angel opportunity posted:

Here is one thing I actually like more about Chinese culture.

This is going to sound pretty spergy, and you're free to call me a goon or call this like "nice c/p" etc., but I'm really just trying to analyze a cultural thing here.

I think the US is worse about this than Europe, but this whole thing is relatively annoying in most of the west. You always feel obligated by western culture to project a certain facade of being "cool." As I've gone from 20 to 30 years old, it isn't so much "cool" now as it is "projecting an image of doing things that are normal or acceptable uses of time," less than it is just "being cool."

An example of this is how many people list "hiking" as an interest on social media or dating profiles. Why are so many people into hiking? Because saying "Binge watching TV" and "Videogames" does not project the image of cool/acceptable behavior that western society obligates you to project. Hiking projects a good image and is something--when you are called out on it--you can say you like but don't "get to do too often."

I'm mostly talking about poo poo that EVERYONE does and very few will admit or talk about in social situations or list out as one of their main hobbies or at least main ways they waste time.

In China you will get people who just say: "My favorite hobby is Dota. I love to play Dota with my friends. It's such a great game. This weekend I am going to go to the internet cafe and play Dota all night with my friends. Do you want to come play with me?" I find this really refreshing, and I find that Chinese people don't judge everything else about you if you admit to having a hobby that isn't cool or doesn't meet some imagined standard of normalcy.

This facade thing extends to how guarded western people tend to be. It's very tedious and annoying to make friends with people in the US especially. There is always this whole thing going on where you have to give the other person a HUGE "out" to avoid being friends with you or hanging out with you. We do this almost subconsciously, but I noticed it pretty hard after being in China for a year. For instance when you meet someone at a bar who seems cool and you get on really well, one of you might say, "We should hang out again sometime."

This is a super loose commitment you make by suggesting like this, and you leave the other person a giant "out." The other person's out is to just say "Yeah, totally." They COULD take you up later somehow (like if you friended each other on Facebook or whatever), but likely they will not at all. If they actually want to make an effort to be friends with you, they will pretty much have to think of something concrete to suggest right then and there, for instance, "Yeah, on Sunday I'm going to this (music thing), you want to go with me?"

The "out" you have to leave people in the US is so loving strong that they pretty much must make a super concrete response to you if they actually want to be friends or hang out with you again.

If you both end up hanging out together from here, I find that usually you have to accept each following invitation no less than two times or the friendship will complete dissolve. The reason this happens is that each person is so worried about leaving the "out" there. "Maybe they don't really like hanging out with me that much, and they said they couldn't hang out this time, so I'll just let it go (forever, never contacting them again) in case they actually don't want to hang out more."

The advantage of this, of course, is that when you meet someone at a bar who you actually cant' stand, you can VERY EASILY get out of ever having to hang out with them, and you don't even have to sound mean doing it. Just say "yeah totally" whenever they suggest hanging out, and never follow up or commit to anything. If they break the social cues and try to keep inviting you to stuff, you can always just ignore the messages or invitations by replying "Yeah I might stop by" or something. the whole social fabric here is heavily weighted toward not actually wanting to ever hang out with new people. It's good if you have a group of friends you like and don't want to meet new people, but it sucks if you just moved somewhere and/or if you generally are not extroverted and good at meeting/befriending people.

Going back to China, in China you have the complete opposite end where people will come right up to you and say, "Hello, do you want to make friends with me?"

Then you say, "Yes."

Then they say, "Great, we will go to barbecue tomorrow night with my friends, I will introduce you to my friends, and we all can make friends together."

The tradeoff here is that it can be really annoying to get rid of someone you don't actually like hanging out with. I had one Chinese friend in Chongqing where he'd text me like every few days, "What are we doing this weekend? Hot pot?" And I didn't really like hanging out with him, so at some point I just had to ghost him. My "Uhh not sure about this weekend" and other vague responses that would have completely gotten me out of being friends with him in the US were totally ineffective in Chinese culture. I either had to ghost him, or tell him something really blunt like, "Hey I am too busy to be friends with you anymore, sorry!"

So each culture here has advantages and disadvantages (lol), but I genuinely do prefer how it is in China. I don't have the energy or effort to do the "I am too cool to be friends" dance in the US, and I'd rather just have to ghost people from time to time and have it be easier to make friends with people from the beginning.

