You subscribe to the thesis that China's future is grim compared to it's present state? Or that it is a dystopia of epic proportions right now? If you care to elaborate, I am interested in your perspective.
It’s in the process of materialising, the conditions are already set. Firstly, China’s "rise" came from cheap labour and the destruction of the environment. Labour is not so cheap anymore, and the environment is all but destroyed. But that’s okay, China’s already rich, right? Problem is the people are still poor, and much of the money already left the country. China’s GDP (PPP) per capita is less than that of Iraq, but the media and hence the masses are too fixated on national GDP to even notice (as times get tougher, this will change). Now that manufacturing is on the way out, where’s the money going to come from? The people still haven’t woken up but the party certainly has. They know there’s a ticking time-bomb of social unrest. Time to bring back Confucian ideology to maintain social order, and find an appropriate scapegoat for all the problems; western values (which they never even clearly defined). Enter the State Administration of Film, Radio and Television (广电总局) to ensure that all media, including movies and TV series, push this agenda, and the Social Credit System (社会信用体系) to ensure that your level of success in life is determined by how closely you follow the party line. People will not even dare joke about the party, let alone criticize it; too easy to get caught and too much to lose. Power will go unchecked at unprecedented levels and be enforced by technology. I could write a lot more, but these are just some of the reasons I think China's future is grim. I have lived in China for a few years and I've been seeing these changes happen before my eyes.
Disagree. Been here 15 years, on and off. Current-era China is innovative, dynamic, real, and above all pragmatic. Politics are basically ignored and irrelevant to most people. China's future is bright, people here are one generation from poverty and can get by simply when necessary. No water? No power? No gasoline? No communications? No problem. People will get by, without grumbling too much, even in the cities. I've seen it with my own eyes. At a time when America and the EU both have little to say for themselves, belittling China's future is rather hypocritical. Remember, China was a self-sufficient economy less than a handful of decades ago, is massively investing in renewable energy and leads the world in things like electric vehicle adoption and mobile payment. Of course, it aint all sunshine, but its pretty warm regardless. (I'm based in Kunming)
China is just like Britain during industrialization, just multiple times larger scale and everything is happening faster. People often wonder why people move to cities to work in horrible conditions. They prefer city dystopia and constant calories to hunger.
Real dystopia is happening in the Sahel Belt in Africa and Indian countryside and slums. Unhindered population growth just increases people who face food insecurity in these places.
I think the "crazy" aspect coming into play is an iteration of the world-shattering view that occurs when a child realizes his or her parents are just people, not infallible perfect protectors. This fundamentally changes the view of the world for a person because a fundamental truth is no longer true. This change can be viewed as "crazy" and reality becomes more chaotic in the new world view.
I believe the same thing is happening right now in modern China. Simply substitute constituents and the oligarchy instead for the child and parent. When the citizens realize the infallible groupthink propaganda touted by the ruling class is in fact being touted by people inflicted with the human condition, they also experience a change in world view. Again, this change is "crazy" and more chaotic: A fundamental truth in their world view is no longer true.
Remember, China favored building a society on Confucianism where society had a set order. There is no room for the chaos in a Confucian society. However, the less-promoted Dao De Jing was written in an attempt to perfectly capture the chaos, contradictions, and hypocrisies of reality. And in a way, applying its teachings to itself indicates it both succeeds and fails in doing so.
The "ultra-unrealism" that the author keeps espousing seems to me a reaction for coming to grips to the mind-expanding change that comes when realizing a truth previously fundamental is no longer true. I am not trying to dismiss their feelings but am appreciating the personal growth. I hope others do too.
>I believe the same thing is happening right now in modern China. Simply substitute constituents and the oligarchy instead for the child and parent.
Only ordinary Chinese citizens are not childlike and easily led at all (that's an early colonial misunderstanding) -- they are just as smart and street-wise as we are, and understand all the gritty details -- they always did.
Thanks for pointing this out. It was not my intention to portray Chinese citizens as childlike. I simply meant to use the loss of childhood innocence as an example of how world views can be changed at a fundamental level. That kind of change can occur at any stage of life for anyone; childhood innocence tends to be the most relatable as an example across cultures.
