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From what you write, and the few Chinese people I've known, it sounds like in China people don't use polite social fictions as much, and are more willing to be blunt and practical. I'm thinking of things like romance, marriage, divorce, child-rearing, and so on. It's not an all-or-nothing effect, but there seems to be a definite trend.
Am I imagining this? Is this a online-only thing? Is this a general trend where Chinese culture is more willing to cut to the chase than American culture? Or does Chinese culture just have polite social fictions in different areas than American culture, and I haven't noticed them? —by Moon Moth
China definitely does have polite social fictions in different areas, and those areas are towards your boss, or your client, or other people in a position of power over you. You have to put things in a way that’s easy for them to hear, instead of just coming out with the truth. There’s often little EQ tests on weibo, where the blogger will write a scenario like, “You’re at a company dinner with your boss, and he says, “You’ve just gotten a raise, haven’t you? Why don’t you pay for this meal?” How do you respond?” And people write in responses for the best way to get out of that situation without offending anyone.
But it’s definitely very different from American culture, because even Chinese polite social fiction is extremely…practical and realistic. “Of course I only care about your feelings because you hold my livelihood in your hands and I can’t afford to make you mad. If you were just a random delivery driver, I wouldn’t care to waste my braincells on this at all.” Exceptionally high EQ people might do this for every complete stranger in their life.
But when it comes to things like finding a wife, looking for a job, settling divorce agreements, or even borrowing money from friends, there’s too much at stake for people to beat around the bush much. Using dating as an example, even if there’s an early dating period where you’re polite and sweet and letting each other down easy, once you make it to the point that you’re heading into a serious relationship, it’s inevitable that you’re going to have to sit down and talk practical issues out like, “When do you plan to get married?” “How many kids do you want to have?” etc, etc.
And even growing up, people around me unabashedly talked about very socially rude topics in America, like, “How much do you make a year?” Like, that’s just a question you can ask people. Even people you hardly even know. People directly asked me how much I weigh too—like, not even friends, just random hairdressers. This is just normal enough that people don’t get offended by it, unless you actively make mean jabs at their income or weight.
I honestly can’t really tell you why this is, but it’s definitely a phenomena I notice too. I wonder if it’s because there’s so much careful stepping on eggshells at work, that people don’t want to do it in personal life too? Or is it just that life pressures are too great that people can’t afford to not hammer down details about what they mean? I dunno. This is a super interesting point though. I should ask my Chinese friends and see what they think.
Are there any big divergences between China as seen on Weibo, vs. your personal experience? For example, in one of your posts, someone mentioned that all they see on social media is how people don't want to have kids. But in real life, hardly anybody DOESN'T want kids. I suppose that's true of social media everywhere. Are there any glaring differences? — by MoreOn
I mean, technically, yes. Because I am from a super rural, super backwaters, super poor region of China. So my experience whenever I’m visiting my grandparents is drastically different from what I see on Weibo, which is mostly filled with white-collar people in big cities. And like everywhere, rural poor people are the most willing to have kids. But, like, also, I’m not exactly sure poor rural farmers is any more representative of China than white-collar city dwellers. The same way you can’t really judge America only by people who live in trailer parks, right?
I’ve seen a lot of weibo posts that point out that the biggest misconception you can have while reading weibo is that everyone makes six figures a year easily, and that’s just not true in “real life”, so to speak. I think I’ve mentioned before too, that yeah, university-educated, white-collar, first line city dwelling women are over-represented on weibo, and that’s definitely the primary demographic that doesn’t want kids.
At the same time, though, even by the Chinese government’s own statistics, birth rates are plummeting at a hilarious rate, so I 100% believe that’s a thing that’s happening.
How does copyright work in China? I heard that authorship of books/ideas/creative content/engineering know-how isn't culturally respected or legally enforced. And that's why China is so chill about pirate servers and Mercedes car clones. Is there truth to that? And if so, is there a difference between external and internal copyright? Like, is Chinese authorship respected and enforced whereas western isn’t? — by MoreOn
Oh no, knockoffs are everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Hardly any Chinese authors bother to get published in real life anymore, because the webnovel industry is so incredibly well-developed and mainstream. But at the same time, when I got into Chinese webnovels, I literally spent an entire year reading a knockoff website and never even noticed, it was so well-built and famous and aped the actual legitimate site so closely. There’s a massive industry of people hired to copy out the original novel the second it comes out. And there’s nothing authors can really do about it except to just…beg their readers to tip them on the official website out of sheer good will?
About the only guaranteed way to make money is to sell the novel you wrote to be made into a TV show or movie, and how many authors really get big enough to do that?
I think for actual, like, technological breakthroughs, at least the super important ones, the government will actually protect that and guard it like a national security problem. But if you’re just making music or novels or whatever online, you’re better off hoping to just let the knockoffs slide and at least get your name out there, so even if people aren’t paying to read your books, they’re aware you wrote them. And then use that fame to become an influencer and sell adspace on your Instagram account or something.
China definitely has laws against pirating. It’s not supposed to be legal. But as far as I can tell, nobody really bothers to enforce it. Maybe they just can’t. There’s too many knockoffs that are too hard to root out. After all, China has laws against porn too, and it’s not like that doesn’t get shared around plenty.
