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I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008
Why does this thread persecute the Falun bong.

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I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008
Do cats in China not have 9 lives?

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008
What's stopping me from making a separate Tibet thread?

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

Queue for a free calendar?

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008
Hi /r/China,

From now on we are going to start enforcing the "no circlejerk" rule more strictly when it comes to CCJ terms.

This means that rainy, rocky, nong, and tim will no longer be allowed on /r/China. These words are considered CCJ slang as they either originated in /r/chinacirclejerk (now /r/CCJ2) or became popularized there.

There are a few reasons for this:

Rainy - Although this word was originally created to describe a certain archetype of Chinese women, it is too often used as a catch-all term for Chinese women in general. For many people it feels racist and/or misogynistic, and we think /r/China would be better off without it. For similar reasons the male equivalent, Rocky, is not acceptable either.

Nong - Similar to "Rainy," nong is too often used in a racist way to refer to Chinese people. Even when it is used to mean nongmin it is derogatory and often offensive. It's just not necessary, and no longer welcome on this subreddit.

Tim - This isn't racist or sexist, but it is often used in an rude and offensive way and makes /r/China feel hostile, unwelcoming, and cliquey.

In general, these words are often used offensively, to insult, or dehumanize, and they make /r/China seem like a bitter male expat's club, with its own negative terminology for newbies and Chinese people, when what we really want to create is a more friendly, welcoming, open and accessible subreddit where anyone with an interest in China can feel comfortable posting.

We would rather not ban people for this so will just be giving out gentle warnings at first, and if you really want to use these words, /r/CCJ2 is alive and thriving, and is a place where you can pretty much say anything you like.

This is a great community, and we hope that this will make it even better. Please help us out by using the report function if you see a post or comment that we have missed and please continue to report racism and spam, thanks!

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

ladron posted:

can someone explain this one please?

What / who is Tim Budong?

Tim Budong is a play on the Chinese phrase ting bu dong, which translates to "I don't understand". Hence, a Tim Budong is a clueless, FOB (read: fresh off the boat) foreigner. The female version of a Tim is called a Tina Budong.

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

Fojar38 posted:

i predict that "when india rules the world" will become the new hot thing in the next couple of years as it becomes increasingly obvious china has peaked

India will become a superpower by 2020.

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008
https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/53xtzo/does_anybody_else_teaching_ielts_find_they_have/

quote:

Does anybody else teaching IELTS find they have to actively fight against what the students are being taught by their Chinese IELTS tutors?

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

I just blew my load, this must be what sex feels like.

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

Haier posted:

It's 730am on a Saturday and I'm the group of seven employees who are forced to go outside carrying signs and chanting slogans in unison over a loud speaker because the boss thinks this is a super great way to get more business.

"DIaoyou Islands belong to China"
"gently caress Japan"
"50% off, today only"

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

quote:


Price for Blood Donor Cards Surges on Beijing's Black Market


The price of blood donor cards is surging on the black market in Beijing as desperate families seek access to blood in the midst of a national blood shortage. Blood donors in Beijing receive more than some free cookies and a sense of altruism when they donate blood – they also receive special “donor cards” that grant donors and their family members priority access and reduced cost for donated blood and blood transfusions.

These cards incentivize blood donation, but for those who are unable to donate due to health issues or other limitations, cards are available on the black market – if you’re willing to pay. The price for one card typically ranges from RMB3000 to RMB10000.

A Beijing morning news reporter recently spent several hours near a Chaoyang blood donation center speaking with sellers and potential buyers of blood donor cards. One buyer, Wang Dong (not his real name), brought his four-year-old daughter to Beijing from their hometown in Shandong to seek medical treatment, only to find that it was impossible to get his daughter the blood she needed. So he turned to the black market. For a 15-minute wait and RMB1500 (demand was low that day, prices dropped accordingly), the father had a blood donor card that would get his daughter the care she needed.

