To feel I've been lied to about China

[Sulettamercury]

I'm well aware the country is far from perfect but no where is and I've just come back for the summer after spending 2 years there working as a teacher I'm going back in a few weeks.

What I can't get over is the fact all my friends seem to be indoctrinated into thinking China is this 1984 style hell hole where you can't criticise the government or do anything without being in constant fear.

I have to say living there really opened my eyes and I was shocked when in my first months of teaching one of the Chinese workers (now a good friend) started openly moaning about government policy and I'll admit I was nervous at the time but soon realised nothing would happen and that despite what I was told no one came after her and she didn't disappear and that every one was moaning about government policy if it didn't suit them with no consequences.

The infrastructure is also wonderful and far from the cheap rubbish you're told it is and housing isn't all on the verge of collapse or at least no worse than some of the rubbish I've seen here in the UK

Again it's definitely not perfect but AIBU to say I I feel like we're lied to in the west about how bad China really is and that some of the things we accuse them of we either do ourselves or we blow out of proportion?

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....

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.

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.

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.

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

What do you teach OP?

Glad someone upthread mentioned Tibet.

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

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.

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

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

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.

I teach English btw and I'm aware enough to know my entire experience could easily be curated to have given me the impression I've come away with by careful placement etc.

Part of me started this thread because I suppose deep down I want my opinion shaken up a little but I do think some of the stuff we're told is sprinkled with a little bit of anti China propaganda just like they do with us

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!

Do people in China buy anything from Temu?

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.

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.

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 son went there and loved it. He was in the big cities mainly and thought it was very modern and clean and interesting.
My other friend was half Chinese and traced her relatives back to a remote region in China. They had to get special permission to visit from the town official because free travel is restricted for foreigners in some areas. They found the relatives who were living in abject poverty farming rice. China is wealthy on the coast but has many problems in the country areas.

This reminds me of all the post World Cup posts about how the US isn't all bad.

Of course not! But it's a place where corruption is rampant and human rights abuses occur daily.

I have visited China several times on business and so have a very limited experience, but I have to say I have really enjoyed everything about all of my visits. The cities I have visited have been clean and well-ordered, trains were easy to navigate for a foreigner with zero Mandarin/Cantonese, and I never felt under threat or in danger as I do in some European (and British) cities.

There is the slightly strange thing once you leave big cities of people constantly wanting to be photographed with a white person, including when I would be in a shop and realise that there was a family standing next to me to pose for a selfie with me without asking my permission, but to be honest that was mild compared with my Indian colleague who was treated like Hollywood royalty the number of people who were photographed with her. Presumably they saw even fewer Indians than Europeans.

But all that said, there was a compliance about people that seemed odd, even if they are allowed to grumble as you say @Sulettamercury. China is a huge country and generalisations are impossible. There are definitely parts that are not a third world country as we are led to believe, but I do wonder if people are encouraged to speak their mind rather than merely permitted to.

Interestingly this was partly the opinion of one of my friends who then went on to tell me how good Dubai was which kinda made me scratch my head.

Except you're expanding your personal experience to the whole, vast country.

My experience of China was very different from yours. The first time I was in rural Yunnan and having to use communal toilets every day (communal as in squatting over a hole or trench alongside several other people, with no dividing walls).

The second time I was in Xinjiang. It was just after the Urumqi riots, when the government had shut down the internet and to the area about with closing all international phone lines. To remain in touch with my family, I had to call another friend in China (outside Xinjiang) and he would pass on my messages.

Every town square was filled with soldiers drilling. There were convoys of military trucks with soldiers standing around the edges, their guns pointing ahead at us. I couldn't find accommodation because it had nearly all been taken over my the army. And when I did find a room, I discovered that every channel on the TV was only broadcasting propaganda. It was insane.

And now the Uighurs in the province are in concentration camps. I quote:
Between 500,000 and 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities have been detained or imprisoned in China's Xinjiang region since 2017. Human rights researchers and advocacy groups estimate that roughly 500,000 are currently held in formal prisons and high-security detention facilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_China

But yes, China is absolutely fine. We're all completely wrong about it 🫤

Except you're expanding your personal experience to the whole, vast country.

My experience of China was very different from yours. The first time I was in rural Yunnan and having to use communal toilets every day (communal as in squatting over a hole or trench alongside several other people, with no dividing walls).

The second time I was in Xinjiang. It was just after the Urumqi riots, when the government had shut down the internet and to the area about with closing all international phone lines. To remain in touch with my family, I had to call another friend in China (outside Xinjiang) and he would pass on my messages.

Every town square was filled with soldiers drilling. There were convoys of military trucks with soldiers standing around the edges, their guns pointing ahead at us. I couldn't find accommodation because it had nearly all been taken over my the army. And when I did find a room, I discovered that every channel on the TV was only broadcasting propaganda. It was insane.

And now the Uighurs in the province are in concentration camps. I quote:
Between 500,000 and 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities have been detained or imprisoned in China's Xinjiang region since 2017. Human rights researchers and advocacy groups estimate that roughly 500,000 are currently held in formal prisons and high-security detention facilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_China

But yes, China is absolutely fine. We're all completely wrong about it 🫤

Ever so many Christians from Hong Kong have left since it went back to China because of the repressive way the government has treated the since HK returned to Chonese ownership. Many have been unable to take all their money with them because of government bureaucracy. Their experience of HK China vs HK under Britain has been very negative.

There is the slightly strange thing once you leave big cities of people constantly wanting to be photographed with a white person,

We spent 3 weeks in China in April this year and this happened to people in our group in Tiananmen Square! I suppose as that is the place most Chinese people want to visit in Beijing then the people requesting the photos may have been from smaller, more remote, places.