As for trademark infringement, like people selling Mercedes clones, that’s a slightly…different issue. Back in the day, around the early 2000s? Maybe even the 2010s? There was actually a really big effort and movement to stop knockoffs and get them off of the market. That’s when the laws came out that if you found a knockoff, you can sue the manufacturer for 10x what you paid for the item. So people would find a store that definitely sold knockoffs, then place an order for, like, 200K RMB’s worth of handbags, and then sue for 2 million RMB, and actually win in court.
But I’m not sure when, at some point, the whole narrative got turned around. Mainstream opinion stopped being, “Ah, damn these knockoff merchants, making unsafe, unsanitary, overpriced goods and scamming people!” into, “They’re just small business owners trying to make a living—why are we oppressing our own people to protect the profits of the dirty American imperial capitalists??” And with the shift in public opinion, you couldn’t win those knockoff lawsuits anymore. In fact, you were at a risk of being counter-sued for extortion, for knowingly buying way more handbags than you would ever use just to get more money in compensation.
So that meant people basically stopped trying to report knockoffs all together. And now you can still get the 10x recompense, but it’s not really punishing the knockoff industry when you can only claim it on one or two items at a time.
And knockoffs of Chinese local brands happens just as often as western brands. Or, at least, it happens just as often if the Chinese local brands also have a high price. But there’s no point in making knockoffs of, say, Chinese toothpaste that only costs 2 RMB per tube to buy, and it costs 1.5 RMB to produce. You can’t really go any cheaper than that. So visually, it looks like knockoff manufacturers primarily target western brands.
For the FAQ: it feels like Chinese people, at least on social media, are quite negative about the USA (though envious of its position as an unquestioned superpower), very negative about Japan, and more mixed about South Korea. Are there any countries that Chinese people are both positive about and aspire for China to imitate? Or is China so unique that it's not really a relevant question? — by Emma
There’s no country where people in China are like, “Yes, we should be like that, 100%.” But there are aspects of other countries that Chinese people wishes could exist in China. Like, for Chinese blue-collar workers to get paid as much as German blue-collar workers. Or to get the same amount of annual leave as France. Or to live somewhere super low population density, like Iceland. Or free healthcare. Or not having to get tutoring, etc, etc. Even countries that China hates, people can pick out a tiny aspect here or a small thing there that they want in China too.
Like Japan does a really good job of pushing Japanese culture out onto a global market (with anime and all that). People think China should really do more of that. And even for America, the average, normal person doesn’t really have to put a lot of thought into how to kiss up to their boss, and people in China are envious of that.
You’ll get bullied off the internet if you say something like, “Germany is an objectively better country than China.” on the Chinese internet, though in real life I’ve met a couple of people who definitely think America (or even Japan!) is an objectively better country than China. But it’s not that controversial to pick out one policy here and there to say we need this in China too.
For the FAQ: Is there more context behind the statement that “Chinese soccer’s been in deep shit the last 20 years”? — by Nullsrc
I’ll start by saying I’m not a big soccer fan. I don’t really know anything about the industry at all. But I can say this—the Chinese National Soccer Team is baaaaaad. They’re just…incredibly…not good at their jobs. Like, China is ranked number 80th in the world! Behind Uzbekistan and Oman and stuff! And I know like, at first, people might be like, “Well, that’s not too bad. Aren’t there like 200 countries in that ranking? China’s still in the top third.”
But I don’t think you understand how important soccer is to China. Partly, this has to do with the history that back in 1985, in the World Cup playoffs, China lost to Hong Kong and couldn’t make it into the World Cup. That wasn’t seen as just a soccer loss, but some kind of national and political loss too. I’m not sure exactly what it was like back then, but apparently, it caused an absolute shitfit among the people of China, and ever since then, Chinese people has viewed China’s soccer scores as not just a sports competition, but somehow a proof of China’s strength as a nation?
As someone who’s not interested in soccer at all, it’s all very confusing to me. But you can’t deny that soccer is one of the primary sports that China invests money into. A lot of people across a lot of departments spend a lot of time trying to make China be better at soccer as their full-time job. And yet, China still hasn’t even made it into the World Cup since 2002. Literally billions of RMB have been sank into this, and China’s soccer team has only gotten worse.
Like, this is what the Chinese soccer team looks like:
Like, not at all like professional athletes. For comparison, this is what normal soccer players look like?
Obviously, a lot of corruption is going on. For a team that hasn’t even made the qualifications to play in any proper competitions, the Chinese soccer team gets access to a lot of privileges like five-star hotels when they go out, party busses, sea cucumber everyday for breakfast, so on and so forth. And for a very brief period in Chinese internet history, complaining about how shitty the Chinese soccer team is doing has become almost a coded way to get past the censors to complain about how corrupt and inept the Chinese government is.
But yeah, in summary, the context is just that the Chinese national team sucks at soccer, because you get in by connections, you’re not required to train, and it’s almost an open secret that it’s a way for politicians to launder money. There’s a lot of corruption because soccer has a weird amount of political significance in Chinese people’s eyes, so it’s always easy getting a big budget for it.
This isn’t to say that Chinese people are bad at soccer. Like, for example, Chinese women’s soccer do incredibly well on the world stage. Number 15 in the world compared to the men’s number 80. Even local universities or communities pull together soccer teams that are confident they could outperform the national team if they were given the opportunity. And that’s precisely why people are so mad about a bunch of rich politicians and elites sweeping taxpayer money into their own pockets while letting this dumpster fire of a national team continue to embarrass all of China in front of the world.
Oh my god I was not prepared for the pictures of the Chinese soccer team
“How much do you make a year?”
Lol we get all that and more too, especially during Chinese New Year.