Another example was given to me by a coworker: after Fukushima, she realized that her employer ultimately did not care about her safety in a regional-paralyzing event. That shattered her world view about how she would be viewed as an object, not a person, by employers. This was despite all the women-in-tech, no-glass-ceiling, etc rhetoric. She vowed to take a new job where she would consider only employers that had demonstrated an active commitment to their employee's safety. It changed her world view about PR pieces put out by companies, especially with regards to diversity.
Edit: To conclude, I personally believe there is an opportunity for personal growth about learning a healthy distrust in what government or politically-active people have to say in any country, including the USA, for everyone. Including myself. I truly did not mean to single out the Chinese in a degrading manner.
I firsthand observed the fall of communist regime in my country (1989). A lot of ordinary citizens (some of them with great education and so on) were very childlike when interacting with the non communist world and the new rules. There was naivete in the population that was exploited and cashed to the fullest. Ponzi schemes, predatory advertising, cults, quacks ...
When the rules of the game change drastically - we are all children until we figure out the new ones.
I appreciate that you are reasoning well from the basis of your understanding of China, and you have arrived at a good explanatory story that works well within a sort of Jungian "collective unconscious" theory of society and culture.
However, I think that it is too broad in its generalizations to be viable, and it does not pay enough attention to the actual historical context of circumstances in China.
Thanks, and I admit my understanding is pretty general having spent very little time with people currently living in modern China. Could you or others correct me? I would appreciate pointers, insights, or refinements.
I agree the craziness of China's society today is because people are lost in a unfamiliar era. The old life style where family and village are at the absolute center is gone, but the new structure with comprehensive and strictly enforced law and modern civic code are not in place. People are dumbfounded. Imagine if Europeans were teleported from 600 AD to 1800 AD, bypassing all those Renaissance/Enlightenment years.
In China's history the oligarchy/government/emperors were always been regarded as the oppressor, the enemy, the bad guy, by ordinary Chinese. They got power through violence or family line. So people didn't care much, other than paying the painfully exorbitant taxes. For people it's the village leaders/families that actually had intimate ties with them. I think perhaps a better analogy for the world-shattering change facing by today's China might be an isolated tribe being suddenly exposed to modern capitalism/commerce/ideas of freedom/etc., and felt lost, and is searching for ways to go forward, while there are no applicable lessons either from its own history or the hugely different western countries. It's truly remarkable.
> When the citizens realize the infallible groupthink propaganda touted by the ruling class is in fact being touted by people inflicted with the human condition, they also experience a change in world view.
As someone who has grown up in and is Chinese, I very much disagree with this sentiment, especially in modern day. There has always been a discordant and uncomfortable relationship with authority in Chinese culture- we are polite to put on airs to our authorities but we also secretly hate them in some respects. We understand they are human, like us, but for the sake of society rule airs are put on to keep them. It has always been understood that authority and corruption are tightly bound, perhaps even more understood than in America.
The young see all the holes the government has and both desires to being justice and also acutely feel the burdens of society's structure on them, but to upend society has an almost horrific cultural connotation, a cultural catastophe referred to only as "that critical time" or "those difficult times". In this triangulation we have also the need for simple food, water, love, shelter, peace. The modern world and the ancient world are so intertwined in China, that going of the cities is like a form of time travel. The difference between my mother's home village and the city less than 1 hour away by train is the entire industrial revolution.
Much of modern China is also influences from "the critical time" on the modern history. China still has not recovered, culturally, emotionally. It might never will, not in any real way. People have been producing this kind of literature since that time. The most accurate thing in the article is when the article notes that China might "always" have been like this.
Yes, China has always been like this in its own way. China has had these methods of storytelling for a long, long time. Now the new generation of writers is applying this methods to modern problems and modern society in its complex, cage-like structure that everyone is aware of in their bones.
