After blogger cures her baby’s reoccuring rash, she has ascended to the throne of baby-rearing king in her family. She has summarised what worked for her for the internet. First, put less clothes on your baby. Always one layer less than adults. Put moisturiser on every 2-3 hours. Apply medicine three times a day. And bathe the baby every other day instead of every day.
Guy asks for advice on the internet—his girlfriend is a nurse and makes about 8000RMB a month. Her parents don’t work except for 3-4 months a year, so she sends them 1500RMB every month to support them, which her dad spends on alcohol, cigarettes, and the lottery. Her dad also used to beat her mom and her. They’re asking for 130,000RMB for bride price, with no dowry. He’s worried that if he marries her, her family will become a burden upon them, whereas he wants to put their joint income towards improving their own quality of life. The top-voted internet comment says, “Jesus Christ, what does it matter to you if I want to spend my own money on my own parents. We’re not even married yet, what fucking business it is of yours? I’m supposed to give my parents money. If I can work, why would I make my parents work too?”
Blogger from England talks about how some right-wing Americans will transfer their hatred of the left into a worship of China for some reason, including taking videos of some primary school’s daily fitness exercises as evidence of how all Chinese people receive military training from childhood like Spartans; saying that China puts explosive devices in the helmets of their soldiers; sentencing all drug dealers to death, even for marijuana; and how they invented the word baizuo and what that means.
China is very mad about Yaya, a panda in the Memphis Zoo who passed out lately and looks extremely mangy and underfed. People are calling for the panda to be returned to China. Yaya has apparently had four miscarriages in this zoo because she is being starved.
Blogger says that women would stop making excuses for men like, “Oh, he just has low EQ.” if they ever saw how well those men perform for their boss. It’s not that men don’t understand or can’t accommodate for your emotions—they just don’t care to. The top-voted comment points out that she’s also never heard of anyone getting drunk and beating their boss.
An ad-account is giving out free HPV vaccines in return for liking and subscribing.
Someone living in Yunnan wants to start selling coconuts at night markets to make more money in preparation for having kids. Relationship advice blogger ends up talking to her about business advice instead, telling her to go get a neon sign, the bigger the better, and a bunch of little lights to light up her stall. Don’t throw away the empty coconuts, use them as decorations, and get a radio and play music. This person has a brother who wants to join in, so the blogger told her to give him and his friends some coconuts and just tell them to walk around the night market drinking from their coconuts. They need to expand their merchandise to do coconut candy, coconut pudding, coconut cake. Livestream selling coconuts online. Get a couple of local ethnic minority clothes, and when people buy two coconuts, let them dress up and take photos for them for free. Let super pretty people take photos for free too, if they post the photo to their social media.
The government predicts that in the next four years, amount of babies born will fall under 7 million, as opposed to 17 million babies born in 2015. In the future, there will be much less need for schools, children’s hospitals, labour and delivery hospitals, children’s products and clothing. All the companies relying on cheap labour to function are going to run into trouble too.
Parent complaining about her primary school child’s arts and crafts homework. The curriculum expects her kid to learn how to knead dough, raise silkworms, keep bees, breed quails, and how to keep insects out of granaries.
Blogger is stressed out about her child, who is ten years old, who had just went for his checkup. Apparently, he is the size of an 8-year-old, shorter and lighter than 95% of his peers. If he doesn’t go through a growth spurt soon, the doctor recommends giving him growth hormones. She posts a picture of her son’s breakfast—it includes 2 strawberries, 4 chestnuts, half of a mandarin orange, and a quarter slice of apple.
Video of a man running across a busy street and being struck by a truck. Blogger is calling for the truck driver to be acquitted of all charges, because the man was at fault first for jaywalking. If you force the truck to pay anything at all, it’ll only encourage people to throw themselves at trucks for money.
There’s a documentary of a 6-year-old with terminal illness, and the last ten days he had with his parents. The most notable thing is that after he passes away, he gets to stay in his hospital room and bed for another 36 hours, while a Buddhist monk chants over him.
A relationship-advice blogger says that she feels the women born between 85 to 05 are gradually becoming “smarter” when it comes to relationships. This has to do with the demographics. From 1985 to 1995, that was the hardest the one-child policy was enforced. Especially if you have any kind of government employment, you would be ending your life if you had more than one child. So this is probably the generation with the largest proportion of single female children in all of Chinese history. This creates a large group of female inheritors who got to enjoy the totality of their family’s love, energy, and resources.
As these people grew up, China was exploding economics, rapidly improving in infrastructure, and just about everyone can afford a house if they worked hard, and that house rapidly skyrocketed in value.
With enough female inheritors, naturally, there was more call in society that women get an equal share of inheritance, get equal rights to education, and so on. If parents pay for their son to go to school, they should pay for their daughter to go to school too. In the 60s and 70, if you gave a third of your estate to your daughter or paid for her to go to primary school, you can brag about how much you love your daughter. But if even a third of women in society are single children who are getting 100% from their family, that is going to put pressure on non-single-children families to be fair to their daughters.
Because you only have to have maximum one child, even a lot of women who are very reluctant to have children will compromise and have one. Just grit your teeth and get through it. As a result, these women and their mothers who only have one child, have much more time and energy to devote themselves to their career. So the status of Chinese women have been raised to a never before seen height because of the one child policy. Once women had enough money to take care of themselves, they can focus on love and ideals and companionship and abstract values like that. So, as a result, women born before 1993 probably had the largest ratio of marrying down in Chinese history. Because men who put all their effort into keeping you happy and giving you high-quality companionship is probably not going to also be richer than you.
From 1996 onwards, there’s a lot less enforcement on the one child policy. With just a little bit of manoeuvring, you can have two. And with that, sexism began to rear its head too. You can ask families with more than one children, what happens if your daughter doesn’t want to get married? Well, obviously, the house and the whole estate is going towards the son, including any family business. While there’s plenty of parents who don’t mind living with their children in perpetuity, no one’s ever heard of living with your sister-in-law for the rest of your life. If you have an unmarried daughter, no one wants to introduce a wife to your son. So Chinese parents are forced to put pressure on their daughters to marry early.
But if you’re young, chances are you’re not even financially independent yet. So you end up relying on your husband for financial support. And so young women begin competing with each other to marry up, rather than competing with men for better careers. After all, how long do you have to work on your own before you can afford even a single square foot of a house?
Could you give links along with these translations/summaries? For some of these it'd be cool to see the original source.
Also, thanks for the very interesting substack!