To clarify, I don’t believe in the surface level propaganda thrown in China’s way about “1984 dystopian society,” “Mao killed 60 million people,” “Xinjiang concentration camps” or things like that.

I’m curious about a few negative factors of China that have become widespread knowledge over the past decade or so by even the politically literate audience, and I want to learn how accurate these things are, how prevalent they are in today’s society in China, and how much it would impact the day to day life of someone living in China.

  1. Quality control, I have read stories about Chinese factories producing guns, steel, industrial goods, consumer goods, food products, far below acceptable or safe standards, leading to construction/infrastructure failure and severe health complications. There are also claims that smaller restaurants in China today still sometimes use very low quality ingredients that can result in serious health issues. How much of an issue is this?

  2. Population issue. The Chinese population trend is going in a unfavorable direction right now, and there are reports of young people not wanting to have children because of cultural and cost reasons. How much of an issue is this, and will China end up like Korea and Japan in another decade or two?

  3. Unemployment, it is a fact right now that Chinese people have a 20% unemployment issue due to an abundance of university graduates without sufficient jobs to match this supply. And this has caused internal competition to swell to unreasonable standards leading some people to straight up give up on their careers and become full time neets. Are there any positive trends or actions to resolve this issue?

  4. Education. The education system sounds terrifying in China right now, children as young as elementary schoolers having to sleep only 6 hours a night to finish their homework from school and tutoring services. I have also read that after the government banned tutoring of core classroom subjects, illegal tutoring services have become a thing. I would laugh at how this would be the most asian issue ever if I wasn’t so horrified by the situation. Is there any government effort to resolve this right now?

  5. Nepotism. From what I have heard and read, using connections to obtain positions and resources in China is still very common. How bad is this, and are there any reforms or policies tackling it?

  6. Mannerisms and emotional intelligence of the average person. There are frequent complaints about Chinese people being horrible tourists, being extremely rude, having the emotional maturity of a donut until at least the age of 30, and also taking advantage of anything free to disgusting levels (I have personally seen old Chinese ladies take out a container and fill it with ketchup from a restaurant where the condiments are self served). I understand the reasoning behind this, China in it’s current iteration is a relatively new country, and the education received by different generations varies massively in quality, with only really Gen Z on average obtaining a level of education that is on par with western populations. I just want to ask how bad this is in day to day life, and if it is tolerable.

Thanks for reading my somewhat long post, I’d appreciate any response, you don’t have to respond to all of my points, any point would be fine. I want to have a positive impression of China but these points are really bugging me right now.

  • urshanabi [he/they]@lemmygrad.ml
    3·
    1 year ago

    For an ‘objective’ understanding, there would need to be a thorough systematic scientific analysis. The first of which wouldn’t necessarily be enough, but which would improve through subsequent studies. It would need to be systematic because numbers and figures without sufficient context can be misleading.

    You may have heard individuals claim that EVs are worse for the environment due to the nickel, cobalt, lithium, etc. While it is true that the procurement and refinement of the materials are awful ethically and environmentally, pointing at a point in the sequence of events a given thing encounters is not enough to make a meaningful conclusion. What is done is called a ‘Life Cycle Analysis’ where the material is tracked and understood at every point along the sequence. This can then be used as an evaluative standard against oil-derived fuels which have also been studied this way.

    I don’t know if there would be enough resources available from the interested parties to conduct something so thoroughly. Typically internal data or external data are combined and filtered to create some kind of approximation. This works well enough, but it’s not something I would consider satisfying. In this area I am a layperson, I don’t have a good way to understand what is in these reports properly in context and what they mean.

    For a given molecular compound or protein, let’s say in a cell, I can look at its metabolic properties, the DNA, the mRNA, how it may differ from organisms within the same species, across species, phyla, etc. This allows me to zoom in or zoom out so to speak and at any level have the appropriate context and tools to analyze it. If this is done piecemeal it becomes significantly harder, and much less accessible. Though certainly it can be done. The other thing is that there may be emergent or otherwise unknown confounding factors that slip between the cracks when the comparisons are not made holistically.