The whole filter thing seems to be an extension of the single most striking feature of Chinese culture to a western perspective, which is the overwhelming sameness of absolutely everything. I truly cannot tell the difference between any of their pop culture because it all objectively looks identical. Shows, art, music, games, fashion, all look like they were stamped out of a factory and approved by committee. How is it possible that a billion people have all collectively converged on one single highly specific art style with almost no perceptible variance?
The Chinese equivalent of a dive with a good band is not ultra-commercialized international content available through western syndicates. If you want to get an idea of how hard they'd be to discover, try listing the American cultural rebels you know of (that are actually rebelling from something, not commercializing a 40 year old punk style).
While true, that probably says more about what you’re looking for at home. I could be wrong, maybe you’re really into the late pop fads, mass market tv events and all of that. To an extent this comes down to comparing an entertainment landscape you know how to navigate to find the stuff aimed at you, with a foreign one.
Western reality tv, procedurals, game shows, soap operas and so on are incredibly samey after all. BUT the other factor is that creative endeavors in China take place under a censorship regime. Some topics are safer than others, so the mainstream tends to be quite formulaic and focused on fantasy, sci-fi, or pseudo historical shows.
I think you may want to interrogate why you feel this way a little more before you assign it to a "feature of Chinese culture." Frankly your comment comes across as aggressively ignorant.
This is a common experience with any unfamiliar genre: it all looks or sounds the same at first, because the point of a genre is to express variation within a specific, familiar structure. As a newcomer, the structure dominates your perception, until you've exposed yourself to enough instances that you can filter out the common features and notice the details, which are where the actual creativity lies.
>"This is a common experience with any unfamiliar genre: it all looks or sounds the same at first, because the point of a genre is to express variation within a specific, familiar structure."
If it were a question of genre, sure I get that. But we're talking about effectively all commercial art at this point. It has nothing to do with "western superior" racism or anything like that. Japan does not have this problem at all, even though they invented the anime aesthetic.
Where is the Chinese Mario, Elden Ring, or Metal Gear? What studio is producing a truly original distinct visual language?
> Japan does not have this problem at all, even though they invented the anime aesthetic. Where is the Chinese Mario, Elden Ring, or Metal Gear? What studio is producing a truly original distinct visual language?
I live in Japan and I strongly disagree. The products you mention are the ones strong enough to get exported overseas, but within Japan itself you get a thousand manga/anime/dorama/idols/games per year that all look pretty much identical, everything feels extremely derivative.
I have no idea about Chinese pop culture, but it could be that for someone not familiar with it everything may be too unfamiliar for the differences to become appreciable.
For example I don't listen much electronic dance music (house, techno, trance etc), and whenever I go end up in a club it sounds to me that its always the same loud thumping song playing. Those who go frequently do seem to find a lot of variation though.
All: I know this article intersects with several touchy topics, but the personal experience and observations of the author make it interesting and different. Please respond on that level—the interesting and specific—rather than just to generics. The latter tends to turn vituperative, as people just crash into each other's pre-hardened positions like angry bumper cars.
What I wonder based on this piece is how much the lived experience for someone in China differs from the view from outside — and the author admits that his is a "fairly narrow window," though certainly wider than mine. But when I visited China, I saw both the part that reflected popular ideas of what it's like there (based on what actually propagates to other countries) but also a part that felt like everyone was playing along with these aspects so as not to stick out.
Of course that may just be me projecting my own perspective onto them, but I did get the feeling that there is a performative aspect to the culture described in this article, and that whatever lies underneath it is likely, as in so many places, not really accessible to anyone who was not born and raised in a place.
eugh, I cannot state how much I hate the propensity of fellow immigrant children to assign broad, categorical psychological traits to their home country people based on the tiny sample size that is their lived experience. that might come from the fact that people would ask me 'hey does your family do this' based on the Amy Tan movie they watched and me having to be 'yeah my family does not do that whatsoever, that's not all Chinese people'
I think part of this bias is due to their not having any actual domestic, critical understanding and thus can't apply the same analytical tools they would use to analyze, for eg, why Youtube Shorts/IG Reels/etc took off here
for example, some of the claims the author makes are just silly:
> Chinese consumers already had a high tolerance for slop and AI content fit naturally into this ecosystem without ever triggering an uncanny-valley reflex.
yeah buddy, this isn't due to some inherent acceptance of unreality, the massive volume of low-budget vertical 微短剧 (weiduanju) on Douyin and Kuaishou is driven by economic factors like digital ad-arbitrage [0]. most of these studies spend the vast majority of their budget on advertising to get views with an incredibly small amount reserved for actual production. and so thus you get 1) over-saturation of ads for consumers displacing traditional media and 2) a race-to-the-bottom of the uncanny valley for output
plus, the CAC cracks down a lot more on cruddy micro-dramas than US regulators do on shitty TikTok/YShorts/IG Reels content (ie not at all, ever)
> This basic message is inculcated throughout Chinese upbringing: push through and ignore physical discomfort, but attend to and be subject to social censure. It's okay to be buffeted by the elements, but if your grades are bad, you'll be too ashamed to face your parents.
yeah, again, this is blaming individual psychological conditioning and not systemic forces. like here, managing reputation has to do with high-stakes institutional checkpoints, not an irrational preference for perception over physical reality. when the 高考 (gaokao) and your 户口 (hukou) literally dictate whether or not you have access to housing, schools, and healthcare, you would of course focus your attention on grades and social standing. if there were other gatekeepers, the 'culture' would shift to focus there too
> Dark World thinking sees all virtue and kindness as pretense. Among many such tropes, a common derogatory trope is of women who act nice and innocent 白莲花 (white lotus) while being deceitful and manipulative on the inside. Chinese media creates trapped priors that people acting kind, altruistic, and pure are more likely to be evil."
yeah, so this happened because they dismantled the 铁饭碗 (tiefanwan) [1]. the state basically dismantled the kind of sub-utopian socialist give-everything social programming (that certain propagandized Western leftists seem to believe are still in place) and let the market fully take over. when your universal safety net is gone, extending trust or finances to others who are economically incentivized to compete with you becomes a sub-optimal play. it's why 内卷 (neijuan or involution) is a widely discoursed about issue in Chinese society
also, it's very funny to see 白莲花 (white lotus) used... seriously here? in Chinese social media, that's a satirical term and positions the bailianhua as sanctimonious. it's not aspirational, it's like calling someone a Karen here
I keep reading this article and I keep getting more and more frustrated by it every minute lol
>Even among strains of nationalism, Chinese nationalism seems to be particularly chip-on-your-shoulder. My impression is that this kind of insecurity is less in your face, but still present, in younger Chinese today. It is concerning how much Chinese AI models catching up in the AI race is entangled with this national insecurity.
investment in domestic computing and foundation models is guided by industrial policy (科技自立自强) [0]. this isn't some kind of ego issue shared across 1+ billion people, it's literally policy set up by central planninng
> "My current hypothesis is that the locally optimal message to China is in the vein of “give us your autists who feel alienated by the monoculture,” but others may prefer a more conciliatory approach that directly appeals to the dominant culture."
the lived reality of Chinese neurodivergence is not some abstract thing that's fun to joke about. it's, instead, families carrying a child through an educational system that offers minimal specialized scaffolding, navigating intense social stigma, and absorbing the terror of what happens to a dependent adult when their aging parents die. instead of seeing this population as a recruitment pool of "hyper-logical code monkeys" waiting to be drafted into an American AI safety crusade, maybe think of them as people. otherwise you're no different from the people who are just calling them slurs
also, to describe Chinese culture as 'monocultural' is just wrong. a migrant worker on a factory floor does not share the same culture as a tech worker at Baidu - and neither of them share the same culture as a factory owner. there's also like a billion subcultural niches in China - lie flat 躺平 and letting it rot 摆烂 just to name two more popular ones. it's not as if the people there are stupid to knowing their culture is exploitative - the critique of 996 is widespread
> > Chinese consumers already had a high tolerance for slop and AI content fit naturally into this ecosystem without ever triggering an uncanny-valley reflex.
> yeah, this isn't due to some inherent acceptance of unreality, the massive volume of low-budget vertical 微短剧 (weiduanju) on Douyin and Kuaishou is driven by economic factors like digital ad-arbitrage [0]. most of these studios spend the vast majority of their budget on advertising with an incredibly small amount reserved for actual production and so you get AI filtered slop because it's cheaper than paying actors or make up artists or the whole supporting crew
> plus, the CAC cracks down a lot more on cruddy micro-dramas than US regulators do on low-quality TikTok/YShorts/IG Reels content (ie not at all, ever)
I'm not following your argument with this one. American production companies (which also use and are funded by advertising) also certainly care about their bottom line, and would cut the budget of "paying actors or make up artists or the whole supporting crew" as much as they could get away with. As you note, the reason they can't get away with cutting that stuff more isn't because they're regulated more in America. Rather, they can't cut more because viewers wouldn't tolerate it. What argument are you actually making about why Chinese companies getting away with the low-budget (low-quality) "slop" isn't the fault of the people tolerating it by watching?
There is plenty of American food that isn't "inauthentic slop inundated with additives and high fructose corn syrup", it's just happening in houses and in kitchens and not in chain restaurants or pre-made in grocery stores.
Just want to say that this isn’t a fundamental problem. Because it’s not my experience :) Love my family, and we’ve survived on the generosity of complete strangers. My folks weathered unemployment in the 90s because some anonymous angel left an envelope of money at their door.
The vast majority of peoples' actions are beneficent, or at least polite. Otherwise, nobody would even keep their cars on roads. Stores would keep all merchandise in locked displays (not just the expensive things where the rare thief causes too much damage).
