Genuinely think this is a fantastic explaination and write up. I feel like this blog (and particularly this post) has added to my really narrow view of China and why Chinese immigrants where I live act the way the do. I imagine it is quite miserable having to sit and stow in it and think about just how horrible things are so thank you for this
I’ve studied east asian geopolitics and this is the first time someone in english has connected all of the dynamics you describe here to historical events in such a way that the Chinese mindset is not only just intellectually but also now emotionally digestible. Thank you for this.
Thank you! It really upsets me when people dismiss societal phenomenons with just a handwave of "it's culture~" like that's enough of an explanation. I find that in almost every case, if you dig down enough, there's a very sensible place that every cultural custom comes from. There's almost always a practical societal reason why a cultural custom has survived the decades, why it can be universally present in a bunch of very culturally diverse states.
It really offends me when any behaviour of any people are dismissed as just "Well, they're weird people." Like, I'm not saying that CCP isn't a deeply problematic government (oh god, it is), but a lot of times, there's an honest reason *why* they honestly think they're doing the right thing, and if we don't understand that, we'll never be able to properly confront it and figure a way out.
"And the people who had taken over weren’t political elites, weren’t necessarily well-educated, had never actually ran a country before, and they were attempting something entirely new, with no well thought-out constitution or legal code off of a predecessor that they could copy off of. "
This is something people don't understand. The same is true of SO many brutal authoritarian regimes...see Stalin, for instance. I read a book on Pol Pot, who got a little education on communism in Paris and it struck me how a little education can actually be dangerous. A little exposure to ideas, coupled with a weak foundation in larger frameworks for understanding, can set a path for massive exploitation.
I always thought that the United States benefited SO much from founders who were relatively well educated as well as the intellectual context of the time (as Enlightenment theory circulated the anglophone world).
To quote you, "it’s just a very depressing society with a lot of very depressing problems". A lot of interesting points and angles. To pick one example, I knew of Unit 731, but had only ever discussed them from the context of America's moral position, how there's a false perception that breaking the bounds of morality allows massively better research, the fact that a ban on bioweapons was what encouraged them, etc. I didn't connect the dots that of *course* China would be furious that America gave some of them pardons and stipends.
A language point I'm curious about: you write "federalist vs communist", and every other writer I've seen uses "nationalist" to refer to the non-communist side. Why the difference?
For a future note, if you ever think you have an interesting writing angle on it. One of the pieces about modern China that I really struggle to grasp, having grown up in the modern hyperpower, which is slowly descending to mere great power status, is that sense of humiliation you mention. I know it exists: practically everyone who writes about China talks about it. I just can't connect emotionally to it. It's so far from my experiences. And it seems crucial to understanding so much of the conflicts around China's rise today and in the future.
I only lived in China for the first 8 or so years of my life. I don't identify that strongly as "Chinese", and I'm still fucking furious that America would apologise to Japan for the atomic bombs but never apologise to China. During the Nanking Massacre (which happened before Pearl Harbour), it was literally America that was helping supply Japan. America is where Japan got a lot of crucial war resources like petroleum. And it's not as though Japan was trying to hide what they were doing--it was right on the front pages of their newspapers the beheading competitions. It's not as though it would've been hard for America to figure out what their goods were being used for. And no one ever even talks about America's role in this.
Huh. You know, I have no idea how the word "federalist" came to me, it just stuck in my brain as the proper name for the Guomin Dang. I guess I just remembered wrong.
Also, while I'm happy to eventually write about that period of modern Chinese history, I'm not sure it would be that helpful? If it hasn't ever happened to you, then it's very hard to empathise based on reading words about it alone.
Excellent explanation, connecting many things together into one coherent story.
But the last line here is pretty depressing: "if China ever got to the top of the world one day, so incredibly strong and prosperous that no other nation could possibly be a threat. Maybe then, they’ll feel enough of a sense of security to decide they no longer need to hold up the economy with human sacrifices?"
There's no difference from that and things will never get better — how that can country of neurotics terrified of losing control (a description also quite appropriate for America, in some ways) ever feel that sense of security?
Or perhaps it's not so complicated, and the key is simply that China is still (median) a rather poor country, and as more and more people escape from sweatshop-levels of poverty, things will get better. Not all the way, but people might be a little less desperate, and isn't desperation the problem?
