Let them keep their ignorance. I've decided to give up educating them for two reasons:
1) It's impossible for them to realize that China is a much better place than what western media depicts. It's even better than most western countries nowadays.
2) It's for China's benefits to keep them in thinking China still what China was 100 years ago.
Don't wake up them, let them live in their dreams.
Oh, please, as a Chinese I can say with 100% certainty that this is false. The Chinese state media and parents lament in the same way how douyin (tiktok’s version in China) dumb down the next generation of children.
He is asking why are you overthinking this? People in China have put the cultural revolution behind them, it might be helpful for others to do the same when attempting to psychoanalyse present day Chinese behaviours.
Your weight, your age and how much you earn are not taboo subjects in China, so people will bring them up in casual conversations.
Firstly, the fact that these terms exist in language and officialdom is meaningless. There is perhaps nowhere else in the world today sporting a greater gap between the official line and the reality of popular life than mainland China.
Secondly, Chinese popular nutrition is still in the dark ages, its common currency being tradition, old-wives hearsay and happenstance. Things that are imported or claimed to be imported are held in high esteem for no other reason. Basic biology is barely taught.
I've been here on and off for 13 years, mostly on, and that's most of my adult life. I was born in Australia, my wife is Chinese, and we chose to have our kid in Thailand. However, I have many friends who have had children here and in fact this morning we just visited a friend in a local hospital who had just had a C-section. Frankly, the kid was wasted looking and it seemed obvious to me that they'd scheduled the operation prematurely.
Thirdly, the author confuses Confucian tradition (family lineage oriented for 2000+ years) and eugenics. The benefits of coming from an aristocratic background of eating well, education and the social network that brings is recognized in all societies. Choosing not to have a child (to kill them because of genetic status) is something else entirely, and even checking the sex of your baby is outlawed here... which isn't to say it doesn't happen, just that it's a lot more on the 'no popularly accessible eugenics' side than the west.
However, there is a hint of reality in the article. The Chinese government has for decades collected the blood of foreigners visiting the country, ostensibly as a medical exam to check whether you have some life-threatening disease and may spread it about the country but obviously partly as a backslap to other countries for doing the same and partly as a money spinner. I have often supposed that database, which is certainly linked to other information about visitors such as who they are, where they come from, who their family is, where they have been and what they are nominally doing in the country, is being compiled in to a massive global genetic database for research purposes. That much is perhaps real, but the eugenics line as spouted here is to my mind utterly baseless.
Most of those annoying and stupid individuals are from the so called China's Lost Generation. I found the following video made by two westerners explains the reasons in a pretty accurate way.
I'm not Chinese, and this article seems too...broad? I guess you can say anything about Millenials from anywhere, with condescending tone, and get pageviews.
At some point, you're being insulting by implicitly stripping everyone of the agency to deal with their own lives and problems. I don't think the last people in China that have ever had agency were 800 years ago. I don't know where that line is, but ~40 generations is definitely on the other side of it. (Probably isn't a "line" anyhow.)
This reminds me of account security questions. They ask things like "what's your childhood nickname", "what's your first pet's name". To my Chinese mother-in-law, who was born in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, when food was scarce, everyone was poor, education was not easy to get, government was non-functional due to anarchy, and when her first priority was to survive, all those questions are just weird. They reek of first-world assumptions.
First time to hear that. If you are Chinese grown up in PRC as well, it's most likely you are younger than I am. Also, what I said is not some content directly from a specific source. Even there is some kind of "standard" from the authority in some way, the possibility that people have exactly same consensus in this regard.
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