I disagree with the assessment that this is "crazy" or "coming to grips with a fundamental truth is no longer true". It is a rational consequence of applying ancient storytelling methods to a complex triangulation of the new generation's situation, where we are all aware that the government is a corrupt and easily-swayed monster, but social upheaval is horrifically dangerous monster in its own right. It is a problem with no certain solution, so we write.
Thanks for sharing. I really enjoyed reading your perspective. Online forums can sometimes oversimplify complex, deeply-rooted problems if the solution appears easy from the outside looking in.
> but to upend society has an almost horrific cultural connotation, a cultural catastophe referred to only as "that critical time" or "those difficult times"
In historical context the Chinese have every right to be weary. Between WW2 and the "Great Leap Forward" over fifty million have died due to famine and warfare, either inflicted by international forces or the ruling class.
Yeah the Opium wars, where Britain arguably got a whole nation addicted to Opium in order to secure better trading conditions for the East India Company.
Well, Confucianism is as much about choosing the benevolent and harmonious path as it is with relationships and order.
You can't really talk about a Chinese society and only bring up Confucianism as it is also a mix of Daoism and Buddhism - all three of which are at odds with each other.
I would think Daosim and its ideas of the needs and rights of "self" would be closer linked to official corruption than that of Confucianism.
The author's examples of so-called ultra-unreal are not so new. Like there were no corrupt courtesans in olden days?
Re: The Internet: It doesn't necessitate a new genre anymore than the invention of the telephone did. Good literature incorporates technology just where it's needed to move the plot along and it's all just window dressing over the basic proverbs and parables at the core.
So, some corrupt officials, a polygamist, a wanted official seeking asylum in a foreign consulate, and restaurants reusing cooking oil too much is an example of "unreality"?
Where exactly did the author grew up in? Cushioned upper class life, or Disneyland?
And those examples in a country with over a billion people? You can find all those examples in Africa, Asia, South America, etc.
A lot of those are hardly uncommon in the West either, just in more "white collar" versions. Restaurants re-using cooking-oil? Tons of restaurant are closed every year for just that and worse hygienic offenses. Or we have some company like VW falsifying emissions data (and lately, it comes out that several other companies did), impacting the environment in a huge scale.
Corrupt politicians? We have Presidents and PMs, senators and MPs openly retiring and joining the boards of companies they helped during their political career.
Heck, in Mexico the mob abducted 140+ students, executed them all together, and for the country it was business as usual for the country.
You're doing no better by trivializing the author's purview. He doesn't live anywhere else you mentioned, he lives in China and in Tibet before that. That is the world he inhabits and that his writing reflects.
Not to mention that problems are relative; you think an American balking at finding out their favorite restaurant was closed because of hygiene issues doesn't feel something comparable to a Chinese person who finds out their favorite street vendor used gutter oil? [0]
Also in all of those Western examples you gave, China was much worse off. How can you say that China's situation isn't bad with a straight face? This is a country where the smug is so bad you can't see a few feet ahead of you. Where people who criticize the government can be made to disappear. Where the internet goes through a firewall [1] and is closed off from the rest of the world. [2] Sure, there are many countries worst off, but that doesn't mean we can completely overlook issues with our own countries.
> Not to mention that problems are relative; you think an American balking at finding out their favorite restaurant was closed because of hygiene issues doesn't feel something comparable to a Chinese person who finds out their favorite street vendor used gutter oil?
I don't think it's unreasonable to have a strong reaction in either case. But I do agree with the parent commenter that believing this to be unprecedented and "beyond unreal" shows a level of ignorance or naivety that is more remarkable than the event itself.
>You're doing no better by trivializing the author's purview. He doesn't live anywhere else you mentioned, he lives in China and in Tibet before that.
There are billions of people, including highly successful or educated people, living in a place X all of their lives, while still not understanding it. Do, for example, Trump supporters really understand their country?
>you think an American balking at finding out their favorite restaurant was closed because of hygiene issues doesn't feel something comparable to a Chinese person who finds out their favorite street vendor used gutter oil?
They wouldn't call the whole country "unreal" for that.
>Also in all of those Western examples you gave, China was much worse off. How can you say that China's situation isn't bad with a straight face? This is a country where the smug is so bad you can't see a few feet ahead of you.