Another man waiting to buy a donor card, Song Zuguang, had been told he was high enough on the blood donation wait list to receive blood, unlike Wang’s daughter, but Song did not have the money to pay for the transfusion. Without a blood donor card, receiving a blood transfusion comes with heavy fees attached – fees for transportation and storage of the blood, among other things. So even for those with access to blood, the cost can be prohibitive without a donor card.

The process for acquiring a black market card is simple enough – once a black marketeer has found a buyer, he sends one of his many associates in to donate blood. These associates donate as often as 15 times a month. (The Red Cross regulations advise donating no more than once every 60 days.) These associates use the buyer’s name and ID number, and are issued a donor card in the name of the buyer. The card is then turned over for an often-steep price. But for a desperate father like Wang Dong, no price is too high for the health of his child.


http://www.thatsmags.com/beijing/post/15577/price-for-blood-donor-cards-surges-on-beijing-s-black-market

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008
At least you can supervise so nothing stupid can be written on the wall.

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

The Lobotomy Kid posted:

I'm taking a holiday in China near the end of October, what's good?

Are you going to China?

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

oohhboy posted:

I can't wait for the inevitable nationalist BS to follow.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37516098

I'm so angry I'm going to smash a Korean made car.

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008
If you ate someone's head during the cultural revolution would you have gained face?

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008
Sex in China is like 'Lie back and think of Jinping"

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

nong posted:

the chinese region of hong kong
:eyepop:

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

Haier posted:

My Dear Goons,
I can sleep easy tonight knowing I finally found that Sixhead I've been looking for. Fiveheads are too common, and I've been looking for something more to give me the "boost" I've been wanting. I swiped right. Goodnight.



:manning:

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

quote:


Chabuduo! Close enough ...
Your balcony fell off? Chabuduo. Vaccines are overheated? Chabuduo. How China became the land of disastrous corner-cutting


In our apartment in central Beijing, we fight a daily rearguard action against entropy. The mirror on my wardrobe came off its hinges six months ago and is now propped up against the wall, one of many furnishing casualties. Each of our light fittings takes a different bulb, and a quarter of them are permanently broken. In the bedroom, the ceiling-high air-conditioning unit runs its moisture through a hole knocked in the wall, stuffed with an old cloth to avoid leakage, while the balcony door, its sealant rotted, has a towel handy to block the rain when it pours through. On the steps outside our door, I duck my head every day to avoid the thick tangle of hanging wires that brings power and the internet; when the wind is up, connections slow as cables swing.

The apartment is five years old. By Chinese standards, it’s far better than the average. Our toilet works, while in many of my friends’ houses, flushing the loo is a hydraulic operation akin to controlling the Nile floods. The sockets do not flash blue sparks when plugged in, and all but two work. None of the lightbulbs have ever exploded; and the mirror merely broke away, rather than falling spontaneously from the frame. The shower is not placed next to the apartment’s central wiring and protected by nothing more than rotting drywall.

I am a believer in Hilaire Belloc’s 1911 epigram:

It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.

I barely qualify as wealthy, even in China, and artisans are few and preciously guarded. Most of the time, when I’ve called in help, I’ve been left standing in a flooded bathroom with a panicked 20-year-old assuring me that he thinks he can get the pipe back on.

My time in China has taught me the pleasure and value of craftsmanship, simply because it’s so rare. To see somebody doing a job well, not just for its own reward, but for the satisfaction of good work, thrills my heart; it doesn’t matter whether it’s cooking or candle-making or fixing a bike. When I moved house some years ago, I watched with genuine delight as three wiry men stripped my old apartment to the bone in 10 minutes, casually balancing sofas and desks on their backs and packing the van as tightly as a master Tetris player.

