alt Hacker NewsOn social reality in China
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I am Chinese living in America.
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'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 think this was a good read, but as a US citizen with no connection to China, it's hard to say. I imagine what this kind of post would sound like but in the reverse, someone in China commenting on these kinds of social dynamics for US citizens, and I can't help but think it'd be a pretty crude characterization of our reality.
I would have really liked it if the author offered their perspective of the US version of these dynamics in a more one-to-one way. It'd let me "calibrate" their characterizations based on how accurate their version of the US side of this is based on my experience.
Regardless, I do think this attempts to at least apply nuance to this kind of discussion, and, of course, the author made it clear that they're aware of the kinds of faults I'm describing, so at least there's that.
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
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):
https://www.youtube.com/@kangkanginchina7
https://www.youtube.com/@Chineseruralareas
Anyway, I view this as one of the more positive uses for AI.
"something (grimdark power-scaling quasi-isekai fantasy) that likely appeals to Chinese netizens"
There's a huge amount of that stuff appearing as Chinese AI-created dramas. Although there seem to be only about ten standard plots. ("Banished girl heiress returns from the countryside to rich family" is very popular. Some of the vertical dramas with that plot are so similar it suggests re-use of the same prompt. Incidentally, if you don't watch Chinese drama and want to, see "Princess Agents", the original. That's a pre-AI big budget project with good plotting and characters.)
The AI fear for China should be that people will have to leave their city job, and return home in shame to their village, and farm. AIs and robots do most of the city work. There are still rich, modern, cities. You're just outside them.
The drama version would start like this: An employee is called into their boss's office and told they are being replaced with an AI. They pack their belongings into a cardboard box (a cliche of Chinese drama) and walk out of the building. When they get home, a petty official visits them and tells them their hukou is being revoked for being unemployed. Then we seem them with a small suitcase getting on a green train, headed for oblivion in the countryside.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Weird to talk about these traits like Chinese cynicism and generational trauma without even mentioning the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
"Social death" is a common thing on Chinese social media apparently, shame-based virtue
> 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).
> Dark World thinking as described in Truth or Dare – a deep cynicism about human nature. People are by default out to get you.
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.
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.
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!
eugh, I cannot state how much I hate broad, categorical psychological traits gettinng assigned to entire countries of people. that might come from the fact that people would ask me 'hey does your family do this' based on some 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 not having any actual domestic, critical understanding of the home country culture and so you end up not applying the same analytical tools you'd use to analyze, for eg, why Youtube Shorts/IG Reels/etc took off here
some glaring examples from the essay:
> 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)
> 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.
this is again blaming individual psychological conditioning and not systemic forces. like in the US, 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)[1] 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."
this happened because they dismantled the 铁饭碗 (tiefanwan) [2]. 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://36kr.com/p/3547915143655305
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324106192_China%27s...
[2] https://www.routledge.com/The-Individualization-of-Chinese-S...
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What happened to the first comment that was posted here? I'm assuming it was removed because it was just a list of what I am assuming are a bunch of CCP censored terms and it didn't engage directly with the content; however, it caught my attention because I have never noticed previously a comment removed without a placeholder. Then again I suppose this why I don't see a bunch of removed spam posts.
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Chinese people find American food disgusting: inauthentic slop inundated with additives and high fructose corn syrup.
Europeans feel exactly like this as well. And as an American who's lived in Europe for decades, I couldn't agree more.
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my wife is chinese.
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...
All: I know this article intersects with 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. Generic discussion is repetitive and usually turns vituperative, as people just crash into each other's pre-hardened positions like angry bumper cars.
It's fine, of course, to disagree; we just want conversation to stay in the key of curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.