Well, there are industrial cities in Europe where it used to be like that. Or the horrible smog in LA in the 70s-80s. And China has been the "factory" of the world for 2 decades, so we've basically outsourced our smog there.
>Where people who criticize the government can be made to disappear.
That has been business as usual in places ranging from Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain to Mexico for most of the 20th century (and still in the 21st). Not to mention most of Latin America, and often with you know who's support.
>Where the internet goes through a firewall and is closed off from the rest of the world.
Well, if the US was in their place, ie no longer top dog, with another country owning most of the internet's infrastructure and flagship services, and openly meddling in their regional affairs, plus stuffing its culture and political views all over the world, they'd do something like to to. Like they did during McCarthy, where certain tendencies had to be eradicated from mass media, cinema, etc.
You do realize that the death of Mao, the cleansing of th Gang of Four, and the end of the Cultural Revolution was only 40 years ago? A significant fraction of people there survived the Great Leap Forward and now live in a weirdly capitalistic country. Couple that with the difference between rural and urban China, and I expect you might want to forgive the author abit of dislocation.
>You do realize that the death of Mao, the cleansing of the Gang of Four, and the end of the Cultural Revolution was only 40 years ago? A significant fraction of people there survived the Great Leap Forward and now live in a weirdly capitalistic country.
I do realize that -- in fact it's not that different from what's been going on elsewhere, e.g. where I live. A lot of European countries had a similar story (WWII was 70 years ago, fascist regimes/Juntas in Grece, Portugal and Spain ended like 40 years ago or less, the Eastern bloc collapsed 26 years ago. Romanians that are 40 year old now grew up with Ceausescu and several whole countries didn't exist but as part of Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia.
The didn't jump (no pun intended) from the Great Leap Forward into a weirdly capitalistic country overnight -- this has been going on since the 80s. The author himself was 17 years old when the cultural revolution ended -- he spent most of his life in the transition, not in that era.
Plus all of his "unreal" examples (from restaurants re-using cooking oil, to corrupt higher-ups, to the polygamist official, etc could have happened just as well in 1970 or in 1850 China -- or anywhere else for that matter).
He might have a point -- but not based on his examples. They sound more like a lack of experience with similar things going on in most countries ("it can only happen here") than genuine unreal-ness.
A clearer example of the sort of unreality that the author is trying to describe to you would be the Wenzhou train derailment in 2011. [1]
Faced with a crisis that was guaranteed to attract national attention, local officials reacted by attempting to quickly bury the derailed cars on the spot, to the sheer incredulity of absolutely everyone else in China.
This is not easily dismissed as a mere example of corruption, or cruelty, or societal failure; rather, it appeared more like a desperate innovation, an attempt to mitigate political damage that revealed serious disconnects between the worldview of the local administration and those of both the general populace and the national administration.
It was particularly curious and apt in that this was a national crisis about a great source of national pride, wherein perennial worries of Chinese governance were brought to the fore.
That's just anothet point to a short list. Sure, the list is longer, but the problem that the train derailed to begin with, that happens here, in europe, as well.
>They don't try to cover up train accidents, though. Nobody would even have this idea, I mean what the?
They didn't try to cover up the train accident in China either. The accident was a major news event for days, there was big rescue missions, etc. They also did an investigation on the causes, down to the design, creation and operation of the trains and lines: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/world/asia/design-flaws-ci...
What they also did, which was hasty, and people called them on it, was trying to bury the broken carriages afterwards -- not to somehow hide that the accident happened (that was major news everywhere anyway), but as a clumsy "move on, nothing to see here" gesture.
> And those examples in a country with over a billion people? You can find all those examples in Africa, Asia, South America, etc.
And North America. And Europe.
> Corrupt politicians? We have Presidents and PMs, senators and MPs openly retiring and joining the boards of companies they helped during their political career.
You can't really call it corruption because it's just the system working as designed.
Big business and Big government are intertwined and interdependent. State governments protect and isolate corporations from competition domestically and they use state power to protect 'national interests' internationally. In exchange for this politicians and high level bureaucrats get their cut.
