11/15/25 - If you make 5K a month in China, you don’t have to pay taxes.
A compilation of people being stupid:
“Me, while pregnant: “He’s moving around in my tummy.” My husband: “Who is?””
“Advisor: Please bring a bank card with you at the start of next semester, preferably from the China Construction Bank, but other banks work too.
Somebody: I don’t have Construction Bank cards. Can I bring something else?
Advisor: Sure.
Somebody: Does Industrial and Commercial Bank work?
Me: …Feel bad for the advisor for a second.”
“”You have your surgery tomorrow morning so you can’t eat or drink anything after 8PM today.
At 10PM: “Can I have a vegetarian burger?”
“My mom made some porridge, can I drink it?”
“I want some milk.”
“I know I can’t have anything, but I can eat bread, right?”
It happens all the time. I don’t think this is just a matter of education.”
“Class leader in the group chat: “Please check whether or not you passed all your classes this semester.”
Stupid people: “What about last semester?””
“Get to the police station: “Did you lost your ID?” Her: “No, I forgot it at home.” Can’t get a new ID if you didn’t lose your old one. Her: “Can’t you do something about it? I need a place to stay tonight!””
“If only one person brought an ID to get checked in at a hotel front desk, so long as you don’t bring it up, then I won’t bring it up either. But if you ask, then we can’t allow it.”
“But some hotels are closed off. Their policy is that even visitors have to get registered. If the hotel is a part of an office building, you 100% can, but otherwise, you gotta see the hotel’s rules.”
“I don’t have friends like this around me. They’ve been eliminated in the stream of time by me. If I hang out with people like these, I’ll get super resentful and it’ll trigger all the dark sides of my humanity. I’m afraid I’d murder them if it went on for too long.”
“Our teacher told us that if you want to break the rules, don’t tell anyone and ask them to look the other way. Just do it secretly and take responsibility if something goes wrong.”
“Worker: ID please. What are you here for?
Me: (Passes over ID) Getting a new ID.
Worker: This isn’t going to expire any time soon. What are you getting a new one for?
Me: The photo is too ugly. I want a new one.
Worker: We can’t issue new IDs unless you lost your old one.
Me: Then pretend I lost it.
Worker: There’s security cameras. You just handed it over to me. How am I supposed to do this? Go away and come again some other time.”
“…Went to the community hospital and there was an ilithiophobic doctor. He said I keep having random nose bleeds because it’s too dry. My mom kept asking if it was because I played on my phone too much. He started getting mad and arguing with my mom, and I really wanted to die as an introvert…”
“I’ve ran into something like this…but I was sitting right next to the uncle. The flight stewardess didn’t get impatient at all! She explained everything three times. I was the one who got impatient! I just yanked the uncle’s little table up and opened up the window blinds and went, “You better listen to the stewardess! I’m a lawyer. If you refuse to cooperate and put me and the other passengers in danger, we can file a joint lawsuit against you when we land.” (I’m not actually a lawyer at all. I was just super annoyed and I made it up.)”
“Flying to Foshan. The stewardess emphasised 800 times that this is a joint military civilian airport, so we can’t open up our window blinds, but some people, I dunno if they just didn’t understand or if they were spies, insisted on opening them, and the stewardess had to get up and warn them several times.”
“Just tell them it’s illegal behaviour. If you don’t want to get taken away by the cops as soon as you get off the plane, then please cooperate.”
“When I passed through a military civilian airport, it was the same. The announcement and the stewardesses repeated 800 times pull it down, pull it down, and not only did he keep his up, but he let his kid play with the window blinds. I just reported him.”
[A lot of Americans have been flooding into Rednote (Xiao Hong Shu) as an alternative to Tiktok. As one of the only social media platforms that don’t require you to bind an account to your national ID, it’s super accessible to foreigners to make a new account there. And it’s rapidly turned into some kind of large-scale AMA.]
“In this China-America double-checking, everyone’s figured out that America is a paradise for rich capitalists, but it’s only so-so for normal people.