Grand Fromage posted:

I am frequently asked how I get my skin so white and sometimes I just tell them to try having an Irish grandparent but if I'm bored I like to make up some sort of elaborate TCM-esque food thing like boiling avocados in blended fish juice and rubbing the goop on before bed and hope they actually try it.

hakimashou posted:

The best chinese singer is and always will be Faye Wong.

LimburgLimbo posted:

Yeah I was gonna say, you may not like her genre or whatever but calling Teresa Teng a bad singer is dumb as gently caress because she's pretty definitely not?

angel opportunity posted:

In China you will get people who just say: "My favorite hobby is Dota. I love to play Dota with my friends. It's such a great game. This weekend I am going to go to the internet cafe and play Dota all night with my friends. Do you want to come play with me?" I find this really refreshing, and I find that Chinese people don't judge everything else about you if you admit to having a hobby that isn't cool or doesn't meet some imagined standard of normalcy.

BONGHITZ posted:

I am moving to china to teach english!

Coolguye posted:

so yeah, if i have two people in a room, and one will lie to me about who they're loving and what they do on the weekend, and the other will lie to me about work, play, history, and what the sky looks like, i will absolutely consider the first person irreproachably honest, regardless of the fact that they're putting on a show.

Haier posted:

https://www.reddit.com/r/blackpeoplegifs/comments/6qjiax/being_black_in_china/






I like the thread where people are saying Chinese learned from Americans how to be racist against black people, because China has no black people. It's no wonder we can't tell these dumb Millennials about our China experiences without the immediately resorting to "ur racist!!"

Chomp8645 posted:

BONGHITZ posted:

Baronjutter posted:

it's much more rare to meet people that don't generally follow the general dominant social norms?

quote:

Thomas Handasyd Perkins, one of Boston's leading merchants, has been taking risks with shipments to China for nearly 40 years. But now, he may have gone too far.

Perkins drafts a letter to his nephew and business partner in the Chinese port city of Canton, now known as Guangzhou. The message is an apology and a warning: More than 150,000 pounds of Turkish opium is on its way.
...
Perkins and Co. was among the first -- if not the first -- American companies to establish a permanent trading office in Canton. With employees on the scene year-round, the firm can optimize profits on the drug — which is still legal in the United States, but illegal in China.

Company agents store chests filled with squash-size balls of opium in ships anchored offshore, to have some control over supply and price. They develop relationships with smugglers and corrupt top government officials. And they use boats manned by dozens of rowers to speed past inspectors, sneak up the coast, and deliver opium beyond the official port.

The business plan pays off again and again. On Jan. 11, 1827, one year after the apology, Perkins is back at his desk, writing another letter to his nephew. This time the tone is almost giddy.

"I have written and thought so much of opium that it gives me an opiate to enter upon the subject," Perkins tells Cushing.

Baronjutter posted:

but I always wonder about the levels of social diversity in China. From the stories people tell, it sounds much more homogenous than say north america, where it's much more rare to meet people that don't generally follow the general dominant social norms?

Haier posted:

http://i.imgur.com/EzJ6rV1.gifv

Coolguye posted:

the issue with the 'americans are super truthful and straightforward' thing is what are you comparing it to

americans lie a fair bit, sure, but the things they lie about are generally relatively small things for social situations etc. there are tons of social cues you can invoke in the US and Canada to demand drop dead honesty and lots of examples people can point to in their own lives where ignoring those cues led to some repercussions that are best avoided. foreigners will likely not understand these social cues very well and as a result are more likely to get lied to, but most western societies have enough contact with foreigners that foreigners who DO invoke the appropriate social cues will get the benefit that natives get the supermajority of the time.

when you compare it to norms in many other cultures, this makes americans, canadians, brits, and scandinavians loving paragons of truth and bluntness. peruvians, argentinians, and brazilians lie to each other so routinely that their respective governments had to run goddamn public access campaigns on the value of truthfulness and how punctuality and reliability were the cornerstones of a proper economy. peru could quantify that it was losing 15% of its GDP per year because no motherfucker on the planet could be trusted when they gave a date for anything from a meeting to a delivery. even some dude you have known all your life cannot get a real answer out of you when you ask when a load of steel is showing up to the construction site or if you are meeting him to talk about the mccalley deal at lunch.

