredients. Basically, labelling your food wrong is still illegal. But the enforcement seems really bad. I can’t even say what’s really trustworthy in China, except that Chinese food that’s aimed at being exported overseas do abide by overseas laws. So, for example, Kangshifu (a instant noodle brand) got on the news for having two separate factories for making their Pickled Beef noodles, where the Chinese side was a goddamn horror show in food safety, but the American side actually abides by American health and safety codes. So if you’re buying any Chinese snacks that’s actually in America with an FDA label, then you’re probably safe.
But everything I put in my mouth in China, I do it with an attitude of, “Ahhh, who cares about cancer. It’s so tasty.”
What's the attitude in China towards single mothers? Or out-of-wedlock children? What about non-traditional families, like a lesbian couple and their children? Does it happen often? Does the attitude vary much with region or socioeconomics? — MoreOn
There has been an unbelievably dramatic shift in attitude towards single mothers in just the last two years, with a single law change. It used to be that you couldn’t get your children onto your hukou if you don’t write down who the father is on their birth certificate. If you don’t know who the father is, and can’t find a man who’s willing to put his name on it, then your children grow up not being able to enjoy a lot of crucial societal benefits like public schools. This all changed back in around 2020? Or is it 2019? They made it so that single women can put their children on their hukou without having to write down a father. And from that moment on, there’s hardly been any stigma about choosing to have children on your own without a man. People are actually genuinely really excited about it.
If you’re divorced with children, then people might still gossip about you. But if you’re like, “Nah, I just bought some sperm or had a bunch of one night stands, and have a kid now.” People are like, “Wow, that is so cool.”
And you can buy sperm and have children without a man and happen to live with your special friend and hang out with her all the time, and absolutely no one will question it. But I’m not sure you can be openly lesbian without attracting a lot of gossip yet. I don’t know if it varies with region, but both my friends in well-to-do parts of Shenzhen and my family from rural backwaters middle of nowhere are like, “Oh man, I’m excited! Finally, there’s a way to have kids without having to live with a man!” Even the older generation, like my grandma and my mom, are like, “But it’s great! You never have to worry about fighting with a man for custody!”
How do westerners fit in the Chinese society? There's an occasional mention of European companies in China, with European bosses. I would assume those people live (or at least get temporarily stationed) in China. Do they typically learn enough Chinese to get by? Or do Chinese people accommodate by speaking European languages with them? Or, are those Europeans already pre-selected for their knowledge of Chinese? Do they mostly settle in cities? — by MoreOn
I…have no idea? I’ve gotta say though, in the last 10 years, there’s been a dramatic improvement to the average amount of English a Chinese person knows. It’s honestly at the point where I’d tell people they don’t have to worry about much of a language barrier at all if they stick to bigger cities. And if you’re doing business in China, you need a wechat to get anything done, and you can text people on wechat in English, and people can press on a translate button and it’ll machine-translate it into Chinese, and vice versa. So you can stick to using texts and get quite far, I think.
My gut instinct is Chinese is really hard. I’ve hardly ever met any western people who can speak it beyond a very, very, very basic level. But almost every Chinese person I’ve ran into can handle at least basic English.
What happens to old people who don't have a support network? No kids, or kids out of the country? If they are wealthy or have good pensions, are there any decent assisted living facilities? What about poor people who can't take care of themselves? —by MoreOn
Uh, not even ironically? They just work until they die. There are decent-looking assisted living facilities. I have no idea if they’re any good on the inside though. You always hear stories of under-reported elder abuse, even in America. I’m not sure if the situation would be any better in China. My guess is probably not?
There is social security cheques you get from the government. It’s next to nothing at all if you’re a poor rural farmer. Or, honestly, if you’re an average person. I think in my village, the government pays every retired old person like…120 RMB a month? It’s juuust enough to buy basic food, a little more comfortable if you also have a spouse getting the same cheque. But it’s not enough to pay for any kind of healthcare. So you just die the first time you get sick and can’t get better again.
But the other reason people desperately want government jobs is that if you get promoted into any semi-important position at all, you get a ton in pensions once you retire. Like, five figures a month.
Are Japanese people discriminated against? —by OmgPuppies
Lately? Yes. Because of how much propaganda is going on about the Fukushima water release thing. But on an average day when there hasn’t been any big news lately? Not really. Chinese people will still meme about it occasionally on the internet, but in real life, people generally are more worried about things closer to them than Japan. And everyone below 40 these days grew up on anime anyways. There are tons of Chinese people who are passionate fans of Japanese idol singers and anime and stuff, while at the same time making racist memes about Japan on the internet.
But overall, aside from the past week or so, I’d definitely say that there’s definitely still animosity about certain parts of history. There’s animosity towards the Yasukuni shrine. There’s a little bit of animosity towards the Japanese government. But people don’t have any animosity against Japanese people or even culture in and of itself.
Is ancient Chinese comprehensible to modern Chinese speakers? — by OmgPuppies
Depends on how ancient. I can read anything back to Tang Dynasty no problem, so long as it’s in halfway decent handwriting. I can capture enough keywords to kind of work out what a page is about in Wei-Jin era. Anything back to Han Dynasty, I need someone to type it out in a computer first, because I can string the sentences together. And once you get back to the Spring and Autumn period, even if it’s typed out, I still need annotations to know what a sentence is talking about.
Apparently, if you actually go to high school in actual China, they’ll teach you Shang Dynasty runes, but that is crazy and I’ve never even made an attempt myself.
