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"there is no activism protesting anything or driving for any kind of change,"

This isn't true. There have been several documentaries covering people trying to drive change in China that the west has documented. (Hooligan Sparrow, Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry, The Ivory Game, etc. just on Netflix alone) The problem is, these people are regularly disappeared in China and their lives are put at risk by doing this work.

In truth, most people know the chinese government, especially Xi, is behaving to preserve control first and foremost. That this benefits the chinese economically is a side effect- but now that effect is waning.

> these people are regularly disappeared in China and their lives are put at risk by doing this work.

that's what I mean. how does this effect fashion?

It affects how the counterculture is expressed. Look at the 996 movement for example. Things have to be done carefully, anonymously, covering your own tracks, with a sort of guerilla tactics and plausible deniability.

Or, if I can be blunt- the difference between the american idea of being edgy and contercultural and the chinese idea of being edgey and countercultural is that the government in america will not run you over with tanks if you organize a public sit down. (However, make no mistake, the government in america will eliminate dissidents of enough threat in similar ways to china- see chelsea manning or the black panther movement.)

so how does this effect clothing, dress, and behavior in public? on the surface does everyone look very compliant and homogeneous? or do they look the same and dress the same as the west? For example, do Chinese millennials use hair colors that don't occur in nature as often, etc?

"so how does this effect clothing, dress, and behavior in public?"

Of course it affects behavior in public, as well as clothing and dress. You can't openly support movements- including the wearing of logos, brans, slogans, sayings, etc.

"do Chinese millennials use hair colors that don't occur in nature as often"

I'm pretty sure dyed hair is still considered popular and fashionable in east asian cultures, given the pop bands coming out of there!

Or, you know, the Occupy movement. There was a hushed coordinated government crackdown one day and then it just stopped.

> In China, everybody fully supports the government, don't they? I mean that what the Party does, has 100.00% approval rating at all times, there are no Facebook groups for discussing it, there is no activism protesting anything or driving for any kind of change, and everyone there just totally supports everything. (In Mainland China).

I take issue with that description of China because any government that is in power usually is so because large numbers of its citizens supporting it.

That's something absolutely normal, as it doesn't work any other way. But with China, it's somehow made out to be something bad when the Chinese are supportive of their country and government.

Similarly: Facebook ain't the only platform for discussion and organizing, the notion that China doesn't have any such platforms, and thus no counterculture like that, is just silly.

Ridicule of the government is quite common on Chinese social media.

But then a lot of Chinese folks who cross over to Western social media find the anti-CCP sentiment to overreach (no doubt bc of the geopolitical considerations involved), and switch over to a defensive posture as a result.

Have you ever been to China? You can find yourself cornered by armed soldiers with assault rifles just for taking a photograph of the "wrong" building in a completely ordinary public thoroughfare. Dissent is literally banned and access to external social networks is cut off.

There's no way support for the government is completely genuine in such an environment.

There are plenty of places in the USA where you're not allowed to take photographs too.

Citation needed.

Name a place in any USA city where you will be detained and your equipment confiscated for taking pictures from a public thoroughfare.

You made the assertion that there are places in china where this happens so you can go first.

This happened to me personally in Nanjing. I'd show the photos as proof, but of course I don't have them anymore.

I can name such places in Germany where the US military has jurisdiction.

Bad Aibling, with its ECHELON installation, used to be quite infamous for that because it was located in a pretty popular hiking region.

I doubt the US military is that much more lenient domestically about having their installations photographed/filmed, no military really is, and a lot of law enforcement/IP rights are neither [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography_and_the_law

Keep in mind you're also a (most likely) obvious foreigner taking pictures of perhaps a sensitive building in a foreign country. You don't think that given the current geopolitical climate, Asian people in the US taking pics of say, Mar-a-Lago, or a military complex or even an industrial park would sometimes run into trouble?

