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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

> I dont get why americans are scared of us: we're just as scared of them.

Agreed. I'm not pro-CCP in any way, shape, or form, but the rhetoric and jingoism coming from politicians in both the US and China is stupid, and will end up causing an accidental escalation. Look at the whole balloon fiasco. Relations really need to normalize or the world is in a world of hurt.

I also blame a lack of English and Mandarin fluency in China and US respectively for causing this issue. The average Chinese or American doesn't get a chance to see life on the other side, so people end up building orientalized images.

Also, ime on the Hill, most of the people making China policy weren't Asian American nor had strong experience with Chinese (or Asian in general) culture on the ground. A lot of this was due to imo discriminatory hiring practices that prevented people with "ties" to a specific region from becoming a specialist for that area.

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I doubt it’s a language or cultural problem.

The CCP just aren’t very nice people.

US politicians are taking advantage of the situation to score populist points at home - but their caution towards China isn’t totally unwarranted.

Journalists aren't sent abroad as much anymore.

After 2008, most news bureaus shut down their foreign offices [0], and whoever is left tends to stay within a bubble around the main bureau in that country, while sourcing news from freelancers.

In addition, when you can't see or understand social media in another language and on an entirely different ecosystem of platforms, you end up getting a warped view of the world.

[0] - https://theconversation.com/with-foreign-bureaus-slashed-fre...

> Journalists aren't sent abroad as much anymore.

when the CCP arrests people for reporting things they dont like, it's no wonder foreign journalists don't want to go there.

You can’t just call the billions of people in China CCP. And they also aren’t just pro US shills either. Unwarranted or not Chinese in China overwhelmingly support their own government over others, and this is in fact attributable to culture because anyone who is not Chinese is referred to in the language as an “outside country person.”

Your comment also exemplifies the sort of Berlin wall of cultural exchange between the two countries. You refer to the CCP as this sort of opaque not so nice organization but in fact the political system of the two nations are not so different if viewed as a whole system rather than the superficial parts. Sure China has one party with overreaching power over industry and corporations. But when you see the US system as a whole it’s not too different with corporations controlling both parties (you’ll see they often contribute to both Democrats and Republicans). One party, controlling corporations vs corporations controlling both parties. Not much difference in the end.

A lot in the west sort of just have a vague understanding of the workings of Chinese politics, and even less about the day to day life and well being of an average Chinese person. This is mostly due to the fault of China though, limiting cultural exports and making it difficult to get tourism visas for westerners. I’m not sure what that’s about. Chinese have a better understanding of foreign life but probably still a bit lacking in terms of understanding foreign politics. And even though there are a lot of overseas Chinese there’s just way more Chinese people who don’t know about the west apart from pop culture just because there are billions of Chinese (raw numbers).

> I also blame a lack of English and Mandarin fluency in China and US respectively for causing this issue. The average Chinese or American doesn't get a chance to see life on the other side, so people end up building orientalized images.

I doubt the lack of English and Mandarin fluency is a big factor here. The CCP made a deliberate choice to isolate China from the outside world as much as possible.

The crackdown on English only began around 2020-21, yet even in much more laid back times in China there wasn't much cultural exchange outside of the elites.

WhatsApp and FB used to be popular for a hot second (and still were in Xinjiang and Tibet until crackdowns in 2016-18), and it used to be easy for non-Chinese nationals to join WeChat or SinaQQ until 2017-19, yet most American commentators wouldn't go on there to get a feel of discourse on the other side, or go to a Tier 2/3/4 city, while Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese tourists, journalists, and businesspeople would.

People forget that most Asian Americans would could bridge the gap tend to be on the younger end (10s-30s) but most decision makers are in their 60s-70s. It's the same issue across the Pacific in China as well.

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