This is something that the state is designed specifically to do. Economic exploitation is the purpose of having centralized government.
People used to be much more honest and aware of this sort of thing. During the era of president Wilson it was common to talk about how it was important for USA to eliminate 'wasteful competition' by consolidating businesses into national-sized entities that could more effectively represent USA interests internationally. It was felt that is USA was allowed to remain a hodge-podge of small to medium competing businesses that it would not be able to compete internationally with other nations.
Nowadays it's a common belief that centralized democratic government is needed to counter the negative effects of corporate avarice instead of realizing that state government is necessary for these 'large corporations' to exist in the first place.
Whether or not this is bad is a matter of perspective.
I think you're ignoring the difference in scale between corruption we see and hear about in most of the developed world, and the rampant corruption we see in China. And China is currently exceptional, in that it is neither truly developed, nor developing (as in most "third world" countries where you could see that amount of immense corruption), but its own mix of hyper-developed and third world.
>I think you're ignoring the difference in scale between corruption we see and hear about in most of the developed world, and the rampant corruption we see in China.
I'll take any major difference in scale with several grains of salt, as I believe the developed world is just more sophisticated in hiding that corruption.
>but its own mix of hyper-developed and third world.
So like New York and Mississippi? Or California and South Dakota?
> So, some corrupt officials, a polygamist, a wanted official seeking asylum in a foreign consulate, and restaurants reusing cooking oil too much is an example of "unreality"?...
Your blasé phrasing strips away all the context. If Donald Trump was to be outed as a practising Muslim today, it would be unreal (to me a least), but one could equally say: "bah, hypocrite politicians are everywhere" - it still wouldn't make it any less "unreal", in context.
> Corrupt politicians? We have Presidents and PMs, senators and MPs openly retiring and joining the boards of companies they helped during their political career.
None of your corrupt politicians have been discovered with $31 million of cold, hard cash stashed at their lake houses. Seeing a fork-lift hauling 300kg of $100 notes on live TV would be 'unreal'. What's unreal is not the corruption, per se, but the context around it.
I only skimmed the article since reading familiar @#$% in Chinese context in another language made me feel sick. I think this guy is just like many other Chinese that want to make a claim on a global stage with little awareness of what the reality on that stage might be. They often coin a concept for China and claim its uniqueness and somewhat advancement. People are easy to make that kind of claim when all they can see are just raw observations, especially when they think they know what they observed.
From what I can guess, he is from the inside of the system "体制内". So most likely, someone in the system needs to do some more "theoretical" work to prove/claim the advancement of "us" (Chinese). That's it. Don't worry about what it actually delivers, it is way less related than we think. The only difference nowadays is that we can make those propaganda seen by westerners. Even on HN.
Whilst I'm sure China has some 'ultra-unreal' situations, I don't think anything it can produce will top this one... 62 people have the same level of wealth as half the world's population. If you're talking ultra-unreal, nothing else is likely to come close to global inequality.
I don't know about 'new'. I read Dos Passos's _U.S.A._ trilogy many years ago, and what I kept thinking in reading articles and essays about China's modernization over the past decades is, 'it's just like in Dos Passos!' Especially when you read about some Chinese businessman who has founded a dozen businesses none of which have anything to do with each other after starting as a beggar or something, I kept finding it an echo of the people in Passos. China is really in a similar stage as the USA was in the Gilded Age, right down to the muckrakers in Hong Kong and private security agencies.
Sorry but I really don't think "chaohuan" is a Chinese word. I don't like the author's writing style, use measures instead of the content to gain readers interest. Also I agree with some fact in the article, but it overemphasizes the bad side and neglect the good side. I agree the "Good fortune is that wherein disaster lurks", but I don't think we should stop progressing because of the afraid of the disters. There is also another Chinese saying "Righting a wrong must first Overcorrect", although it's saying overcorrect but I think it's saying all the cost of doing right. And the bad side can be seen by the public is because the Chinese government is doing something to deal with the bad things.
