It’s been nice to see ordinary Americans open up to life in China but everyone is acting blind to their censorship. Makes me thankful for the fediverse and being able to self host my own instance.
It’s been nice to see ordinary Americans open up to life in China but everyone is acting blind to their censorship. Makes me thankful for the fediverse and being able to self host my own instance.
Pro or anti X nation state rhetoric is rarely helpful. I fully agree that blind support of another country just because it’s not the US is just silly. I don’t know what you mean by all bad. How’re you labeling all three of those countries?
Have you been to China? The thing that is affecting so many US users on xiaohongshu is waking up to how many aspects of Chinese daily life and society are actually better than the supposed best country in the world. This has been my experience on my most recent of many times in China. It shocking how many issues and stressors exist in America that don’t in China.
Do you have your head under a rock? Over the past few years China has been putting the Uighur people in concentration camps while Russia has been invading and genociding Ukrainians.
No, China hasn’t. There has been no evidence.
We know how much information should get out of a state with complete control over the flow of information, via Palestine and Ukraine’s respective genocides. Instead of any of that, we have vague, contradictory accusations from Islamic extremists. The uighur people control Xinjiang, and thanks to investment it’s flourishing.
China killed Islamic extremism via education and improving material conditions; that’s not acceptable to the West, so they made up a story.
Neither the knee-jerk Americans nor you are being honest.
You don’t serve a cause, whatever cause it may be, by lying.
You’re right, hence why I encourage people to visit Xinjiang and try to find these millions-strong concentration camps or just, you know, talk to people from China, especially that region.
Besides a few people that lived most of their lives in the Middle East, not China, there are no witnesses or ‘victims’. And we all know who tends to recruit agents in the Middle East like they’re run by a evangelical death cult.
By that logic, there have never been any detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Why, if there were, surely you could just walk into Gitmo and see them yourself! But you can’t! So they must not have every existed!
Interesting way of doing it.
The difference being, of course scale. But thank you for further proving my point. We know the names of every detainee in Guantanamo, we know the flights in and out, we have satellite pictures of it despite it being a facility that’s top secret.
And yet
Of course, it doesn’t prove your point. Have you seen any of the detainees personally? Are you just going to rely on reports from western media about them, or from family members that are thousands of miles away? Do you believe that it’s “top secret” just because western media is telling you it is?
Or is it perhaps more likely that concentration camps, black sites, and detention facilities for ‘irregular combatants’ would maybe not be something that is open to reporters, and perhaps locals might not be willing to be open about them with foreigners?
Families in Uyghur communities around the world have referenced the camps with regards to their missing friends and relatives. Here are some from my city. It’s intellectually dishonest to suggest there are no witnesses or evidence.
Yes, as I said, western people with vague ties and no evidence of said ties making up stories.
We know what genocide looks like when a country has complete control over all communications … It looks like hd video. It looks like leaked audio. It looks like tens of thousands of refugees despite military blockades on all sides.
It is not vague stories and claims from people that voluntarily left decades earlier. It is not stories that you can immediately disprove on a visit. It is not the d-tier propaganda that people like you only believe due to racism and believing the Chinese are so fundamentally different that those doing the genocide would have not one single person defect and come forward. The Chinese are human. Not a hive mind. In even the most brainwashed examples of real genocide, a double digit percentage of those perpetrating it defect and try to tell the world. Not one single one has. None of the thousands upon thousands of people required in the act and cover-up of this ‘genocide’ have broke… Making it the most successful conspiracy in the history of the world… If it were true.
Why do you people stop having critical thinking skills the second China is mentioned?
???
No, because I don’t fall for the propaganda. I’ve met one of the NYT reporters on that and their sources were three Ugyhurs and trust me. I’m guessing you don’t speak Chinese and have zero knowledge of it besides MSN?
I think to each their own. My wife spent two weeks in China for work, and she’s still traumatized from it.
You definitely need to tell us what happened with your wife. Can’t just write something like that and leave it hanging!
Lol. Alright I’ll try to be as vague as possible while still trying to respect those involved.
