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Comment by theseadroid | Hacker News Reader

Chinese here. I dont wanna argue about other misinformation this thread have presented so far but just one thing: Access to the book 1984. jd.com is like amazon equivalent in mainland China (amazon.cn has less traffic there)

Searching 1984 returns: http://search.jd.com/Search?keyword=1984&enc=utf-8&wq=1984&p...

the first item has 93k reviews. On taobao (by alibaba) the search results are: https://www.taobao.com/list/product/1984%E5%A5%A5%E5%A8%81%E...

I dont know where you get the idea that average mainland Chinese person who attended their public school system (we dont really have a private school system yet, for better or worse) are not aware of those things.

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>> Access to the book 1984. jd.com is like amazon equivalent in mainland China (amazon.cn has less traffic there)

> I dont know where you get the idea that average mainland Chinese person who attended their public school system...are not aware of those things.

I just asked my Chinese friend, and they haven't heard of 1984 and report that they mainly read textbooks in high school or college. They didn't read novels because they weren't tested on that material.

I would guess that mainland Chinese people are less aware of dystopian, anti-authoritarian novels like 1984 than Americans, even if they are available, if only because those books are commonly part of US high-school curriculums and not Chinese curriculums.

True, 1984 is not included in any Chinese textbook. Chinese education system is not the best. We have literature related classes from primary school to high school but they don't include many western works (well translation is one factor I can see). And the way teachers teach them is very very test orientated. We have a big test after highschool called Gaokao which is almost the only factor to decide which college you can go to. Many ppl spend their entire highschool prep for that one test. (There are schools specialized for students retaking this test after they failed the first time, and it takes 1 year to retake.)

During college there's no mandatory literature courses anymore but I was exposed to many western work during that time in my spare time. One reason was I was trying hard to learn English. But I can see many people dont have the incentives to read those even if those works are famous even in China. Many STEM college students in China start to prep for studying overseas once they step into college and all they care is GPA + a good Toefl/GRE score (and there are faster ways of getting good scores for those other than reading literature).

I dare to say many of those STEM students become the friends and coworkers you guys have in US today and they probably haven't "wasted" much time on pondering issues outside of STEM fields or getting their own lives to a better place.

Edit: not appearing in literature textbooks doesn't mean it's not famous or popular in mainland China. Haruki Murakami is also a very popular author whose work is not included in textbooks. He has a book called 1Q84 which was very popular and many Chinese got interested in 1984 because of it.

> I would guess that mainland Chinese people are less aware of dystopian

Chinese people does not like reading in general. Extremely few are aware of how gov works, what's the difference between party and state, and what democracy is.

However it not like the Party are actively censor George Orwell's books, it's just so insignificant. In 2016, the chinese Ministry of Education published list of recommended books for middle & high school libraries.

http://ncct.moe.edu.cn/uploadfile/2016/0518/2016051802153430...

You can search for "9787547121290", which is the ISBN for Animal Farm by George Orwell.

You might be surprised to learn that they don't know Star Wars either, or Dallas, or Moby Dick.

I met many visiting students, e.g. from India or Bangladesh, who do not know Star Wars, which was kind of a reality check for me, for how deep in a bubble we live.

Yea talk about a bubble: how many Americans know the romance of the three kingdoms or the monkey king? At this point people are just talking past each other, instead of trying to see the cultural factors of another person.

Small language note, "public school" is an ambiguous term when used internationally like this.

For whatever reason in the US, Canada (and probably some other countries) "public school" means "free government run school". Meanwhile in the UK (and wikipedia tells me India and Australia) "public school" means "non government school you have to pay to go to".

I'm guessing that you mean the American version of "public school"?

In the UK we use "state school" to mean "free government run school" - does that translate across the Atlantic?

'State school' is used to refer to state (as in United States) funded university or college. This may not be common across all regions though. Private schools for pre-university students are not that common in my area, which I assume has something to do with the specificity of the term here.

Note: I think I was less than clear. In my area 'state school' is a way to refer to university or college that is primarily or entirely paid for by state government.

Hey yes. Most Chinese schools and universities are government run and funded majorly by the government. There are a small number of private funded schools (especially English only international schools which are really really expensive) and not many people attend those.

As someone who went to Chinese schools, the hierarchy (at least in my city) was:

Kindergarten, Elementary, and Middle school: private schools were better, or perceived as better. People actively vet their schools if they can, my parents went to 3-4 schools before deciding to send me to one. There used to be a test to get into Middle schools (7-9th grade), but they abolished it, so now parents try to "donate" their way in if they can or somehow pass the interview process. Some public schools were good, but some perception was you could not control for quality, so if you can pay a tuition then you should find a school and pay it.

For high schools (10-12th grade), the public schools reigned king. This is (I think) because you have to take a test to get into. Some private schools are good, but the very very best (multiple kids get into Peiking/TsingHua/Ivy League etc) highs schools are all public and purely meritocratic in terms of getting in.

There are international schools, but those are only open to foreign nationals.

It's completely non-ambiguous what the parent meant by public school because they contrasted it with private schools.

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