mainlanders easily rank up there with that level of deceit. one factory i worked with out there back when i did business in shenzen told me that sir, everything is fine with your order, we will be shipping it tomorrow morning, sir. i had already been burned by this motherfucker once so i called a friend of mine in the area and asked them to call the factory himself; he'd known the factory manager since he got into business as an interpreter 5 years back and had a supposedly great relationship with him. again, was told everything is fine. i still didn't trust the motherfucker and told my contact there i'd double his daily rate if he went out and did a site visit for me.

one hour later he sent me a picture showing how the loving loading area of the factory was charred black and mostly melted because there had been a fire earlier that week and no shipments had gone in or out for the last 4 days. no more were going out for at least another week, the damage was so bad. of course when i called up the factory and told them i'd caught them lying to me, they denied they'd ever said anything of the sort, EVEN WHEN I PLAYED THEIR VOICE FROM AN HOUR BEFORE BACK AT THEM IN THE SKYPE CALL. he simply claimed "i don't know who that is, but it isn't me, sir." it's one of the numerous reasons why i no longer do business in china.

i mean you can talk about how it's nice to hear that someone likes DOTA and extreme kayaking in the same breath or something but the idea that that relates to some level of valuable honesty is patently absurd. it's also not just a xeno thing. chinese people lie to each other constantly, about serious, serious poo poo. i dated one girl from a tiny village an hour west of beijing for a while and one of the things we broke up over was the fact that i donate blood to the red cross. you'd think this would be a really trivial thing but she was insanely creeped out by it, because of her distinct and powerful memories of local government officials piling into her village and demanding everyone donate a pint of blood. for accident victims in the city, they said. she got out of it because she was a little girl at the time, and thank gently caress she did because it was a completely illegal black market operation where the government officials stole the blood of the villagers and didn't even have the decency to sterilize their needles while they were doing with it. there was a loving AIDS epidemic in the village in the months after this blood raid because the officials were using dirty needles to draw the blood. she simply could not separate herself from that horrifying experience and broke up with me because she was absolutely loving positive i had some sort of bloodborne disease by now if i had donated 2 gallons of blood the way i said i did - because some government officials lied up and down and literally stole blood out of her family and friends' veins.

and we absolutely know that plenty of face-worshipping mainlander clods will lie about everything from their marriage prospects to their health from the stories in this very thread, so social lying is still at least as big a thing in china as it is in america.

it'd be nice if we lived in a world where you could take every word that came out of someone's mouth as canon gospel but that hasn't been the human experience literally ever. the loving epic of gilgamesh has people lying to each other up and down the road about seriously mortal poo poo. so yeah, if i have two people in a room, and one will lie to me about who they're loving and what they do on the weekend, and the other will lie to me about work, play, history, and what the sky looks like, i will absolutely consider the first person irreproachably honest, regardless of the fact that they're putting on a show.

Fojar38 posted:

I think there is a coordinated anti-china campaign in the western media, they're just being selective about it. Do a search on google for "diamond league monaco usain bolt 2017" and you have plenty of results plus a few videos. Try a search on the Chinese men's team that won the 4x100m relay and beat out 2 American teams in the same event and you'll get practically nothing. Also, every time Sun Yang was mentioned in Australian media when he won a race or something, they'll keep bringing up his 3 month suspension and branding him a drug cheat over and over again. I mean, seriously?

Anti-news operate on either ignorance or negativity to antagonise a group or country, its only natural that people would fight back. Take for instance the case of the Canadian journalist who questioned the Chinese Foreign Minister at the time about human rights issues in a meeting that had nothing to do with the situation (it was a meeting in Canada), check out his amazing shutdown of that journalist :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qikBsQ1h4S8

His stance was right, China pulled over 600 million people out of poverty with low foundations to begin with. They would not have succeeded if they took on India, Philippines or Indonesian's approach using corruption or military, and they would not have succeeded if they were continuously distracted by trolls like this journalist.

Think about it, China does not have a media large enough to have an impact on the rest of the world let alone control it, only the countries that are heavily invested in the media do. You know who they are. I think all this is just a carefully planned effort to keep China in check and slow them down.

angel opportunity posted:

I find this really refreshing, and I find that Chinese people don't judge everything else about you if you admit to having a hobby that isn't cool or doesn't meet some imagined standard of normalcy.

