To feel I've been lied to about China

This is my China NC because I don’t say where I work on my regular username. I agree that the west massively exaggerates how bad certain things are in China. But there are definitely off-limits topics of conversation. I have never ever heard Chinese staff at my school speak about politics at all. Like if someone else brings it up they change the subject. But I work close to Tibet. We get a lot of inspections. I had to teach my A level subject with no textbook this year because the bog standard one was deemed too contentious and I couldn’t black out enough of it without rendering it useless. I’ve helped another teacher rip pages out of their textbooks. I’ve become an expert at dancing around many elephants in the room while not lying to the kids. I’m not saying too much here. My boss tells us to assume everything we say online will be seen.

My husband worked there for a while. They had Chinese managers who would tell them they were being pressured to steal the code base etc. for the government. They pulled out after several were disappeared.

The state doesn’t go after every bit of dissent, but it is brutal when it wants to be and there is no way to challenge.

I think we obviously have a biased view of it and as a country it has some incredible challenges to meet with a rate of change that’s unparalleled. Overall it may be no less awful than our own state during the Industrial Revolution. I would not want to be governed by them though.

Really pleased to read your post OP. DD is off there in a couple of months time. She is very excited, as we are for her. She’s trying it out for a few weeks with a view to spending some of her gap year there.

Do people in China buy anything from Temu?

Visited New York a few years ago and encountered all the homelessness, drug taking, saw bodies being taken away after a cold night on the streets- we were told to be careful as there was so much knife and gun crime- I don’t know that western culture is s all that amazing!

Your bar was pretty low if someone not being carted off for being casually critical is cause for such a u-turn. Perhaps you’ve swung from ott negative to ott positive and need more nuance generally. That said, you’d really believed ‘the truth’ that whoever this blanket source is that spreads China hate, you’d never have gone there. So it’s all less than credible as a take.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Drinks-Kool-Aid-Grocery/s?rh=n%3A358584031%2Cp_89%3AKool-Aid

I disagree. They are progressing in many ways but are hugely, hugely regressive in others.

China is quietly observing and progressing while the rest of the supposedly "advanced" world implodes. In my opinion, China is the future. I am learning Mandarin Chinese just in case.

It didn’t benefit them? They had all their overpriced PPE ready to sell to the world for an inflated cost. That’s without even looking at anything else

Glad someone upthread mentioned Tibet.

I had a couple of days in China years ago and must admit that I was glad to leave.

What do you teach OP?

OP have you read about the re education camps in Xinjiang? The forced labour of detainees or the way they are committing cultural erasure and placing severe restrictions on the practice of Islam? The forced sterilisation and abortion? RSDL, holding people in secret locations for months (enforced disappearance)? The total dismantling of Tibetan identity? The sinicization and mandation of religion? The referring to women who do not wish to have children or marry as extreme feminists? The banning of LGBT topics? The execution of more people than the rest of the world combined? (Also for some completely non violent crimes. Think something like counterfeit money smuggling). I get where you are coming from. It is wrong to think everyone in China is.like this or supports this but it is naive to not think that China isn't a terrifying place, in parts. I've spent a long time there.

Your are very naive. You have one data point, one person having a grumpy moan to another. It’s completely different if say you complained online or criticised people in authority or wanted to protest or gather people together. You’d be censored and you can land yourself in trouble, you can be imprisoned, and if you escaped your family would be harassed. Hong Kong is a nightmare for press freedoms and protests now. China has a long arm too, and can cause trouble for Chinese living abroad.

Yes the big cities have modernised but not all of it.

I don’t think ‘we’ are told that China is a hell hole. I haven’t visited. My understanding of China is that it is a vast country incorporating a huge variety of climates, cultures and topography, that includes historical sites of extraordinary sophistication and antiquity, that it is a one-party authoritarian state with significant controls on things we would regard as important over here such as free media, privacy and movement, and that it is also an increasingly prosperous country with enormous economic growth for some years (currently slowing) which has meant huge investment in infrastructure and improving quality of life, alongside a lot of pollution and some of the downsides of affluence. I understand that Chinese religious history is very different from ours but that it has a strong Christian, Muslim and a smaller Jewish population. I think of Chinese culture as typically quite xenophobic but rather in a ‘why would we be interested in other countries’ way, and perhaps that is changing.

My sister spent time studying in the Chinese interior in the late 80s and absolutely hated it. The teaching was unimaginative and poor, the facilities basic, the natural environment degraded, and as a white woman she was a rarity and the object of a lot of really unpleasant sexual attention (finding her clean underwear with semen stains on it, endless staring). But that was a very long time ago.

I think China is quietly building it's position globally. I believe they'll soon be the most advanced country.

YANBU.

And these stupid comments about covid... Follow the £ and blame that country, just like Ebola....

By the way, OP, I always enjoyed my stays in China.

Doesn't make me think the Chinese government's systematic destruction of the Uyghur people and use of forced labour is OK.

(And I should add I haven't been back as a tourist since that repression became known.)

I understand now. Similarly to the way many people still think of parts of Africa as being full of starving people with HIV (my experience of the African countries I've visited were incredible. Vibrant. Wonderful people. But still lots of human rights issues and scary for women at times). Some parts of China are incredible. However the human rights issues for surpass those we see in the UK.

“Moaning about government policy” is very very vague. But generally, I think you are being very naive because it is a one party state and there is widespread fear about speaking out against the government. Your example of one person (where we don’t even know what they were speaking out against) doesn’t prove anything. The communist party has eyes and ears everywhere and they might have turned a blind eye to that particular person but that doesn’t mean others won’t be reprimanded for it. When I have visited China, I have been struck by the level of corruption and bribery and how important it is who you know.

Haha very true, but people have toilets in their houses in the UK, they don’t have to use the street communal toilet blocks because there is nothing else.
Also there were no doors on the toilet stalls. To me that was awfully primitive.

It’s a big country.

Must try harder OP!

Is this thread a response to this story yesterday?

This was the guy's fifth attempt to get out of China and stay out.

'I must get out into the free world', dissident who fled China on boat tells BBC
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2j2jw117lo
When asked for comment, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry told the BBC that the Chinese government "handles the entry and exit of its citizens in accordance with the law and that Chinese citizens must abide by the Constitution and the law".
Dong, a police officer-turned-human rights activist, has been jailed in China several times for his activism.
In 1999, Dong was fired from the police force after 13 years because he signed a petition to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the brutal Tiananmen crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.

I do think you’re naive to believe that your colleague grumbling about the government is a good example of how China deals with political dissent more generally.

Similarly, I accept it’s not a total hell hole, and I would like to visit. But let’s not pretend it’s misunderstood - it is what it is, a dictatorship doing authoritarian stuff.