The bad experiences stand out because that's how our minds are wired, and they're so uncommon as to be surprising.
In those 24 hours 1600 stores were looted, 1000 fires laid, firefights broke out, the mafia in little Italy hat to defend the quarter with barricades and arms, robbers were being robbed by other robbers, almost 4k people were arrested to the point where they had to be put into basements and gyms. That's one day without order. The bad experiences don't stand out because they're uncommon, they stand out because we all instinctively know we're one bad week away from eating each other. Which by the way given that this is a thread about China, happened in the living memory of some people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre
"In the massacre, methods of slaughter included "beheading, beating, live burial, stoning, drowning, boiling, group slaughters, disemboweling, digging out hearts, livers, genitals, slicing off flesh, blowing up with dynamite, and more".[1][8] In one case, according to official records, a person had dynamite bound to the back and was blown up into pieces by other people (so called "heavenly maiden scattering flowers", 天女散花)—just for fun"
All the authors observations ring true, and they all stem from one simple fact: China was a very poor country just forty years ago, and even today is only a middle income country.
The uncomfortable truth is a lot of the things westerners take for granted are, in fact, luxuries. Arts and creativity is a luxury. Freedom to pursue passion is a luxury. Compassion is a luxury. Self-esteem is a luxury. If you barely have enough food to feed your family, as a significant number of Chinese people were in the 60s and 70s, you cannot afford any of these.
China has grown richer at a remarkable rate, but the mentality shift can take generations.
I think this also leads to the most important observation of our time: progress is now much more difficult to measure and the control over the narrative is fierce.
This entire century of media has been an endless splitting of hairs and casting of doubts.
> The uncomfortable truth is a lot of the things westerners take for granted are, in fact, luxuries.
This is supposed to be uncomfortable? Why? Most inter-national discussions here are about how their country is better because they have bigger houses, more toys, and how they can remain oblivious to how the rest of the world works because of how good their “soft” or “hard” power is at managing the rest of the world.
That sort of international comparison talk is usually more motivated by arguing that "my rich country is better than your rich country" than "my rich country is better than poor underdeveloped countries". Oftentimes it is a proxy argument for the best degree of government involvement in the economy and other policy questions.
This is China. People have been arguing about the progress of China relative to the West/USA for decades and decades. Just like they have been arguing over US/Europe.
I'm only speaking from my own experience here. When I've seen stressed out people who are expected to believe in "virtues", they just become more dishonest to hide their bad behavior.
The bell curve of human behavior stays the same no matter what time or place.
One's compassion reservoir capacity is proportional to one's capacity to fulfill its own needs first. You fill your cup first before you pour into others.
It's amazing to me how ignorant this comment is. Someone is teaching you something about a culture you don't understand and you're chastising them (or condescending to an entire nation).
> No. These are virtues, not luxuries.
According to your particular ethics. Has it ever occurred to you that the ethics you have isn't universal but is simply an artifact of your culture?
Compassion and self-esteem are not artifacts of culture or ethics. They're intrinsic to humanity. The manner of expression of these virtues can vary among different cultures. The audience of these virtues can vary among different beliefs and ethical frameworks. But the virtues exist in every society.
I have to daily remind myself that people on here probably haven't had a single liberal arts class (like philosophy or anthropology) because they're stemlords.
> But the virtues exist in every society.
And also not to do bright. brother you're literally commenting on your own response to a post about how such a virtue is potentially absent in some society
I'm actually quite disturbed to read that so many people believe compassion has anything to do with material satisfaction. Compassion isn't some bourgeois luxury, it's fundamental to any sort of well-being, be it individual or societal.
If it really came down to the famine, I'd ask why isn't this mentality seen in Bangladesh, who also lost around 5% of it's population to famine in the 20th century? They're some of the kindest, most welcoming people I've been around in the face of a poverty that China no longer knows.
So I'm having a hard time believing that TFA isn't completely off on this one, as I'd expect a society that had 2000 years of contact with Buddhism to have absorbed at least a little of the Buddha's teachings on karuna. Especially one whose main school was that of Mahayana and it's ideal of the Bodhisattva.
This is exactly true. I've seen people share what they have in poor rural South America and India. It seems common.
Japan, post war was desperately poor, but everyone shared what they had. A friend who grew up in rural China in the 60s-70s described very compassionate behavior. Communism is often born of necessity and not political will. Those who cheat and steal are ostracized, if not hunted.
It is during rapid transitions, and it seems during both growth and decline when hoarding and theft become rampant. In steady state, those that remain, work together.
If they grew up in Rural China and weren't telling you stuff about their experiences of "The Great Leap Forward" or "The Cultural Revolution", particularly the extreme amounts of selfishness one had to utilize to simply survive, they, like many people who have had to exist in destitute conditions, They're probably not telling you the whole story, and never will because they do not want to deal with the social judgements from people over actions they took to survive.
There's a good chance that for the survivors from that era, their parents almost certainly did some extremely evil things to survive.
You appear to have no real knowledge of Chinese history, perhaps as bad as that (not) taught in China. Around 1960 when the famine and related purges occurred the population was ~650M so even with the high end of 30-45M dead of starvation over 3 years, it's a few percent. It's horrifying to be sure, but it was concentrated (for political reasons they were exporting grain) in the west and central China where food was grown, while the major population centers were largely spared (still almost 1% died). So no, not every person alive in 1960 was involved in some sort of genocide, or even aware of it. The political elite of course suffered relatively little (until 60-80% of them were in turn purged less than 10 years later), but they were also (as usual) a tiny minority <3% of the population. This purge was called the Cultural Revolution also driven by Mao. Then came Deng, and now Xi. With some periods of relative political complexity in between.
Please study some history and stop assuming literally everyone is evil. That leads to the very expectations, political apathy, and actions that allow this kind of situation. It's unhelpful.
Go ask anyone from, say, Myanmar (especially Arakan state) what they think of Bangladeshi people. You might find that opinion of "They're some of the kindest, most welcoming people I've been around in the face of a poverty that China no longer knows" to not be so widely held.
Maybe you should ask Bangladeshi's what they think of the Rohingya people. It turns out that Myanmar is not the only country oppressing them and refusing to give them citizenship!
The tendency to want to group an entire race/people with opinions based on hundreds of experiences with them, let alone dozens or a few, is the same tendency in us that spawns racism and prejudice. Your experiences have no influence on the reality of "the goodness of a people".
I'm married to a Bangladeshi, so yes I'm very aware of the treatment of the Rohingya at a state and societal level. I have close Bangladeshi friends that have done humanitarian aide work with their communities in Cox's Bazaar. It's a horrible crises.
My comment was responding to the author's argument that compassion only arises when material needs are accounted for, that compassion is some middle class thing. They were arguing that Chinese culture doesn't emphasize it because of their history of war, famine, and poverty. I think that's a horrible misunderstanding of both compassion and Chinese culture, and was merely countering it with an example of a people that have also experienced a famine that had a similar mortality rate who display perfectly normal human levels of compassion and kindness despite that history. I then went on to conclude that the original writer is likely completely off on how they view Chinese culture, that compassion is fundamental to being human and has nothing to do with bourgeois material comfort.
We tend to want to think in binaries -- people are compassionate or not. People are welcoming or not. That's not how reality works though, it's more nuanced. I was in no way arguing that an entire community of people aren't capable of mistreatment of others. Of course they are. But can a people that have experienced a massive amount of trauma and poverty and loss capable of displaying compassion? Of course they are. Because compassion is a fundamental aspect of being human.
Also, poor people produce art and are creative. Art and creativity are oftentimes reault of not being able to afford comfortable middle class boring life, having issues you deal with, needing to distract yourself from hopelessness.
The communists in China actively tried to replace old virtue (it was barely alive in China pre-revolution anyway) with new virtue. New virtue was hollow, shallow, empty and fake.
Say that all you want, make it a mantra if you like. But have you ever skipped a meal out of sheer poverty? Or might you be projecting ethics (ie aka Americanism)? Maybe we should actually cut them some slack.
I have. I know a lot of generous, compassionate poor people. I met loads of them in Honduras and Brazil and Belize. Compassion and generosity need not be a factor of economics.
Severely competitive and hopeless environments will do a hell of a job on human compassion.
Read about the dehumanizing effects of concentration camps on individuals hiding food from their family or praying their father dies so they can get his food
Its arguable that our ability to build luxurious enough societies has allowed out compassion to flourish far beyond what is witnessed elsewhere in the state of nature
> Severely competitive and hopeless environments will do a hell of a job on human compassion.
True.
> Its arguable that our ability to build luxurious enough societies has allowed out compassion to flourish far beyond what is witnessed elsewhere in the state of nature.
Concentration camps and famines are not the 'state of nature'. A closer analogue would be tribal societies in the Amazon basin, Eastern Africa and the like. Constant hunger and scarcity are not the norm for well adapted human cultures, nor have the been for most of recorded history.
By state of nature I means the non human vilification life space.
Of course a concentration camp isn’t the state of nature
I’m saying human compassion far exceeds anything witnessed in the animal/plant kingdom. Some animals show affection for their offspring, but it usually doesn’t extend beyond that. There is no dog or lizard or tree version of mother Teressa
Concentration camps were created, engineered and run by rich people. Whatever lack of perfect compasion and fight for scraps you see inside, comparably rich people making conscious choice to create them, support them, work in them, profit from them have less of it.
I dont know what you mean there. It was just historical fact about who build them and run them.
They did not emerged as force of nature out of ground. They were intentionally and conciously build. And guards were well fed.