If you make 5K a month in China, you don’t have to pay taxes, but that’s not true in America. If you get paid 5K a month, you’ll only get 3K after all the taxes.
Rent is sky high, and as for real estate, I’ll expand a little more. Houses in America aren’t cheap at all. Their housing to income ratio is a little lower than us. You can think of it as, if you make 3K a month in China, then houses are 500K, whereas you can make 3K a month in America and only spend 300K on a house. That’s about the ratio. But they have real estate tax. Once you buy a house, you have to keep paying every year, and rent is super high. So overall, Americans spend quite a bit on housing.
As for cost of living, goods are cheap, but services are expensive. Eating out, getting a haircut, getting your AC fixed is all super expensive. If you include all of that, the cost of living is about three times higher than us.
Overall, while 5K a month in America converts to over 30K a month RMB, the actual standard of living is only equivalent to making 10K a month in China.
Chinese-Americans have already summarised that USD to RMB conversion rates really should be 1:2. That is to say, if you can get paid 20K a month in China, and there’s an opportunity to go to America right now, you have to at least get paid 10K a month in America to get the same standard of living as in China.
You can feel it out for yourself.”
Comments say, “Lol, I don’t think so. Why do people all over the world go suffer in America then?”
“It’s a paradise for poor people too, because there’s free aid, high purchasing power, and high blue collar wages.”
“But their 5K a month corresponds to working 3 days a week for 5 hours a day. What about your 5K a month?”
“Rednote is going viral in America and it’s scaring the shit out of the government. Now America’s already closed the download option and are refusing to let Americans use it. Hurry, aren’t there some experts who can brag about freedom of speech in America?”
Comments say, “We gotta teach them how to buy Chinese-made phones so they can direct download the whole set of social apps.”
“It’s scaring all the turncoats too. Without an arbitrage on information, what are they gonna live on?”
“The ruling class of America is quaking in their boots...”
“There’s a legend in America that if you’re unsatisfied about a certain policy, you can call your congressman and tell him about your complaints. In order to avoid being voted out at the next election, your congressman will do everything he can to resolve your problem.
On the stage is the American congress banning Tiktok to protect American people’s data privacy. Below the stage are Americans actively going to Rednote to hand over their privacy.
So Americans aren’t happy about this. So why don’t they call their congressmen? Do they not want to? Do they not know their phone numbers?”
Comments say, “You win if the call goes through at all.”
“What about Japanese congressman? Although most of them come from wealthy legacies, can voters not contact them at all?”
“This is even more interesting, because my friend actually called the mayor’s hotline and got his issues resolved.”
“This world is really magical.
Actually, most girls think they’re really pretty in their own eyes, and they don’t have even a basic ability to assess men, to the point where there’s no cost to men bragging at all. For real.
A magical sight on Rednote yesterday: A guy whose ID is literally something something Fat Bro, living in Baoshan, is almost 50-years-old, and claimed that he once spent 180K on a girl in 2 days and didn’t do anything with her. That he spends 300K on his girlfriend a month. That his girlfriend gets an hourly pay of 500RMB.
Anyone with any basic knowledge would know that he’s bragging. He says he might not have much money but he’s very generous. That if he made 5 million RMB, he’d spend 90% of it on his girlfriend. Men who are actually like this don’t have social media profiles that look like him.
But what happened? He said his private messages have exploded with pictures of hot young girls, he can’t even add all of them to his wechat. He even got an official warning that he’s redirecting traffic to other sites.
Alright, fine. You can be whatever you want on the internet. Guess another 50-year-old cube man [people whose height and weight are the same numbers, like 180cm, 180 pounds] managed to get off today. He’s posting those pictures to groupchats to rate them.”
Comments say, “A lot of people don’t lack knowledge, they lack common snese.”
“OMG, can these people please possess me? Whenever someone starts bragging, I can’t help laugh at them (and that’s kind of rude too) T_T”
“Maybe all the people adding him are just scammers.”