Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Leaving China
521–530 of 686 posts
Re: Leaving China
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually pretty fascinating if you spend time in SE Asia. Chinese have been immigrating to all the countries for centuries. There are super old communities of Chinese in Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, everywhere in fact. And they are often a distinct community, with their own language (a dialect from where they came from in China). They were often economic migrants, so tend to be seen as a "merchant cla…
It's odd that they've managed to avoid assimilation for so long. Bodes ill for countries that rely on long term assimilation for stability.
It's mostly because societies, where they're minorities, actively work against their assimilation. Just look at the US alone where they're always the outsiders.
Re: Leaving China
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sinovac, Sinopharm, etc that China made weren't working up to the required standards. It wasn't something anyone wanted to come out and admit. To make vaccination mandatory they'd have to admit, kill off their own producers and import. It'd be a political disaster.
Their vaccines weren't great but mandating them would have been a lot better than nothing.
For the people? Not for the politicians and executives. Any stats that show the vaccines as performing worse than the competition would hurt sales.
Re: Leaving China
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no place, and no time, where people are better than what you see before you right now. Sometimes, the political system is better. People? There is nothing new under the sun.
This a a strange postmodern take. All places and cultures are really equal? Maybe Im missing your point, but to take a hyperbolic example, surely you wouldn't live in north Korea and say "There is no place, and no time, where people are better than what you see before you right now."
I have no reason to think people in North Korea aren't just as nice and just as terrible as people in Seattle or anywhere else, really. The political system in North Korea is atrocious, but the point was that people are people.
Re: Leaving China
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
China is a civilisation masquerading as a nation.
I had no idea how sprawling Chinese diaspora was until I was in Ecuador and a sailor on the boat with me took me to a Chinese restaurant. In Ecuador. Of course there would be a Chinese restaurant in Ecuador, but of course there's also a sailor on my US-flagged ship who's ethnically Chinese and speaks Mandarin. And so we ordered Chinese in Chinese, in a Spanish-speaking country. In 1999.
Amsterdam, Vancouver and lots of other big cities have a large enough Chinese population that there can be whole districts that are mostly Chinese. To the point where the street signs are in Chinese.
Re: Leaving China
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 90s are now thirty years ago, and Taiwan has undisputably been a functioning democracy since then.
It is difficult to get distances in time into my own mind. But for those other than me reading this and having trouble with this mentally. The first democratically elected president in Taiwan in 1996, which was arguably a high point in the democratisation process, is now in 2023 temporally equidistant to the moon landing in 1969 and us in the present.
It's also difficult for societies with populations absorbed deep into their private sphere, with very little feeling for history, how developments 30, 50, or even 100 and 200 years still leave all kinds of traces and influences, materialized in attitudes, political affiliations, laws, and so on.
History is not a "that was back in the day, doesn't matter anymore" affair.
Re: Leaving China
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait why is that a problem? Nationality and ethnicity are two different things.
They have the same name, which makes it confusing. E.g. if someone is French does that mean their ethnicity or their nationality?
Some Basques may want a word, and some Corsicans, Bretons, Alsatians, Catalans and probably others as well.
Re: Leaving China
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
You aren't refuting what he's saying you're just trying to change the subject.
This guy pops up in many China threads to regurgitate CCP talking points.
Yeah, god forbid somebody doesn't have the US viewpoint on foreign policy and other countries, especially given its excellent track record and how it has fucked up one country after another for a century!
Anybody having different opinions must be burned to the stake!
Re: Leaving China
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. Estonia was my top pick in the EU. In retrospect, were you searching or escaping?
Probably both. Escaping the routine, boring familiarity and searching for that one place where I'd be perfectly content with existence, but that in itself I have come to find is probably not possible to achieve because of the very nature of being human. Being self-aware is such a curse sometimes.
I think everyone is trying to fill that void whether they realize it or not.
Hope you find your happy place. Good luck :)
Re: Leaving China
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
While there are very jaded views about cultural superiority and other things like that. I think the truth is probably less cynical. I can move to japan and marry a Japanese wife, work for a Japanese company, pay Japanese taxes, and speak fluent Japanese, but I will never be Japanese because my skin is white. People can move to America, and as long as you speak English without an accent, there is an assumption that yo…
> I will never be Japanese because my skin is white. for some reason i find this statement kind of strange... are you saying "japanese" to mean "fit in as japanese" or "japanese nationality"? > and as long as you speak English without an accent, there is an assumption that you are American. n=1 but this has not been my experience.... > and speak fluent Japanese without accent?
> n=1 but this has not been my experience....
I don't doubt your experience. I was projecting myself onto others, probably too much...
America is a big place. If you don't have that experience in big west coast cities, I would be a bit surprised. Likewise, I would expect well educated folks to also assume that lack of accent means American, not in an intentional way, but an automatic one.
There are large swathes of the US that I doubt would see anyone who isn't a white evangelical christian as American.
My intention was not to be black and white or absolutist, though I see how what I said reads that way.
> without accent?
Yes
> are you saying "Japanese" to mean "fit in as japanese" or "japanese nationality"?
In a way, I meant both. I meant for a Japanese person to apply the word "Japanese" to me casually. To see me as part of "us" when a Japanese person says "us" to mean Japanese.
I think if you read the article I linked, what I am trying to express will be clear. It is an extremely meaty read, but I feel like it is somewhat like taking the red pill when it comes to understanding politics and the political forces that govern us. American education has poked at the ideas in that article without providing the philosophical basis. I've heard "diversity" so many times, but never a real, non hand-wavy, explanation of why diversity is important or why we apply energy to it.