And in here, when you use inmates lack of compassion as example of powerty causimg lack of it, you absolutely should compare to compassion of builders and guards.
Which is why I think the whole premise of GP is kind of suspect. China has housed a highly-developed society - not just a civilization, but a contiguous, if evolving, social order - for longer than most of the rest of the world. Even what they consider backwoods and rural is basically urban by most historical standards.
These aren't the problems of a society rising out of a state of nature; as TFA states, "The narrative is that China experienced a “century of humiliation”". I think certain aspects of Chinese culture as we know it, writ-large, make more sense coming from people who weren't just recently struggling as a society, but who are well aware of how that condition compares to their historical one.
My counter argument though is how the elite class have a certain scarcity mentality and still holds on to these observations made in the articles.
In college, I dated a few Asian who all had similar mindset. Dating wasn’t about finding the right match but more about “upgrade your social face being accepted by foreigners”. It was shockingly weird at the beginning.
That is the "mentality shift can take generations" part.
Those ladies may be part of the elite now. But remember their parents or grandparents went through the Great Chinese Famine where an estimated 15-60 million people died.
I grew up in the third world. Agree with this comment.
Also my personal belief is that courtesy is a luxury born of abundance. I have observed how minor ‘scarcities’ in the advanced economies can surface behaviour that some would attribute to less developed places e.g. an unexpected slew of cancelled transit
Here in Germany, people are generally good at queuing in supermarkets. This does break down for a minute when a new checkout counter opens; people will rush past others to get into the new line without regards for others. There's this short feeling of breakdown in social norm, fear of getting left in the dust, so politeness and consideration take a backseat and the elbows come out.
In developing countries, including China, my experience has been that this is the standard, and people will act accordingly even if there is abundance. Cancelled transit is a good example as well, it interacts with a primal fear of ours of being left behind or drawing the short stick, even if rationally, it is pretty inconsequential.
I can imagine this can be hyper specific to the store itself, not as a generalization across an entire country.
To give more anecdata — Union Station in Toronto has trains that leave in all directions. The ones going East and West tend to form queues on the platform at rush hour. The train heading north-west to another city tends to form mobs that rush the door upon opening.
Lots of reasons why, but geography and SES may not factor as much. Could be something as simple as supply/demand of free seats.
Hm, this reminds me how the marshmallow experiment [1], initially thought to show differences in character, turned out to surface differences in wealth.
I would add that just having a 60-70 hour work week for many jobs means a different lifestyle, even if you're comfortable financially.
Friend of a friend got hukou in Wuhan recently and picked up a crappy job as a convenience store clerk. 10 hrs/day, 3 days off a month. But! She can comfortably live off it in a major city with a studio apt and even save a bit. Doesn't even need roommates.
I would focus more on current realities when seeking explanations, because the mentality can shift a lot in a single generation.
I'm from Finland. My grandparents were of a generation that knew poverty and hunger and fought in wars. They raised their families when the country was still poor, and food security was always at the back of their minds. My parents grew up in a country that was rapidly getting wealthier. Their generation took food for granted, but owning things was important to them, as it was something they could not have in their youth. For my generation, the country has always been wealthy, and we have always been able to take basic necessities for granted. Our focus has been in choosing what we want to do with our lives, as the world is open and there are many options to choose from.
The corollary to this of course is what happens to countries experiencing the reverse, a rapid decrease of passion and "luxury" for large swathes of the population.
This one is interesting. I'm from Poland, and I'd argue that during very shitty communist times people had a whole lot more compassion than now, when the country is in a much better shape.
I was getting quite depressed after reading the first chapter of Ai Weiwei's 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows. It describes a woman who gave away or let her child die in order to take care of some more well off people's children, which I remember to be Ai's fater or grandpa. Then goes on to describe what his dad went through during the Cultural Revolution.
Much of Europe was dirt poor before the war. There were actual food riots in Amsterdam. The Netherlands didn't get sewers until the 1950s. Showers became mandatory only in the 1970s.
We take our decadence and degeneracy for granted but it is all new. There are people alive now who remember Christianity.
Pretty strong disagree. Compassion -- and humanity towards other humans -- isn't based on what you have. The degree to which you are able to act on your compassion and do something, yes, that's certainly limited by what you have. But not the compassion itself.
I've met many very poor people in very poor countries who had more compassion and humanity than rich people in rich countries.
> and they all stem from one simple fact: China was a very poor country just forty years ago, and even today is only a middle income country.
Recent poverty is a factor, but I disagree that it's where these characteristics stem from. I've lived and worked in countries as poor or poorer than China, and I also lived 6 years in China (and not in an expat bubble) and the characteristics described in the article* are not directly related to an escape from poverty. (*which I largely agree with, though maybe less so the Dark World frame; instead I think instead Chinese have historically a different moral framework than Westerners. For example, being "clever" enough to do something that Westerners would consider wrong (stealing, cheating, etc.) and get away with it, is a sign of strength.)
In my view, Chinese behavior is pre-eminently impacted by filial piety, social appearances, and the fact that when you live in a country with 1.5 B people if you don't push and shove, and even step on a few hands and heads, you're not getting anywhere. And you _must_ get somewhere because of your parental expectations and the need to fulfill your responsibilities to care for your parents when they get old.
Added to that is the more recent development that the CCP has achieved a level of information and social control that other authoritarian countries could only dream of. It's very effective to a degree that Americans would find shocking. (The author's first point about the ubiquity of social media in China goes along with this, and has become a highly effective means of "guiding" public thought.)
Westerner isn’t an income class. For instance, I grew up in appalachia and also didn’t have food, clean water, heat, electricity, health care, clothing, or plumbing. But, I did have free speech rights, access to libraries, and friendships with other poor creative kids like me.
> If you barely have enough food to feed your family, as a significant number of Chinese people were in the 60s and 70s, you cannot afford any of these.
This has also been true where I am from (formerly East Germany), yet we still had arts, creativity, freedom to pursue passion, compassion and self-esteem. We might have had only barely enough food to feed a family, but that didn't mean that we acted like animals.
In Greece the postwar generation was born in poverty after WWII and a civil war. But they created wealth enough to live in relative luxury: multiple homes, ample available income and free time, holidays around the world. If you are willing to live, you will in the same generation.
> Most characters are Chinese, but even those who are not continue to mostly think and act in this similarly alien style.
No, most good characters in those books are chinese. I liked technical aspects of the book a lot, but on societal level there was quite a bit xenophobia up to including racism against white people.
Still interesting, maybe something akin to picking up some pulp novel from 1920s that had other races in stereotypical cartoon evil roles. Not something pleasant to read in 21st century for anybody with more modern values (where average typical Chinese stand on this I leave to them here, no idea).
I don't have any personal experience with this, but what's interesting to me is how similar a lot of this sounds to America. I'm not saying it IS the same as America, just that if there is a substantive difference I didn't get a sense of it
- Nationalism stemming from insecurity (I tend to notice the poorest, most desperate tend to be the proudest)
- "social death" - Is that not so different that being canceled or fear of being canceled? To me it seems very apparent that people who get ostracized on the national stage take a huge personal toll and have their personality changed for years.
- Also for the Dark World example he uses a Peter Thiel quote. I think optimism/trust/community is lower here now that a few decades ago. But I do agree that in tech jobs I've anecdotally seen more cutthroat approaches (e.g. refusing to share knowledge with a coworker) from other cultures more often.
> I tend to notice the poorest, most desperate tend to be the proudest
I think this is where folks go astray. There are tons of well-off or even wealthy people who love America, give to their churches, cheer on their kids at sporting events, and have what appears to an outsider as an unbelievably high amount of nationalism. It's not really the poorest, most desperate slice of society by any measure. Have you lived outside of a major city in the US?
Looking at the research it shows that subjects who self-identify as loving America can be preducted by best by being older, and political party, though not wealth at all.
So I don't really have any hard-data to justify my impression that it's uneducated blue-collar white men without much going for them that vociferously love america, maybe it's just country music that gives that impression, or the type of uneducated poor who enter the army with blind faith in our institutions, etc.
I think this article makes the same silly mistake most people do when analyzing other cultures: Overemphasis on national identity. I'm specifically speaking to point four here: I've got family in china, have visited for periods of months at a time, and don't see most people I've interacted with thinking about national identity or priorities mostly at all. Like people anywhere, they're wrapped up in their social lives, careers, and hobbies moreso than any kind of proving china or chinese people are this or that. The author calls out their own bias created by interacting with immigrants and internet culture, which I think will tend to form this lens
This is likely because as the author admits, their interaction with everyday Chinese is mainly through the Internet and cultural products, which has a significant bias.
Chinese government actively shapes the online discourse, so the messaging is already filtered. To make it worse, it meant people found out that the easiest way to silence your opponent is to brand them as anti-China, so you see a lot of pro-China virtue signaling. Finally, people also realized patriotism is lucrative.
I wonder what would be a country which is good for autists (in the sense of this article). Probably (parts of) the US, but I'm wondering whether there is some non-trivial answer.
Kind of adjacent: Can somebody explain why the LW/EA/rationalist types all seem to be so ardently against China?
They're otherwise generally in support of doing the greatest good for the greatest number, at least ostensibly, so I wonder what it is about China -- which has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty domestically and is looking to export wealth abroad (most notably in the form of accessible "luxury" goods such as electric cars) -- that seems to trigger them so much.
China's political economy is also far more "rationalist" than anything you'll find anywhere else.
