All: I know this article intersects with touchy topics, but the personal experience and observations of the author make it interesting and different. Please respond on that level—the interesting and specific—rather than just to generics. Generic discussion is repetitive and usually turns vituperative, as people just crash into each other's pre-hardened positions like angry bumper cars.
All the authors observations ring true, and they all stem from one simple fact: China was a very poor country just forty years ago, and even today is only a middle income country.
The uncomfortable truth is a lot of the things westerners take for granted are, in fact, luxuries. Arts and creativity is a luxury. Freedom to pursue passion is a luxury. Compassion is a luxury. Self-esteem is a luxury. If you barely have enough food to feed your family, as a significant number of Chinese people were in the 60s and 70s, you cannot afford any of these.
China has grown richer at a remarkable rate, but the mentality shift can take generations.
sublinear 4 minutes ago [-]
I think this also leads to the most important observation of our time: progress is now much more difficult to measure and the control over the narrative is fierce.
This entire century of media has been an endless splitting of hairs and casting of doubts.
advael 6 minutes ago [-]
I think this article makes the same silly mistake most people do when analyzing other cultures: Overemphasis on national identity. I'm specifically speaking to point four here: I've got family in china, have visited for periods of months at a time, and don't see most people I've interacted with thinking about national identity or priorities mostly at all. Like people anywhere, they're wrapped up in their social lives, careers, and hobbies moreso than any kind of proving china or chinese people are this or that. The author calls out their own bias created by interacting with immigrants and internet culture, which I think will tend to form this lens
zug_zug 8 minutes ago [-]
I don't have any personal experience with this, but what's interesting to me is how similar a lot of this sounds to America. I'm not saying it IS the same as America, just that if there is a substantive difference I didn't get a sense of it
- Nationalism stemming from insecurity (I tend to notice the poorest, most desperate tend to be the proudest)
- "social death" - Is that not so different that being canceled or fear of being canceled? To me it seems very apparent that people who get ostracized on the national stage take a huge personal toll and have their personality changed for years.
- Also for the Dark World example he uses a Peter Thiel quote. I think optimism/trust/community is lower here now that a few decades ago. But I do agree that in tech jobs I've anecdotally seen more cutthroat approaches (e.g. refusing to share knowledge with a coworker) from other cultures more often.
devindotcom 23 minutes ago [-]
What I wonder based on this piece is how much the lived experience for someone in China differs from the view from outside — and the author admits that his is a "fairly narrow window," though certainly wider than mine. But when I visited China, I saw both the part that reflected popular ideas of what it's like there (based on what actually propagates to other countries) but also a part that felt like everyone was playing along with these aspects so as not to stick out.
Of course that may just be me projecting my own perspective onto them, but I did get the feeling that there is a performative aspect to the culture described in this article, and that whatever lies underneath it is likely, as in so many places, not really accessible to anyone who was not born and raised in a place.
kakacik 12 minutes ago [-]
> Most characters are Chinese, but even those who are not continue to mostly think and act in this similarly alien style.
No, most good characters in those books are chinese. I liked technical aspects of the book a lot, but on societal level there was quite a bit xenophobia up to including racism against white people.
Still interesting, maybe something akin to picking up some pulp novel from 1920s that had other races in stereotypical cartoon evil roles. Not something pleasant to read in 21st century for anybody with more modern values (where average typical Chinese stand on this I leave to them here, no idea).
zeusdclxvi 19 minutes ago [-]
"Social death" is a common thing on Chinese social media apparently, shame-based virtue
F3nd0 8 minutes ago [-]
I assume it runs deeper, but that doesn’t feel all that foreign compared to the US, does it?
999900000999 15 minutes ago [-]
> Dark World thinking as described in Truth or Dare – a deep cynicism about human nature. People are by default out to get you.
This is largely correct across cultures.
“Trust is a luxury I can’t afford.” - Cormega
Your best friends will screw you over for fun.
Your friendly boss will lie to your face.
Family members have no issue with ripping each other off once money is on the line.