In many of the historical fiction works you've recommended, the government always seems to have issues feeding refugees. Was this a major issue historically? —OmgPuppies
O.o Wait, is this…is this not a thing everywhere else? Feeding a ton of people is always hard. Keep in mind, the fact that refugees exist to begin with means some kind of catastrophe has taken place, whether it’s flood or earthquake or drought or whatever. So some of your previously productive land is already ruined. Whenever such a large disaster like that happens, it has all kinds of ripple effects on the economy. For example, a lot of those refugees are going to turn into bandits, and the skyrocketing crime means it’s very hard to transport resources to where they’re needed. If it’s a flood, you can’t use rivers reliably for transport either. And if it’s bad enough that there’s significant numbers of refugees, it means the local government structure isn’t functioning either, so you have a very hard time collecting statics on what exactly is going on on the ground. And that means it’s very easy for corruption to happen without even necessarily drawing anyone’s attention.
Without modern fast transportation and communication tools, it’s just really really hard to get food halfway across a continent into the hands of the actual people. Even if the refugees are coming to you, individual cities don’t keep enough grain on hand to feed double their population for long. So you’re still running into the same problem of how to transport resources along bandit-infested roads without anyone skimming a little off the top.
In several of your posts, you've mentioned women getting fired for marrying/getting pregnant. Is this officially allowed, or are laws against it just unenforced? — OmgPuppies
Yeah, it’s super illegal, but first of all, if you’re unemployed and expecting, you likely don’t have money to sue to begin with. And secondly, the burden of proof is on you as the person who initiated the law suit to prove that it was just because you got married/pregnant, and not because you weren’t performing as well, the company needed to downsize anyways, or just because your boss happened to dislike you. So it’s very difficult to get it actually enforced. People also don’t hire married or expecting women to begin with, which is also even harder to enforce legally.
Would it be possible for you to get some information about what your friend's timelines look like, so we can better understand the extent of the algorithmic impact on what you're posting?
To give a specific example of why I think this might be useful: I noticed that epidurals have been mentioned fairly frequently in your blog. I (college-aged male) had never heard of them before-hand, and at first interpreted their prevalence as suggesting different attitudes towards medical care for women giving birth. But then I talked to some similarly-aged women IRL, and they all knew about epidurals.
The result of this is that I'm not sure whether to label the mentions of this procedure as being due to the gender effect of this feed being optimized for a woman, or a culture effect, and I'd be curious to better understand how representative your feed is. — by Stephen Rout
I’ve tried to put on a proxy and go read weibo without logging onto my account, and the main difference, as far as I can tell, the main difference is that there’s a lot more entertainment news—celebrity posts and promotions for upcoming TV shows. I almost always skip these by, because I don’t think it’d be that relevant to people here, so I guess the algorithm’s stopped pushing it at me.
But at least with the epidurals, that’s definitely not just me. It’s been a notably hot topic for long enough that some of the Chinese current events youtubers I watch have mentioned a strong popular movement for a mother’s right to choose how to give birth to her children, and getting epidurals more proliferated, because there are still a ton of hospitals who don’t offer it, or have a strict quota for how many people they offer it too.
A lot of Chinese influencers have noted that the biggest secret to getting a ton of views and comments and shooting onto the front wages of Weibo is with feminism (and anti-feminism) topics and relationship topics. And childbirth/epidurals are a subset of that. Just like a month before I started this weibo, there was like a 3-month long campaign on weibo for trains to start selling menstrual pads, that was also all over the place. There’s just a really strong movement on the internet to call for more benefits for women.
Supposedly, this is because the demographics of weibo users (and apparently internet users in general) lean female.
What do people say about the Evergrande situation? — by TonyZa
People know that it’s fucked. People know that it’s average house buyers like them who are being fucked, instead of the banks or the real estate developers. Some of the braver bloggers out there will point out that it’s fucked because of government mismanagement and a failure to institute good market regulations to begin with. There’s a lot of anxiety on the internet about whether it’s a good or bad idea now to be buying real estate. How much of an impact this has been to the Chinese economy. Whether there’ll be a recession as a result of this. What the government is going to do as a response if there is a recession, so on and so forth. There are a lot of opinions floating around, and without any trustworthy statistics, it’s really hard to tell what’s going on.
For the real estate market in particular, the general opinion seems to be, “Well, it’s not like you can actually not buy a house though.” So the advice given for how to maximise for safety when buying a house is, “Buy it in the most popular parts of first-line cities.” Which is great advice if you ignore how that’s going to be some of the most expensive houses in China. So, basically, just like every economic disaster, you’re basically fine if you’re super wealthy. But if you can’t afford to throw eight-figures at an apartment unit, then to some extent you’re gonna be stuck buying a house that’s gonna lose value instead of gain.
There was a very brief movement for everyone in China to stop paying their mortgage in protest of the government not doing enough to fix this situation, but it never really got too big so it kinda sank in the water. It’s still a pretty popular movement to cancel the concept of 期房 (future houses), where you’re purchasing real estate that hasn’t even been built yet. Nowhere else in the world does this (supposedly), other than Hong Kong. And China’s laws for regulating what real estate companies can and can’t do with that money before they’re done building the house is way weaker than Hong Kong’s. But that voice almost never reaches the internet, because it gets censored out as directly talking about the government being incompetent (or maybe corrupt?).
A very popular Cantonese chor yuet (month sitting) dish is pig trotters in a black vinegar broth, which is said to strengthen blood and bone. No clue if that’s true but it’s hella nourishing just eaten like that over white rice. 😋
Oh, so when you said 10K per month before, you mean USD? I thought this was RMB.
Also, I read before that back in the 2010s the entire US spy network in China basically got destroyed, do you think this is a psyop? Source here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spies-espionage.html