My Experience Working and Living in China
frankzliu.com
frankzliu.com
I don't doubt this at all. The problem is what the CPC considers criminal.
> Xinjiang and Tibet are two exceptions to this which I won’t dive deep into.
If you're going to gloss over these examples of where we know there are totally egregious uses of technology to infringe on people's civil liberties, and human rights, then what meaningful discussion is actually left to be had?
> When I was still a student at Stanford, I once lost an internship opportunity because a “traffic violation” - biking at night without a bike light - showed up on my background check. In all fairness, I consider it to be extremely easy to stay off China’s social credit “blacklist” - just be reasonable and avoid breaking the law.
I somehow doubt this is true. Unless he's talking about some totally different kind of 'background check'. I've had numerous background checks, and in most countries they only cover criminal history. They don't cover your history of civil offenses. In many countries even relatively serious traffic offenses are dealt with as civil offenses. Let alone what he describes.
Also, "just be reasonable". Just don't be one of the targeted minorities either, I guess? Just don't play too many videogames; Or play videogames they don't like; Or browse the free press; The list goes on...
This really reads like propaganda. If you told me this was written by someone who grew up in China, and just moved to America. I would totally believe you.
There's a lot of Chinese stereotypes being trotted out here, but I'll address this one. Those who refer to themselves as Cantonese do not feel superior, but they have generally felt pushed around by Beijing. Guangdong was, and still partially is, the economic powerhouse of China. This has made the North nervous at times. Beijing has continually pushed their political weight around to try and stifle any sense of original Cantonese cultural, from suppressing the language and media to installing leaders that are happy to oblige with these policies. For the most part they have been successful, and it's quite sad. The homogenization of China is seen as necessary to bind the country, but has destroyed the cultural beauty of the country.
As an ethnic Chinese who been in, and out of China every year since childhood, I'd yes, it's very superficial. I do not feel he lived in China for long enough outside of the insular expat bubble.
Chinese Americans have self-invented insecurities about being "identity-less," but Chinese in China have very real insecurities about being "identity-less"
This "identity searching" crowd looks very strange to me. Besides us speaking languages of the same linguistic family, is as easily different as India, and UK. For me, who spent nearly all childhood in Russia, and whose parents were separate from China for 5, and 4 generations, Chinese Americans do still feel more similarly wired than mainlanders today, which are their own completely brand new type of people.
It's very similar with my experience meeting overseas Russians from immigration waves from before 1917 in America. For some reason, to me they felt "more Russian" after 4-5 generations in the US than people whom I knew back home.
> 1. I visited a prison in Jiangxi to discuss a potential prisoner safety solution. In a meeting with the vice-warden, he tacitly mentioned how Adidas shoes were being made in the prison that he was running. We quickly pulled out of that project. I haven’t bought Adidas- or Nike-branded shoes since.
This gave me a chuckle. I don't know what to get off people like him. In China I've seen a lot of very strange Western types who scream "there is no Democracy in America!," and then ran to China out of all places to find a big surprise.
Please write them up!
Well said. I have my own ideas, but why do you think this is?
No idea what you mean by that.
I didn't read the entire article but the fact that he said he considers Macau separate speaks for itself to me, he probably doesn't know much about it. Hong Kong was truly separate until recently, Macau had been under Mainland control even before 1999 so it's been decades now. The influence is clearly visible to anyone who knows the country. There also weren't any meaningful protests when the CCP broke the two systems agreement as there were in Hong Kong.
That said, I don't see any reason to ad hominem attack the guy. China is a closed off society and increasingly so again under Xi. A foreigner will not understand everything after living there for a short time. Of course that's true for any place but it's especially true with China. It's a running joke among expats that new arrivals who've only been there a year or two have the complete opposite view of the country than they're going to have a couple of more years down the line.
Curious how relatively recent regionalism plays in modern Chinese thought.
People who call themselves cantonese and not chinese are mostly from Hong Kong. People in Hong Kong always thought of themselves as superior to mainland Chinese and not just that they openly discriminated against them and darker skin people from south asia many of whom hold Hong Kong passport.