How many probate attorneys eat well because siblings need to sue each other ?
I don’t even think it’s a matter of capitalism or economics.
Something is off about humanity at a fundamental level.
paimapi 18 minutes ago [-]
eugh, I cannot state how much I hate broad, categorical psychological traits of entire countries of people. that might come from the fact that people would ask me 'hey does your family do this' based on the Amy Tan movie they watched and me having to be 'yeah my family does not do that whatsoever, that's not all Chinese people'
I think part of this bias is due to their not having any actual domestic, critical understanding and thus can't apply the same analytical tools they would use to analyze, for eg, why Youtube Shorts/IG Reels/etc took off here
some examples from the essay:
> Chinese consumers already had a high tolerance for slop and AI content fit naturally into this ecosystem without ever triggering an uncanny-valley reflex.
yeah buddy, this isn't due to some inherent acceptance of unreality, the massive volume of low-budget vertical 微短剧 (weiduanju) on Douyin and Kuaishou is driven by economic factors like digital ad-arbitrage [0]. most of these studies spend the vast majority of their budget on advertising to get views with an incredibly small amount reserved for actual production. and so thus you get 1) over-saturation of ads for consumers displacing traditional media and 2) a race-to-the-bottom of the uncanny valley for output
plus, the CAC cracks down a lot more on cruddy micro-dramas than US regulators do on low-quality TikTok/YShorts/IG Reels content (ie not at all, ever)
> This basic message is inculcated throughout Chinese upbringing: push through and ignore physical discomfort, but attend to and be subject to social censure. It's okay to be buffeted by the elements, but if your grades are bad, you'll be too ashamed to face your parents.
this is again blaming individual psychological conditioning and not systemic forces. like here, managing reputation has to do with high-stakes institutional checkpoints, not an irrational preference for perception over physical reality. when the 高考 (gaokao) and your 户口 (hukou) literally dictate whether or not you have access to housing, schools, and healthcare, you would of course focus your attention on grades and social standing. if there were other gatekeepers, the 'culture' would shift to focus there too
> Dark World thinking sees all virtue and kindness as pretense. Among many such tropes, a common derogatory trope is of women who act nice and innocent 白莲花 (white lotus) while being deceitful and manipulative on the inside. Chinese media creates trapped priors that people acting kind, altruistic, and pure are more likely to be evil."
this happened because they dismantled the 铁饭碗 (tiefanwan) [1]. the state basically dismantled the kind of sub-utopian socialist give-everything social programming (that certain propagandized Western leftists seem to believe are still in place) and let the market fully take over. when your universal safety net is gone, extending trust or finances to others who are economically incentivized to compete with you becomes a sub-optimal play. it's why 内卷 (neijuan or involution) is a widely discoursed about issue in Chinese society
also, it's very funny to see 白莲花 (white lotus) used... seriously here? in Chinese social media, that's a satirical term and positions the bailianhua as sanctimonious. it's not aspirational, it's like calling someone a Karen here
It's clear that you know a ton about this, and your comment includes much interesting and specific information—that's great! But can you please edit out the swipes and putdowns? Everyone's perspective is limited, after all.
I keep reading this article and I keep getting more and more frustrated by it every minute lol
>Even among strains of nationalism, Chinese nationalism seems to be particularly chip-on-your-shoulder. My impression is that this kind of insecurity is less in your face, but still present, in younger Chinese today. It is concerning how much Chinese AI models catching up in the AI race is entangled with this national insecurity.
investment in domestic computing and foundation models is guided by industrial policy (科技自立自强) [0]. this isn't some kind of ego issue shared across 1+ billion people, it's literally policy set up by central planninng
> "My current hypothesis is that the locally optimal message to China is in the vein of “give us your autists who feel alienated by the monoculture,” but others may prefer a more conciliatory approach that directly appeals to the dominant culture."
