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[Trollheiming]

西安不是中国. 你认为中国人都下很大的无知云, 可是你可以看到从最高的山吗？

Like a great many things in China, people know the things that are supposed to be unknown. Like how to get around the Great Firewall. Like which party officials are on the take. Like Falun Gong. Like porn and homosexuality and AIDS. And the government knows that people know. It's an intricate charade. Everyone breaks the law in little ways that don't create social unrest, and the governnment turns a blind eye. Everybody feels like they've gotten away with something.

不错。 我看懂了。必要我爱人告诉我，你说汉语说得好不好. 现在她睡觉了。但是你对我说得还可以。

我在很多地方爬山了：华山，泰山，松山，黄山。在中国污染的云比最高的山很高！

At any rate, strong effort. It's bad for us foreigners to botch up Chinese to each other. For one thing, a reverse term for "Chinglish" has yet to be devised.

Regarding the idea that everyone secretly knows what happened, well, if they're canny enough to learn English and take trips to America, then maybe they are. They're actually not representative of most Chinese on the ground in China, though. My honest appraisal is that the opinions are not a vast pantomime being played by people who really know what's up. Occasionally I get a question like "Why don't other countries like China?" and in this context, I realize that Chinese news is constantly filled with grievance-peddling that makes Chinese people feel isolated. I could tackle some real issues in this regard, like the outrageously greedy Chinese territorial claims that extend hundreds of miles into the South China Sea to within sight of the Phillipine and Vietnamese coasts. But I never actually do. They want me to say something more "correct" than that. The Chinese who really care about climbing the great firewall, and reading real outside opinions are vanishingly few in number.

And which party members are on the take? Couldn't we make a shorter list of which ones aren't on the take?

I'm quite aware of the 愤青, but they're still a small minority. Just because they have a myopic view of their own history doesn't CHANGE history or mean that everyone else is ignorant of it. That's akin to saying that just because the US has some angry skinhead Holocaust deniers, the whole US is anti-Semitic.

I was having my plate of 京酱肉丝 in a local hole-in-the wall eatery here a few weeks ago, the kind that you find on any street corner here and can somehow pull off an amazing dish far better than the best hotel fare. I'm eating and the cook comes out and drinks some baijiu with me and starts asking me about Diaoyu Dao. Naturally, I just kept saying that those islands belong to China. As long as the 肉丝 stays free of unreasonable amounts of rat droppings, those islands can belong to whomever the cook chooses. Incidents like this make me doubt your appraisal of the movement's extent. To me, the fenqing seem everywhere and they make it their business to question foreigners. I wish I could believe that it's a charade or merely limited to a similar extent as holocaust denial in America, but I have vast differences with you in calculating the numbers of the Angry Youth movement. It hardly seems uncommon to me.

But where I take the strongest exception is in this notion that you have that all bad things in China come from a certain amorality that you ascribe to not having "found Jesus". You're looking at China with the eye of a missionary and a foreigner. You might live there, but you're still a laowai. Worse, you seem to be a laowai who holds himself apart from the people he's surrounded by -- the spiritual descendant of the sort that lived in the Concessions in Shanghai, and put up signs like "No Dogs or Chinese Allowed". Maybe I'm wrong in that assessment, but you haven't given much evidence to the contrary.

I said a certain morality exists that is peculiarly western for some reason, and then opined that it might be a historical memory of Christianity even though Christianity is now well-advanced into evolving into an atheistic Secular Humanism. There are other systems of morality, which is not to say amorality or immorality. If you think Chinese people believe everything that you believe, and have a system of right and wrong that squares with your ideals about such things, then that's your unfortunate error. Cheating, for example, is not a big ethical deal in the universities here. Students cheat on exams all the time and get caught without serious repercussions. In America, you can have your academic records expunged. Lose four years and thousands of dollars for the gross crime of copying someone else. China is different. Your grave misdeed is their slight infraction.

I'm content with my identify. I am a laowai here, and I always will be. If you fight this, you'll be unhappy here. More often these days, to their credit, I'm a waiguoren now, but on a few occasions I have even had the unpleasantness of being a baigui. In Xi'an, there are certain areas of the city that have hundreds of foreigners each day, but other parts of the city where a western face is as new as as it was in 1999. You'll have children running after you, shouting laowai at you, no matter how enlightened you are.