If you want to talk about regional differences like Newyorker or Californian then it does exist in China today where Shanghainese consider themselves at top and mostly disliked by Beijinger or HongKonger and others.
Efforts for unification of China started in Qin empire (221–206 BC) [0], which includes language standardisation and still a work in progress given there are still large number of dialects and ethnic groups in China. Lucky for China many of its historical culture remains along with language, cannot say the same for native Americans, whose language is not even part of official languages in North or South America.
Can you explain to me why chinese people - not just in the PRC but also Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia - seem so eager to eliminate every chinese language that isn't Mandarin?
It's truly bizarre to me. Even people who want the EU to become a super state don't do things like call Dutch and French 'dialects' and demand the whole thing standardise to one language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_on_traditional_and_simp...
"they punished us at school if we spoke $MOTHER_TONGUE instead of $NATIONAL_LANGUAGE".
Care to explain what part of the comment you take issue with?
This isn't what actually happens in practice though. In practice, children speak the language their school tells them to speak. And generation by generation less and less people speak the other language, and in smaller and smaller areas.
I'm somewhat familiar with the situation in Taiwan. No one is actively suppressing Hokkien (or Taiwanese or whatever you want to call it) anymore, but the language of instruction is still Mandarin and so Hokkien is dying rapidly. Even in cases where both parents speak it, often their children can just understand it and don't speak it, and there's zero chance their children - grandchildren of hokkien speakers - will.
Used to work with some Chinese Malaysians from Penang. All under 30, all spoke Mandarin to each other because the level of Hokkien knowledge ranged from "fluent" to "none at all".
For practical reasons alone most people are going to focus on those top 3. I know some people who are reasonably fluent in no less than 5 languages but it's not that common and you will obviously see at least two or 3 are passable at best. These are going to happen even if the schools could somehow teach 4-5 dialects + standard mandarin +_ english + malay!
Malay: National Language
English: International langauge
Hokkien: Mother tongue
Mandarin: ???
I genuinely don't understand why a brand new language that wasn't traditionally spoken into the area was introduced.
And in those days of the early 20th century when the foundations of formal education were laid if one was an educated person it would have been either in Mandarin or English (that said HK Cantonese is/was a huge pop culture influence but I don't think it ever was in an pan-sino educationist sense)
Yeah, the strong desire to do that is something I don't understand. But thanks for getting to the crux of it - it's all about having a chinese exclusive lingua franca.
A unified Chinese identity takes precedence over the local one, this is even more so when you are at the mercy of divide and conquer techniques. The only other alternative was Cantonese but then why would the Hokkien buy into that and vice versa? Educational resources are thin enough as it is.
English Mandarin Malay Then one of the various major dialects - and even then once you start moving around the country the Penang hokkien speaker in KL has to either switch to english or mandarin and the KL cantonese speaker in penang has to switch to mandarin and english and at the end of the day, with both the PRC and ROC using Mandarin as the common tongue, and the same situation existing for any other sinophere country bar Hong Kong...there we go.
If you go overseas and meet a random other Chinese person, your heuristics of common language are again going to skew
English or Mandarin then Cantonese then only one of the others so...
I've lived in Singapore for 10+ years. I work with a mix of Singaporeans (native and naturalized HK'r's) and Malay Chinese (coincidentally all from Penang). Day to day chats in the office is English/Singlish and hokkien. Calls with vendors in Penang are in English and Hokkien. Calls with Taiwanese vendors are in Mandarin. When we have calls with our Taiwanese vendors, one of my older Singaporean colleagues always attends because he has the strongest mandarin on the team.
Language standardization was for the written form, not spoken.
But people of Chinese ethnicity will first always identify themselves as Chinese not Cantonese or Shanghainese or Beijinger or Fujianese except for some people who prefer to think they are superior then being Chinese.
Its like saying New Yorker is different from a Californian and they are not American. When they are outside USA they will prefer to be called New Yorker not American.
