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Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

I kind of wish our pop culture was this bad. People would go outside more.

One of the things that I find amusing about Chinese people I meet and talk with who are traveling outside of China is that they are not obsessed with pop music, celebrities or sports, or at least far less than we are in the west.

As an example, I met a fashionable young Chinese lady with an apparently large income who was traveling the world. You know what she did for fun? She played the piano, did tourist stuff and went out for dinner with friends.

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This really isn’t true. Chinese have songs, they have popular music groups, many like K pop or K dramas, many like costume dramas or going for a night out to sing karaoke. Soccer is really popular, basketball is too for some strange reason. Heck, just say you are American in Beijing and taxi drivers will most definitely ask you about the NBA (if you can speak Chinese).

There is a lot of selection bias in generalizing about a culture via its world travelers :).

The state really sucks at propaganda though, so it shouldn’t be surprising that efforts like this are filled with lots of cringe. It definitely shouldn’t be considered pop culture.

>basketball

Basketball was introduced to China by missionaries in 1895, so it's been there almost as long as it has in the US.

Perhaps, but its current popularity hinges around the NBA. I’m pretty sure the NBA has more fans in China than in the USA.

Except when the state propaganda is popular, is the pop. All those songs about putin are actually popular in some parts of russia.

Kids in China are like kids anywhere. The authority is specifically not cool even if it is to be respected and obeyed. It is more effective for the Chinese government to encourage popular actors/singers to be sympathetic and promote government points of views, which is basically what they do.

> As an example, I met a fashionable young Chinese lady with an apparently large income who was traveling the world

Change Chinese to American, or Ethiopian in that part of your comment. This is selection bias pretty hard.

Yeah, I'm blown away that this was their evidence, especially for such a strong claim.

Expats/emigrants/travelers are basically the group least able to generalize over their countrymen back home.

No, your example is rich people gonna rich people. The average person in the US or China can't afford to travel the world, go out every day with friends, etc.

They are, instead, obsessed by money.

Most people in China grew up extremely poor, so this makes sense.

Compared to what, Americans, who are all about net worth, work, business success, making it big, personal branding, and so on?

Some Americans are like this, but in my experience, most aren't.

That's a self selecting group though. All of the Americans I met while travelling and living outside of America seemed disinterested in pop culture too. It's not the "Chinese" part of your observation that's relevant.

People outside the west would say the same of the westerners they see traveling.

It’s pop literally because it’s popular. The people who have the freedom and interest to travel the world are not “typical” citizens in any country.

> The people who have the freedom and interest to travel the world are not “typical” citizens in any country.

That didn't sound right as in my experience most people do a foreign trip at least once a year. Turns out it of course very much depends on the country: Finland travels the most while US is among the least foreign-travelling westerners. That according to https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-whose-citizens..., which says every Finn does 1.7 foreign trips per year on average.

Sorry for the spammy site but hard to look for hard source data on mobile.

It feels like most of Norway migrates to Thailand in the winter. Scandinavia itself is not very representative of the rest of the world.

A fashionable young Chinese lady traveling in the US is not your average Chinese person.

They’re clearly upper to upper middle class and they’re clearly going to enjoy different “hobbies” abroad.

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