And yet I swear, and I'm not exaggerating about this in the slightest, that the average EA/LW poster hates China far more than the average /pol/ poster -- and is perfectly comfortable making sweeping generalizations where 1.4B Chinese are concerned. Guys like Scott Alexander rarely (if ever) have a good word for them; Zvi Moshowitz discounts and belittles every technological advance they make, despite otherwise being very fair; and you see what LW itself is like...
They call themselves rationalists but they don't apply their own theories, they think permanent authoritarianism is as bad as human extinction. It's a predictable offshoot from their own west coast US ideological origins.
It is kinda weird when I think about. Surely Chinese style technocratic leadership and political system would be most efficient in reaching goals of those people. It probably should be the system to emulate. Instead of utter inefficient messes seen in other parts of the world.
Maybe they just are lot less rational and altruistic than they claim to be. With significant biases...
One thing many Westerners get wrong about the PRC is assuming its economically monolithic, though I guarantee you that's the outcome of decades of Chinese messaging to the West. They want to appear unified, that they've done all these amazing things and everyone has benefited.
In reality, there's two separate economies within the PRC. Around 40% live in the modern world we see in images of China (skyscrapers, EVs, high-speed trains, etc.). Awesome stuff, to be sure, and that same environment has been engineered to track every single interaction you make with it. You must use Wechat; no exceptions. Say the wrong thing on the Internet? You might lose the ability to take long-distance train or airplane rides within China, let alone international travel rights.
The other 60% live with dirt floors, hand carts, and engage primarily in subsistence farming. (It's been about five years since I last looked up those stats, but it should be around the same.) The US has eliminated this level of poverty; having even access to an automobile is enough.
The PRC argues they're able to take care of all their people, but they're nowhere near out of the woods when it comes to food insecurity. Due to population and geographic realities, they simply cannot grow enough food to feed their own people, so importation is an absolute necessity. For this reason, "unlicensed" fishing fleets (no Chinese group larger than 20 people operates without de-facto government consent) sail across oceans to fish just outside a country's territorial waters.
The Chinese political economy appears to be rationalist, but few countries have more political dishonesty than the PRC. According to an old friend who extensively knows Chinese politics, there's three main political factions: pro-Xi reformers, anti-Xi old guard Communists, and everyone else. Their ability to disappear a political enemy without what we'd term "due process" is truly unheard of in the West. Local politics is arguably worse; bribery is how anything gets done, and local officials suppress incident fatalities because over a certain threshold (around 30), the higher-ups will shame them. In such a media-controlled environment, that's less difficult than you might think living in the West.
When you talk about exporting wealth with EVs, that comes with the understanding that the PRC has de-facto control of your vehicle. Most people dislike the idea of the PRC not only retaining all data gathered by your car but having remote access to disable or drive it. If that's alright with you, go right ahead.
Your "60% live with dirt floors and engage primarily in subsistence farming" claim is utterly indefensible. At the end of 2025, China’s population was 67.9% urban and 32.1% rural. Even in 2021 -- approximately when you say you last checked -- it was already 64.72% urban.
Also, and even more importantly, rural residence does not mean subsistence poverty. Look at stats on Chinese rural household possessions -- they're actually reasonably well-off. (e.g., >100 air conditioners per 100 households, whereas in France only ~25% of households have air conditioners!) Little surprise, then, that the World Bank credits China with lifting almost 800 million people out of extreme poverty.
Even if I grant your claim about food insecurity -- which is also fundamentally untrue, but not worth getting into -- how is it relevant? They need to import soybeans for animal feed, so they are evil?
You don't like them for some reason -- but I still don't get it, as the reasons you've put forth here make no sense and are flimsy, paper-thin.
Italy is at 56% overall -- and 27.3% "in small municipalities with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants" (i.e. rural dwellings) -- and they usually have brutal summers:
Point is, the Rural Chinese aren't pre-industrial dirt farmers. When it comes to things like air conditioners, cell phones, TVs (~100% of households), internet use, etc., they usually rank quite highly.
As such, "60% live with dirt floors, hand carts, and engage primarily in subsistence farming" is either a lie or shocking ignorance, plain and simple.
I guess had old data. Seems like about 30 years ago, it was 40/60 urban/rural but now is 60/40 urban/rural. Good for them!
The air conditioner point, while hilarious, is not really comparable because Europeans have the money to install them but are usually forbidden from fixed installs due to historical building preservation codes and other regulations. Europeans create that issue for themselves, like always.
On food insecurity, I'll point to this excellent (though slightly older) article about food production in the PRC (https://factsanddetails.com/china/cat9/sub63/item348.html). For a more recent perspective, I asked AI for an answer:
> While domestic production has grown to nearly 7.5 billion metric tons annually, the overall food self-sufficiency rate has declined from 94% in 2000 to approximately 66% in 2020. Consequently, China has become the world's largest agricultural importer, relying on global markets to supplement domestic production for a diversified diet.
So, yeah, food insecurity (perhaps better termed food supply insecurity, I'll admit), though that might change once they start experiencing population shrink over the next fifty years.
I dislike the PRC due to a complete, utter mistrust of their entire operating model. It's undeniable that their methods are worth examining to understand the exact reasons for their effectiveness in growing the overall standard of living, educational outcomes, infrastructure, and more, and I will readily acknowledge that. How the PRC achieved that success is by truly, genuinely only caring about itself, with marginal concern for the outcomes of anyone other than themselves ("themselves" being the political elite, not the People). For all the global discussions about transitioning away from fossil fuels, the PRC destroys that progress every single day with their energy policies.
Most Americans are completely unaware of the extent of corruption in other countries. There is ALWAYS work to be done here, but to even compare them is genuinely comical. The PRC is far, far, far more corrupt. When I say corrupt, I don't mean greasing wheels or backroom deals; that's how all political structures (governmental or otherwise) operate, and if you can't accept that, then don't get into politics. Corruption in the PRC boils down to structured, deliberate misrepresentations and omissions of facts to avoid shame and preserve a good appearance (some parallels exist here with the USSR). Nothing even like that exists in the West, and you would be naive or silly for believing it does. For primarily that reason, I dislike them.
PRC is far less likely to do something malign with my data or my vehicle than the US government and the conglomerate of monopoly business interests it represents.
What's your understanding of cross-border data flows and third-party doctrine?
Say data leaves the US and goes back to the PRC. Did you know it's actually easier (from a legal perspective) for the US government and its business interests to collect the data outside the country than inside? It's actually in the intelligence and industrial communities' best interests for data on US persons leave the country. My point is, even with your beliefs, you should very much dislike that PRC automotive data will leave the country.
Remember the OPM hack? Perhaps the data should have simply been given to the PRC, since they're better data stewards and have our best interests in mind (/s). Ultimately, PRC vehicles will be used for facial recognition, home address identification, employer identification, and more. If you think I'm being hyperbolic, consider that the PRC can locate any person inside their borders (at least within an urban area) within ten minutes.
You’re right regarding countries in the ‘free world’, but PRC has stricter data controls for industrial interests and the CIA’s human intelligence network was largely killed when Xi Jinping took power.
Why should I remember or care about the OPM hack? I’m less concerned by fantastical stories or things ‘attributed’ to China than the things the US government does around the world in my name or to me directly at home which are beyond dispute.
I don't understand where you're getting "hates China" unless that's a framing of "disapproves of the Chinese government on the whole".
I have seen Zvi pushing back against the narratives that open-weights models and Chinese ICs have caught up to the frontier. Was he wrong? But I can't recall any animus against Chinese people or their talent there.
It's rather obvious Zvi is biased if you consider the totality of his work on China (since Covid to the current AI boom), not only because of his statement of facts or his policy positions but rather his writing style, which betrays his view the Chinese are somehow not only technologically but morally inferior. And he expresses them with an emotional valence similar to his treatment of Trump.
Pour any Rationalist article through a colander and what remains after the pseudo-intellectualism drain away is bog standard US right-wing ideology. That’s why.
An interesting recent phenomena is that regular Chinese people have figured out how to use AI to speak for them to make english language youtube videos. They are quite fascinating to watch, because you don't normally get such an unfiltered perspective. I think people feel safe posting these because nobody knows them in the west, whereas family, friends and govt. see Chinese social media. And of course youtube is banned in China.. Some of them make a few hundred bucks from Alphabet, this is a big deal.
Here are a few (check out the comments- working class people from around the world make contact):
I enjoy these videos a lot, esp. if they are about history and engineering. Some of videos have really good production quality. I guess they are probably translated fron original WeChat etc. source material.
Thank you for sharing these. I work with many Chinese people, but I am from a working class background. All the Chinese people I work with are of course the smartest and brightest and most fortunate, so it's difficult to get a sense for what working class Chinese people are like.
I'd like to argue that different generations of Chinese people might have drastically different characteristics, because of how quickly life changes here.
I'm a native Chinese person born around the new millennium, and some of the observations in this article seem to apply only to specific generations.
"Dark World thinking as described in Truth or Dare": I personally don't feel this at all. But this mentality does apply to many people over 70.Some of the elderly people I met are mean and selfish by today's standards, but considering they might have literally survived a starvation, this shouldn't be that surprising.
"Primacy of social reality, and of shame and “face.”: I don't know about this. Maybe because I grew up in this environment, I am used to the social norm and don't find it uncomfortable at all. Yet I haven't lived abroad for a long time, so I don't know how different it is somewhere else.
"Chinese social media is like American junk food.": Basically true. Social platforms can be atrocious, but there are rational and comfortable circles. They tend to stay low though, since popularity usually destroys them. But I'd argue that this is the same anywhere on the internet.