I don't think this is about individual people not feeling security in their lives (although Chinese people definitely feel very little security in their lives). I think this really is about survival instinct on a national scale. China's been through so much shit because of its complacency in not industrialising, that there's a very, very strong national identity in "never forget, never let it happen again" that goes far beyond how Americans felt about 9/11, for example.
China doesn't just want to be comfortable. China feels a pressing need to be at the very top of the world, so that no one can ever come marching into its territory, take its lands, rape its people, steal its priceless artefacts, and then turn around and and scold it for all the pain it had to go through to recover from that. There is a very, very strong sentiment in China that the rest of the world is out to get them.
And yeah, it's never going to happen. America doesn't feel like literally no other nation could be a threat to it. Britain at its very peak didn't feel like it had no challenges left in the world. And a population that's been taught and brainwashed from birth to remember how they were bullied and humiliated by the world is never going to be able to see the reality that China has already got enough international leverage that people can't fuck with it easily.
It's so sad too because geopolitically recent decades may have been the best chance for peace and prosperity China will ever get. They lost no important territory, and built a nuclear deterrent. USA military was keeping piracy down and making it easy for China to get oil and trade with anyone it wanted. Cheap Russian commodities let China industrialize and employ so many people meeting its own needs and manufacturing for the world. Ascendant political factions in the West really believed that letting China into the WTO and otherwise liberalizing trade would not just be an economic win and lift millions out of poverty, but lead to a kinder human rights regime too. The chance for the happy ending you mention at the end of the article - this was it! But it passed without China recognizing it, and instead we got Xinjiang, Hong Kong, secret police abroad, wolf warrior diplomacy...
If we call it understandable for China to think and act this way, we must also see it as understandable how everyone else reacts. If nothing is ever enough, if China can never relax and stop oppressing its people and threatening everyone else, repeating its terrible history of conquering and vassalizing those it can, we then cannot blame everyone else for believing that China must be stopped so that China cannot happen again.
This is very clear, thank you. The part I don't think I grasped before is that it isn't necessarily about personal opinion, but more about an element that's widespread in the culture itself.
And it really is brainwashing, isn't it? A misguided fear based on a distorted view or reality.
The fear of people who will "come marching into its territory, take its lands, rape its people, steal its priceless artefacts, and then turn around and and scold it for all the pain it had to go through to recover from that" is understandable in a historical context, but it's hardly an accurate description of China's contemporary situation. Even far smaller and weaker nuclear powers don't have to worry about this.
Yeah, but that fear and humiliation is a fantastic tool for any totalitarian state. All of them like to make up a menacing, inhuman, nigh all-powerful enemy as a blank check in the safety versus freedom debate. "If you don't give us all of this power and let us invade all of this privacy, who's going to protect you against the wolves? You might complain about the government exploiting you--but without the government, it would just be Britain that exploits you!" And the CCP has plenty of historical context to rely on to back their claims up. That, and the firewall means that people in China have just as little clue about what every day life is like in the west, as the west knows about what every day life is like in China.
I can't count how many people I've talked to who genuinely think that Chinese people who emigrate to western countries live like second-class citizens, like it's still the 19th century or something.
Yes, it's the classic Stalinist/Maoist playbook — the stability of the authoritarian state relies on having both a powerful external enemy (in this case the Western imperialists) and insidious internal foes (the corrupt officials who just happen to be rivals too). The presence of both internal and external enemies means any state action can be justified by the presence of so many "existential" risks.
I'm really shocked by the second point, though. For instance, I'm in the SF Bay Area and most Chinese immigrants who come here to work in tech maintain close relations with people in mainland China (family, friends, etc). They naturally don't get treated like second class citizens — they are the elite, people with excellent jobs and stock options and the means to live very comfortable lives. Doesn't that kind of message get back at all?
I think people who end up working in tech would be considered upper middle class even back in China, where the rote argument of, "Well, sure, if you're wealthy, you should go to America. It's better for wealthy people there, because it's a capitalist country. But if you're just a normal, average person, then you should stay in China, because even if you go, you'll still be on the bottom of society, and it's even worse for poor people in America."
So like, yeah, I think the people directly related to immigrants in America have a more accurate idea of America, and chances are, if they can, they try to come over to America. But outside of a very tight social circle related to those people, the stories of what it's like in America never gets out. Aside from the closest of my friends in China who know what kind of person I am, it's pretty common for anything I say about life in America to be dismissed with, "Well, you just got lucky." or "You just only talking about the good parts." or even, "Are you a spy?"