But such scenes are an unusual treat. (And, after losing the card for my master movers, the next time I shifted house, the moving team did a fine imitation of the Three Stooges.) Instead, the prevailing attitude is chabuduo, or ‘close enough’. It’s a phrase you’ll hear with grating regularity, one that speaks to a job 70 per cent done, a plan sketched out but never completed, a gauge unchecked or a socket put in the wrong size. Chabuduo is the corrosive opposite of the impulse towards craftmanship, the desire, as the sociologist Richard Sennett writes in The Craftsman (2008), ‘to reject muddling through, to reject the job just good enough’. Chabuduo implies that to put any more time or effort into a piece of work would be the act of a fool. China is the land of the cut corner, of ‘good enough for government work’.

Yet sometimes there’s a brilliance to chabuduo. One of the daily necessities of life under Maoism was improvisation; finding ways to keep irreplaceable luxuries such as tractors or machine tools going, despite missing parts or broken supply chains. On occasion, it was applauded as ‘peasant’ science or Stakhanovite virtue, but more often it meant trouble if noticed by a superior, since Maoism often matched the call for revolution with a pedantic insistence on the correct routine, especially in the factory or the farm. Improvisation could get you accused of ‘sabotage’ – why were you fixing a problem you hadn’t caused? Besides, why would there be a problem in the first place, when things were so well-planned from the top?

But improvisation was a vitally needed talent, and a particular genius developed among some of the senior generation, now in their 60s and older: an ability to go beyond make-do-and-mend to the kind of skills displayed by the A-Team when they’re locked in a barn by villains and they construct an armoured vehicle out of nothing but gardening tools and old tyres. More usually, chabuduo is the domain of a village uncle who grew up with nothing and can whip up a solution to anything out of two bits of wire and some tape. Gate broken? Don’t worry about getting a new lock, we’ll fix it up with some wire, it’ll be chabuduo.

Today, the countryside is full of isolated inventors who build their own juddering planes or pond-going submarines from scratch, or craft full-scale catapults to resist demolition teams. Their mechanical genius has nowhere to go; they’re stuck in a world of farm repairs and lunatic projects. But on a small scale, it’s visible all over even the big cities, from the sidewalk salons assembled out of castaway furniture where layabouts and grandfathers play cards in the afternoon, to the numerous home-built roof shelters made by doting locals for Beijing’s stray cats.

Yet chabuduo is also the casual dismissal of problems. Oh, your door doesn’t fit the frame? Chabuduo, you’ll get used to kicking it open. We sent you a shirt two sizes too big? Chabuduo, what are you complaining about?

At my old compound, the entrance to the underground parking lot was covered by a 20-metre-long half-cylinder of heavy blue plastic. Nobody had noticed that this made a highly effective wind trap, and it had been only crudely nailed to the brick foundations. Chabuduo, what’s it going to matter? When a storm hit, the nails burst from the pressure and it was sent hurtling across the compound, smashing stone tables and trees; I came down in the morning to find it lying across the grass like a fallen jumbo jet’s wing.

We were lucky, nobody was killed. But behind China’s disasters, ‘good enough’ squats more often than actual malice: compromises that are mere annoyances in daily life become fatal when undertaken on an industrial scale. Problems that a keen eye or a daily routine can circumvent transform into deadly rifts when reproduced millions of times nationwide.

The deaths pile up: on construction sites where men dangle from tied-together lengths of old rope; from meat carried in unrefrigerated vans; from fires in badly wired apartments

Take the last year alone. You don’t have a proper cold-storage chain to send vaccines? Well, stick some ice in the parcels and put them in the post. Chabuduo, and children cough to death. Why take the sludge to a disposal site? Just pile it up here, where everyone else has been putting it. Chabuduo, and 91 people are crushed by a landslide in Guangdong. Separate out the dangerous materials? What does it matter, just stick that nitrate over there. Chabuduo, and a fireball goes up in Tianjin, north China’s chief port, incinerating 173 people.

‘There’s a Tianjin-level explosion every month,’ a staff member at a national-level work-safety programme told me, asking for anonymity. ‘But mostly they happen in places that nobody cares about.’ Careless disasters are buried all the time; when a chemical plant exploded in Tangshan in March 2014, a friend there told me of the management’s relief after the Malaysia Airlines flight 370 went missing the next day, swallowing up all other news and making sure nobody but them noticed, save for 13 widows.