And HN prefer to write a bad China, but as a Chinese citizen I think my life is becoming better and richer instead of worse. And mood and bias both have huge impact to make us misunderstanding the world.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadAlso... this has been going on in the US for decades.. and if you think China is ultra-unreal, AVOID Japan.
What city were you in, out of curiosity?
Real dystopia is happening in the Sahel Belt in Africa and Indian countryside and slums. Unhindered population growth just increases people who face food insecurity in these places.
I believe the same thing is happening right now in modern China. Simply substitute constituents and the oligarchy instead for the child and parent. When the citizens realize the infallible groupthink propaganda touted by the ruling class is in fact being touted by people inflicted with the human condition, they also experience a change in world view. Again, this change is "crazy" and more chaotic: A fundamental truth in their world view is no longer true.
Remember, China favored building a society on Confucianism where society had a set order. There is no room for the chaos in a Confucian society. However, the less-promoted Dao De Jing was written in an attempt to perfectly capture the chaos, contradictions, and hypocrisies of reality. And in a way, applying its teachings to itself indicates it both succeeds and fails in doing so.
The "ultra-unrealism" that the author keeps espousing seems to me a reaction for coming to grips to the mind-expanding change that comes when realizing a truth previously fundamental is no longer true. I am not trying to dismiss their feelings but am appreciating the personal growth. I hope others do too.
Only ordinary Chinese citizens are not childlike and easily led at all (that's an early colonial misunderstanding) -- they are just as smart and street-wise as we are, and understand all the gritty details -- they always did.
Another example was given to me by a coworker: after Fukushima, she realized that her employer ultimately did not care about her safety in a regional-paralyzing event. That shattered her world view about how she would be viewed as an object, not a person, by employers. This was despite all the women-in-tech, no-glass-ceiling, etc rhetoric. She vowed to take a new job where she would consider only employers that had demonstrated an active commitment to their employee's safety. It changed her world view about PR pieces put out by companies, especially with regards to diversity.
Edit: To conclude, I personally believe there is an opportunity for personal growth about learning a healthy distrust in what government or politically-active people have to say in any country, including the USA, for everyone. Including myself. I truly did not mean to single out the Chinese in a degrading manner.
When the rules of the game change drastically - we are all children until we figure out the new ones.
However, I think that it is too broad in its generalizations to be viable, and it does not pay enough attention to the actual historical context of circumstances in China.
In China's history the oligarchy/government/emperors were always been regarded as the oppressor, the enemy, the bad guy, by ordinary Chinese. They got power through violence or family line. So people didn't care much, other than paying the painfully exorbitant taxes. For people it's the village leaders/families that actually had intimate ties with them. I think perhaps a better analogy for the world-shattering change facing by today's China might be an isolated tribe being suddenly exposed to modern capitalism/commerce/ideas of freedom/etc., and felt lost, and is searching for ways to go forward, while there are no applicable lessons either from its own history or the hugely different western countries. It's truly remarkable.
As someone who has grown up in and is Chinese, I very much disagree with this sentiment, especially in modern day. There has always been a discordant and uncomfortable relationship with authority in Chinese culture- we are polite to put on airs to our authorities but we also secretly hate them in some respects. We understand they are human, like us, but for the sake of society rule airs are put on to keep them. It has always been understood that authority and corruption are tightly bound, perhaps even more understood than in America.
The young see all the holes the government has and both desires to being justice and also acutely feel the burdens of society's structure on them, but to upend society has an almost horrific cultural connotation, a cultural catastophe referred to only as "that critical time" or "those difficult times". In this triangulation we have also the need for simple food, water, love, shelter, peace. The modern world and the ancient world are so intertwined in China, that going of the cities is like a form of time travel. The difference between my mother's home village and the city less than 1 hour away by train is the entire industrial revolution.
Much of modern China is also influences from "the critical time" on the modern history. China still has not recovered, culturally, emotionally. It might never will, not in any real way. People have been producing this kind of literature since that time. The most accurate thing in the article is when the article notes that China might "always" have been like this.