I (an American with a lot of interest in China) was playing doudizhu with some Chinese friends recently. It was agreed that the losers would have to kowtow to the winner instead of paying money. I was on the losing side and it meant nothing to me, while even in a private, joking setting it was apparently a very uncomfortable thing to have to do for my teammate. See also the general cultural attitude toward doing something embarrassing as a "punishment" for losing a bet or game, something fairly unknown in the US.
Great counterexamples! These are specifically part of the game, whereas in Chinese culture it seems to be more like "let's play a defined game with winner and loser, and in order to motivate you not to be the loser, we'll agree that the loser do something embarrassing." Like in the US when I would play recess games as a kid, if you lost, you just lost with nothing at stake. Also we're all in our thirties instead of kids playing truth or dare.
The bit about why one would want to be a doctor. Money, status, approval... helping sick people (hysterical laughter). Is exactly how my millenial Chinese colleagues that came to North America to study in university are like.
> Some of the elderly people I met are mean and selfish by today's standards, but considering they might have literally survived a starvation, this shouldn't be that surprising.
My grandfather survived starvation and much, much worse things during and after WWII (in Russian captivity). He died of old age a long time ago, but was a very kind and not at all selfish person.
As a casual visitor: the nationalism point rings very true, everywhere, their nationalism is more about hurt national pride than anything.
The point about the cynical view however I disagree with. I don't think I have the correct words to explain this, but basically, unlike India, Korea and maybe to a certain point Japan, they distrust this kind of American, almost forced friendliness, cheerfulness and enthusiasm and see it as fake, which is very similar to how French, Belgians, Dutch or Germans feels sometimes (I know I did my first time around in California).
That's also the reason why out of all of Asia, I feel the best working with Chinese teams (Japanese too but I have more trouble with their English).
[Edit]: forgot the point about social shame: not untrue, but geographically limited to the more rural area in my casual observation. No one in Beijing takes themselves that seriously, but in poorer areas, pride and face felt more important.
I think the thing people miss is that American friendliness is a bit fake, just not malicious. It's built on our pastoral history, but has evolved into a way to smooth down the sharp edges of a very competitive society - especially when that pastoral mindset ran headlong into the immigration that made contemporary America what it is.
If my main consideration in an interaction with a stranger is to avoid its escalating to violence, I'm going to be polite, but I'm going to be a bit reserved, not enthusiastic or friendly.
In these discussions, non-Americans often describe Americans as always happy, which is another quality I'm going to tend to avoid showing in the hypothetical interaction with the stranger because if he is feeling bitter or resentful, my being happy might set him off.
The US is a big place. There isn’t one “American culture”. If someone in one part of the country says we should get drinks sometime they’re just saying a nice thing. In another part of the country, that means “this weekend”.
Yeah, i totally get that, it's absolutely not malicious, i'm not sure it's even fake, maybe only a bit exagerated. But for an unaware person, it _feels_ that way, and i guess when American visit France or the netherlands, or, to go back to the subject, China, our reactions must feel weird.
That was jut to tell the author that i think he misread how Chineese are on this specific point. It wasn't a criticism of North Americans at all. Really, i think this is charming now (as long as we don't work together, then i will find this infuriating and bitch about it to my SO)
I'm hesitant to move further from TFA, but a brief one-shot: Among Boston people who returned after "trying" SV/SF/California, I repeatedly heard of struggling, amidst an unfamiliar ambient "friendliness" culture, to recognize social signals around "actual" friendship - was someone "really" interested in becoming friends, or were they merely performing "friendly". AI tells me this is called peach vs coconut, nice vs kind, guess vs ask cultures.
Similarly, someone (with no family connection to China) learned Chinese, later married into a family from/in China, and would describe "Chinese" culture. Someone else from China glossed their insights with a dismissive 'their friends are criminals [sic], and they're over generalizing from that subculture'.
So amidst country-level cultural themes, and regional variations, and generational differences (and gender, hukou, ethnicity, etc), and subcultural diversity, it's sometimes a challenge to tell what cultural elements are which.
> I'm hesitant to move further from TFA, but a brief one-shot: Among Boston people who returned after "trying" SV/SF/California, I repeatedly heard of struggling, amidst an unfamiliar ambient "friendliness" culture, to recognize social signals around "actual" friendship - was someone "really" interested in becoming friends, or were they merely performing "friendly". AI tells me this is called peach vs coconut, nice vs kind, guess vs ask cultures.
My experience is that everyone from outside the Northeast thinks those of us from the Northeast are assholes, and we think they're all two-faced sociopaths.
This rings true. I came to Philly from England in 2004. I'm an outsider, but I get by socially.
When I have visited California it feels superficial and fake. People are like, we're all laid back and let's go surfing! But if you trip over someone's dog leash they are going to sue you.
This is laughably inaccurate. Author's information source is unreliable for a start (interactions with older generations, and depiction of lives in China in fictions and online media), which is already seeing China via funhouse mirrors. That perception is then filtered through a Western lens. What comes out is barely even recognizable.
One interesting thing about Chinese culture is what I'm calling "cultural diglossia". "Diglossia" by itself means coexistance of two languages. E.g. in the Arabic world, the language of the Quran is used in official documents, but the regular languages have drifted away from it.
In China this was also the case with the literary language (文言), but it went even further. You actually had to master it to advance in any official career. So a government official instead of, say, learning how to manage a city, had to learn the old philosophical texts written in a language nobody speaks. And they had to pass actual exams for that knowledge.
Now China has the Communist writings displacing these old philosophical texts. They are about as useful, and I don't think many people really care about them, but you have to show knowledge of them to advance in your career.
I don't think this is a _good_ pattern, it reinforces the belief that everyone around them is lying and that everyone's behavior is fake.
Some of them are just weird and have stories that are nothing like European fairy tales. For example, a story of a spirit befriending a man just to talk from time to time. And then the spirit had to eventually move to another location because it got a promotion. Just imagine the culture, where even your afterlife is going to be just as bureaucratic as your regular life!
I think one of the biggest differences, that the author misses, is that China is a totalitarian state.
The average citizen is not who you need to convince. The national narrative is set from the top, disseminated through the Central Propaganda Department, and enforced.
It’s not a grass roots effort to sway national policy in China AFAIK - you’re trying to convince a small group of key people who have enough of their hands on the steering wheel of a totalitarian state.
Single party state still has elections. You still have to get the votes. You just don’t have 2 layers of voting (primary for party, then secondary between parties). The primary is the final election. I guess the confusion is where the intersection happens between bottom up voting and the top down appointees. Not too different from corporations… there is some merit based promotions from individual contributors, but at some point in the middle management , you get a bunch of yes men because of the top down control…
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[ 0.33 ms ] story [ 20.4 ms ] threadWestern reality tv, procedurals, game shows, soap operas and so on are incredibly samey after all. BUT the other factor is that creative endeavors in China take place under a censorship regime. Some topics are safer than others, so the mainstream tends to be quite formulaic and focused on fantasy, sci-fi, or pseudo historical shows.
If it were a question of genre, sure I get that. But we're talking about effectively all commercial art at this point. It has nothing to do with "western superior" racism or anything like that. Japan does not have this problem at all, even though they invented the anime aesthetic.
Where is the Chinese Mario, Elden Ring, or Metal Gear? What studio is producing a truly original distinct visual language?
I live in Japan and I strongly disagree. The products you mention are the ones strong enough to get exported overseas, but within Japan itself you get a thousand manga/anime/dorama/idols/games per year that all look pretty much identical, everything feels extremely derivative.
For example I don't listen much electronic dance music (house, techno, trance etc), and whenever I go end up in a club it sounds to me that its always the same loud thumping song playing. Those who go frequently do seem to find a lot of variation though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Of course that may just be me projecting my own perspective onto them, but I did get the feeling that there is a performative aspect to the culture described in this article, and that whatever lies underneath it is likely, as in so many places, not really accessible to anyone who was not born and raised in a place.
The whole reason you have entrepreneurs in the US is because people DON'T judge for you failing. You can always start again.
I think part of this bias is due to their not having any actual domestic, critical understanding and thus can't apply the same analytical tools they would use to analyze, for eg, why Youtube Shorts/IG Reels/etc took off here
for example, some of the claims the author makes are just silly:
> Chinese consumers already had a high tolerance for slop and AI content fit naturally into this ecosystem without ever triggering an uncanny-valley reflex.
yeah buddy, this isn't due to some inherent acceptance of unreality, the massive volume of low-budget vertical 微短剧 (weiduanju) on Douyin and Kuaishou is driven by economic factors like digital ad-arbitrage [0]. most of these studies spend the vast majority of their budget on advertising to get views with an incredibly small amount reserved for actual production. and so thus you get 1) over-saturation of ads for consumers displacing traditional media and 2) a race-to-the-bottom of the uncanny valley for output
plus, the CAC cracks down a lot more on cruddy micro-dramas than US regulators do on shitty TikTok/YShorts/IG Reels content (ie not at all, ever)
> This basic message is inculcated throughout Chinese upbringing: push through and ignore physical discomfort, but attend to and be subject to social censure. It's okay to be buffeted by the elements, but if your grades are bad, you'll be too ashamed to face your parents.
yeah, again, this is blaming individual psychological conditioning and not systemic forces. like here, managing reputation has to do with high-stakes institutional checkpoints, not an irrational preference for perception over physical reality. when the 高考 (gaokao) and your 户口 (hukou) literally dictate whether or not you have access to housing, schools, and healthcare, you would of course focus your attention on grades and social standing. if there were other gatekeepers, the 'culture' would shift to focus there too
> Dark World thinking sees all virtue and kindness as pretense. Among many such tropes, a common derogatory trope is of women who act nice and innocent 白莲花 (white lotus) while being deceitful and manipulative on the inside. Chinese media creates trapped priors that people acting kind, altruistic, and pure are more likely to be evil."
yeah, so this happened because they dismantled the 铁饭碗 (tiefanwan) [1]. the state basically dismantled the kind of sub-utopian socialist give-everything social programming (that certain propagandized Western leftists seem to believe are still in place) and let the market fully take over. when your universal safety net is gone, extending trust or finances to others who are economically incentivized to compete with you becomes a sub-optimal play. it's why 内卷 (neijuan or involution) is a widely discoursed about issue in Chinese society
also, it's very funny to see 白莲花 (white lotus) used... seriously here? in Chinese social media, that's a satirical term and positions the bailianhua as sanctimonious. it's not aspirational, it's like calling someone a Karen here
[0] https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1014167
[1] https://www.routledge.com/The-Individualization-of-Chinese-S...