the lived reality of Chinese neurodivergence is not some abstract thing that's fun to joke about. it's, instead, families carrying a child through an educational system that offers minimal specialized scaffolding, navigating intense social stigma, and absorbing the terror of what happens to a dependent adult when their aging parents die. instead of seeing this population as a recruitment pool of "hyper-logical code monkeys" waiting to be drafted into an American AI safety crusade, just call them slurs instead - it has the same effect
also, to describe Chinese culture as 'monocultural' is just wrong. a migrant worker on a factory floor does not share the same culture as a tech worker at Baidu - and they do not share the same culture as a factory owner. there's also like a billion subcultural niches in China - lie flat 躺平 and letting it rot 摆烂 just to name two more popular ones. it's not as if the people there are stupid to knowing their culture is exploitative - the critique of 996 is widespread
What happened to the first comment that was posted here? I'm assuming it was removed because it was just a list of what I am assuming are a bunch of CCP censored terms and it didn't engage directly with the content; however, it caught my attention because I have never noticed previously a comment removed without a placeholder. Then again I suppose this why I don't see a bunch of removed spam posts.
dang 8 minutes ago [-]
If you're asking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937309, users flagged it. When a post gets a lot of flags relative to upvotes, HN's software kills the post (that's what "[dead]" means). Moderators sometimes also kill posts, but mostly they're killed by software.
Dead posts are removed from public view, but you can still see them by turning the 'showdead' setting on in your profile. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
You'll also see posts that don't deserve to be [dead] and for that we have something called vouching - also in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html ("What does [dead] mean?")
david927 16 minutes ago [-]
Chinese people find American food disgusting: inauthentic slop inundated with additives and high fructose corn syrup.
Europeans feel exactly like this as well. And as an American who's lived in Europe for decades, I couldn't agree more.
ramesh31 44 minutes ago [-]
The whole filter thing seems to be an extension of the single most striking feature of Chinese culture to a western perspective, which is the overwhelming sameness of absolutely everything. I truly cannot tell the difference between any of their pop culture because it all objectively looks identical. Shows, art, music, games, fashion, all look like they were stamped out of a factory and approved by committee. How is it possible that a billion people have all collectively converged on one single highly specific art style with almost no perceptible variance?
marssaxman 1 minutes ago [-]
This is a common experience with any unfamiliar genre: it all looks or sounds the same at first, because the point of a genre is to express variation within a specific structure. The structure dominates your perception until you've exposed yourself to enough of it that you can filter it out and notice the details.
whatshisface 30 minutes ago [-]
The Chinese equivalent of a dive with a good band is not ultra-commercialized international content available through western syndicates. If you want to get an idea of how hard they'd be to discover, try listing the American cultural rebels you know of (that are actually rebelling from something, not commercializing a 40 year old punk style).
MisterTea 26 minutes ago [-]
Why does everyone equate music with ultra commercialized crap? Why ignore the underground and alternative scenes? There is a fuck ton of alternative underground music and art. It's not hard to find.
Maxatar 17 minutes ago [-]
That's kind of the point though. There are a ton of alternative underground music and art, but it's not popular and it's even less popular outside of the various countries from which it originates.
The same is true of Chinese culture. China has an unbelievably diverse range of music, film, theater, etc... but what gets exported to a Western audience is not going to be things like Beijing's underground punk and experimental noise scenes, Chinese shoegaze, Sichuan and Yunnan folk music, Mongolian throat-singing fused with metal, dozens of completely different regional opera traditions, underground queer cinema, or Sichuanese rap.
Westerners will mostly get the small slice of Chinese culture that is easiest to export, translate, market, and fit into familiar expectations about what "Chinese culture" is supposed to look like.
whatshisface 22 minutes ago [-]
Because we have a push-based knowledge culture that encompasses only what someone is willing to pay an advertisement channel to tell you.
RobotToaster 26 minutes ago [-]
Is that really any different to Hollywood and western pop songs?
nonethewiser 41 minutes ago [-]
This reminds me of South Korea. IDK if its still a thing but apparently there was an official puffer jacket tier list and 90% of high school students wore 1 of about 8 different jackets.