Also, you may have been to China, but have you ever taken the time while there to attempt to understand why there might be some support for the government? This is a country where even among the fairly young, most experienced poverty as children, where their parents and their grandparents have experienced hunger, sometimes severe famine, being invaded and conquered and brutalized by the Japanese, then civil war, and the civil strife and turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Chinese families are close knit, most grow up living with their grandparents - these generational experiences are ingrained into the fabric of society. There's genuine and heartfelt appreciation for the recent policies and stability that has finally let a people raise themselves out from that poverty. (China in the 50's, 60's, and 70's was much poorer than Sub-Saharan Africa - per capita GDP was something from 1/2-1/3 of even places like the Congo and Zimbabwe). There is pride too, overwhelming pride in the grit and determination and hard work that has been poured into all that development and progress. Obviously, that's not to say that there isn't plenty of criticism and opposition and people making fun of aspects of the government and government policies, but the general support is not fake or coerced. I imagine it's not that different from the way a certain generation of Americans from a particular economic class saw FDR and his whole New Deal administration.

Just keep in mind that sometimes, depending on their background story and life experiences, people can see the same things in a very different light. They also have different utility curves - some might value a tootsie roll over a twix bar, some might value liberty over their own life, or some might just value stability and the opportunity to live their lives and raise their children over anything else in the world.

Trivially false. Every US President almost always had a <50% approval rating, and is usually the most popular politician.

Unfortunately when dissent is explicitly illegal, opinion polls are scientifically invalid. That's the CCP's choice, not external propaganda.

you didn't talk about how this affects fashion, etc.

How does it "affect fashion, etc."? You act like China is this super isolated place where nobody knows what's happening outside of it and everybody is just a conformist wearing their state-sponsored grey unis.

When in reality Chinese people are as diverse a people as any other, they are just as influenced by Western pop-culture as any other people.

Case in point: Asian hip hop, yes even Chinese hip-hop has seen quite a rise in popularity.

They copy a ton of tropes out of the US, like most non-US hip-hop has been doing for decades, but they also inject their own Chinese identity as part of the narrative of the songs [0].

Of course, that's a rather acquired taste, but I would easily count as "counter-culture", after all that's also exactly what it started out as in the US.

[0] https://youtu.be/rILKm-DC06A

I'm guessing you're being downvoted for the pretty uninformed, tone deaf statement below.

>In China, everybody fully supports the government, don't they? I mean that what the Party does, has 100.00% approval rating at all times, there are no Facebook groups for discussing it, there is no activism protesting anything or driving for any kind of change, and everyone there just totally supports everything. (In Mainland China).

No they don't have 100% support. Where are you deriving this information?

Your point about Facebook is sort of bizarre. Are you aware that China has famously blocked Facebook?

There is activism, too. For example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qidong_protest

That article explicitly states that CCP tolerates protest against non-CCP actors and issues that don't challenge their authority. The CCP supported the protest, so it was allowed.

The claim is that everyone supports everything, no? Presumably these protesters did not support what they are protesting against. Do you disagree?

Are you familiar with the Tiananmen Square protest?

you didn't talk about how this affects fashion, which is my question.

I don't care how it affects fashion. You asked why you're being downvoted and I explained why.

> In China, everybody fully supports the government, don't they?

Do they? I remember a Chinese friend telling me about how elections worked in his town. When he was a student, their voting cards were checked by the teachers to make sure they supported the principal's friend. So maybe 100% support on paper, but definitely not 100% voluntary. (That's only one small part - there's definitely more opposition, not full support either way)

Maybe your claim that "everybody fully supports the government" is seen as rude?

The article has already said it. It was not the millennials supported the government 100%. Many of them were just indifferent to politics.

Eastern Europe in the 80s. Everything seemed mostly normal, everyone "supported the government", no social media, the economy went bad, people grumbled then suddenly in a year or two everything was upended.

"Listen to how woke I am while I call a billion people robots"

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Eye of the beholder, brother. Poster asked for feedback. I thought I was being economical.

Ah ok. I see your point in this case.

Cheers and appreciated.

FWIW, my basic angle here is 'people are people'. If the board were overloaded with anti-American or anti-Russian stuff, I'd be making mostly the same points.