But the small deaths pile up: on construction sites where men wield blowtorches without safety goggles, or dangle from tied-together lengths of old rope; from food poisoning from meat carried in unrefrigerated vans; from fires in badly wired apartments. The toll grows every day, especially among the poor, unnoticed and unrecorded by the institutions supposedly guarding them.

Many Chinese cities are half building site; I’ve gone on walks through back alleys that resembled Super Mario levels, full of grinding wheels shooting out flurries of super-heated sparks, bricks dropped from scaffolding above without warning and cords strung across the pavement. ‘Why don’t you put tape around that?’ I asked at one spot, pointing to a guttering pit next to the road, deep enough to break a neck. The migrant workers shrugged. ‘Nobody told us to.’

In a 1924 article, the critic Hu Shih turned chabuduo into an eponymous parable. ‘Mr Cha Buduo’, his protagonist, lives his life by the principle of ‘Close enough’. ‘Certainly you’ve heard people talk about him,’ wrote Hu. ‘So many people say his name every day.’

Mr Cha Buduo doesn’t understand why he misses trains by arriving at 8:32 instead of 8:30, or why his boss gets angry when he writes 1,000 instead of 10, or why Iceland is different from Ireland. He falls ill and sends for Dr Wāng, but ends up getting Mr Wáng, the veterinarian, by mistake. Yet as he slips away, he is consoled by the thought that life and death, after all, are close enough.

For Hu, the cure for this hazy malaise was modernity; the tick of the railway station’s clock, the carefully kept account book, the doctor’s prescribed remedy. He wanted an end to the veneration of fuzziness, mysticism and incompetence that, in his parable, eventually cause the public to pronounce Mr Cha Buduo a Buddhist saint and ‘Great Master of Flexibility’. Hu’s contemporaries, educated in Japan or the United States, longed to embrace the modernity of a new nation, and ditch the past and all its accumulated dust. But the flood of modernity, already lapping around China’s cities even before Hu Shih’s time, didn’t bring care and precision; it destroyed it.

Even before Hu’s day, overpopulation and globalisation were hitting China hard, driving huge migrations in the late 19th century. Chinese people were struggling with new technological and governmental norms with which they had no experience. The disasters of war and revolution cracked what traditions were left. Today, since China’s head-first dive into the modern world began in 1979, mass urbanisation, internal migration and the constant flux of change have eroded most traces of the skills for which the country was once renowned.

Earlier this year, in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, I feasted – visually – on the Ming-dynasty plates that 16th-century Ottoman sultans favoured, the glaze still preserved and each marked proudly with its makers’ stamp. Our sense of the material past might be biased toward the beautiful and the fine, purely because it’s more likely to be valued and thus to survive. But ample evidence speaks to pre-modern China’s skills, developed most particularly with the thriving commercial environment and rich merchant patrons of the Song (960-1279) and Ming (1368-1644) dynasties. The craftsmanship of China overwhelmed Europeans and Ottomans alike, sparking waves of awe and imitation.

Some arts, of course, have survived. Close to my home, a Manchu family still makes beautiful and funny scenes of Beijing life from tiny doll’s furniture, the posed bodies of cockroaches standing in for human beings. But there is so little left. Wood-workers, lute-makers, coopers, weavers of rare cloth: they remain only in pockets.

To some extent, this is a normal historical process. In 19th-century Paris, Hamburg and New York, writers complained of builders who didn’t know one end of a trowel from another, of plumbers more likely to smash your pipes than mend them, of glaziers whose frames would fall and shatter the next day. Rural migrants flooded the cities, looking for any day labour they could find, their own local skills useless in a new environment. In a generation or less, the rush of modernity invalidated talents developed over centuries.