Yes, China has always been like this in its own way. China has had these methods of storytelling for a long, long time. Now the new generation of writers is applying this methods to modern problems and modern society in its complex, cage-like structure that everyone is aware of in their bones.
I disagree with the assessment that this is "crazy" or "coming to grips with a fundamental truth is no longer true". It is a rational consequence of applying ancient storytelling methods to a complex triangulation of the new generation's situation, where we are all aware that the government is a corrupt and easily-swayed monster, but social upheaval is horrifically dangerous monster in its own right. It is a problem with no certain solution, so we write.
In historical context the Chinese have every right to be weary. Between WW2 and the "Great Leap Forward" over fifty million have died due to famine and warfare, either inflicted by international forces or the ruling class.
You can't really talk about a Chinese society and only bring up Confucianism as it is also a mix of Daoism and Buddhism - all three of which are at odds with each other.
I would think Daosim and its ideas of the needs and rights of "self" would be closer linked to official corruption than that of Confucianism.
Re: The Internet: It doesn't necessitate a new genre anymore than the invention of the telephone did. Good literature incorporates technology just where it's needed to move the plot along and it's all just window dressing over the basic proverbs and parables at the core.
Where exactly did the author grew up in? Cushioned upper class life, or Disneyland?
And those examples in a country with over a billion people? You can find all those examples in Africa, Asia, South America, etc.
A lot of those are hardly uncommon in the West either, just in more "white collar" versions. Restaurants re-using cooking-oil? Tons of restaurant are closed every year for just that and worse hygienic offenses. Or we have some company like VW falsifying emissions data (and lately, it comes out that several other companies did), impacting the environment in a huge scale.
Corrupt politicians? We have Presidents and PMs, senators and MPs openly retiring and joining the boards of companies they helped during their political career.
Heck, in Mexico the mob abducted 140+ students, executed them all together, and for the country it was business as usual for the country.
And those are examples or unreality? LOL.
Not to mention that problems are relative; you think an American balking at finding out their favorite restaurant was closed because of hygiene issues doesn't feel something comparable to a Chinese person who finds out their favorite street vendor used gutter oil? [0]
Also in all of those Western examples you gave, China was much worse off. How can you say that China's situation isn't bad with a straight face? This is a country where the smug is so bad you can't see a few feet ahead of you. Where people who criticize the government can be made to disappear. Where the internet goes through a firewall [1] and is closed off from the rest of the world. [2] Sure, there are many countries worst off, but that doesn't mean we can completely overlook issues with our own countries.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter_oil
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_C...
I don't think it's unreasonable to have a strong reaction in either case. But I do agree with the parent commenter that believing this to be unprecedented and "beyond unreal" shows a level of ignorance or naivety that is more remarkable than the event itself.
There are billions of people, including highly successful or educated people, living in a place X all of their lives, while still not understanding it. Do, for example, Trump supporters really understand their country?
>you think an American balking at finding out their favorite restaurant was closed because of hygiene issues doesn't feel something comparable to a Chinese person who finds out their favorite street vendor used gutter oil?
They wouldn't call the whole country "unreal" for that.
>Also in all of those Western examples you gave, China was much worse off. How can you say that China's situation isn't bad with a straight face? This is a country where the smug is so bad you can't see a few feet ahead of you.
Well, there are industrial cities in Europe where it used to be like that. Or the horrible smog in LA in the 70s-80s. And China has been the "factory" of the world for 2 decades, so we've basically outsourced our smog there.
>Where people who criticize the government can be made to disappear.
That has been business as usual in places ranging from Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain to Mexico for most of the 20th century (and still in the 21st). Not to mention most of Latin America, and often with you know who's support.
>Where the internet goes through a firewall and is closed off from the rest of the world.
Well, if the US was in their place, ie no longer top dog, with another country owning most of the internet's infrastructure and flagship services, and openly meddling in their regional affairs, plus stuffing its culture and political views all over the world, they'd do something like to to. Like they did during McCarthy, where certain tendencies had to be eradicated from mass media, cinema, etc.
