11/03/23 - FAQ Answered!

[Thanks for all your questions and all your support! I’m having a hard time thinking of a third essay topic to throw in the poll, so I guess feel free to make suggestions in the comments for something I can do a deep dive into that people might be interested in!]

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You've touched on LGBT issues a few times, I'd love to learn more about what those are like in China. What kind of stereotypes are there for gay men & women, and how are they viewed by mainstream society? — by Calph

I’ve said before that China has a very…practical sort of homophobia, in that for the most part, people don’t particularly care who other people are having sex with. It’s really only a problem when it’s your own children. And even then, it’s only a problem if you insist on being openly gay and not having kids. For the most part, your parents won’t particularly care what you’re doing on the side, so long as you’re willing to marry a beard and have enough intercourse to have at least one child (preferably male). Once you’ve fulfilled that mission, you can screw around all you want, and your own mom will cover for you. As a result, the stereotype for gay men is that they’re gross (because for some reason, a lot of them are into feet?), promiscuous, and often frauds. They’ll trick women into marrying them and get her pregnant, just to immediately disappear and not actually offer any support or companionship. Or worse, bring home STDs in the process of getting her pregnant.

But tricking a woman into marriage is pretty much the only thing available to gay men in China if they want kids, or want to fulfil their family’s demands for kids, because surrogacy is illegal, purchasing eggs is illegal, and you can’t adopt without being married, and gay marriage is nowhere close to being legal.

It was earlier this year that it became possible for unmarried women to get their children onto their hukou and get them registered, I think just a month or so before I started this substack? And I swear, overnight, any resistance towards lesbians have completely disappeared. My parents have instantly went from, “Oh my god, you cannot be gay, we will be so upset.” to, “You know, buying sperm and having a baby on your own without getting a man involved sounds like a great deal.” I swear, it took less than 2 days for them to make the turn around. And if you happen to want to live with your best friend and hang out all the time, that’s perfectly fine too. As a result, there’s not a whole lot of stereotypes for lesbians, except that if you can afford the lesbian lifestyle (that is, have parents who love you enough to buy you a house despite how you’re a girl), then you’re super lucky.

But in terms of people who are completely unrelated to you, like just walking down the street and seeing two men walk hand in hand or something, it’s really not something that anyone pays attention to, even super conservative old people like my grandma.

But! In the world of webnovels, there is a bizarre amount of segregation between het romances and homo romances. I don’t know why. But if you’re in the hetero romance section, then not even background extras are allowed to be gay. If you post any comments being like, “Wow, Extra A and Extra B [both men] are super sweet with each other.” You’ll get a lot of internet hate for bringing up homo romances under a het romance. And the opposite applies. I’ve seen an author write several novels set in the same expanded universe, and get an unbelievable amount of hateful comments because there’s an easter egg in one novel which is a gay romance which refers to one of her previous novels, which was a hetero romance.

Supposedly, this is because people don’t like it when you’re “off topic”, but I’ve never seen this much hate whenever people start off-topic talking about, like, recipes in the comment section instead of the actual novel. So I definitely think there’s something weird going on, I just haven’t figured out why this phenomena exists.

There is frequent mention of how tall someone is. Is that a big thing in China? What is considered a good height for a man? for a woman? Is that equal to or greater than the average height? — Two Chihuahuas

It’s a big thing in America too, right? That height is super important to dating? At least for a man. I guess the main difference is that height is also super important to dating if you’re a woman. The ideal height for men is 180cm+, but not more than 195cm. Any more than that, and you’re too tall. And if you’re any shorter than 170cm, you’re considered too short.

For women, the ideal height is 170cm-ish. Any more than 180cm and you’re way too tall. But any shorter than 160cm, you’re way too short.

For both men and women, ideal height is much higher than average height (about 167cm for men, 156cm for women), but it’s not the end all be all stat. You can make up for it with other, much more important aspects, like having gone to a good university, or being rich, or having a government job.