[Criptfeind]

I think the new rules should be that Troll should make all his posts in 100% Chinese. I feel this will improve the quality of discourse tremendously.

[RedKing]

西安不是中国. 你认为中国人都下很大的无知云, 可是你可以看到从最高的山吗？

Like a great many things in China, people know the things that are supposed to be unknown. Like how to get around the Great Firewall. Like which party officials are on the take. Like Falun Gong. Like porn and homosexuality and AIDS. And the government knows that people know. It's an intricate charade. Everyone breaks the law in little ways that don't create social unrest, and the governnment turns a blind eye. Everybody feels like they've gotten away with something.

不错。 我看懂了。必要我爱人告诉我，你说汉语说得好不好. 现在她睡觉了。但是你对我说得还可以。

我在很多地方爬山了：华山，泰山，松山，黄山。在中国污染的云比最高的山很高！

At any rate, strong effort. It's bad for us foreigners to botch up Chinese to each other. For one thing, a reverse term for "Chinglish" has yet to be devised.

Tai haole. If only the cloud was high in Beijing...instead it's at street-level. Only place I've ever been where you could get the air stuck in your teeth.

Regarding the idea that everyone secretly knows what happened, well, if they're canny enough to learn English and take trips to America, then maybe they are. They're actually not representative of most Chinese on the ground in China, though. My honest appraisal is that the opinions are not a vast pantomime being played by people who really know what's up. Occasionally I get a question like "Why don't other countries like China?" and in this context, I realize that Chinese news is constantly filled with grievance-peddling that makes Chinese people feel isolated. I could tackle some real issues in this regard, like the outrageously greedy Chinese territorial claims that extend hundreds of miles into the South China Sea to within sight of the Phillipine and Vietnamese coasts. But I never actually do. They want me to say something more "correct" than that. The Chinese who really care about climbing the great firewall, and reading real outside opinions are vanishingly few in number.

I'll grant you that most of the proxy use in China is for pirating media and porn, rather than self-enlightenment. And most of my experiences have been in college towns (if a population of 6 million counts as a 'town'), where there might be a higher level of information awareness. And yes, there is absolutely a media culture of aggrievement, whether it's war movies about the baby-raping demons from Hell Japanese or discussion of how the West resents China's rise, even when we mostly don't. The territorial claims is a thorny issue. There's a pattern of using really, really old Imperial claims as justification, whether it's Tibet or Taiwan or the Diaoyu or the South Spratlys. For my part, I think they have legit claims on Tibet and the Diaoyu Dao (although the ROC has a legit claim on Diaoyu as well), de jure but not de facto on Taiwan, and totally illegit on the Spratlys.

And which party members are on the take? Couldn't we make a shorter list of which ones aren't on the take?

After the Bo Xilai thing, and with the change in leadership, I'm hopeful that the CCP will really do some house-cleaning. But as always, 山高皇帝远.

I'm quite aware of the 愤青, but they're still a small minority. Just because they have a myopic view of their own history doesn't CHANGE history or mean that everyone else is ignorant of it. That's akin to saying that just because the US has some angry skinhead Holocaust deniers, the whole US is anti-Semitic.

I was having my plate of 京酱肉丝 in a local hole-in-the wall eatery here a few weeks ago, the kind that you find on any street corner here and can somehow pull off an amazing dish far better than the best hotel fare. I'm eating and the cook comes out and drinks some baijiu with me and starts asking me about Diaoyu Dao. Naturally, I just kept saying that those islands belong to China. As long as the 肉丝 stays free of unreasonable amounts of rat droppings, those islands can belong to whomever the cook chooses. Incidents like this make me doubt your appraisal of the movement's extent. To me, the fenqing seem everywhere and they make it their business to question foreigners. I wish I could believe that it's a charade or merely limited to a similar extent as holocaust denial in America, but I have vast differences with you in calculating the numbers of the Angry Youth movement. It hardly seems uncommon to me.

I have to admit, I haven't been back since 2007. It may have gotten worse in the interim, and it may be a bigger thing in the interior.