That's not even necessarily true, people all over China refer to themselves by their province, sometimes even prefecture or city, simply out of pride. People are proud of being from Shanghai, or proud of being from Fujian, etc. People are aware of tongue-in-cheek stereotypes regarding their own hometown among the larger Chinese population, and that makes each of them feel special and proud.
Here in NZ the govt tried to force people not to speak Te Reo, literally beating it out of children in school, happily we're past that now but, well, that's how cultural imperialism works
You can't say they "refuse" to speak to people in Mandarin because they simply _can't speak_ Mandarin. Back then, many people simply did not have enough schooling to learn Mandarin, and so they simply couldn't speak it (at least not fluently). The government was not stupid. There was utterly no reason to enforce Mandarin and deprecate Cantonese when they were expecting so much investment from Hong Kongers (who usually did not speak Mandarin either) during that period.
Cantonese TV stations and radio stations are still doing just fine today. And then of course you can't have just Cantonese when there's an influx of labour from other parts of China, which is why, as a simple matter of economic adaptation, Mandarin gradually picked up. But Cantonese is not being threatened in any way. In fact, there is now a more widespread understanding of the importance of Cantonese, because it is _closer_ to Middle Chinese from the Tang and Song dynasties than many other dialects. It's an important dialect for properly studying and appreciating Tang poems. I know people in more Northern parts of China who know Cantonese songs from the 80s and 90s of Hong Kong because they appreciate the more classical wordings and rhymes of the lyrics.
A) Hi, I'm from Sichuan B) Oh, great! It must be nice to sit around all day drinking tea.
And beyond.
The question is more about the conditions of work/live in the prisons.
And at least some of the US prisons don't look so much better. Better sure, but by a to small margin to be proud of it.
I've seen videos from Xinjiang taken by Chinese themselves and the content appears alarming. It's a misunderstanding?
They are not authentic.
But the fact no one is allowed to freely investigate Xinjiang only enforces that someone is going on and the CCP is trying to hide it.
The world wants to interfere because genocide is a crime against humanity. Every rape, every murder, every torture. It is unacceptable, and so is denying it.
China does this constantly and they do it quite openly.
Can you not see the issue with what you wrote? It's like you've almost made the mental connection, but you're not self aware enough to realize the last part.
There is a literal genocide happening in your country and you are complicit. Shame, shame, shame on you.
Xianjing is an ultra police state, with some cities having police stations every few hundred meters, identity checks, absolute media controls, total propaganda.
Don't even try cover it up, defend it, or try to make some kind of argument based in moral ambiguity i.e. 'racism in the US' which is not remotely reproaching the level of oppression.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/pulitzer-priz...
> “I was involved in a project that uses face recognition to track residents going in and out of communities … Data from such a system was also entirely managed at the local level and not automatically shared with the provincial or central governments.“
> “In all fairness, I consider it to be extremely easy to stay off China’s social credit ‘blacklist’ - just be reasonable and avoid breaking the law.”
It went through the whole progression from “it’s not happening” to “it might be happening but it’s not a big deal” to “it’s happening and you deserve it” in just a few paragraphs. Impressive.
In reality life in China today is not much different than it is anywhere else. And I think it's borderline bizarre if not straight up insulting to suggest that the author does not have a 'Western point of view' despite living in the US since he was three years old. Chinese parents, like the Chinese state, contrary to popular imagination do not have brain altering superpowers.
It takes Olympic level mental gymnastics to get to "all-seeing and all-powerful secret government" from "my local DMV can barely fill out a form correctly."
I'm sure all world governments would function much better if there were in fact a limitless supply of extraordinarily capable employees willing to work for government salaries.
So tell me, how do you get there from "my local American DMV can barely fill out a form correctly"? Because it happened. And it will continue happening if we forget history.
You can construct an oppressive regime simply by dedicating enough people to it, but they still can't exceed the fundamental ceiling of wage:job_tenure:performance.
Consequently, every example you mentioned routinely failed.
In aggregate they accomplished oppression, but emotional pleas about "forgetting history" don't change the fact that we're talking about bureaucracies. And bureaucracies only ever approach a semblance of competency via brute force, either in resources or manpower.