How are gaming in China, are people really addicted, is it mostly male? —by Luis

I don’t think it’s possible to be really addicted the way people in the west might imagine it in China. Firstly, it’s because almost all games in China require you to register an account with your National ID in order to play, so they know exactly who you are in real life. And if you’re underaged, then you’re only allowed to play video games for one hour a day on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. So people have less of an experience of growing up with video games, or at least not gaming all day.

Then, you basically have a short 4 year window in university, where you might be able to game all you want, until you screw up your grades enough that you get kicked out. And then, you’re back to not being able to sustain the habit of gaming anymore, because you have to work 12 hours a day, six days a week. With no social safety nets, there’s not much of an option to just stay at home, not work, and keep gaming.

There’s a little bit of the Japanese otaku problem, where sometimes, you can rely on your parents to just support you through gaming. But living expenses are sincerely costly enough in China, that if you’re from an average family making average money, your parents sincerely can’t afford it even if they wanted to. Especially if they hate you a little later, and now that you’re an adult, they’re starting to have old people medical problems.

So for the most part, gaming addictions don’t take the form of spending too much time on video games, just spending too much money on video games, with all its microtransactions and pay to win.

The gamer population in China is still majority male, but it’s not a big majority. According to this website, it’s 54% male and 46% women. And that’s a tilt small enough that it makes me think it might just be because China is 54% male and 46% female. This more or less backs up my impression too, in that everyone games.

The most popular games right now are Honour of Kings (basically Chinese League of Legends), Genshin (gacha-based RPG), and PUBG (a battle royale type game). And in the case of Honour of Kings and PUBG, it’s definitely both because it’s a game formatted in nicely chunked out sessions, to play whenever you have a little bit of free time, because you know exactly when the next good stopping point is, and you can still have a complete experience of the game despite only playing in 20-30 minute chunks.

But all the games that are super mainstream and well known in the west and just about as well known in China. Call of Duty, Elder Scrolls, GTA, etc, is all something you can bring up, and almost everyone (who isn’t an old grandma or grandpa) will know what you’re talking about.

There’s also, like, next to zero console gaming in China, and all the very popular console-based stuff is still…like, around in China. But it doesn’t have nearly the same amount of mainstream proliferation as in the west. This is probably because parents won’t buy their kids switches or playstations, machines that do nothing except let you game, because gaming is bad and a distraction from learning. But with so much of school now dependent on computers (especially since covid hit and online classes became a big deal), you can’t really get away with not buying your kid a computer anymore. Just like for even adults, a lot of people can’t get their spouse to agree to buy a console, but every family is going to own a computer. Oh, and of course, there’s a ton of mobile gaming, just like in the west.

So things like Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon aren’t nearly as well-known or iconic. Instead, it seems like most people’s childhood nostalgia for video games is early Chinese MMORPGs.

I can’t recall if this has already been asked, but I get the sense abductions play a much larger role in the public consciousness of Weibo than on twitter, is this a legitimately a much larger issue in China than the us/anglosphere? I’ve noticed the stories often seem to revolve around being sold into slavery in the boonies - is there actually an industry that revolves around this or is this more reflective of a fear of the city dwelling weibo demographic? — by dat Boi

Oh, it definitely plays a much bigger role in the public consciousness, because it is a much bigger issue, absolutely. I mean, like, how many cases have there been in America, where a woman was abducted and held prisoner and had a dozen children only to be rescued decades later? Like, three? Because societally, there’s just not a good way to make this happen. You can’t just bring random 8 year old to the social security office and be like, “Yo, this is my kid, and I just never bothered getting ID for her. Give her a social security number please.” And if the woman so much as calls up a random Pizza Hut and asks them to call the cops on her behalf, they’ll probably agree to help.