It was an episode of the massive long-running Chinese CCTV show called "Legal Report" which aims to educate people about Chinese law, in addition to doing true crime stuff. I completely forget which episode it was though, and they have a massive backlog going all the way back to 2008 >.< Sorry
Very interesting but I believe that many of these problems have been created by the CCP. Someone said that China has the poorest chinese people in the world and that impressed me. Bad economic policies started in 1948 and lasted 30 years. The destruction of cultural elites and the assault on faiths and traditions left people morally unmoored. Deng's One Child policy crashed fertility and made the deficit of girls far worse.
How does the status of women in mainland China compares to Taiwan?
It's hard for me to say because I've never really lived in Taiwan. I don't know a lot of people who are Taiwanese. But I have good opinions of Taiwan just because when a billionaire cheats on his wife there and gets divorced, he actually has to pay millions in child support, instead of just 200 bucks a month.
Also, some would say that bad economic policies still exist today. >.> I'm not sure they ever stopped. They're not *as* disastrous as the Mao famines, maybe, but some of China's economic laws are also all kinds of fucked.
I also think it's not as much the assault on faith and traditions that left people morally unmoored. The government doesn't actually do much about people who are Buddhist or Daoist. My grandpa is a very devout Buddhist, goes to the temple every single day. I think what left people morally unmoored is the famines itself--it's hard to care about morality when you're starving.
To play devil's advocate, what people might have in mind when referring to China as not being overly anti-feminist might come from a few observations: 1. Lots of foreign students in western countries are women, which means clearly that there wasn't a strong setback to them being educated, at least during the one-child policy era, 2. China isn't known for an overly macho cultures, at least compared to the likes of Latin America or southern Europe -- although the lack of knowledge of the “””karaoke””” culture for sure distorts this view, and lacks strong religious prescriptions for being chaste, therefore seeing women as mostly sexually liberated, especially compared to other areas of the world outside of the western first world, 3. The legacy of communism emphasizing that women are intellectually equal to men and can attain the same roles of leadership in society. Communist societies were arguably earlier in this revolution compared to the West. Some people have this view of a "latent" sexism in western societies, which they think is absent from ideologically purer countries with a legacy of communism, which did try to enforce perfect equality on paper through broad ideological strikes -- although you do cover the actual legal situation very well and disprove this view.
Only a small minority of the most elite of China even ever get to study overseas though, so it's hardly representative of the Chinese population in general. There are a lot of charity efforts to build schools for poor regions of China, and they've found it necessary to build girls-only schools because, otherwise, the entire class is only boys. They had to offer free meals, because otherwise people would rather keep girls working in the fields than to send them to school. And they've had to start instituting a rule where meals have to be finished at school, because otherwise, parents would force their girls to not eat at school so they can save the food for their brother.
China, I feel like, is a super macho culture. I know a lot of married couples in China. I think one man out of at least 50, 60 examples in my life has ever changed a single diaper. And China has a much stronger...virgin complex than western society actually. Having previously lived with a boyfriend at all lowers your chances in the dating market going forward, even if you were entirely chaste. A much larger percentage of women are strictly no sex before marriage--not because of any religious regions, but just out of practical concern. Abortions are believed to lower your chances of getting pregnant in the future, although um, I don't actually know if this is true, or if this is just like Chinese medical superstition.
I've once gotten into an argument on the internet because I'm a big support of IUDs. It's a great form of birth control for people with ADD like me, because I never have to remember pills or appointments. People ask, "Why not just have your husband get a vasectomy?" And I was like, "?? But what if you want to have sex with people you're not married to? You can't make every one night stand get a vasectomy. You can't even make a boyfriend get a vasectomy most of the time." And then I literally got scores of messages shocked and horrified and basically assuming that I was a professional sex worker?
Thank you. I find myself wanting to read more about this topic since I didn't know, what posts on your substack (or outside sources) would you recommend?
Um. I actually don't know a lot of English sources for this. It kind of stresses me out writing this. I definitely don't go about reading about this for fun.
Honestly, in my experience, there is an absolute dearth of western sources on what life is actually like in China. That's partially why I started this blog to begin with--because I'm tired of explaining to each and every one of my friends over and over again why their common misconceptions of China is laughably wrong.
I'm honestly not sure what to recommend. Um. Try making some Chinese friends???