But in much of the developed world, the sense of craftsmanship soon returned. There was the pleasure of invention, of the cutting edge, of developing new standards for a new trade. In late 18th-century England, brickmakers crafted their own rich metaphors, where, as Sennett notes, the invention of ‘honest’ brick (without any artificial colour added) reflected the manufacturers’ own pride. Ford workers in the 1930s envisioned a gleaming automated future made with their own tools. In contrast, Chinese workers have been stranded for four decades in a dead zone, where the old skills have been lost, but a new professionalism hasn’t evolved. And the era of quick-and-dirty shows no signs of disappearing any time soon.

If what you’re making represents a world utterly out of reach to you, why bother to do it well?

Why is China caught in this trap? In most industries here, vital feedback loops are severed. To understand how to make things, you have to use them. Ford’s workers in the US drove their own cars, and Western builders dwelt, or hoped to dwell, in homes like the ones they made. But the migrants lining factory belts in Guangdong make knick-knacks for US households thousands of miles away. The men and women who build China’s houses will never live in them.

The average price of a one-bedroom apartment in a Chinese second-tier city – a provincial town of a few million people, straining at its own geographical and environmental limits – is around $100,000; the average yearly salary for a migrant construction worker is around $3,500. Their future is shabby pre-fabricated workers’ dorms and old country shacks, not air conditioning and modern bathrooms. If what you’re making represents a world utterly out of reach to you, why bother to do it well?

The opacity of Chinese companies means it’s often hard to pin down the blame for even cataclysmic failure; the maker’s marks once inscribed on every brick in a city’s walls have been replaced with the mirages of holding companies and shell enterprises. Local governments fearful of higher unemployment and lower GDP work assiduously to shield their favoured businesses from any consequences for their actions.

The greatest gulf of all is between the planners in Beijing and the workers on the ground who implement their policies. Huge swathes of the country still operate under the logic of the planned economy, reacting to government quotas and guaranteed bailouts. Yet craft requires the feedback of users and the marketplace. The quota, set for everything from wordcounts for journalists to arrests for policemen, is a powerful spur to value nothing about the product except the speed of its production. Chabuduo: good enough for government work.

There is one glowing exception to the culture of chabuduo: China’s tech sector, perhaps because it developed near-simultaneously with the rest of the world’s. In other areas, Chinese factories and workshops weren’t developing new trades, but taking over ones the West needed done cheap. There was none of the pride or knowledge earned by problem-solving or invention. By contrast, the e-commerce giant Alibaba has honed the art of getting goods from buyer to seller in a vast country to levels still unknown in the West – albeit possibly through the use of the Hobbit-like founder Jack Ma’s network of magical fairy roads – while mobile payment, fierce and relatively open competition and the money that flowed from it have produced their own set of brilliant skills.

Yet tech can’t escape the curse altogether. Sloppy coding, broken apps and massive privacy failures are common, especially when China’s state industries are forced to develop internal programs rather than use commercial ones for ‘security’ reasons. China’s search engines are abysmal, simultaneously crippled by government censorship and protected from real competition. Baidu, the biggest, was struck by scandal earlier this year, after repeatedly promoting quack medical treatments in exchange for payment.

After the scandal, the authorities announced that they would take hard measures to ensure that Baidu performed better. And where reputation can’t push responsibility, regulation can step in. But in practice, China’s regulatory authorities are a void. Although each disaster is ritually castigated in the press, any follow-up is rapidly killed; the average lifespan of coverage of even a massive disaster such as Tianjin is less than a week, before the mandates of the propaganda bureau go out and the story disappears from the papers.

Everyday regulation is even less efficient, bound by a set of perverse incentives that have persisted for decades. Regulators, under-funded and under-staffed, aren’t expected to cover every possible enterprise. Yet if they inspect a site or company, they’re deemed to be responsible for any future disasters there, which can cost them their jobs, Party membership or even potential jail time. The obvious solution is for regulators to cover few sites and concentrate on the least risky areas, thus minimising their personal risk. This failure is compounded by the absence of a functioning civil legal system, especially for collective action; mistakes that could mean massive lawsuits in the West can be papered over in China. Even the death of migrant workers can be paid off with as little as $5,000.