It's 'cartoonish' for someone who has not yet been on the receiving end of the negative externalities of such system to fathom that it doesn't exist.
Why don't you, as an 'Enlightened Ex-Pat in China' go around making posts about the history of Tiananmen, or write a critical piece about the police state in Xianjing, and then see what happens? Or any number of other things?
"In reality life in China today is not much different than it is anywhere else."
Of course it is - because most of us are preoccupied with normal things.
Life in Russia is 'mostly the same as everywhere else', even right now, as we speak, isn't it?
And yet, witness what is happening in Ukraine.
'Life in China is mostly the same as everywhere else' is true, just as up to a million people are being interned on the basis of their ethnicity.
The OP is effectively correct: although 'bias' may not be the correct term, certainly the simple participation in absolutist and totalitarian systems without oversight is a problem, and the attitude that somehow this is 'normal' and 'without externalisations' is what OP was referring to as 'bias'.
Your own dissonance is similar, and it's at the root of the problem.
"My life is normal, ergo, the system is relatively normal" is the myopia that allows for these things to happen.
but they aren't. Regulation of tech really only started in earnest only a few years ago. Before that there was barely any privacy frameworks, there was hardly any oversight into anything, and as a result the Chinese tech sector was basically in a Wild West state which accounts for much of its very rapid growth. The state was so absent that private tech companies tried to sabotage each other to gain advantages.
One interesting example from the last decade is the "3Q War" between Tencent and Qihoo, which ended in Tencent essentially blocking use of its own messaging client when they detected that people used Qihoo 360. It's as if Youtube decided to stop operating on any device that had TikTok installed.
There's countless of startup stories like this that would have ended in front of a judge or regulator anywhere else within a week, but in China for a very long time nothing really happened. Chinese 'growth hacks' and profit driven behaviour makes SV look well behaved in comparison.
This completely wrong idea that somehow every aspect of the Chinese economy is strictly regulated is one of the results of this distorted overhyped view people have of the Chinese government.
It's like working at BlueApron and claiming that the NSA definitely isn't spying on Americans because they aren't tracking their meal plans.
* For the west part, I recently saw an old video of Biden (still senator) mocking post-Soviet Russia for thinking to look at China for prosperity.
Which is insane when you look back on it. Since we didn't become prosperous under liberalism either. Nowhere in the west did liberal democracy bring prosperity. The US wasn't a liberal democracy when it became rich. We are the wealthiest nation in the world decades before liberal democracy arrived. The same goes for the british, french, etc.
It's not that China doesn't have democracy. China's democratic system was created by itself based on its own national conditions. It is completely different from Western democracy, but it does not mean that there is no democracy.
It is recommended that you read the history of China objectively and understand how this country with a long history has developed step by step to today. Oh I believe your opinion will change.
Taiwan is a special case because it came after years of KMT oppression and the death of Chiang. His son was more lenient and then his son's successor opened the door for democracy. Taiwan is much smaller and had more exposure to America than the mainland, which definitely helped.
I don't think this it's this simple...even if it was, it doesn't sound very sustainable / appealing to me.
It's like looking at the high achiever students studying ungodly hours in Law schools or Medical schools. Similarly unappealing and less sustainable, but the rewards will be sweet (aside from the debt).
The corporate newspeak is honestly sickening.
Isn't this the sentiment and euphemism trotted out when referring to the "immigrant work ethic" across most cultures and countries?
In terms of "sickening" -- as a child it was drilled into my head that my parents and other (usually similarly immigrant) families worked incredibly hard so that they could provide a better life for their children, with the implicit expectation that I might do the same for my own some day.
Yes, it was drilled into your head. It was the carrot on the stick that keeps people moving.
With a ballooning national debt, worsening social blights, and an objectively bleaker economic outlook, I think it's finally time to admit that the carrot was never there--for the majority of us, and perhaps all of us if the nukes start flying.
