>Chinese people who study abroad are more often confused by the things missing in the west than they are liberated in the way you describe, in my experience.
As someone who has never been to China could you list some things the West is missing?
As someone who has never been to China could you list some things the West is missing?
— An American that spent a few weeks in China.
Chinese people's attitudes toward the one-child policy and also sex-selective abortion are complicated and varied, but they don't seem very similar to Americans' attitudes at all!
In the U.S. it's common for people's religions to completely formally proscribe some forms of birth control and/or abortion. This has led to a big political debate about what the scope of their legal rights to avoid subsidizing these things for other people should be. It's not surprising that that debate should exist, but also not surprising that it would be uncommon in China where (1) the most practiced religions largely don't have these teachings and (2) people don't have a common expectation that the state will give their religious practices and beliefs a considerable amount of deference.
I think a median American attitude is that nobody else should pressure you to have more or fewer children than you want to; if your religion encourages you to have children, other people are also largely supposed to respect that, and in modern times, if you just don't want children, other people are also largely supposed to respect that. (In blue tribe environments having many children is suspicious and in red tribe environments having no children is suspicious, but in both cases people are increasingly effective at pushing back socially against other people's scrutiny about this, and even at pushing back against their own families' judgments or preferences.) (These considerations don't necessarily apply the same way outside of opposite-sex monogamous married couples.)
I don't think these norms are common in the same way in China or in Chinese cultures elsewhere. In particular, I think even if Chinese people don't all think their parents, or governments, should get to decide how many children they have, it doesn't seem like many will reach U.S. levels of offense that prospective childbearing couples' parents, or governments, have an expressed preference and actively try to influence this.
As for quality of care, obviously the facilities in the U.S. are nicer - they better be, you are paying 10x - 100x for that! For the treatment, most friends of mine from China complain the doctors in the U.S. don't do anything; they just give you some advil and send you home. However, antibiotics are probably prescribed too liberally in China, and IV injections used too much.
Of course there are some drawbacks too. First, the flip side of "no surprise bill" is everything is due upfront, so it's not unheard of that critical treatment is delayed because the patient is trying to find money. Second, since healthcare is so cheap, people usually don't carry health insurance other than the government provided one, which has a maximum payout amount per year. As a result, if you get rare / serious condition you can still get ruined financially. Nowadays more and more people begin to purchase commercial health insurance - which are still an order of magnitude cheaper than the U.S. ones.
I wouldn't want to end up in hospital in the US or china. Think the only countries I would feel at ease in are Singapore and Taiwan.
US healthcare is notorious for its problems so I was ready to believe your initial statement. But actually you say:
1. "Nobody goes bankrupt from going to the doctor", but "if you get rare / serious condition you can still get ruined financially". Those two statements are direct contradictions of each other.
2. "you can walk into the hospital and be seen pretty quickly" but also ... "it's not unheard of that critical treatment is delayed because the patient is trying to find money". Again, being seen pretty quickly and not being seen because you're trying to find money are in direct conflict.
Nowadays more and more people begin to purchase commercial health insurance - which are still an order of magnitude cheaper than the U.S. ones
Everything in China is cheaper than in the US. It's still a poor country.
Honestly both systems sound just as bad as each other, or rather, the Chinese system sounds far worse. I'd rather be alive and bankrupt, rather than refused treatment entirely, because I didn't have the cash at the exact moment I fell ill or there was some SNAFU with payment systems.
If more and more people choose to buy health insurance, that sounds like China is well on the way to a US style model as it develops.
The sweet pleasure of being spied upon by the CCP ?
There's literally a WWII scale Holocaust going on in China right now. You have a lot of nerve asking "what's the difference?"
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On an aside, but related to the broader conversation, the YouTube channel AsianBoss regularly visits China and conducts very revealing interviews with Chinese people on similar topics to those discussed in this thread: https://youtu.be/sTzgE1nvxZs
Public transportation and affordable healthcare are the norm in most highly developed Western democracies such as the UK, France, Sweden, etc.
Basic research in (for example) AI is probably on par with the west, I think it’s fair to say the engineering/applied side is ahead. This is helped by essentially zero concern for privacy = more data. WeChat translate CN-EN is miles ahead of Google. Any kind of large scale tech that has anything to do with surveillance, things like CV, deep-packet inspection, would be unmatched I’d say.
It’s definitely not free of racism.
That's interesting!
At the same time, deepl.com is also miles ahead of Google, so I'm not all that impressed by Google Translate anymore. (Deepl itself is impressive is heck!)
I could see myself reading a whole book through Deepl if I had a reason.
Quite impressive, especially that DeepL (and every other machine translation application) makes use of research done at Google.
It's been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but it's worth reiterating - safety.
China is one of the safest places in the world. I literally never had a single concern for the physical well-being of my mother, my wife, anyone - no matter what part of the city they were in, or what time of the day.
Worth mentioning that I've found Singapore to be the same.
Contrast that with life in Australia (Melbourne), where I was constantly on edge even in the early evening, I'd worry every time my wife was out late, not to mention the instances where I was physically threatened or assaulted.
Maybe if you're Chinese. Right after college, a friend of mine (white American) worked in a job where he spent time at a factory in China, until he got stabbed in the lunch room by some older worker. He's fine, and while there is may be a degree of safe, it's definitely a question of safe for whom.
I'm mainly talking random street violence, which is far, far rarer than somewhere like Australia. I'm fairly sure that applies to most of "the West", too.
So that leaves anecdotes and personal experience. How many direct experiences of violent crime in both places have you had, and how do you know this generalises?
Not just the CBD though - almost every time I caught the 57 tram, there was some kind of screaming match or altercation (none involving me, thankfully). Visiting St Albans at night, I was treated to roving groups of young men smashing windows and helping themselves to whatever they felt like. Even the train back was really sketchy too.
That's without mentioning the Eurydice Dixon and Aiia Maasarwe cases, which were really unsettling.
I never worried about any of this stuff in China. There were literally zero occasions where I felt physically unsafe. Whereas Melbourne? Every time I was in the CBD after dark, I felt I needed to be on guard - and I'm a physically capable male.
I know the relations are strained between our countries but I hope they improve. Our government has "do not travel" recommendations in place for China due to the current political issues between our nations but I would love to visit one day.
- Reliable high-speed railway.
- Night markets -- lots of people socializing in the street into the early hours of the morning, enjoying street food, beer, etc.
- A sense of shared experience that's difficult to find in hyper-individualistic societies.
The Chinese perspective, AFAICT, is that individual liberties are worth trading for prosperity and so-called "economic" liberties. I'm told that this is something that's difficult to understand unless you've experienced the sort of progress that China has observed firsthand.
Ironically, these night markets are disappearing a bit as prosperity goes up. For example, in Shenzhen, a lot more roads were built to accommodate the huge increase in the number of automobiles, and it seems that many of these markets have succumbed to the concrete jungle.
I think that's a false dilemma. The Nordic states have roughly the same personal liberties as the US, but the welfare system means people are much more financially secure.
Btw I'm intentionally trying to stay take a neutral stance on this topic when discussing my understanding of attitudes in China. In fact my personal viewpoint is that economic prosperity without a strong and healthy respect for human rights will have bounded lifetime, but that's a different discussion. Regardless I think it's important to understand all the viewpoints.