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

Why did he need to find a girlfriend in China, couldn't he find one in Australia?

Coolguye posted:

the issue with the 'americans are super truthful and straightforward' thing is what are you comparing it to

americans lie a fair bit, sure, but the things they lie about are generally relatively small things for social situations etc. there are tons of social cues you can invoke in the US and Canada to demand drop dead honesty and lots of examples people can point to in their own lives where ignoring those cues led to some repercussions that are best avoided. foreigners will likely not understand these social cues very well and as a result are more likely to get lied to, but most western societies have enough contact with foreigners that foreigners who DO invoke the appropriate social cues will get the benefit that natives get the supermajority of the time.

when you compare it to norms in many other cultures, this makes americans, canadians, brits, and scandinavians loving paragons of truth and bluntness. peruvians, argentinians, and brazilians lie to each other so routinely that their respective governments had to run goddamn public access campaigns on the value of truthfulness and how punctuality and reliability were the cornerstones of a proper economy. peru could quantify that it was losing 15% of its GDP per year because no motherfucker on the planet could be trusted when they gave a date for anything from a meeting to a delivery. even some dude you have known all your life cannot get a real answer out of you when you ask when a load of steel is showing up to the construction site or if you are meeting him to talk about the mccalley deal at lunch.

mainlanders easily rank up there with that level of deceit. one factory i worked with out there back when i did business in shenzen told me that sir, everything is fine with your order, we will be shipping it tomorrow morning, sir. i had already been burned by this motherfucker once so i called a friend of mine in the area and asked them to call the factory himself; he'd known the factory manager since he got into business as an interpreter 5 years back and had a supposedly great relationship with him. again, was told everything is fine. i still didn't trust the motherfucker and told my contact there i'd double his daily rate if he went out and did a site visit for me.

one hour later he sent me a picture showing how the loving loading area of the factory was charred black and mostly melted because there had been a fire earlier that week and no shipments had gone in or out for the last 4 days. no more were going out for at least another week, the damage was so bad. of course when i called up the factory and told them i'd caught them lying to me, they denied they'd ever said anything of the sort, EVEN WHEN I PLAYED THEIR VOICE FROM AN HOUR BEFORE BACK AT THEM IN THE SKYPE CALL. he simply claimed "i don't know who that is, but it isn't me, sir." it's one of the numerous reasons why i no longer do business in china.

i mean you can talk about how it's nice to hear that someone likes DOTA and extreme kayaking in the same breath or something but the idea that that relates to some level of valuable honesty is patently absurd. it's also not just a xeno thing. chinese people lie to each other constantly, about serious, serious poo poo. i dated one girl from a tiny village an hour west of beijing for a while and one of the things we broke up over was the fact that i donate blood to the red cross. you'd think this would be a really trivial thing but she was insanely creeped out by it, because of her distinct and powerful memories of local government officials piling into her village and demanding everyone donate a pint of blood. for accident victims in the city, they said. she got out of it because she was a little girl at the time, and thank gently caress she did because it was a completely illegal black market operation where the government officials stole the blood of the villagers and didn't even have the decency to sterilize their needles while they were doing with it. there was a loving AIDS epidemic in the village in the months after this blood raid because the officials were using dirty needles to draw the blood. she simply could not separate herself from that horrifying experience and broke up with me because she was absolutely loving positive i had some sort of bloodborne disease by now if i had donated 2 gallons of blood the way i said i did - because some government officials lied up and down and literally stole blood out of her family and friends' veins.

and we absolutely know that plenty of face-worshipping mainlander clods will lie about everything from their marriage prospects to their health from the stories in this very thread, so social lying is still at least as big a thing in china as it is in america.

it'd be nice if we lived in a world where you could take every word that came out of someone's mouth as canon gospel but that hasn't been the human experience literally ever. the loving epic of gilgamesh has people lying to each other up and down the road about seriously mortal poo poo. so yeah, if i have two people in a room, and one will lie to me about who they're loving and what they do on the weekend, and the other will lie to me about work, play, history, and what the sky looks like, i will absolutely consider the first person irreproachably honest, regardless of the fact that they're putting on a show.

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

he would often quote the famous words of Chairman Mao: “hǎo hǎo xué xí, tiān tiān xiàng shàng1”