It's "sickening" because it's a lie used to keep people thinking about a hopeful future that probably won't exist. If we didn't have this lie hanging over our heads, if we weren't chasing imaginary future rewards, we would demand equitable conditions now instead of continuing to chase after illusions.
"The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." — John Adams, May 1780
Blind optimism is bound to get us into trouble. I'd prefer some facts that support the thesis that a strong work ethic always leads to a brighter future.
The Nazi's worked hard. The communists in Russia worked really hard. Things didn't turn out so well for them.
Direction is more important than force. I'd bet on a Volkswagen diven by a professional over a race car driven by a senile old lady.
You have 24 hours every day. with 996 you:
- spend 8h sleeping,
- 12h working,
- at least 1h commuting both ways
that leave you only 3h left that you spend probably to eat, take shower, do grovery. Not much space for anything else.
I think I would prefer a prison life in some scandinavian country - at least you get a lot of free time to read all the books on your reading list.
While slavery is forced labor, 996 is more about people trying to get ahead. During my wall street days, I elected to work 8 am - 2 am, 7 days a week for subpar pay, all because of future potential rewards. Many of my peers dropped out due to the pressure and didn't stick around for the big payoffs. If you interview them, no doubt they would consider themselves "slave labor."
The Chinese economy is not growing at a 'blistering pace' because of the long hours worked by these people. If this were true, we would see it in productivity figures but China is actually very low on those measures. It also seems to imply that the rest of the world is just lazier than China hence the lower growth. Are the people of South Korea for example that much lazier than their Chinese counterparts?
China grows at a rate of 6% because GDP growth isn't a measure of output in China in the same way as in the UK for example, it's a policy decision. This doesn't mean they invent the figures which many people seem to believe, the activity is actually taking place and that's obvious if you've ever been to China.
The economy is structured in a way to achieve growth targets. Local and provincial officials are rewarded for achieving growth targets with career advancement, so they come up with creative ways to fund dubious infrastructure investments or just use proceeds from land sales. SOEs engage in investment and production that would not be economic if not for discounted interest rates given by state owned banks, funded in part by negative real rates for deposit holders (the people working 16 hour days). These banks have loan books elevated levels of non-performing loans, but because of the closed financial system they don't have to realise these losses and can be quietly recapitalised if necessary. High level party officials have been talking about rebalancing from export and investment to consumption led growth since Wen Jiabao in 2007. Since then consumption share of GDP actually fell even lower.
China is not some ticking time bomb ready to explode on debt, they have similar levels of total debt to GDP as the US and EU do. But equally it's not some hyper efficient utopia full of the hardest working people on earth.
This line of thinking is really bothersome because believing that 'China is outworking us' will invariably result in political rhetoric in western countries aimed at making workers work longer hours or peeling back various labour protections. Not to say no reform in these areas is necessary of course.
Not since China imprisoned the two Michaels in retaliation for Canada imprisoning Meng Wanzhou.
No thanks.
The charges were made up and yet they were too submissive to secure their releases. Let’s just say I’m not sure the response would have been as mild had they kidnapped Americans instead.
I wouldn't go so far to say he's a puppet of China's government, but he's certainly timid with them.
Antagonizing them may play well to a certain constituency, but they'll be the same ones kicking you out of office when the economy tanks.
The only reason the world has moved as quickly on Russia as they have is because Russia's economy is 1/10th the size of China's.
But its economy hasn't tanked and exports to China are still going strong.
Sounds tough.
And although I don't like his foreign policy posture in general - he did do something hugely ballsy:
Trudeau actually said publicly that nations ought to form a coalition to work against China's antagonism.
This is a 'big deal' because it's actually what needs to happen - and - China is hugely sensitive and retaliatory about such things.
China very effectively uses their central control to divide and conquer - politicians, business leaders, NGOs around the world are afraid of their wrath.
For Trudeau to say this, my gosh, I can't even believe he did.
That said, he and Canada do not have the power to lead that initiative. It might take a Putin-like moment, which maybe has arrived.