>Even among strains of nationalism, Chinese nationalism seems to be particularly chip-on-your-shoulder. My impression is that this kind of insecurity is less in your face, but still present, in younger Chinese today. It is concerning how much Chinese AI models catching up in the AI race is entangled with this national insecurity.
investment in domestic computing and foundation models is guided by industrial policy (科技自立自强) [0]. this isn't some kind of ego issue shared across 1+ billion people, it's literally policy set up by central planninng
> "My current hypothesis is that the locally optimal message to China is in the vein of “give us your autists who feel alienated by the monoculture,” but others may prefer a more conciliatory approach that directly appeals to the dominant culture."
the lived reality of Chinese neurodivergence is not some abstract thing that's fun to joke about. it's, instead, families carrying a child through an educational system that offers minimal specialized scaffolding, navigating intense social stigma, and absorbing the terror of what happens to a dependent adult when their aging parents die. instead of seeing this population as a recruitment pool of "hyper-logical code monkeys" waiting to be drafted into an American AI safety crusade, maybe think of them as people. otherwise you're no different from the people who are just calling them slurs
also, to describe Chinese culture as 'monocultural' is just wrong. a migrant worker on a factory floor does not share the same culture as a tech worker at Baidu - and neither of them share the same culture as a factory owner. there's also like a billion subcultural niches in China - lie flat 躺平 and letting it rot 摆烂 just to name two more popular ones. it's not as if the people there are stupid to knowing their culture is exploitative - the critique of 996 is widespread
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209580992...
> yeah, this isn't due to some inherent acceptance of unreality, the massive volume of low-budget vertical 微短剧 (weiduanju) on Douyin and Kuaishou is driven by economic factors like digital ad-arbitrage [0]. most of these studios spend the vast majority of their budget on advertising with an incredibly small amount reserved for actual production and so you get AI filtered slop because it's cheaper than paying actors or make up artists or the whole supporting crew
> plus, the CAC cracks down a lot more on cruddy micro-dramas than US regulators do on low-quality TikTok/YShorts/IG Reels content (ie not at all, ever)
I'm not following your argument with this one. American production companies (which also use and are funded by advertising) also certainly care about their bottom line, and would cut the budget of "paying actors or make up artists or the whole supporting crew" as much as they could get away with. As you note, the reason they can't get away with cutting that stuff more isn't because they're regulated more in America. Rather, they can't cut more because viewers wouldn't tolerate it. What argument are you actually making about why Chinese companies getting away with the low-budget (low-quality) "slop" isn't the fault of the people tolerating it by watching?
Europeans feel exactly like this as well. And as an American who's lived in Europe for decades, I couldn't agree more.
It's either healthy organic vegan, or junk.
This is largely correct across cultures.
“Trust is a luxury I can’t afford.” - Cormega
Your best friends will screw you over for fun.
Your friendly boss will lie to your face.
Family members have no issue with ripping each other off once money is on the line.
How many probate attorneys eat well because siblings need to sue each other ?
I don’t even think it’s a matter of capitalism or economics.
Something is off about humanity at a fundamental level.
And these positive actions happen 100x more often, at least.
But indeed, nobody is perfect
That’s eviction #1.
You can see the hate and xenophobia coming out. When times are tough people need someone to blame.
The bad experiences stand out because that's how our minds are wired, and they're so uncommon as to be surprising.
that's exactly what happens when state power vanishes. It's always fun to recall historical events, in 1977 when New York lost power for 24 hours (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977...)
In those 24 hours 1600 stores were looted, 1000 fires laid, firefights broke out, the mafia in little Italy hat to defend the quarter with barricades and arms, robbers were being robbed by other robbers, almost 4k people were arrested to the point where they had to be put into basements and gyms. That's one day without order. The bad experiences don't stand out because they're uncommon, they stand out because we all instinctively know we're one bad week away from eating each other. Which by the way given that this is a thread about China, happened in the living memory of some people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre
"In the massacre, methods of slaughter included "beheading, beating, live burial, stoning, drowning, boiling, group slaughters, disemboweling, digging out hearts, livers, genitals, slicing off flesh, blowing up with dynamite, and more".[1][8] In one case, according to official records, a person had dynamite bound to the back and was blown up into pieces by other people (so called "heavenly maiden scattering flowers", 天女散花)—just for fun"
We see people fight over Black Friday deals. God help us if there was an actual food shortage.
All the authors observations ring true, and they all stem from one simple fact: China was a very poor country just forty years ago, and even today is only a middle income country.
The uncomfortable truth is a lot of the things westerners take for granted are, in fact, luxuries. Arts and creativity is a luxury. Freedom to pursue passion is a luxury. Compassion is a luxury. Self-esteem is a luxury. If you barely have enough food to feed your family, as a significant number of Chinese people were in the 60s and 70s, you cannot afford any of these.
China has grown richer at a remarkable rate, but the mentality shift can take generations.
This entire century of media has been an endless splitting of hairs and casting of doubts.
This is supposed to be uncomfortable? Why? Most inter-national discussions here are about how their country is better because they have bigger houses, more toys, and how they can remain oblivious to how the rest of the world works because of how good their “soft” or “hard” power is at managing the rest of the world.
Sure.
> Compassion is a luxury. Self-esteem is a luxury.
No. These are virtues, not luxuries. You don't need a high income to be compassionate or have self-esteem.
I'm only speaking from my own experience here. When I've seen stressed out people who are expected to believe in "virtues", they just become more dishonest to hide their bad behavior.
The bell curve of human behavior stays the same no matter what time or place.
If you are starving, you don’t even have that option. You need to prioritize your survival.
> No. These are virtues, not luxuries.
According to your particular ethics. Has it ever occurred to you that the ethics you have isn't universal but is simply an artifact of your culture?
If you can hardly find food or medicine, there is very little room left in your brain for virtues.
This is why religion was developed to help people cope. Society collapses quickly when there is scarcity.
We saw a small glimpse of that in COVID with people hoarding basic toiletries in US.
I have to daily remind myself that people on here probably haven't had a single liberal arts class (like philosophy or anthropology) because they're stemlords.
> But the virtues exist in every society.
And also not to do bright. brother you're literally commenting on your own response to a post about how such a virtue is potentially absent in some society
If it really came down to the famine, I'd ask why isn't this mentality seen in Bangladesh, who also lost around 5% of it's population to famine in the 20th century? They're some of the kindest, most welcoming people I've been around in the face of a poverty that China no longer knows.
So I'm having a hard time believing that TFA isn't completely off on this one, as I'd expect a society that had 2000 years of contact with Buddhism to have absorbed at least a little of the Buddha's teachings on karuna. Especially one whose main school was that of Mahayana and it's ideal of the Bodhisattva.
Japan, post war was desperately poor, but everyone shared what they had. A friend who grew up in rural China in the 60s-70s described very compassionate behavior. Communism is often born of necessity and not political will. Those who cheat and steal are ostracized, if not hunted.
It is during rapid transitions, and it seems during both growth and decline when hoarding and theft become rampant. In steady state, those that remain, work together.
There's a good chance that for the survivors from that era, their parents almost certainly did some extremely evil things to survive.
Please study some history and stop assuming literally everyone is evil. That leads to the very expectations, political apathy, and actions that allow this kind of situation. It's unhelpful.
Go ask anyone from, say, Myanmar (especially Arakan state) what they think of Bangladeshi people. You might find that opinion of "They're some of the kindest, most welcoming people I've been around in the face of a poverty that China no longer knows" to not be so widely held.
Maybe you should ask Bangladeshi's what they think of the Rohingya people. It turns out that Myanmar is not the only country oppressing them and refusing to give them citizenship!
The tendency to want to group an entire race/people with opinions based on hundreds of experiences with them, let alone dozens or a few, is the same tendency in us that spawns racism and prejudice. Your experiences have no influence on the reality of "the goodness of a people".
My comment was responding to the author's argument that compassion only arises when material needs are accounted for, that compassion is some middle class thing. They were arguing that Chinese culture doesn't emphasize it because of their history of war, famine, and poverty. I think that's a horrible misunderstanding of both compassion and Chinese culture, and was merely countering it with an example of a people that have also experienced a famine that had a similar mortality rate who display perfectly normal human levels of compassion and kindness despite that history. I then went on to conclude that the original writer is likely completely off on how they view Chinese culture, that compassion is fundamental to being human and has nothing to do with bourgeois material comfort.
We tend to want to think in binaries -- people are compassionate or not. People are welcoming or not. That's not how reality works though, it's more nuanced. I was in no way arguing that an entire community of people aren't capable of mistreatment of others. Of course they are. But can a people that have experienced a massive amount of trauma and poverty and loss capable of displaying compassion? Of course they are. Because compassion is a fundamental aspect of being human.