Genuinely think this is a fantastic explaination and write up. I feel like this blog (and particularly this post) has added to my really narrow view of China and why Chinese immigrants where I live act the way the do. I imagine it is quite miserable having to sit and stow in it and think about just how horrible things are so thank you for this
I’ve studied east asian geopolitics and this is the first time someone in english has connected all of the dynamics you describe here to historical events in such a way that the Chinese mindset is not only just intellectually but also now emotionally digestible. Thank you for this.
Thank you! It really upsets me when people dismiss societal phenomenons with just a handwave of "it's culture~" like that's enough of an explanation. I find that in almost every case, if you dig down enough, there's a very sensible place that every cultural custom comes from. There's almost always a practical societal reason why a cultural custom has survived the decades, why it can be universally present in a bunch of very culturally diverse states.
It really offends me when any behaviour of any people are dismissed as just "Well, they're weird people." Like, I'm not saying that CCP isn't a deeply problematic government (oh god, it is), but a lot of times, there's an honest reason *why* they honestly think they're doing the right thing, and if we don't understand that, we'll never be able to properly confront it and figure a way out.
"And the people who had taken over weren’t political elites, weren’t necessarily well-educated, had never actually ran a country before, and they were attempting something entirely new, with no well thought-out constitution or legal code off of a predecessor that they could copy off of. "
This is something people don't understand. The same is true of SO many brutal authoritarian regimes...see Stalin, for instance. I read a book on Pol Pot, who got a little education on communism in Paris and it struck me how a little education can actually be dangerous. A little exposure to ideas, coupled with a weak foundation in larger frameworks for understanding, can set a path for massive exploitation.
I always thought that the United States benefited SO much from founders who were relatively well educated as well as the intellectual context of the time (as Enlightenment theory circulated the anglophone world).
To quote you, "it’s just a very depressing society with a lot of very depressing problems". A lot of interesting points and angles. To pick one example, I knew of Unit 731, but had only ever discussed them from the context of America's moral position, how there's a false perception that breaking the bounds of morality allows massively better research, the fact that a ban on bioweapons was what encouraged them, etc. I didn't connect the dots that of *course* China would be furious that America gave some of them pardons and stipends.
A language point I'm curious about: you write "federalist vs communist", and every other writer I've seen uses "nationalist" to refer to the non-communist side. Why the difference?
For a future note, if you ever think you have an interesting writing angle on it. One of the pieces about modern China that I really struggle to grasp, having grown up in the modern hyperpower, which is slowly descending to mere great power status, is that sense of humiliation you mention. I know it exists: practically everyone who writes about China talks about it. I just can't connect emotionally to it. It's so far from my experiences. And it seems crucial to understanding so much of the conflicts around China's rise today and in the future.
I only lived in China for the first 8 or so years of my life. I don't identify that strongly as "Chinese", and I'm still fucking furious that America would apologise to Japan for the atomic bombs but never apologise to China. During the Nanking Massacre (which happened before Pearl Harbour), it was literally America that was helping supply Japan. America is where Japan got a lot of crucial war resources like petroleum. And it's not as though Japan was trying to hide what they were doing--it was right on the front pages of their newspapers the beheading competitions. It's not as though it would've been hard for America to figure out what their goods were being used for. And no one ever even talks about America's role in this.
Huh. You know, I have no idea how the word "federalist" came to me, it just stuck in my brain as the proper name for the Guomin Dang. I guess I just remembered wrong.
Also, while I'm happy to eventually write about that period of modern Chinese history, I'm not sure it would be that helpful? If it hasn't ever happened to you, then it's very hard to empathise based on reading words about it alone.
Excellent explanation, connecting many things together into one coherent story.
But the last line here is pretty depressing: "if China ever got to the top of the world one day, so incredibly strong and prosperous that no other nation could possibly be a threat. Maybe then, they’ll feel enough of a sense of security to decide they no longer need to hold up the economy with human sacrifices?"
There's no difference from that and things will never get better — how that can country of neurotics terrified of losing control (a description also quite appropriate for America, in some ways) ever feel that sense of security?
Or perhaps it's not so complicated, and the key is simply that China is still (median) a rather poor country, and as more and more people escape from sweatshop-levels of poverty, things will get better. Not all the way, but people might be a little less desperate, and isn't desperation the problem?