But where I take the strongest exception is in this notion that you have that all bad things in China come from a certain amorality that you ascribe to not having "found Jesus". You're looking at China with the eye of a missionary and a foreigner. You might live there, but you're still a laowai. Worse, you seem to be a laowai who holds himself apart from the people he's surrounded by -- the spiritual descendant of the sort that lived in the Concessions in Shanghai, and put up signs like "No Dogs or Chinese Allowed". Maybe I'm wrong in that assessment, but you haven't given much evidence to the contrary.

I said a certain morality exists that is peculiarly western for some reason, and then opined that it might be a historical memory of Christianity even though Christianity is now well-advanced into evolving into an atheistic Secular Humanism. There are other systems of morality, which is not to say amorality or immorality. If you think Chinese people believe everything that you believe, and have a system of right and wrong that squares with your ideals about such things, then that's your unfortunate error. Cheating, for example, is not a big ethical deal in the universities here. Students cheat on exams all the time and get caught without serious repercussions. In America, you can have your academic records expunged. Lose four years and thousands of dollars for the gross crime of copying someone else. China is different. Your grave misdeed is their slight infraction.

Agreed, but I don't think that's Christian/non-Christian, I think that's just China. IMHO, it doesn't come out of Buddhism or even state atheism because it predates the Communists by centuries, if not millenia. I think it comes out of having to survive and get by as one of a billion people, without much of a support network beyond family. By the same token, I've had Chinese who I barely knew beyond "a friend of a friend of a friend's brother's co-worker" kind of stuff who were incredibly kind and generous to me. It's all about the guanxi. If you have any kind of connection, however tenuous -- it seperates you from the billion other people and puts you in their in-group. If you're not in that in-group...well, you're fair game for whatever.

I'm content with my identify. I am a laowai here, and I always will be. If you fight this, you'll be unhappy here. More often these days, to their credit, I'm a waiguoren now, but on a few occasions I have even had the unpleasantness of being a baigui. In Xi'an, there are certain areas of the city that have hundreds of foreigners each day, but other parts of the city where a western face is as new as as it was in 1999. You'll have children running after you, shouting laowai at you, no matter how enlightened you are.

Good enough for me. I owe you an apology for my comment earlier, it was out of line.

[Scoops Novel]

Well, you seem to be improving, Trollheiming.

[Trollheiming]

Well, you seem to be improving, Trollheiming.

I'm the next-generation stuff. Build a better mouse-trap, and better mice evolve.

Tai haole. If only the cloud was high in Beijing...instead it's at street-level. Only place I've ever been where you could get the air stuck in your teeth.

Beijing's the worst, for sure. But the cloud never really disappears entirely anywhere. It's just thinner in certain regions of the country. On the bright side, if you can pretend that it's just mist, China suddenly becomes a land of exotic mystery.

The territorial claims is a thorny issue. There's a pattern of using really, really old Imperial claims as justification, whether it's Tibet or Taiwan or the Diaoyu or the South Spratlys. For my part, I think they have legit claims on Tibet and the Diaoyu Dao (although the ROC has a legit claim on Diaoyu as well), de jure but not de facto on Taiwan, and totally illegit on the Spratlys.

In all honesty, the Chinese claim to Diaoyu seems a bit weak to me. Not that I'd ever say that publicly!

I have to admit, I haven't been back since 2007. It may have gotten worse in the interim, and it may be a bigger thing in the interior.

China has changed a lot since 2007. Not much for the better, I'm afraid. I never had a hotel reject me as a foreigner until last year. All foreigners now have to stay in three-star or better hotels. For our own comfort, of course. But there are plenty of decent hotels that this law removes from your options when travelling around the country on the spur of the moment. Also, until June of 2010, you could breeze into any 网吧 and log some time on the internet beside dozens of young Chinese playing World of Warcraft. Now everyone must show national ID at the front desk, and most foreigners only have passports. Those aren't accepted.

Naturally, these laws are loosely enforced, but it can still be upsetting to walk out of a hotel that rejected you, after you arrived in town near midnight and want to crash anywhere decent. No foreigners or dogs allowed.

Good enough for me. I owe you an apology for my comment earlier, it was out of line.