Societies thrive when humans cut each other a little slack. They die when people are constantly looking for ways to take advantage of others.
Read about the dehumanizing effects of concentration camps on individuals hiding food from their family or praying their father dies so they can get his food
Its arguable that our ability to build luxurious enough societies has allowed out compassion to flourish far beyond what is witnessed elsewhere in the state of nature
True.
> Its arguable that our ability to build luxurious enough societies has allowed out compassion to flourish far beyond what is witnessed elsewhere in the state of nature.
Concentration camps and famines are not the 'state of nature'. A closer analogue would be tribal societies in the Amazon basin, Eastern Africa and the like. Constant hunger and scarcity are not the norm for well adapted human cultures, nor have the been for most of recorded history.
Of course a concentration camp isn’t the state of nature
I’m saying human compassion far exceeds anything witnessed in the animal/plant kingdom. Some animals show affection for their offspring, but it usually doesn’t extend beyond that. There is no dog or lizard or tree version of mother Teressa
They did not emerged as force of nature out of ground. They were intentionally and conciously build. And guards were well fed.
And in here, when you use inmates lack of compassion as example of powerty causimg lack of it, you absolutely should compare to compassion of builders and guards.
These aren't the problems of a society rising out of a state of nature; as TFA states, "The narrative is that China experienced a “century of humiliation”". I think certain aspects of Chinese culture as we know it, writ-large, make more sense coming from people who weren't just recently struggling as a society, but who are well aware of how that condition compares to their historical one.
It still is.
My counter argument though is how the elite class have a certain scarcity mentality and still holds on to these observations made in the articles.
In college, I dated a few Asian who all had similar mindset. Dating wasn’t about finding the right match but more about “upgrade your social face being accepted by foreigners”. It was shockingly weird at the beginning.
Those ladies may be part of the elite now. But remember their parents or grandparents went through the Great Chinese Famine where an estimated 15-60 million people died.
Also my personal belief is that courtesy is a luxury born of abundance. I have observed how minor ‘scarcities’ in the advanced economies can surface behaviour that some would attribute to less developed places e.g. an unexpected slew of cancelled transit
Growing up, I was used to cars honking all the time.
Not a thing in US suburbia.
One fine day, there was a gridlock because of people exiting a stadium after a fireworks event, lo and behold, honks all over the place from all cars.
In developing countries, including China, my experience has been that this is the standard, and people will act accordingly even if there is abundance. Cancelled transit is a good example as well, it interacts with a primal fear of ours of being left behind or drawing the short stick, even if rationally, it is pretty inconsequential.
To give more anecdata — Union Station in Toronto has trains that leave in all directions. The ones going East and West tend to form queues on the platform at rush hour. The train heading north-west to another city tends to form mobs that rush the door upon opening.
Lots of reasons why, but geography and SES may not factor as much. Could be something as simple as supply/demand of free seats.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
Friend of a friend got hukou in Wuhan recently and picked up a crappy job as a convenience store clerk. 10 hrs/day, 3 days off a month. But! She can comfortably live off it in a major city with a studio apt and even save a bit. Doesn't even need roommates.
I'm from Finland. My grandparents were of a generation that knew poverty and hunger and fought in wars. They raised their families when the country was still poor, and food security was always at the back of their minds. My parents grew up in a country that was rapidly getting wealthier. Their generation took food for granted, but owning things was important to them, as it was something they could not have in their youth. For my generation, the country has always been wealthy, and we have always been able to take basic necessities for granted. Our focus has been in choosing what we want to do with our lives, as the world is open and there are many options to choose from.
This one is interesting. I'm from Poland, and I'd argue that during very shitty communist times people had a whole lot more compassion than now, when the country is in a much better shape.
We take our decadence and degeneracy for granted but it is all new. There are people alive now who remember Christianity.
And accusations of "degeneracy" and "decadence" were there all the time anyway. We have centuries of those complains.
Pretty strong disagree. Compassion -- and humanity towards other humans -- isn't based on what you have. The degree to which you are able to act on your compassion and do something, yes, that's certainly limited by what you have. But not the compassion itself.
I've met many very poor people in very poor countries who had more compassion and humanity than rich people in rich countries.
Recent poverty is a factor, but I disagree that it's where these characteristics stem from. I've lived and worked in countries as poor or poorer than China, and I also lived 6 years in China (and not in an expat bubble) and the characteristics described in the article* are not directly related to an escape from poverty. (*which I largely agree with, though maybe less so the Dark World frame; instead I think instead Chinese have historically a different moral framework than Westerners. For example, being "clever" enough to do something that Westerners would consider wrong (stealing, cheating, etc.) and get away with it, is a sign of strength.)
In my view, Chinese behavior is pre-eminently impacted by filial piety, social appearances, and the fact that when you live in a country with 1.5 B people if you don't push and shove, and even step on a few hands and heads, you're not getting anywhere. And you _must_ get somewhere because of your parental expectations and the need to fulfill your responsibilities to care for your parents when they get old.
Added to that is the more recent development that the CCP has achieved a level of information and social control that other authoritarian countries could only dream of. It's very effective to a degree that Americans would find shocking. (The author's first point about the ubiquity of social media in China goes along with this, and has become a highly effective means of "guiding" public thought.)
This has also been true where I am from (formerly East Germany), yet we still had arts, creativity, freedom to pursue passion, compassion and self-esteem. We might have had only barely enough food to feed a family, but that didn't mean that we acted like animals.
No, most good characters in those books are chinese. I liked technical aspects of the book a lot, but on societal level there was quite a bit xenophobia up to including racism against white people.
Still interesting, maybe something akin to picking up some pulp novel from 1920s that had other races in stereotypical cartoon evil roles. Not something pleasant to read in 21st century for anybody with more modern values (where average typical Chinese stand on this I leave to them here, no idea).
- Nationalism stemming from insecurity (I tend to notice the poorest, most desperate tend to be the proudest)
- "social death" - Is that not so different that being canceled or fear of being canceled? To me it seems very apparent that people who get ostracized on the national stage take a huge personal toll and have their personality changed for years.
- Also for the Dark World example he uses a Peter Thiel quote. I think optimism/trust/community is lower here now that a few decades ago. But I do agree that in tech jobs I've anecdotally seen more cutthroat approaches (e.g. refusing to share knowledge with a coworker) from other cultures more often.
In everyday life the description in the article is nothing like what I imagine America to be.
I think this is where folks go astray. There are tons of well-off or even wealthy people who love America, give to their churches, cheer on their kids at sporting events, and have what appears to an outsider as an unbelievably high amount of nationalism. It's not really the poorest, most desperate slice of society by any measure. Have you lived outside of a major city in the US?
Looking at the research it shows that subjects who self-identify as loving America can be preducted by best by being older, and political party, though not wealth at all.
So I don't really have any hard-data to justify my impression that it's uneducated blue-collar white men without much going for them that vociferously love america, maybe it's just country music that gives that impression, or the type of uneducated poor who enter the army with blind faith in our institutions, etc.
Chinese government actively shapes the online discourse, so the messaging is already filtered. To make it worse, it meant people found out that the easiest way to silence your opponent is to brand them as anti-China, so you see a lot of pro-China virtue signaling. Finally, people also realized patriotism is lucrative.
"Am I German or Autistic?" [1]
[1] https://german.millermanschool.com/
They're otherwise generally in support of doing the greatest good for the greatest number, at least ostensibly, so I wonder what it is about China -- which has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty domestically and is looking to export wealth abroad (most notably in the form of accessible "luxury" goods such as electric cars) -- that seems to trigger them so much.
China's political economy is also far more "rationalist" than anything you'll find anywhere else.
And yet I swear, and I'm not exaggerating about this in the slightest, that the average EA/LW poster hates China far more than the average /pol/ poster -- and is perfectly comfortable making sweeping generalizations where 1.4B Chinese are concerned. Guys like Scott Alexander rarely (if ever) have a good word for them; Zvi Moshowitz discounts and belittles every technological advance they make, despite otherwise being very fair; and you see what LW itself is like...
Maybe they just are lot less rational and altruistic than they claim to be. With significant biases...
In reality, there's two separate economies within the PRC. Around 40% live in the modern world we see in images of China (skyscrapers, EVs, high-speed trains, etc.). Awesome stuff, to be sure, and that same environment has been engineered to track every single interaction you make with it. You must use Wechat; no exceptions. Say the wrong thing on the Internet? You might lose the ability to take long-distance train or airplane rides within China, let alone international travel rights.
The other 60% live with dirt floors, hand carts, and engage primarily in subsistence farming. (It's been about five years since I last looked up those stats, but it should be around the same.) The US has eliminated this level of poverty; having even access to an automobile is enough.
The PRC argues they're able to take care of all their people, but they're nowhere near out of the woods when it comes to food insecurity. Due to population and geographic realities, they simply cannot grow enough food to feed their own people, so importation is an absolute necessity. For this reason, "unlicensed" fishing fleets (no Chinese group larger than 20 people operates without de-facto government consent) sail across oceans to fish just outside a country's territorial waters.
The Chinese political economy appears to be rationalist, but few countries have more political dishonesty than the PRC. According to an old friend who extensively knows Chinese politics, there's three main political factions: pro-Xi reformers, anti-Xi old guard Communists, and everyone else. Their ability to disappear a political enemy without what we'd term "due process" is truly unheard of in the West. Local politics is arguably worse; bribery is how anything gets done, and local officials suppress incident fatalities because over a certain threshold (around 30), the higher-ups will shame them. In such a media-controlled environment, that's less difficult than you might think living in the West.