Social games that drive conformity.
devindotcom 15 minutes ago [-]
I think you may want to interrogate why you feel this way a little more before you assign it to a "feature of Chinese culture." Frankly your comment comes across as aggressively ignorant.
comboy 21 minutes ago [-]
To me China seems much more diverse than the US.
EA-3167 25 minutes ago [-]
While true, that probably says more about what you’re looking for at home. I could be wrong, maybe you’re really into the late pop fads, mass market tv events and all of that. To an extent this comes down to comparing an entertainment landscape you know how to navigate to find the stuff aimed at you, with a foreign one.
Western reality tv, procedurals, game shows, soap operas and so on are incredibly samey after all. BUT the other factor is that creative endeavors in China take place under a censorship regime. Some topics are safer than others, so the mainstream tends to be quite formulaic and focused on fantasy, sci-fi, or pseudo historical shows.
Can you please not break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are? I realize it's frustrating—most of all when someone is lazily expressing a one-sided majority view (<-- not talking about the GP here, just in general), but it's necessary to wait until that surge of frustration subsides before posting, if we're to have the kind of discussion we're trying for (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
If you know more than someone else does, that's great—but in that case please share some of what you know, so we can all learn, and please do it without resorting to putdowns or swipes.
I know that takes more time and energy, but in this way you make an enduring positive contribution instead of an ephemeral destructive one. Curious conversation is fragile; it can't withstand many kicks and blows.
What exactly is a productive response to blatant racism other than calling it out? What constructive discussion does a variant of "all Asian people look the same" engender?
The issue is the kind of community we're trying to have here. In deciding what counts as a good contribution, that has to be the high order bit.
At a minimum, one thing that requires is not punishing people for being wrong. We're all wrong, after all.
applfanboysbgon 8 minutes ago [-]
I would argue that shunning racism is productive for the commons. Instead it is the person calling it out who is being shunned. Wonderful.
The claim being made is so obviously, categorically incorrect that it falls apart within a single second of examination. For example: Hoyoverse, a Chinese company, produced Genshin Impact and Nodusfall, two games with completely different art styles. And yet, in typing this, I have already spent an order of magnitude more effort[1] than somebody professing their racist worldview is dignified to receive. I think the actual productive response is shutting that down. I mean, really. A billion people who can only produce one artstyle like a factory? The claim is so patently, obviously, intentionally racist and incapable of holding up to reality it's absurd.
I could spend an hour scrolling back through my Twitter likes and collecting links to a huge array of Chinese artists with divergent artstyles, but in doing so I would be doing nothing more than wasting my own time, because someone with such a flagrant disregard of reality to come to that conclusion in the first place isn't going to change their view based on being shown reality.
Whatever. I unfortunately have a compulsion to check this site, but I'll do my best to refrain from posting in the future, since your vision of the site is one where posting racist comments is welcome and calling them out is unwelcome.
maonnaise 60 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
zb3 52 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 47 minutes ago [-]
Please make your substantive points without putdowns or attacks, not matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
You may not owe cartels better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
It's fine, of course, to disagree; we just want conversation to stay in the key of curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
All the authors observations ring true, and they all stem from one simple fact: China was a very poor country just forty years ago, and even today is only a middle income country.
The uncomfortable truth is a lot of the things westerners take for granted are, in fact, luxuries. Arts and creativity is a luxury. Freedom to pursue passion is a luxury. Compassion is a luxury. Self-esteem is a luxury. If you barely have enough food to feed your family, as a significant number of Chinese people were in the 60s and 70s, you cannot afford any of these.
China has grown richer at a remarkable rate, but the mentality shift can take generations.
This entire century of media has been an endless splitting of hairs and casting of doubts.
- Nationalism stemming from insecurity (I tend to notice the poorest, most desperate tend to be the proudest)
- "social death" - Is that not so different that being canceled or fear of being canceled? To me it seems very apparent that people who get ostracized on the national stage take a huge personal toll and have their personality changed for years.