Whereas in China, the whole county, maybe even the whole state (or maybe even the whole country >.>) is in on it. Just like in the story I covered recently, not only will no one help you call the cops despite being aware that you’re being held prisoner against your will, but when the cops do come to rescue you, completely unrelated neighbours will assault the police car to stop it from coming in. They’ll lie down in the middle of the road so the police can’t leave. In fact, in some counties, the cops themselves will track down escaped women and bring them back to their purchasers.

There’s a very well-developed and established industry revolving around this. In my article covering the Chained Woman, I noted the statistic that the county she’s in, Feng Xian, has had over 40,000 cases of abductions (that we know about) since the 1980s. And that’s just one single county. There are hundreds more counties like this in China. This article says that, at its peak, over 100K children were being abducted every year (mostly young girls being abducted so they can be worked like a slave for a couple of years before they’re ready to be bred). And almost none of these abductions are resolved quickly, because a lot of police stations are still insisting that being abducted by someone, sold, kept prisoner, and repeatedly being raped and abused is a “civil matter” and they can’t do anything about it, because their KPI doesn’t include stopping abductions. Stopping abductions doesn’t help them get raises or promotions, so they’ll always prioritise other things, like giving out traffic tickets.

And when private charity organisations try to stop abductions, like helping victims find their families, organising rescues, or even just doing public awareness campaigns about how abduction is bad, the local government will try to stop it, both because it makes them look bad and because they know that the ecology of these villages with fucked gender balances relies on abductions to function. At least two of the most active influencers talking on behalf of the Chained Woman’s spent various amounts of time in jail. One of them have still yet to post anything after she was arrested. When a lawyer drove to Fengxian to try to help the Chained Woman get free, he found that the road to the village was blocked with a barricade and there were men armed with guns keeping guard over it to stop any outsiders from coming in. In a country where owning a 3cm keychain gun decoration has put someone in jail. In a country where even police and soldiers aren’t allowed to own guns.

I’m getting very heated and personal over this, because this is sort of my personal pet issue. But yeah. It is a much bigger deal in China, because if you get taken, there is nothing you can do about it. No one will help you. Not random passersby. Not cops. Not the government. Not charitable organisations. So people stress out a lot about how to prevent being abducted in the first place.

I'd like to see your reaction to the famous "second-century warlord" post. — by OmgPuppies

That is amazing. It’s so incredibly appropriate and believable at every stage, it’s hilarious. I am thoroughly delighted. There are so many segments of that taken straight out of actual history. Guess there’s a reason the Three Kingdoms era is the most popular era to write about when writing gay historical fiction.

What is "involution"? I never see the word in originally-English content but it comes up here a lot. — by Alicorn

Involution is basically…a race to the bottom, stressful competition with no winner, basically. The best explanation I’ve seen of it is that if everyone was sitting in a theatre watching a movie, and all of a sudden, to get a better view, somebody stands up to watch. So the guy behind him has to stand up, and the guy behind him has to stand up. And soon enough, everyone in the theatre is standing while watching the movie. Everyone is less comfortable, they’re being made to work harder, and yet the movie is still the same movie. They didn’t get anything extra out of it at all.

It’s used to describe various aspects of Chinese life where you have to work the hardest you can just to stay afloat. For example, I’ve said before that there’s a…分流 in China, splitting the stream, where only 50% of middle school graduates can go on to high school, and only 50% of high schoolers can go on to university. This means that to compete for those opportunities, everyone is studying harder, for longer, sacrificing more free time and health, and yet, the percentage of people who win is still only 50%. If everyone is studying 90 hours a week and raising their grades from 350/750 to 550/750, 50% of them are still going to fail anyways.

So that’s the most classic definition. It’s used colloquially in a lot of areas where the competition isn’t entirely pointless, but the returns are very marginal too. For example, if someone makes a post online looking for a job to be done for 20 RMB an hour, and someone responds, “I’ll do it for 15.” That person will get a bunch of replies like, “Don’t involute. If he said 20RMB, then keep it to 20 RMB.” Because if you’re a scab and bring the price down, then everyone has to work for 15 RMB an hour now, but the work is still just as hard as always.