No problem. I admit that I'm often questioning the motives of other foreigners that I meet in China. We're a colorful lot. I've met the really earnest wide-eyed types, the roving adventurers, the would-be goodwill ambassadors, the scholarly china-watchers, the missionaries of some belief or another, the crass opportunists, the old china hands and their young apprentices, and the downright creeps. And mixtures thereof. I generally try to keep my mind open about why another westerner decided to leave the west, but the temptation to expect something bad, or at least neurotic, is definitely there. 

[Scoops Novel]

According to this BBC article, youth are increasingly narcissistic. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20756247. I suspect we may all be slight sufferers of this. Thoughts?

[Criptfeind]

Yeah. I am pretty sure everyone else is narcissistic, I myself am to perfect for such a thing.

[Scoops Novel]

What are the thirty years old doing with yourselves? I've realized i never see many of you, and have suspicions that this may hold true in the cities as well. Are there many? What are you making of yourselves, and i suppose this is the age where people make something of themselves.

[MonkeyHead]

What are the thirty years old doing with yourselves? I've realized i never see many of you, and have suspicions that this may hold true in the cities as well. Are there many? What are you making of yourselves, and i suppose this is the age where people make something of themselves.

Cant speak for all of them, but I am either at work earning cash to support my young family, or at home caring for my young family. Not like I have that much free lesiure time. For example, I am posting this while working on my desk at home.

[RedKing]

What are the thirty years old doing with yourselves? I've realized i never see many of you, and have suspicions that this may hold true in the cities as well. Are there many? What are you making of yourselves, and i suppose this is the age where people make something of themselves.

I'm still working in the same line of work that I have been for 15+ years (technical support). Which I *HATE*. Which was only supposed to be a job to pay the bills while I found a job doing what I really wanted to do. Unfortunately, "what I really wanted to do" is a mobile target that evolves over time. And rarely pays well.

Meanwhile, had a family -- which increases the pressure to do whatever pays the (now expanded) bills, and decreases the chances of ever actually doing anything with all that fancy, expensive schooling that I enjoyed and am still paying back.

Now I'm getting a divorce and figuring out if this is a second chance to "make something of myself", or just a further step down the hill into Shitsville.

I have a lot of friends my age who are in similar not-yet-midlife-crises, where they have jobs and a decently comfortable standard of living, and a family....and they feel like they never got a chance to do what they wanted to. So here's my advice, you Y's and Z's: DON'T SETTLE DOWN.

Seriously, our economy no longer favors settling. Buying a house is a liability, not an investment. The days of working at The Company for 40 years and getting the gold watch and pension are history. Now it's "get a job, work it for four or five years, then get outsourced or laid off during a downturn". To cope with that, you need maximum portability. You need to be able to pick up and move to where the work is. That means no house, no kids, probably no wife unless she's semi-nomadic too. Nothing that you can't take with you on 24 hours' notice.

[SalmonGod]

What are the thirty years old doing with yourselves? I've realized i never see many of you, and have suspicions that this may hold true in the cities as well. Are there many? What are you making of yourselves, and i suppose this is the age where people make something of themselves.

I'm still working in the same line of work that I have been for 15+ years (technical support). Which I *HATE*. Which was only supposed to be a job to pay the bills while I found a job doing what I really wanted to do. Unfortunately, "what I really wanted to do" is a mobile target that evolves over time. And rarely pays well.

Meanwhile, had a family -- which increases the pressure to do whatever pays the (now expanded) bills, and decreases the chances of ever actually doing anything with all that fancy, expensive schooling that I enjoyed and am still paying back.

Now I'm getting a divorce and figuring out if this is a second chance to "make something of myself", or just a further step down the hill into Shitsville.

I have a lot of friends my age who are in similar not-yet-midlife-crises, where they have jobs and a decently comfortable standard of living, and a family....and they feel like they never got a chance to do what they wanted to. So here's my advice, you Y's and Z's: DON'T SETTLE DOWN.