The Party no more wants hod-carriers or rail workers across the nation to come together than it does Christians, democrats or feminists

All these factors work against the Chinese developing pride in their own work. And if they do, they better keep it to themselves. In the West, unions (for manual labourers) and professional associations (for groups such as doctors and lawyers) played a critical role in setting national standards. They gave people an identity that depended, in part, on both mastery and morality, a group of peers to compete against, and to be held to account by.

But, as Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations (1776), every profession ‘ends in a conspiracy against the public’ and the Chinese Communist Party tolerates no conspiracies except its own. Especially since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, any group that might represent a cross-national basis of resistance to the Party has been cut down. Unionisation, outside of the toothless and corrupt All-China Trade Union Federation, is a threat to the Party, which no more wants hod-carriers or rail workers across the nation to come together than it does Christians, democrats or feminists.

Under the Party umbrella, there is room for professional associations – but only at the top end of the scale. There’s a Chinese Medical Association, but no China Plumber’s Association. Even within those bodies, though, far more value is put on sticking to the official line than in creating a peer group. As the medical journalist Michael Woodhead has pointed out, in the West doctors have clear professional guidelines, and review bodies to keep them on the straight-and-narrow; in China they have only the flickering lamp of their own conscience.

In the end, what perpetuates China’s carelessness most might be sheer ubiquity. Craft inspires. A writer can be stirred to the page by hearing a song or watching a car being repaired, a carpenter revved up by a poem or a motorbike. But the opposite also holds true; when you’re surrounded by the cheaply done, the half-assed and the ugly, when failure is unpunished and dedication unrewarded all around, it’s hard not to think that close enough is good enough. Chabuduo.


https://aeon.co/essays/what-chinese-corner-cutting-reveals-about-modernity

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

Haier posted:

She had six photos. It wasn't even photoshop because there were too many angles to get such proportions properly 'shopped uniformly. One was from a distance in a gym mirror. She is real, and about 14km away from me according to the app.

Something that cracks me up about Tantan (Chinese Tinder knock-off) is how a lot of people don't seem to understand that a selfie with a herp on the lip isn't attractive. Also all the weird plastic surgery like above.

You need to find her and plunge for the sake of the thread.

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

quote:

China concerned about death of Syracuse student from Beijing


BEIJING (AP) — The Chinese government expressed concern Tuesday about the death of a Syracuse University student from Beijing whose body was found behind an apartment complex near the campus.

Yuan Xiaopeng, 23, was found dead after residents nearby reported hearing gunshots Friday.

The local sheriff's office said Saturday that no suspects had been identified. Syracuse University, in New York state, said in a statement that Yuan was a junior studying mathematics, and that his death appeared to be an "isolated incident."

In a statement issued Tuesday, the Chinese consulate in New York said it had received assurances that local authorities "attached great importance" to Yuan's case. Officials "also requested that the police ensure that the personal safety and legitimate rights and interests of Chinese students not be infringed," the statement said.


The consulate also called on Syracuse University to assist relatives of Yuan who were coming to the United States.

According to Syracuse.com, authorities found Yuan's car in the parking lot of the complex in DeWitt, a Syracuse suburb. The vehicle, a black Chevrolet Camaro sports car with the license plate "SWAG PIP," was seen being hauled away Friday.

Yuan posted a photo of himself sitting atop the car on the Chinese social media site Weibo.

Yuan also posted an August 2015 letter from Syracuse University that indicated he had been removed from the university but allowed to return under disciplinary probation. The letter did not say why Yuan was on probation, and university officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

More than 300,000 Chinese are estimated to be enrolled in American universities.


http://bigstory.ap.org/article/791b702719fc4b0d9ddfeb14432f1c41/china-concerned-about-death-syracuse-student-beijing

Oh god i am going to hell hahaha.

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008
Peyton Manning is knocking up everyone in China.

