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.<p>It's fine, of course, to disagree; we just want conversation to stay in the key of curiosity: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>.
I am Chinese living in America.<p>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.<p>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.<p>China has grown richer at a remarkable rate, but the mentality shift can take generations.
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<p>- Nationalism stemming from insecurity (I tend to notice the poorest, most desperate tend to be the proudest)<p>- "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.<p>- 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.<p>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.
"Social death" is a common thing on Chinese social media apparently, shame-based virtue
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.
If you're asking about <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937309">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937309</a>, users flagged it. When a post gets a lot of flags relative to upvotes, the software kills the post (that's what "[dead]" means). Dead posts are removed from public view, but you can still see them by turning the 'showdead' setting on in your profile. This is in the FAQ: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html</a>.
> Most characters are Chinese, but even those who are not continue to mostly think and act in this similarly alien style.<p>No, most <i>good</i> 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.<p>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.<p>This is largely correct across cultures.<p>“Trust is a luxury I can’t afford.” - Cormega<p>Your best friends will screw you over for fun.<p>Your friendly boss will lie to your face.<p>Family members have no issue with ripping each other off once money is on the line.<p>How many probate attorneys eat well because siblings need to sue each other ?<p>I don’t even think it’s a matter of capitalism or economics.<p>Something is off about humanity at a fundamental level.
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'<p>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<p>for example, some of the claims the author makes are just silly:<p>> Chinese consumers already had a high tolerance for slop and AI content fit naturally into this ecosystem without ever triggering an uncanny-valley reflex.<p>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<p>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)<p>> 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.<p>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<p>> 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."<p>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<p>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<p>[0] <a href="https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1014167" rel="nofollow">https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1014167</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Individualization-of-Chinese-Society/Yan/p/book/9781847883780" rel="nofollow">https://www.routledge.com/The-Individualization-of-Chinese-S...</a>
It's clear that you know a lot about this, and your comment includes much interesting and specific information—that's great! But can you please edit out the swipes and putdowns? Everyone's perspective is limited, after all.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>
<i>Chinese people find American food disgusting: inauthentic slop inundated with additives and high fructose corn syrup.</i><p>Europeans feel exactly like this as well. And as an American who's lived in Europe for decades, I couldn't agree more.
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 <i>sameness</i> 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).
Is that really any different to Hollywood and western pop songs?
This reminds me of South Korea. IDK if its still a thing but apparently there was an official puffer jacket tier list and 90% of high school students wore 1 of about 8 different jackets.<p>Social games that drive conformity.
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.
To me China seems much more diverse than the US.
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.<p>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.
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Can you please not break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are? I realize it's frustrating—most of all when someone is lazily expressing a one-sided majority view (<-- not talking about the GP here, just in general), but it's necessary to wait until that surge of frustration subsides before posting, if we're to have the kind of discussion we're trying for (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>).<p>If you know more than someone else does, that's great—but in that case please share some of what you know, so we can all learn, and please do it without resorting to putdowns or swipes.<p>I know that takes more time and energy, but in this way you make an enduring positive contribution instead of an ephemeral destructive one. Curious conversation is fragile; it can't withstand many kicks and blows.<p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=share%20know%20learn%20by:dang" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>
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Please make your substantive points without putdowns or attacks, not matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are.<p>You may not owe cartels better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>
If the Chinese are smart—and I assume they are—then they'll just kick those EA cranks out.