I don't think this is about individual people not feeling security in their lives (although Chinese people definitely feel very little security in their lives). I think this really is about survival instinct on a national scale. China's been through so much shit because of its complacency in not industrialising, that there's a very, very strong national identity in "never forget, never let it happen again" that goes far beyond how Americans felt about 9/11, for example.
China doesn't just want to be comfortable. China feels a pressing need to be at the very top of the world, so that no one can ever come marching into its territory, take its lands, rape its people, steal its priceless artefacts, and then turn around and and scold it for all the pain it had to go through to recover from that. There is a very, very strong sentiment in China that the rest of the world is out to get them.
And yeah, it's never going to happen. America doesn't feel like literally no other nation could be a threat to it. Britain at its very peak didn't feel like it had no challenges left in the world. And a population that's been taught and brainwashed from birth to remember how they were bullied and humiliated by the world is never going to be able to see the reality that China has already got enough international leverage that people can't fuck with it easily.
It's so sad too because geopolitically recent decades may have been the best chance for peace and prosperity China will ever get. They lost no important territory, and built a nuclear deterrent. USA military was keeping piracy down and making it easy for China to get oil and trade with anyone it wanted. Cheap Russian commodities let China industrialize and employ so many people meeting its own needs and manufacturing for the world. Ascendant political factions in the West really believed that letting China into the WTO and otherwise liberalizing trade would not just be an economic win and lift millions out of poverty, but lead to a kinder human rights regime too. The chance for the happy ending you mention at the end of the article - this was it! But it passed without China recognizing it, and instead we got Xinjiang, Hong Kong, secret police abroad, wolf warrior diplomacy...
If we call it understandable for China to think and act this way, we must also see it as understandable how everyone else reacts. If nothing is ever enough, if China can never relax and stop oppressing its people and threatening everyone else, repeating its terrible history of conquering and vassalizing those it can, we then cannot blame everyone else for believing that China must be stopped so that China cannot happen again.
This is very clear, thank you. The part I don't think I grasped before is that it isn't necessarily about personal opinion, but more about an element that's widespread in the culture itself.
And it really is brainwashing, isn't it? A misguided fear based on a distorted view or reality.
The fear of people who will "come marching into its territory, take its lands, rape its people, steal its priceless artefacts, and then turn around and and scold it for all the pain it had to go through to recover from that" is understandable in a historical context, but it's hardly an accurate description of China's contemporary situation. Even far smaller and weaker nuclear powers don't have to worry about this.
Yeah, but that fear and humiliation is a fantastic tool for any totalitarian state. All of them like to make up a menacing, inhuman, nigh all-powerful enemy as a blank check in the safety versus freedom debate. "If you don't give us all of this power and let us invade all of this privacy, who's going to protect you against the wolves? You might complain about the government exploiting you--but without the government, it would just be Britain that exploits you!" And the CCP has plenty of historical context to rely on to back their claims up. That, and the firewall means that people in China have just as little clue about what every day life is like in the west, as the west knows about what every day life is like in China.
I can't count how many people I've talked to who genuinely think that Chinese people who emigrate to western countries live like second-class citizens, like it's still the 19th century or something.
Yes, it's the classic Stalinist/Maoist playbook — the stability of the authoritarian state relies on having both a powerful external enemy (in this case the Western imperialists) and insidious internal foes (the corrupt officials who just happen to be rivals too). The presence of both internal and external enemies means any state action can be justified by the presence of so many "existential" risks.
I'm really shocked by the second point, though. For instance, I'm in the SF Bay Area and most Chinese immigrants who come here to work in tech maintain close relations with people in mainland China (family, friends, etc). They naturally don't get treated like second class citizens — they are the elite, people with excellent jobs and stock options and the means to live very comfortable lives. Doesn't that kind of message get back at all?
I think people who end up working in tech would be considered upper middle class even back in China, where the rote argument of, "Well, sure, if you're wealthy, you should go to America. It's better for wealthy people there, because it's a capitalist country. But if you're just a normal, average person, then you should stay in China, because even if you go, you'll still be on the bottom of society, and it's even worse for poor people in America."
So like, yeah, I think the people directly related to immigrants in America have a more accurate idea of America, and chances are, if they can, they try to come over to America. But outside of a very tight social circle related to those people, the stories of what it's like in America never gets out. Aside from the closest of my friends in China who know what kind of person I am, it's pretty common for anything I say about life in America to be dismissed with, "Well, you just got lucky." or "You just only talking about the good parts." or even, "Are you a spy?"
