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Comment by nialv7 | Hacker News Reader

This is laughably inaccurate. Author's information source is unreliable for a start (interactions with older generations, and depiction of lives in China in fictions and online media), which is already seeing China via funhouse mirrors. That perception is then filtered through a Western lens. What comes out is barely even recognizable.

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Can you share some of what you know that is more accurate? I mean specific details, observations, experiences. That would be a better way to contribute, because the rest of us could learn something.

I'm not saying your critique is wrong, nor (more importantly) uninteresting. What makes it interesting is the second sentence, which—not by coincidence—is the most specific.

But do please edit out swipes like "This is laughably inaccurate" - this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, and your comment would be fine (if a bit too generic) without that bit.

it's unfortunately impossible for me to give you an accurate picture what China, its people, its politics, etc. is like. For starters, even though I believe my own perception is more accurate than the author's, I still have my own biases and am also only able to view it from my own limited perspective. But more fundamentally, it's just impossible for me to beam what's in my head directly into yours. If you live in China, >95% of what you encounter is going to be mundane, boring day-to-day stuff. So whatever I talk about, whatever I lend words too, is just going to be given undue weight in your mind and give you a distorted image.

So instead I just want to say, like, they are just human too, like you and me. We may do things somewhat differently, but deep down we are all the same, we all have to breath, we all have a heartbeat, we all need to eat and shit, and we will all die one day. Remember that, instead of trying to build a reductive caricature of what "Chinese people" is like. If you ever interact with a Chinese person, be sincere, compassionate, and curious, just like how you would interact with anyone.

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