Seriously, our economy no longer favors settling. Buying a house is a liability, not an investment. The days of working at The Company for 40 years and getting the gold watch and pension are history. Now it's "get a job, work it for four or five years, then get outsourced or laid off during a downturn". To cope with that, you need maximum portability. You need to be able to pick up and move to where the work is. That means no house, no kids, probably no wife unless she's semi-nomadic too. Nothing that you can't take with you on 24 hours' notice.

Yarr.  I realized a couple years into my first full time job that it's a fucking trap.  There's not enough time and energy left at the end of the day to make more than token effort at changing your situation.  I also did it to pay the bills while I worked on getting into what I really wanted to.  When I started, I had a couple years of school left, and a two year old kid.  Six years later, I've just recently found a group of people my age all stuck in similar situations, pooling together trying to start up a company.  So I'm putting a few hours a week into that, which is really the best I can do.  Any more and I literally have zero free time and my health rapidly deteriorates.  My wife is entering into her final semester this week, and there may be some more opportunity when she's done.  We'll see if her student loan debt forces me to stay where I am...  I provide for a decently comfortable home life, but I don't really get to enjoy it.  It's completely for my family.  It's a horrible depressing situation.

It may not even matter for much longer.  My employer looks like they're preparing to unofficially downsize.  They have new policies they're going to implement soon that will give them the capability to fire almost anyone on their workforce.  When they first announced the new criteria, it was quickly determined that it would result in every single person in the entire office being fired.  It's been about 6 months since then and people have been trying to prepare, but official word is they're going to be rolling it out soon and it will still result in firing like 2/3 of their workforce.  I don't know if I'll make the cut or not.

[Truean]

What are the thirty years old doing with yourselves? I've realized i never see many of you, and have suspicions that this may hold true in the cities as well. Are there many? What are you making of yourselves, and i suppose this is the age where people make something of themselves.

The ones I've seen are pretty much hosed. The system doesn't work on merit anymore, though that's still the dream they sell us on. "Who you know," is a game I refuse to play, but one I probably should and one I could totally "win" if I did. Same thing with other aspects of being corrupt. Won't do it.

Basically all the other generations behind us spent society into near nothingness and we get stuck with the tab, and inexplicably, the blame. It's funny how exactly NOW we're all suddenly budget conscious and rather than investing (spending) in ways that will get us all out of this mess, we suddenly have started trying to turn off the spigot that has propelled our society forward for the past 40 or so years.... Old people have the audacity to point to various toys and say we're spoiled....


"Alright, let me take away all of your opportunity, social mobility, financial security, and real chance of your dreams coming true in exchange for an Iphone. Any takers?" ~The sentence before a hell of a lot of silence.


I view many older people as spoiled beyond compare. They squandered through the best standard of living in the richest country on earth and somehow are dissatisfied while having a standard of living that is better than many of us ever will achieve.... The jobs, education, and stability they took for granted are offshore, overpriced, and non existent respectively. We're spoiled though? I guess we do have flashy phones....

[SalmonGod]

Old people have the audacity to point to various toys and say we're spoiled....


"Alright, let me take away all of your opportunity, social mobility, financial security, and real chance of your dreams coming true in exchange for an Iphone. Any takers?" ~The sentence before a hell of a lot of silence.

Not to mention a ton of basic freedoms that older generations took for granted.  My generation's lives are so strictly regimented and filled with empty busyness, over-concern for safety, beaurocracy, and over abundance of overly detailed rules that life is fucking suffocating.  Everything is controlled.  I work in an office where you can get yelled at for hanging a jacket on the back of your chair, and our bosses review every minute of our time for "gaps" in productivity.

The Manna system in this short story actually describes pretty well what our experience of work (where we spend the majority of our time) is evolving into.

Our shiny toys (that we get to spend maybe 10% of our waking lives actually indulging in) are literally the only thing we have going for us, and it really pisses me off how often we're said to be spoiled because of it.

[FearfulJesuit]

So...what's that going to turn into when we're the 20-40 or 30-50 generation instead of the 10-30 one?

I hope it's not a permanent state of affairs...the parallels between the current generation and the Lost Generation ninety years ago are striking. But society returned to normal after a while in their case; I think it probably will for us, too.

[Aklyon]

Goddamnit, why did I read the last few posts in here. That was depressing and you're only a decade or so ahead of me.