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

Vegetable posted:

how does that poo poo affect the brain, is there just a lot more bone, more empty space, less brain or what

Inability to process why questions.

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYfb4UX6dT0

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

McGavin posted:

I work in a wine related industry and I find this incredibly hard to believe. Whenever we go to China and have winery owners compare premium wine to garbage gutter wine they always pick the gutter wine. It's bizarre because we are comparing premium product to stuff that is deliberately made with wine faults and they pick the trash wine every time.

It must be like that episode of Seinfeld where George succeeds because he does the opposite of what he would usually do.

They cheated.

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008
https://www.facebook.com/mentalkhk/videos/728446817320199/

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

Haier posted:

M8, they be arms of a Chinese girl found on a Wechat wall making an awful legitimate white people sandwich. Eat Fresh.

-----

Saw an older lady on People Nearby. I assumed she was early forties and it looked like she spoke English, so I thought I'd give it a shot. She added me and we started talking and she did speak English for most of the coversation. She was very friendly and telling me how she'd lived in the US before and it was wonderful, and she loves Japan, and really hates China and Chinese people and said they are all cheaters and "annoying." I asked how she came to this conclusion and she said her family is ethnic Korean and most of them quit China to return to Korea but she's stuck here now.
She said in the future when I am not such a young man I might understand. I asked how old she was and told her my age (early thirties) and she said her daughter is the same age as me.



Now I have a date with her daughter even though I'm working on the mom. LMAO. The daughter is attractive and single and Korean, so I am not complaining. The mom lives one street over and invited me to her house for a home-cooked meal.

I am still convinced something crazy/weird is going to happen. I can't see how it won't, this being China.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZLfasMPOU4

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

Haier posted:

A wing is like a life. The colors of the wing are like the different expereinces inside a life and we have all the experiences we get from life, like wing has colors. A butterflys wing might have 1000000 colors. Our life will have 1000000 experneices and changes a lot. When the light is touching a wing and makes the color change, it is like having a fun time but then it becomes bad. We all know that Mao saw the changes of the colors of China and wanted to make it red and beautiful, liek a red butterfly wing. We followed The Great Chairmao to the revulution, but that is only one color change in Chinas 5000 years of history. So the color of the wing of the butterfly also represents the beuaty of China. Only China has such 5000 years of beautiful history and I love my country very much.

EDIT:
SPeaking of the colors of a wing, here is twenty beautiful red 100 RMB notes stapled to this essay. Please find the beauty in the colors like a wing and I hope you have good dinner tonight and i have good gaokao scores.


888/10


Gorilla Salad posted:

Define colour.

Many insect carapaces are actually white or clear chitin, but have nanostructures which diffract the light striking them giving them a metallic appearance. The may look golden, but they don't actually have any colours in them.

:colbert:

0/10 see me after class.

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008
My fiancée and I have an incredibly positive and rewarding relationship. One that we have earned with hard work, mutual support, and, sometimes, navigating tough conflicts and personal failings. We are a partnership of equals. To understand our current concern you will need to know some of the specifics of who we are:

My fiancée, Hops, (not her real name, clearly) is ethnically Chinese, but has lived in the west for most of her life, and all of her adult life. I am caucasian and have only lived in the west. Hops' family has a somewhat troubled past. They moved often and had fluctuating income. She has ongoing issues with the demands and behavior of her mother, Wheat, and her father is no longer a part of her life. We talk about these issues, and I help where I can, mostly by (hopefully) offering perspective. Finally, our engagement will be her second marriage, my first. We have been engaged for 7 months and are deep in wedding planning, something we are paying for ourselves.

Wheat maintains her connections with China, and is not very comfortable communicating in english. This limits my ability to directly speak with her, but it is not impossible. Wheat lives in the west, but in another country and thousands of miles from Hops and myself.