- Also for the Dark World example he uses a Peter Thiel quote. I think optimism/trust/community is lower here now that a few decades ago. But I do agree that in tech jobs I've anecdotally seen more cutthroat approaches (e.g. refusing to share knowledge with a coworker) from other cultures more often.
Of course that may just be me projecting my own perspective onto them, but I did get the feeling that there is a performative aspect to the culture described in this article, and that whatever lies underneath it is likely, as in so many places, not really accessible to anyone who was not born and raised in a place.
No, most good characters in those books are chinese. I liked technical aspects of the book a lot, but on societal level there was quite a bit xenophobia up to including racism against white people.
Still interesting, maybe something akin to picking up some pulp novel from 1920s that had other races in stereotypical cartoon evil roles. Not something pleasant to read in 21st century for anybody with more modern values (where average typical Chinese stand on this I leave to them here, no idea).
This is largely correct across cultures.
“Trust is a luxury I can’t afford.” - Cormega
Your best friends will screw you over for fun.
Your friendly boss will lie to your face.
Family members have no issue with ripping each other off once money is on the line.
How many probate attorneys eat well because siblings need to sue each other ?
I don’t even think it’s a matter of capitalism or economics.
Something is off about humanity at a fundamental level.
I think part of this bias is due to their not having any actual domestic, critical understanding and thus can't apply the same analytical tools they would use to analyze, for eg, why Youtube Shorts/IG Reels/etc took off here
some examples from the essay:
> Chinese consumers already had a high tolerance for slop and AI content fit naturally into this ecosystem without ever triggering an uncanny-valley reflex.
yeah buddy, this isn't due to some inherent acceptance of unreality, the massive volume of low-budget vertical 微短剧 (weiduanju) on Douyin and Kuaishou is driven by economic factors like digital ad-arbitrage [0]. most of these studies spend the vast majority of their budget on advertising to get views with an incredibly small amount reserved for actual production. and so thus you get 1) over-saturation of ads for consumers displacing traditional media and 2) a race-to-the-bottom of the uncanny valley for output
plus, the CAC cracks down a lot more on cruddy micro-dramas than US regulators do on low-quality TikTok/YShorts/IG Reels content (ie not at all, ever)
> This basic message is inculcated throughout Chinese upbringing: push through and ignore physical discomfort, but attend to and be subject to social censure. It's okay to be buffeted by the elements, but if your grades are bad, you'll be too ashamed to face your parents.
this is again blaming individual psychological conditioning and not systemic forces. like here, managing reputation has to do with high-stakes institutional checkpoints, not an irrational preference for perception over physical reality. when the 高考 (gaokao) and your 户口 (hukou) literally dictate whether or not you have access to housing, schools, and healthcare, you would of course focus your attention on grades and social standing. if there were other gatekeepers, the 'culture' would shift to focus there too
> Dark World thinking sees all virtue and kindness as pretense. Among many such tropes, a common derogatory trope is of women who act nice and innocent 白莲花 (white lotus) while being deceitful and manipulative on the inside. Chinese media creates trapped priors that people acting kind, altruistic, and pure are more likely to be evil."
this happened because they dismantled the 铁饭碗 (tiefanwan) [1]. the state basically dismantled the kind of sub-utopian socialist give-everything social programming (that certain propagandized Western leftists seem to believe are still in place) and let the market fully take over. when your universal safety net is gone, extending trust or finances to others who are economically incentivized to compete with you becomes a sub-optimal play. it's why 内卷 (neijuan or involution) is a widely discoursed about issue in Chinese society
also, it's very funny to see 白莲花 (white lotus) used... seriously here? in Chinese social media, that's a satirical term and positions the bailianhua as sanctimonious. it's not aspirational, it's like calling someone a Karen here
[0] https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1014167
[1] https://www.routledge.com/The-Individualization-of-Chinese-S...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>Even among strains of nationalism, Chinese nationalism seems to be particularly chip-on-your-shoulder. My impression is that this kind of insecurity is less in your face, but still present, in younger Chinese today. It is concerning how much Chinese AI models catching up in the AI race is entangled with this national insecurity.