My wife is in an industry where she has a lot of knowledge in what she went to college for. She had a friend living in China at the time (caucasian), who was also in the same field. The company her friend worked for offered to pay for my wife’s travel and expenses to work for them (Research and Development) on a contract job for two weeks. This company was Chinese, with Chinese workers. I believe there was only one other caucasian person in the mix at the gym (aside from her friend)
From the get go, it was a problem. My wife is caucasian and does not speak the language. Cheng Du where she needed to go. She had to do a connecting flight on the way there in China. It was very difficult to navigate and no one would help her. She eventually managed to get where she needed to go.
Once she was there. It was a nightmare. My wife is in the fitness industry. She has a degree in exercise science and kinesiology. This should give you a frame of reference for how healthy she lives her life and how fit she is. While in china, men would get off their bikes, take pictures of her, point and laugh. I believe they called her Fat tan farmer, far farmer or big lady. Again, my wife is lean and not fat in any way, but China’s standards of what the human body should look like seems insane. Everyone was paper thin. The gym she was working for had banned weights in their gym, weights!
It was very difficult to interact with people at all. Going to starbucks for example, they would either ignore her to her face and have people skip her or go into the back to hide from her. She was under the impression she would have a guide with her most of the time, but that was not the case. They took her out to dinner once, and that was it, they left her to fend on her own. She was not used to the fact that over there, red traffic lights are merely a suggestion (though this aspect is many counties)
The conditions of the area were extreme and changed from block to block. Some streets would have slums and stores made out of sheets of metal right across the street from what look like a 4 star hotel. Where she stayed was a more safe area (where her friend lived). It’s overcast there from pollution or whatever, that If the sun came out people dropped what they were doing to take pictures of it. And it wasn’t even that impressive compared to what we see in the US. It happened twice in the two weeks she was there.
The thing that finally broke her situation was that they handed her thousands of dollars in cash with the directive to go back to the US and go to other gyms, so she secretly record, steal their ideas and report back to them. I guess thinking about it now, they basically wanted her to be a spy for them. The whole experience strained the friendship between her and her friend, they argued and never spoke again after this trip.
Finally on her way back, she had her final surprise. My wife is generally a nervous flyer, and this event put her off from flying for a bit. On her plane back (she can’t remember what company) while they were passing over Japan, they hit the most turbulence she had ever been on. The plan started to violently shake and lose control, the oxygen masks deployed and everyone started crying. She honestly thought she was going to die and this was it. Obviously she made it home, but she’s never going back. I’ve always wanted to visit Japan, but the thought of flying that long and even entering Asia is still traumatizing to her.
Honestly this is really hard to pity all. This reads like white woman goes to new country with new culture and new language and hates everything she doesn’t understand. Such a ridiculous warrants a response otherwise others may take you seriously.
Half of your wife’s “horror” story is her not being used to Chinese culture or speaking any Chinese. People staring and taking photos? This happens in any country where white people aren’t typically present. They’re curious not rude.
Since she can’t speak Chinese it’s a huge assumption for you two to assume they were calling her a fat tan farmer? How would you even come up with that if you can’t understand it. Chinese people do comment on tall or big westerns but not in a rude manner. Again, because they may not have seen someone like your wife before and are curious.
She’s upset about a city having nice and bad parts? Walk down any big city in America. China modernized very recently. She’s upset about people taking photos of the pretty sky? She’s upset about a culture that doesn’t wait in lines?
Idk if it’s worth commenting on learning how other Americans run gyms as “spying.” What an overreaction.
And now your wife is walking around spreading how bad China is along with you. This is just sad.
Wait until you get to Japan and find many places won’t welcome white people, people will move away from you on the subway, most don’t speak English, there are also bad parts.
I am not saying a lot of these things are unique. Someone asked more information on why she was traumatized so I gave the information. I highly doubt I alone will really change anyone’s perception of anything.
As someone whose family is from south america, this is not a typical thing to do to foreign tourists. People don’t point and ridicule. If anything they engage with them more, because they want money. I am sure this happens in other countries as well, but right now we’re talking about China.
Her friend has been living there for years and speaks the language. Some of this happened while they were both together and she relayed what was said (which were also things said to her friend for the time she lived in China). If I wanted to make far fetched stories I could have actually spent time coming up with something creative.