Recently Wheat called Hops, after Wheat had visited China, and said that she expected me to pay a bride-price or dowery to her. Neither Hops or I were familiar with the tradition, and had to resort to wikipedia and ex-pat websites to research the practice. Wheat would not set an amount, saying that I "would have to figure that out," but that she "raised [Hops] into a woman" and that should be kept in mind.

Socially and culturally, I find this abhorrent and objectifying, but I freely admit my bias - I was not raised in this culture. My fiancée agrees with me, calling the request crazy. I also hate the inherent paternalism/cringe of being the "rich white guy paying for an asian bride" even if that is only Wheat's perception. Finally, Hops' first husband was not asked to honor this tradition.

However, I want to strengthen my relationship with Hops for the long term. Wheat's good will and buy-in is important for the health of our life together. She has (unintentionally) offered me a way to buy her opinion. We are in a financial situation where we could afford to pay a small amount but we would take a hit. We are not, by any stretch of the imagination, wealthy. I don't have specifics on Wheat's situation, but it is far from perfect, financial. I know future requests will materialize.

I'd love to hear any thoughts on the situation or background/cultural insight on the bride-price practice. It would be nice to have a number/range to reference to help our decision making. Also how to approach Wheat with our decision.

Privately, the amount I have proposed to Hops is 40 USD in Gamestop credit and a bucket, as those do not depreciate. /s

Apologies for any cultural insensitivity on my part. Thanks!

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

fish and chips and dip posted:

Source your quotes, but the fact that I didn't pay a dowry even though her parents wanted me to, when I got married is one of my proudest China moments. Instead I just got her dad two cartons of chungwa and just paid for the tiny (15 people) banquet, I was out less than 1000 USD for my Chinese wedding.

My Russian colleague paid a dowry of close to 300.000 RMB, and he's not wealthy by any means, that must have been a rough as gently caress hit.



https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/577cp7/questions_about_bride_price_from_a_dumb_white_guy/

Further on down the plot thickens:

quote:

Hold the phone, the mother is from HK? That is an unexpected plot twist.

So a person from HK, who lives in the West, whose daughter has only lived in the West and married a Westerner, demands bride dowry in the name of Chinese tradition?

I've lived in China for a while, so nothing surprises me. But drat...

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

caberham posted:

I hate all lower class people. Especially when they are traveling and going to trashy areas doing trashy stuff.

Actually rich people can be just as obnoxious.

Honestly I think it's just more of a numbers game. Tour groups and cheaper places increases the odds. I still remember my first time going to the empty robuchon restaurant in Macau when it first opened. It was not as well known and years ago. There were 2 other tables of mainlanders but holy smokes they look refined. It was as if I was dining in Europe with old money high society.

Everyone else were too busy throwing their money in the VIP tables and eating fast food.

Nowadays people in china ... bah why bother I'm going to stick with the juicy stories

Old money vs new money.

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

fish and chips and dip posted:

To the goons who where present in China in late 2012, early 2013, remember how Xi Jinping was lauded as the great reformer? Well he's reforming allright.


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/w...collection&_r=0

So, while the Chinese economy is slowing down, and questions about the efficiency and ability of innovate have been raised Xi dada want's to further tighten control and bureaucratize the lumbering giants that are Chinese state owned companies.

What I'm saying in short is, get your money out of China asap.

How can a man with no personality have a cult of personality?

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

THE PWNER posted:

Australian here, Americans are disgusting people but you've learned about the slang from internet memes. People who talk like that don't have the money to travel.


But mostly gently caress white tourists who think the ~exotic location~ they're holidaying in must stop for them.

Except to like Bali or Thailand.

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008
Is Thailand ready for a ladyboy king?

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

Haier posted:



Then she said I was too immature for her and my dick was "like a Japanese penis."

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

Haier posted:

A building collapsed in China. Dad reflexes kicked in and dad grabbed his daughter as poo poo started falling on them. He died in process but protected her and she was recovered from the rubble.
NSFW
http://i.imgur.com/Y9m10Tl.jpg

Why would you save a daughter? Baby girls are not wanted in China.

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I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

rofl

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