investment in domestic computing and foundation models is guided by industrial policy (科技自立自强) [0]. this isn't some kind of ego issue shared across 1+ billion people, it's literally policy set up by central planninng
> "My current hypothesis is that the locally optimal message to China is in the vein of “give us your autists who feel alienated by the monoculture,” but others may prefer a more conciliatory approach that directly appeals to the dominant culture."
the lived reality of Chinese neurodivergence is not some abstract thing that's fun to joke about. it's, instead, families carrying a child through an educational system that offers minimal specialized scaffolding, navigating intense social stigma, and absorbing the terror of what happens to a dependent adult when their aging parents die. instead of seeing this population as a recruitment pool of "hyper-logical code monkeys" waiting to be drafted into an American AI safety crusade, just call them slurs instead - it has the same effect
also, to describe Chinese culture as 'monocultural' is just wrong. a migrant worker on a factory floor does not share the same culture as a tech worker at Baidu - and they do not share the same culture as a factory owner. there's also like a billion subcultural niches in China - lie flat 躺平 and letting it rot 摆烂 just to name two more popular ones. it's not as if the people there are stupid to knowing their culture is exploitative - the critique of 996 is widespread
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209580992...
Dead posts are removed from public view, but you can still see them by turning the 'showdead' setting on in your profile. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
If you turn 'showdead' on, please don't forget that you did! As your last sentence implies, turning it on means signing up to see a ton of dreck. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
You'll also see posts that don't deserve to be [dead] and for that we have something called vouching - also in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html ("What does [dead] mean?")
Europeans feel exactly like this as well. And as an American who's lived in Europe for decades, I couldn't agree more.
The same is true of Chinese culture. China has an unbelievably diverse range of music, film, theater, etc... but what gets exported to a Western audience is not going to be things like Beijing's underground punk and experimental noise scenes, Chinese shoegaze, Sichuan and Yunnan folk music, Mongolian throat-singing fused with metal, dozens of completely different regional opera traditions, underground queer cinema, or Sichuanese rap.
Westerners will mostly get the small slice of Chinese culture that is easiest to export, translate, market, and fit into familiar expectations about what "Chinese culture" is supposed to look like.
Social games that drive conformity.
Western reality tv, procedurals, game shows, soap operas and so on are incredibly samey after all. BUT the other factor is that creative endeavors in China take place under a censorship regime. Some topics are safer than others, so the mainstream tends to be quite formulaic and focused on fantasy, sci-fi, or pseudo historical shows.
If you know more than someone else does, that's great—but in that case please share some of what you know, so we can all learn, and please do it without resorting to putdowns or swipes.
I know that takes more time and energy, but in this way you make an enduring positive contribution instead of an ephemeral destructive one. Curious conversation is fragile; it can't withstand many kicks and blows.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The issue is the kind of community we're trying to have here. In deciding what counts as a good contribution, that has to be the high order bit.
At a minimum, one thing that requires is not punishing people for being wrong. We're all wrong, after all.
The claim being made is so obviously, categorically incorrect that it falls apart within a single second of examination. For example: Hoyoverse, a Chinese company, produced Genshin Impact and Nodusfall, two games with completely different art styles. And yet, in typing this, I have already spent an order of magnitude more effort[1] than somebody professing their racist worldview is dignified to receive. I think the actual productive response is shutting that down. I mean, really. A billion people who can only produce one artstyle like a factory? The claim is so patently, obviously, intentionally racist and incapable of holding up to reality it's absurd.
I could spend an hour scrolling back through my Twitter likes and collecting links to a huge array of Chinese artists with divergent artstyles, but in doing so I would be doing nothing more than wasting my own time, because someone with such a flagrant disregard of reality to come to that conclusion in the first place isn't going to change their view based on being shown reality.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
Whatever. I unfortunately have a compulsion to check this site, but I'll do my best to refrain from posting in the future, since your vision of the site is one where posting racist comments is welcome and calling them out is unwelcome.
You may not owe cartels better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html