Feckless, simply political leaders (all of them) around the world would have to get on board, and the US would have be very down with it. I fear a guy like Trump as president would probably ruin it for a variety of reasons.
Or it could be done indirectly as a new form WTO, or like special trade partnership - the TPP would have been helpful. Or a new forum without Chinese tentacles, a bit like the WTO but with somewhat different objectives.
As far as a 'Canadian' travelling in China, I wouldn't worry about it. It's a big place. It's authoritarian but most people have little to worry about.
On the flip side, when Lithuania named an office incorrectly using a word China didn't like, China was outraged and swift economic consequences were initiated in reteliation.
I am not a trump supporter, in fact he started the tough policy on china, the quad etc Why would he mess it up. He may talk shit, but at least his policies have been sound and the Biden admin is continuing with a lot of them
Trump has no moral compass, sees everything in terms of personal power dynamics and that's it. He can't fathom appeals to bigger ideas or issues, or even strategic concerns.
He deals with countries, as though they are run by other, like-minded real-estate magnates who just want to make a bunch of money and wherein personal relations can be everything.
He doesn't understand that his words are not 'his words' rather, they are the words of the USA.
The obvious example is TPP. TPP was a way to get everyone on the table in Asia except China to have some kind of coordinated leverage.
He killed it.
His instinct about leverage is actually not that far off: USA has a lot more leverage against any single nation. But is strategic instinct is more than lacking, it's stupid. He just can't understand that the US isn't in a dominant position vis-a-vis China, but that 'most of the Pacific' actually is, to the extent they can work together.
Also, Trump admires 'strong men', wants to get along with them, appease them, as there always deals in the works that could come from it.
Trump's kids were raking in real-estate investments while he was president, because he's powerful, Chinese are attracted to that - and - they want to curry favour. Trump is all about selling his brand irrespective of whether it's his office or not to sell. 'Trump White House Steak Knives'.
Trump is pretty good at being 'crazy like a fox' and escalating in anger which actually has some use in foreign policy, but that instinct can be just as much a drawback.
TPP was going to be a really good deal. He dumped it for stupid reasons.
Also, I don't doubt for a second that someone could convince him to throw Taiwan under the bus: "I talked to Xi. He's very, very smart man. Taiwan, you know, it's in China. They even call it China! Did you know that? I just found that out - he told me that. So I think that they need to work that out over there, you know. Xi is a wise man, wise man. We get along great, just great. We're going to do a lot of business together. Big business".
in this light, the retaliation is justified, no? Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Maybe reconsider how much to let the US boss you around.
Or you know, PRC arrested 2 Canadian spies in retaliation (and will execute 1 drug dealer) and there's nothing Trudeau could do but act coy. I'm more surprised how many Canadians are useful idiots and believe PRC would round up 2 innocent Canadians out of 10s of thousands on mainland (100s thousands including HK). Somehow a alleged totalitarian security state that dismantled CIA network a few years prior don't keep tabs on Canadian espionage within their borders.
He doesn't see the problem.
I definitely wouldn’t have the courage to be a journalist here, though. And even for us nobodies, China is becoming less welcoming to foreigners with every year that passes.
They didn't "do anything stupid". They are 2 Canadians that were arrested because Canada had to obey a treaty with the U.S. that mandates the country to arrest anyone that the American justice has judged as guilty. That treaty forced Canada to arrest the daughter of Huawei. In retaliation China arrested the 2 Michaels. The former U.S. "grab-them-by-da-pussy" in chief found it funny to keep her locked so didn't care about it. The whole thing got solved when Biden let her go and China released the 2 Michaels.
The bottom line is: China doesn't give a *** to rule of the law. I hope you don't discover that by yourself.
Is he genuinely curious and intellectually humble, or is he unusually skeptical about western media and prone to both-sidesism (e.g. does he talk a lot about NATO feeding the fire), or is he just a troll?
The brainwash is real, but you’ll never help him by telling him he’s brainwashed. If he’s actually open to it, asking questions patiently and with empathy is the best way to show him where his blind spots are.
Oh yes, definitely! Better report him to the Authorities just to be safe.