141–150 of 219 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A kid chasing a ball out into a crowded street is more likely to survive in China Han the USA. That sounds nice but the fact is more people per 100,000 are killed in China than the US.
Yes, there aren’t many kids chasing balls in the states anymore.
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American wait staff have to rely on tips rather than a living wage, which forces them to take unending amounts of crap, or else they can't pay the rent. American consumers can and do verbally (and sometimes physically) abuse wait staff, and if the staff don't sit there and take it with a smile, they get fired. I don't find this an endearing trait.
Being able to send a dish back doesn't exist because waiters rely on tips. If restaurant owners and managers didn't accept it, waiters would not be permitted to do it. It's not like waiters take a plate back to the line and beg the cooks to do another one because otherwise they won't get tipped. "The customer is always right" is why American service (in general, not just in restaurants) is customer-friendly. It has n…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A kid chasing a ball out into a crowded street is more likely to survive in China Han the USA. That sounds nice but the fact is more people per 100,000 are killed in China than the US.
Yes, there aren’t many kids chasing balls in the states anymore.
China has about 2X per-capita road fatalities, and almost 10X per-vehicle fatalities as the US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
Since the line-cutting topic seems to be of interest, I thought I’d share some first hand experience. Having succumbed to the need for a Big Mac a handful of times during a decade long stint in China, I became accustomed to the devolution of queuing when it was peak time. I quickly found myself pushing in and cutting others off, to make sure my order was taken. This made me reflect on how quickly I adapted to the sit…
Well said. I think this describes the phenomenon perfectly. It’s not complete anarchy, everything goes sort of situation. There is a set of hidden rules that most people abide by. A contrast with a typical Western setting is it doesn’t tend to gravitate towards violence (in my experience). Whereas, a confrontation could easily lead to a violent situation in most Western countries.
Despite how intense some situations can get in China, I’ve rarely ever felt physically threatened. It’s culturally abnormal to resort to violence.
Yes there’s a few nutjobs out there (sword-guy in Sanlitun), but on the whole it’s pretty incredible that such a big city, and country is relatively speaking, so peaceful.
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That's true, but not in the 20th century. For lots of reasons, China broadly missed the industrial revolution. By the time of the communist revolution, they had... basically nothing indigenous. There was no export industry, most people were at a subsistence level, and essentially the entirety of the social elite were foreign-educated aristocracy simply living off of assets worked by a staggeringly large underclass. I…
In case anyone is curious, the “various reasons” are the Opium Wars, collapse of the Qing dynasty/monarchy, World War 2, the subsequent civil war and the Great Leap Forward. I probably wouldn’t use “a mess” to describe all those events though. I guess what the previous OP meant by “potential of its people” is their historical culture, akin to why the Jews are generally quite successful on the whole (attributed to the…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/28/why-t...
China and Europe are different in many ways, but one is that after the Mongol conquest in the 12th century, China remains a unified empire run by a single Mandarin bureaucracy. There is nothing that competes with or threatens China. China does get invaded by Manchu tribes in 1644, but they don’t change the structure of the state. They learned to speak Chinese, dress like Chinese and eat like Chinese.
In Europe, no one ever succeeds in unifying it, and you have continuous competition. The French are worried about the English, the English are worried about the Spanish, the Spanish are worried about the Turks. That keeps everybody on their toes, which is something economists immediately recognize as the competitive model. To have progress, you want a system that is competitive, not one that is dominated by a single power.
I think that is the major difference. It isn’t just that China doesn’t have an Industrial Revolution, it doesn’t have a Galileo or a Newton or a Descartes, people who announced that everything people did before them was wrong. That’s hard to do in any society, but it was easier to do in Europe than China. The reason precisely is because Europe was fragmented, and so when somebody says something very novel and radical, if the government decides they are a heretic and threatens to prosecute them, they pack their suitcase and go across the border."
[...]
"I believe the fundamental reason is China’s position as a single empire, and also its bureaucracy, which is a unique and peculiar animal. On the one hand, it is very progressive, because it is a meritocracy. In Europe, the people who were in power were the sons and nephews of other people in power. But in China there’s an examination, and the people who did the best rose in the Mandarin civil service. So you’d think, “Wow, that’s very progressive.” Except if you look at what they were studying for these exams, they were simply regurgitating the classics. It was the perfect tool to keep reproducing from the same mold generation after generation.
In Europe, something different happens. People study classical knowledge, Ptolemy and Hippocrates and Archimedes, and they begin to say, “Most of this stuff is wrong.” You couldn’t do that in China. If you said “This stuff is wrong,” you failed your exam. But in Europe, the ability to challenge received wisdom is irrepressible."
I never thought quite as broadly as the author, but what he says is consistent with one thing I observed -- driving and pedestrian behavior. In China drivers and pedestrians are both better and worse than those in the US. I found drivers and pedestrians both to be much more aware and had more agency about what they needed to to be safe. Whereas in the US we assume a lot more that the rules of the road are going to be…
In the past, I had the opinion that due to individualism versus collectivism, US drivers tend to take things a lot more personally.
If you accidentally cut someone off or honk at them, US drivers feel it's a direct assault on them. I've witnessed and even personally encountered some scary road rage in the US, but never in China.
However, after finally having the chance to drive in New York, I realize that it's actually a city versus suburban driver/pedestrian culture.
I was quite amazed by how driving in New York City was so similar to driving in a Chinese city. Where it's more of a "dance" between cars, pedestrians, and other vehicles like bikes.
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This isn’t true: at various periods during world history, China has been one of the richest and educated countries in the world. The potential of its people was already there and all that was needed was a peaceful environment with an enabling government.
> at various periods during world history, China has been one of the richest and educated countries in the world. Do you have any further reading on this? It doesn't strike me as too crazy of a statement - but I'd be very interested in seeing how one would go about actually quantifying it.
Wikipedia has a good summary both of the Economic history of China [1] and the Great Divergence [2] (really comes to a head with the collapse of the Qing dynasty). Although devestated by civil war and WW2, IMO China really doesn't descend into complete craziness until the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution [3] that devastated China economically, socially, and culturally (lost generation, send-down movement, red guards, etc).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_China_befo...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence#China
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_China_(194...
I never thought quite as broadly as the author, but what he says is consistent with one thing I observed -- driving and pedestrian behavior. In China drivers and pedestrians are both better and worse than those in the US. I found drivers and pedestrians both to be much more aware and had more agency about what they needed to to be safe. Whereas in the US we assume a lot more that the rules of the road are going to be…
Raised in China here --- still largely prefer driving + walking on US roads.
Most US drivers, except for those in New York, are largely unaware of pedestrians, bikes, and motorcycles. I find it much more dangerous to ride a motorcycle in the US because so many drivers don't expect it and do things like turning right without looking behind them.
However, I do generally prefer driving in the US. The only issue I have is with the police. I'm much more scared of getting pulled over by a cop in the US due to some minor infraction, e.g. having a broke tail light, than I am of Chinese cops.
The experiences the OP has had are priceless, and read something like a novel if someone like John Kennedy Toole had he written about living in China (comic in some respects, but also surreal). The Snow White episode in the elevator is delightful: the father having to explain to his daughter that being associated with Snow White is a good thing, and she being upset at being labeled. The world is shrinking and being s…
> the father having to explain to his daughter that being associated with Snow White is a good thing How can that be a bad thing? I honestly don't understand(I'm from China).
