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China’s Millennials

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Re: China’s Millennials

#81

Post by corey_moncure »

geogra4 wrote: post #73
corey_moncure wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever been to China? You can find yourself cornered by armed soldiers with assault rifles just for taking a photograph of the "wrong" building in a completely ordinary public thoroughfare. Dissent is literally banned and access to external social networks is cut off. There's no way support for the government is completely genuine in such an environment.

There are plenty of places in the USA where you're not allowed to take photographs too.

Citation needed.

Name a place in any USA city where you will be detained and your equipment confiscated for taking pictures from a public thoroughfare.

Re: China’s Millennials

#82

Post by jhbadger »

pwinnski wrote: post #72
jhbadger wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that was a real cohort with an actual cause (soldiers returning home from WWII and starting families, leading to a large increase in births in the decade following 1945). Later generations called Generation X and Millennials are much more arbitrary because there isn't really a defined cause for their existence.

If the complaint is the name, as you seem to be suggesting, then pick whatever name you wish. If the complaint is that not everybody of a given age should be lumped together as one, then that's as true of any generation than any other. Either way, Millennials are not being singled out. Signed, a reluctant member of GenX.

While I don't think people born in the same time are all the same, the fact is a lot of Baby Boomers had at least a shared experience in having a father who came back from the war. I don't think there is anything comparable for us GenXers (who were basically defined as "not Baby Boomers") and the Millennials when the marketers realized the GenX term was going on for too long.

Re: China’s Millennials

#83

Post by Throw_Away_8563 »

> They were offered free software that would enable them to dodge the Great Firewall of China – which blocks almost all major Western news sites and social media outlets – and browse the internet without restrictions. There was some surprise when it turned out that even elite students in China had little interest in finding out what Westerners were thinking. Only 53 per cent of the participants had activated the software (even after repeated reminders), and about 14 per cent of the ones who had activated it uninstalled it shortly afterwards. Active users were browsing content which wasn’t political.

People usually don't care very much about what foreigners think, particularly such a nationalistic people as the Chinese, who AFAIK often think that the West is using anti-Chinese propaganda. Not many Westerners would actively browse Chinese or Indian sites to see their perspective either.

Edit: One might think that the fact that the content is censored might make people curious, but I don't think that is the case if the people support the censorship. In my country, Holocaust denial is illegal, but that motivates few people to read the arguments of Holocaust deniers. Admittedly, the Chinese censorship might be more effective than the German one, making people more curious.

Re: China’s Millennials

#84

Post by freeflight »

thrwway483 wrote: post #39
freeflight wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In China, everybody fully supports the government, don't they? I mean that what the Party does, has 100.00% approval rating at all times, there are no Facebook groups for discussing it, there is no activism protesting anything or driving for any kind of change, and everyone there just totally supports everything. (In Mainland China). I take issue with that description of China because any government that is in powe…

you didn't talk about how this affects fashion, etc.

How does it "affect fashion, etc."? You act like China is this super isolated place where nobody knows what's happening outside of it and everybody is just a conformist wearing their state-sponsored grey unis.

When in reality Chinese people are as diverse a people as any other, they are just as influenced by Western pop-culture as any other people.

Case in point: Asian hip hop, yes even Chinese hip-hop has seen quite a rise in popularity.

They copy a ton of tropes out of the US, like most non-US hip-hop has been doing for decades, but they also inject their own Chinese identity as part of the narrative of the songs [0].

Of course, that's a rather acquired taste, but I would easily count as "counter-culture", after all that's also exactly what it started out as in the US.

[0] https://youtu.be/rILKm-DC06A

Re: China’s Millennials

#85

Post by jacobush »

luckylion wrote: post #79
jacobush wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've heard that too, but I wonder... religion is not something you easily switch between families, and families run deep and old. I am more familiar with Yugoslavia. Look at the Serbs and the Croats. They are both Slavs. Yet the war was hardly over Orthodox Christianity (Serbs) vs Catholic Christianity (Croats).

That's true, but I don't know if Slavs are comparable to Arabs. There are different Slavic ethnic groups with very distinct languages. Arabs are one ethnic group with one language, but part of the Semitic family. I suppose the Sunni/Shia conflict has an ethnic component with the Persians mostly being Shiites, while most Arabs are Sunni.

Not convinced. According to arabs I know, they hardly understand each other at all if they are from to far away countries and never learned the "formal" form.

Re: China’s Millennials

#86

Post by geogra4 »

corey_moncure wrote: post #81
geogra4 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of places in the USA where you're not allowed to take photographs too.

Citation needed. Name a place in any USA city where you will be detained and your equipment confiscated for taking pictures from a public thoroughfare.

You made the assertion that there are places in china where this happens so you can go first.

Re: China’s Millennials

#87

Post by freeflight »

corey_moncure wrote: post #81
geogra4 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of places in the USA where you're not allowed to take photographs too.

Citation needed. Name a place in any USA city where you will be detained and your equipment confiscated for taking pictures from a public thoroughfare.

I can name such places in Germany where the US military has jurisdiction.

Bad Aibling, with its ECHELON installation, used to be quite infamous for that because it was located in a pretty popular hiking region.

I doubt the US military is that much more lenient domestically about having their installations photographed/filmed, no military really is, and a lot of law enforcement/IP rights are neither [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography_and_the_law

Re: China’s Millennials

#88

Post by [deleted] »

lonelappde wrote: post #31
Waterluvian wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weird thing to me is that it's not like the term "Millennial" was self-adopted by the generation it describes. It was pretty much involuntarily assigned to them. And the word alone just has such a lightning rod quality to it.

"Millennial" is a dress-up word for "kids today". The connotation is much clearer under that substitution.

[deleted]

Re: China’s Millennials

#89

Post by corey_moncure »

geogra4 wrote: post #86
corey_moncure wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed. Name a place in any USA city where you will be detained and your equipment confiscated for taking pictures from a public thoroughfare.

You made the assertion that there are places in china where this happens so you can go first.

This happened to me personally in Nanjing. I'd show the photos as proof, but of course I don't have them anymore.

Re: China’s Millennials

#90

Post by pwinnski »

jhbadger wrote: post #82
pwinnski wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the complaint is the name, as you seem to be suggesting, then pick whatever name you wish. If the complaint is that not everybody of a given age should be lumped together as one, then that's as true of any generation than any other. Either way, Millennials are not being singled out. Signed, a reluctant member of GenX.

While I don't think people born in the same time are all the same, the fact is a lot of Baby Boomers had at least a shared experience in having a father who came back from the war. I don't think there is anything comparable for us GenXers (who were basically defined as "not Baby Boomers") and the Millennials when the marketers realized the GenX term was going on for too long.

If I'm getting my dates right, "Baby Boomers" includes both the hippies who were shot at Kent State and the law-and-order types doing the shooting, so to speak. I still think that your objection applies as much to other generations as to Millennials, and that in all cases, the labels are shorthand for a very rough approximation of shared experience.

As for Gen X, the X is lazy, for sure. What we have in common are Baby Boomer parents.

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