She’s not upset about these things. This is mostly commenting on the overall thought that China is great everywhere. It has homeless people and poverty just like the rest of the world. Hell I even originally left out the fact that she saw people eating food off the ground and some sleeping in trash.
If you know another phrase for going to other gyms, recording classes, in secret, trying to not getting caught and emailing this information to another country to steal their information, by all means tell me and I will use it.
There are bad parts everywhere in the world. I also have friends in Japan, and it wouldn’t be work related.
That’s a hilarious story.
That was indeed hilarious to read
It’s also probably made-up.
At airports and train stations in any major city in China, which includes any city that has an international airport, there is English signage everywhere. There are also information booths everywhere staffed by multilingual people. Further, even in the minor cities and such (if she somehow managed to wind up in a small city like, say, Jiujiang), white people have a common tactic they use: stand looking helpless and wait (it’s rarely over ten minutes) for someone to work up the courage to try their “very bad” (the words they will use) English on them and to help them.
Given that she arrived from the USA she started in a major city. Chengdu is another major city. I’m calling a lie on this unless she did this in, like, the 1980s. (That era of China was definitely a different world from today.)
I’m in my 24th year here. I’ve lived in three cities and I’ve visited dozens more. I have never, not even once, seen a gym that didn’t have weights. Indeed most of the time, to my frustration, all they have are weights and a too-small mat for other exercises.
Again, I’m calling this made-up.
LMFAO! The “safest” areas of New York City are far more dangerous than the most dangerous portions of the worst cities in China! Even in a city as tame as Ottawa (that’s in Canada for any Americans reading) there were neighbourhoods I didn’t feel comfortable walking through in the daytime and would not set foot in at night.
In China, by comparison, I cheerfully walked down the darkest of alleys at night even in economically depressed small cities like Huangshi. (You wouldn’t know of it. Just like you’d never heard of Wuhan before 2020.)
Anybody American (of all people!) thinking that parts of China are “dangerous” is incredibly obtuse.
Do you really want literally every American immigrant (or even non-white visitor, or Hell, even your own citizens!) in history to face you with her oh-so-privileged attitude here? Really? You might want a brief refresher.
The inability of Americans to look at how they treat others all while whining how they’re treated is truly stunning sometimes.
And this here seals the deal. The “trauma” wasn’t even caused by the Chinese or China. It was caused by air.
So here’s my take from the story (a take informed by almost a quarter of a century of watching Americans in China):
A whiny, middle-class white American woman wasn’t waited on hand and foot by the Chinese. Combined with the fact that she likely already had bigoted expectations of China led her to melt down into an even whinier pool of self-pity, interpreted everything around her in the most negative light possible, then confabulated even worse things, and finally got “traumatized” by the AIR (literally). And blames that on China too. (And likely blames sunspots on China as well.)
If she went to China in the '80s or maybe even the '90s her experiences with people staring at her and laughing might be true (though it’s odd that someone who at the beginning of the story didn’t speak a word of Mandarin somehow knew what people were calling her), though she likely misinterpreted the laughter and its intent. (Laughter and its usage varies across culture, but Americans are not exactly known for understanding that other cultures even exist not to mention subtle details like this.)
Again maybe in the '80s or '90s her observations of corrugated roofs next to palaces may be legit (although grossly exaggerated), but if this happened at any point in the '00s onward she’s just flatly lying. Chengdu today is a far more modern and good-looking city than any American city, including New York. (Perhaps especially New York since that whole thing of slums interspersed with palaces is something I saw in NYC…)
I won’t comment on being paid to spy on other gyms. I lack any experience with how gyms operate (though I might point out that literally anybody can just walk into a gym, pay a visitor’s fee plus an instructor’s fee, and get to see the operations of a gym directly in first person). That part could be true; there’s shady businesses everywhere (yes, including the USA) who do dumb things. That part gets dumped into the “I don’t know” pile along with a few other minor details mentioned above.
But most of that story? Reeks to high heaven.
What
Edit: oh his wife just can’t handle new experiences.
If you’re interested in what happened with the guys wife in China you replied to he made a comment on my post and answered
https://lemmy.world/comment/14675776
Thanks for linking!