I do realize that -- in fact it's not that different from what's been going on elsewhere, e.g. where I live. A lot of European countries had a similar story (WWII was 70 years ago, fascist regimes/Juntas in Grece, Portugal and Spain ended like 40 years ago or less, the Eastern bloc collapsed 26 years ago. Romanians that are 40 year old now grew up with Ceausescu and several whole countries didn't exist but as part of Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia.
The didn't jump (no pun intended) from the Great Leap Forward into a weirdly capitalistic country overnight -- this has been going on since the 80s. The author himself was 17 years old when the cultural revolution ended -- he spent most of his life in the transition, not in that era.
Plus all of his "unreal" examples (from restaurants re-using cooking oil, to corrupt higher-ups, to the polygamist official, etc could have happened just as well in 1970 or in 1850 China -- or anywhere else for that matter).
He might have a point -- but not based on his examples. They sound more like a lack of experience with similar things going on in most countries ("it can only happen here") than genuine unreal-ness.
Faced with a crisis that was guaranteed to attract national attention, local officials reacted by attempting to quickly bury the derailed cars on the spot, to the sheer incredulity of absolutely everyone else in China.
This is not easily dismissed as a mere example of corruption, or cruelty, or societal failure; rather, it appeared more like a desperate innovation, an attempt to mitigate political damage that revealed serious disconnects between the worldview of the local administration and those of both the general populace and the national administration.
It was particularly curious and apt in that this was a national crisis about a great source of national pride, wherein perennial worries of Chinese governance were brought to the fore.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenzhou_train_collision
They didn't try to cover up the train accident in China either. The accident was a major news event for days, there was big rescue missions, etc. They also did an investigation on the causes, down to the design, creation and operation of the trains and lines: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/world/asia/design-flaws-ci...
What they also did, which was hasty, and people called them on it, was trying to bury the broken carriages afterwards -- not to somehow hide that the accident happened (that was major news everywhere anyway), but as a clumsy "move on, nothing to see here" gesture.
And North America. And Europe.
> Corrupt politicians? We have Presidents and PMs, senators and MPs openly retiring and joining the boards of companies they helped during their political career.
You can't really call it corruption because it's just the system working as designed.
Big business and Big government are intertwined and interdependent. State governments protect and isolate corporations from competition domestically and they use state power to protect 'national interests' internationally. In exchange for this politicians and high level bureaucrats get their cut.
This is something that the state is designed specifically to do. Economic exploitation is the purpose of having centralized government.
People used to be much more honest and aware of this sort of thing. During the era of president Wilson it was common to talk about how it was important for USA to eliminate 'wasteful competition' by consolidating businesses into national-sized entities that could more effectively represent USA interests internationally. It was felt that is USA was allowed to remain a hodge-podge of small to medium competing businesses that it would not be able to compete internationally with other nations.
Nowadays it's a common belief that centralized democratic government is needed to counter the negative effects of corporate avarice instead of realizing that state government is necessary for these 'large corporations' to exist in the first place.
Whether or not this is bad is a matter of perspective.
I'll take any major difference in scale with several grains of salt, as I believe the developed world is just more sophisticated in hiding that corruption.
>but its own mix of hyper-developed and third world.
So like New York and Mississippi? Or California and South Dakota?
Your blasé phrasing strips away all the context. If Donald Trump was to be outed as a practising Muslim today, it would be unreal (to me a least), but one could equally say: "bah, hypocrite politicians are everywhere" - it still wouldn't make it any less "unreal", in context.
> Corrupt politicians? We have Presidents and PMs, senators and MPs openly retiring and joining the boards of companies they helped during their political career.
None of your corrupt politicians have been discovered with $31 million of cold, hard cash stashed at their lake houses. Seeing a fork-lift hauling 300kg of $100 notes on live TV would be 'unreal'. What's unreal is not the corruption, per se, but the context around it.
From what I can guess, he is from the inside of the system "体制内". So most likely, someone in the system needs to do some more "theoretical" work to prove/claim the advancement of "us" (Chinese). That's it. Don't worry about what it actually delivers, it is way less related than we think. The only difference nowadays is that we can make those propaganda seen by westerners. Even on HN.
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2016/01/...