This is minor, but do you know when that acid dumping case occurred, or have any sources? I'm curious to learn more about it
It was an episode of the massive long-running Chinese CCTV show called "Legal Report" which aims to educate people about Chinese law, in addition to doing true crime stuff. I completely forget which episode it was though, and they have a massive backlog going all the way back to 2008 >.< Sorry
Very interesting but I believe that many of these problems have been created by the CCP. Someone said that China has the poorest chinese people in the world and that impressed me. Bad economic policies started in 1948 and lasted 30 years. The destruction of cultural elites and the assault on faiths and traditions left people morally unmoored. Deng's One Child policy crashed fertility and made the deficit of girls far worse.
How does the status of women in mainland China compares to Taiwan?
It's hard for me to say because I've never really lived in Taiwan. I don't know a lot of people who are Taiwanese. But I have good opinions of Taiwan just because when a billionaire cheats on his wife there and gets divorced, he actually has to pay millions in child support, instead of just 200 bucks a month.
Also, some would say that bad economic policies still exist today. >.> I'm not sure they ever stopped. They're not *as* disastrous as the Mao famines, maybe, but some of China's economic laws are also all kinds of fucked.
I also think it's not as much the assault on faith and traditions that left people morally unmoored. The government doesn't actually do much about people who are Buddhist or Daoist. My grandpa is a very devout Buddhist, goes to the temple every single day. I think what left people morally unmoored is the famines itself--it's hard to care about morality when you're starving.
Fascinating stuff as always.
To play devil's advocate, what people might have in mind when referring to China as not being overly anti-feminist might come from a few observations: 1. Lots of foreign students in western countries are women, which means clearly that there wasn't a strong setback to them being educated, at least during the one-child policy era, 2. China isn't known for an overly macho cultures, at least compared to the likes of Latin America or southern Europe -- although the lack of knowledge of the “””karaoke””” culture for sure distorts this view, and lacks strong religious prescriptions for being chaste, therefore seeing women as mostly sexually liberated, especially compared to other areas of the world outside of the western first world, 3. The legacy of communism emphasizing that women are intellectually equal to men and can attain the same roles of leadership in society. Communist societies were arguably earlier in this revolution compared to the West. Some people have this view of a "latent" sexism in western societies, which they think is absent from ideologically purer countries with a legacy of communism, which did try to enforce perfect equality on paper through broad ideological strikes -- although you do cover the actual legal situation very well and disprove this view.
Only a small minority of the most elite of China even ever get to study overseas though, so it's hardly representative of the Chinese population in general. There are a lot of charity efforts to build schools for poor regions of China, and they've found it necessary to build girls-only schools because, otherwise, the entire class is only boys. They had to offer free meals, because otherwise people would rather keep girls working in the fields than to send them to school. And they've had to start instituting a rule where meals have to be finished at school, because otherwise, parents would force their girls to not eat at school so they can save the food for their brother.
China, I feel like, is a super macho culture. I know a lot of married couples in China. I think one man out of at least 50, 60 examples in my life has ever changed a single diaper. And China has a much stronger...virgin complex than western society actually. Having previously lived with a boyfriend at all lowers your chances in the dating market going forward, even if you were entirely chaste. A much larger percentage of women are strictly no sex before marriage--not because of any religious regions, but just out of practical concern. Abortions are believed to lower your chances of getting pregnant in the future, although um, I don't actually know if this is true, or if this is just like Chinese medical superstition.
I've once gotten into an argument on the internet because I'm a big support of IUDs. It's a great form of birth control for people with ADD like me, because I never have to remember pills or appointments. People ask, "Why not just have your husband get a vasectomy?" And I was like, "?? But what if you want to have sex with people you're not married to? You can't make every one night stand get a vasectomy. You can't even make a boyfriend get a vasectomy most of the time." And then I literally got scores of messages shocked and horrified and basically assuming that I was a professional sex worker?
Thank you. I find myself wanting to read more about this topic since I didn't know, what posts on your substack (or outside sources) would you recommend?
Um. I actually don't know a lot of English sources for this. It kind of stresses me out writing this. I definitely don't go about reading about this for fun.
Honestly, in my experience, there is an absolute dearth of western sources on what life is actually like in China. That's partially why I started this blog to begin with--because I'm tired of explaining to each and every one of my friends over and over again why their common misconceptions of China is laughably wrong.
I'm honestly not sure what to recommend. Um. Try making some Chinese friends???