When you talk about exporting wealth with EVs, that comes with the understanding that the PRC has de-facto control of your vehicle. Most people dislike the idea of the PRC not only retaining all data gathered by your car but having remote access to disable or drive it. If that's alright with you, go right ahead.
Your "60% live with dirt floors and engage primarily in subsistence farming" claim is utterly indefensible. At the end of 2025, China’s population was 67.9% urban and 32.1% rural. Even in 2021 -- approximately when you say you last checked -- it was already 64.72% urban.
Here's Chongqing, China's largest city by population (~31M): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOjZPCeZzGw
You'll agree that it's by no means a slum.
Also, and even more importantly, rural residence does not mean subsistence poverty. Look at stats on Chinese rural household possessions -- they're actually reasonably well-off. (e.g., >100 air conditioners per 100 households, whereas in France only ~25% of households have air conditioners!) Little surprise, then, that the World Bank credits China with lifting almost 800 million people out of extreme poverty.
Even if I grant your claim about food insecurity -- which is also fundamentally untrue, but not worth getting into -- how is it relevant? They need to import soybeans for animal feed, so they are evil?
You don't like them for some reason -- but I still don't get it, as the reasons you've put forth here make no sense and are flimsy, paper-thin.
> https://www.istat.it/en/press-release/household-energy-equip...
> https://www.idealista.it/news/finanza/casa/2026/07/26/406719...
Point is, the Rural Chinese aren't pre-industrial dirt farmers. When it comes to things like air conditioners, cell phones, TVs (~100% of households), internet use, etc., they usually rank quite highly.
As such, "60% live with dirt floors, hand carts, and engage primarily in subsistence farming" is either a lie or shocking ignorance, plain and simple.
The air conditioner point, while hilarious, is not really comparable because Europeans have the money to install them but are usually forbidden from fixed installs due to historical building preservation codes and other regulations. Europeans create that issue for themselves, like always.
On food insecurity, I'll point to this excellent (though slightly older) article about food production in the PRC (https://factsanddetails.com/china/cat9/sub63/item348.html). For a more recent perspective, I asked AI for an answer:
> While domestic production has grown to nearly 7.5 billion metric tons annually, the overall food self-sufficiency rate has declined from 94% in 2000 to approximately 66% in 2020. Consequently, China has become the world's largest agricultural importer, relying on global markets to supplement domestic production for a diversified diet.
So, yeah, food insecurity (perhaps better termed food supply insecurity, I'll admit), though that might change once they start experiencing population shrink over the next fifty years.
I dislike the PRC due to a complete, utter mistrust of their entire operating model. It's undeniable that their methods are worth examining to understand the exact reasons for their effectiveness in growing the overall standard of living, educational outcomes, infrastructure, and more, and I will readily acknowledge that. How the PRC achieved that success is by truly, genuinely only caring about itself, with marginal concern for the outcomes of anyone other than themselves ("themselves" being the political elite, not the People). For all the global discussions about transitioning away from fossil fuels, the PRC destroys that progress every single day with their energy policies.
Most Americans are completely unaware of the extent of corruption in other countries. There is ALWAYS work to be done here, but to even compare them is genuinely comical. The PRC is far, far, far more corrupt. When I say corrupt, I don't mean greasing wheels or backroom deals; that's how all political structures (governmental or otherwise) operate, and if you can't accept that, then don't get into politics. Corruption in the PRC boils down to structured, deliberate misrepresentations and omissions of facts to avoid shame and preserve a good appearance (some parallels exist here with the USSR). Nothing even like that exists in the West, and you would be naive or silly for believing it does. For primarily that reason, I dislike them.
Say data leaves the US and goes back to the PRC. Did you know it's actually easier (from a legal perspective) for the US government and its business interests to collect the data outside the country than inside? It's actually in the intelligence and industrial communities' best interests for data on US persons leave the country. My point is, even with your beliefs, you should very much dislike that PRC automotive data will leave the country.
Remember the OPM hack? Perhaps the data should have simply been given to the PRC, since they're better data stewards and have our best interests in mind (/s). Ultimately, PRC vehicles will be used for facial recognition, home address identification, employer identification, and more. If you think I'm being hyperbolic, consider that the PRC can locate any person inside their borders (at least within an urban area) within ten minutes.
Why should I remember or care about the OPM hack? I’m less concerned by fantastical stories or things ‘attributed’ to China than the things the US government does around the world in my name or to me directly at home which are beyond dispute.
Authoritarianism is bad, except for when I do it (to protect you).
I have seen Zvi pushing back against the narratives that open-weights models and Chinese ICs have caught up to the frontier. Was he wrong? But I can't recall any animus against Chinese people or their talent there.
Here are a few (check out the comments- working class people from around the world make contact):
https://www.youtube.com/@kangkanginchina7
https://www.youtube.com/@Chineseruralareas
Anyway, I view this as one of the more positive uses for AI.
I enjoy these videos a lot, esp. if they are about history and engineering. Some of videos have really good production quality. I guess they are probably translated fron original WeChat etc. source material.
https://www.youtube.com/@zazainchina
I'm a native Chinese person born around the new millennium, and some of the observations in this article seem to apply only to specific generations.
"Dark World thinking as described in Truth or Dare": I personally don't feel this at all. But this mentality does apply to many people over 70.Some of the elderly people I met are mean and selfish by today's standards, but considering they might have literally survived a starvation, this shouldn't be that surprising.
"Primacy of social reality, and of shame and “face.”: I don't know about this. Maybe because I grew up in this environment, I am used to the social norm and don't find it uncomfortable at all. Yet I haven't lived abroad for a long time, so I don't know how different it is somewhere else.
"Chinese social media is like American junk food.": Basically true. Social platforms can be atrocious, but there are rational and comfortable circles. They tend to stay low though, since popularity usually destroys them. But I'd argue that this is the same anywhere on the internet.
Spin The Bottle? Truth or Dare?
My grandfather survived starvation and much, much worse things during and after WWII (in Russian captivity). He died of old age a long time ago, but was a very kind and not at all selfish person.
The point about the cynical view however I disagree with. I don't think I have the correct words to explain this, but basically, unlike India, Korea and maybe to a certain point Japan, they distrust this kind of American, almost forced friendliness, cheerfulness and enthusiasm and see it as fake, which is very similar to how French, Belgians, Dutch or Germans feels sometimes (I know I did my first time around in California).
That's also the reason why out of all of Asia, I feel the best working with Chinese teams (Japanese too but I have more trouble with their English).
[Edit]: forgot the point about social shame: not untrue, but geographically limited to the more rural area in my casual observation. No one in Beijing takes themselves that seriously, but in poorer areas, pride and face felt more important.
If my main consideration in an interaction with a stranger is to avoid its escalating to violence, I'm going to be polite, but I'm going to be a bit reserved, not enthusiastic or friendly.
In these discussions, non-Americans often describe Americans as always happy, which is another quality I'm going to tend to avoid showing in the hypothetical interaction with the stranger because if he is feeling bitter or resentful, my being happy might set him off.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/ehe25w/why_a...
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/1k7sfbv/so_w...
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/1nq71lc/why_...
That was jut to tell the author that i think he misread how Chineese are on this specific point. It wasn't a criticism of North Americans at all. Really, i think this is charming now (as long as we don't work together, then i will find this infuriating and bitch about it to my SO)
I'm hesitant to move further from TFA, but a brief one-shot: Among Boston people who returned after "trying" SV/SF/California, I repeatedly heard of struggling, amidst an unfamiliar ambient "friendliness" culture, to recognize social signals around "actual" friendship - was someone "really" interested in becoming friends, or were they merely performing "friendly". AI tells me this is called peach vs coconut, nice vs kind, guess vs ask cultures.
Similarly, someone (with no family connection to China) learned Chinese, later married into a family from/in China, and would describe "Chinese" culture. Someone else from China glossed their insights with a dismissive 'their friends are criminals [sic], and they're over generalizing from that subculture'.
So amidst country-level cultural themes, and regional variations, and generational differences (and gender, hukou, ethnicity, etc), and subcultural diversity, it's sometimes a challenge to tell what cultural elements are which.
My experience is that everyone from outside the Northeast thinks those of us from the Northeast are assholes, and we think they're all two-faced sociopaths.
When I have visited California it feels superficial and fake. People are like, we're all laid back and let's go surfing! But if you trip over someone's dog leash they are going to sue you.
In China this was also the case with the literary language (文言), but it went even further. You actually had to master it to advance in any official career. So a government official instead of, say, learning how to manage a city, had to learn the old philosophical texts written in a language nobody speaks. And they had to pass actual exams for that knowledge.
Now China has the Communist writings displacing these old philosophical texts. They are about as useful, and I don't think many people really care about them, but you have to show knowledge of them to advance in your career.
I don't think this is a _good_ pattern, it reinforces the belief that everyone around them is lying and that everyone's behavior is fake.
And since we're talking about culture, I highly recommend this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Tales_from_a_Chinese_S... - it's a series of short fantasy stories written around 400 years ago.
Some of them are just weird and have stories that are nothing like European fairy tales. For example, a story of a spirit befriending a man just to talk from time to time. And then the spirit had to eventually move to another location because it got a promotion. Just imagine the culture, where even your afterlife is going to be just as bureaucratic as your regular life!
The average citizen is not who you need to convince. The national narrative is set from the top, disseminated through the Central Propaganda Department, and enforced.
It’s not a grass roots effort to sway national policy in China AFAIK - you’re trying to convince a small group of key people who have enough of their hands on the steering wheel of a totalitarian state.