The mean wage in Hong Kong not much more than $2,000 per month (a Croatian acquaintance who works there cited the same numbers half a year ago). Its surprising come to think of it, but that means that Muscovites – where salaries are $1,500 per month but multiplied by almost twice – are substantially more prosperous (for instance, renting a one bedroom apartment in the center of Hong Kong would take up the entire average salary). To extend our comparative purview, it would suggest that the average Pole is about as prosperous as the average Hong Konger, while not even the average Russian is all that far behind.
Closer to home in East Asia, this would suggest that the denizens of “Tier 1” Chinese cities now live comparably well to Hong Kongers. And Chinese elites in those cities live much better than their Hong Kong equivalents. A commenter at this blog has told me that higher end professionals, such as well-qualified engineers or Fortune 500 company managers, can make almost American-level wages there but at Chinese costs of living. And in Singapore – the other cosmopolitan city-sized trading hub of East Asia – wages are almost twice those of Hong Kong.
I did not get the impression that my Croatian acquaintance was impressed with Hong Kong. Apart from the material inadequacies, it is also a cultural disappointment. He claimed that his home city in Croatia (not even Zagreb, but their second or third city) had a more diverse musical scene than Hong Kong, even though it has almost twice as many people as all of Croatia. Since he also has a side interest in futurism/transhumanism like myself, I was amused to learn that the equivalent community in Hong Kong is… all made up of expats.
This is the material and cultural context to spandrell’s take that the protests are Hong Kongers’ despairing reaction to lost status. “But at least we have muh democracy!”
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Macau and HK have both become less Chinese, after the handover. Probably not a good sign…
I love how many Cold War cuckservatives used to go apeshit in 1997, saying that ‘Communist China’ would shut down the prosperity of Hong Kong now that China was being handed control. Some of them still have that sort of Pavlovian response to the issue today.
They have a cow if you point out :
i) China, while certainly a one-party state, has a stock market, and does a massive amount of trade with the US.
ii) Hong Kong’s standard of living isn’t much higher, at this point, than Shanghai or Shenzhen.
For certain Cold War cuckservatives, it is always 1980.
Live-in maids from the Philippines and Indonesia has caused this boost. Their numbers have grown leaps and bounds in the mid-2000s. Most middle class families in both Hong Kong and Macau have a live-in maid from the Philippines or Indonesia. Live-in maids are not protected under regular Hong Kong law, nor are they allowed to become permanent residents no matter how long they stay in HK. They are not even allowed to rent their own apartment but have to stay in their employer’s home.
Portuguese expats in Macau and Anglo expats in Hong Kong are both integral parts of the fabrics of their respective societies, and played a central role in the cultural formations of these 2 territories. The optimal number of Portuguese and Anglos in HK and Macau, respectively, I’d think is ideal is about 5%
It makes sense that Singapore would have higher salaries. Iskander has a lot of Chinese in it, but not as many as the Pearl Delta, so it is not as easy to move shop.
Interesting subject: foreign maids are nearly 5% of the pop in HK! And no Vietnamese are allowed, due to past history. Maybe, the Chinese are smarter on immigration than I thought.
BTW, I wonder how the foreign maids effect TFR. You would think it would be exploding, with nannies to look after kids. But I guess not.
Probably there is a certain value to having British expats in HK and Portuguese in Macao. Makes them kind of a tourist attraction for mainlanders. I wonder if the Chinese have ever considered some sort of highly selective, preferential immigration for the purposes of tourism. English (genuine, of course) to HK, Portuguese (same) to Macau.
Though, I have noticed that a lot of happas seem to be anti-regime and liberalist.
This criticism only makes sense if you believe mainland China is better on this point.
No. The point is that they have no cultural advantage over the Mainland, so there’s nothing to differentiate them other than muh democracy. So what’s the point?
I’d certainly be more sympathetic if there was some non-material non-degenerate reason for the protests. But apparently there’s none.
who went to a place filled with chinese people and expected there to be any music at all, let alone the music being good. has this guy ever heard chinese ‘music’.
on a related note, china produced pretty much nothing in like 2000 years other than the 3 or 4 things we always hear about over and over. there used to be mysticism about secrets the chinese must know, knowledge they must have, locked away in their very difficult and inscrutable language. people in the west could not be aware of it unless the learned some chinese and were able to read their tomes, enjoy their literature.
turns out, nah. there’s almost nothing of any value in chinese historical writing on any subject, and their martial arts were all pure garbage with zero value at all. the japanese had 100 times as much interesting stuff to say and things to contribute.
so basically, there’s no reason at all to learn written chinese well, one of the most unnecessarily difficult languages in the world. especially with improving machine translation.
chinese guys do some stuff now, especially in electronics, but man they just blew thru millenia without doing much of anything. imagine wasting like 20 years learning kung fu then getting your ass kicked by a first year boxer or wrestler.
serious question: how much damage did Bruce Lee do to knowledge of fist fighting, by popularizing completely useless stuff like kung fu and jeet kune do? how many millions of people outside of china got the wrong idea about what works in a fist fight from this guy?
probably decades wasted and billions of man hours on total garbage.
i’m allowing for the fact that Lee himself was aware of other styles, studied them, learned them, and wasn’t a rube in his personal training. he was quite smart, and knew a lot about real street fights, weight training, boxing, and fencing. i also liked Bruce Lee, thought he was a great action star, and don’t think he sucked. but his broader influence had to be hilariously negative in the long run.
i was pissed when Brandon Lee was killed during The Crow.
Does the demotion of the Cantonese language play any role in the latest Hong-Kong Chimpout? I’ve never had much interest in Asia proper so I don’t know.
You never realized Chinese ‘martial arts’ is just fantasy?
How old are you?
(And by ‘fantasy’, I mean literally a literary genre, like Gandalf and Harry Potter in the West except chinesy. Though at least in the West nobody seriously LARPs as Hermione, I think.)
Yeah, that’d be a legitimate grievance. But I don’t think it’s a big issue right now, especially since most of the demotion happened two decades ago, and around the 2008 Olympics people were still very much pro-China.
Part of Spandrell’s argument (which Karlin seems to endorse) for Hong Kong’s inferiority is that
Which is a bit funny hearing from a pro-Mainlander.
If I was Chinese I would understand the actions of the CCP.
However, at the risk sounding a bit sociopathic, I hope for a intensification of the Sino-American conflict, and a “Tiananmen Mk. II” would be a good way to ensure this happens. But this also requires that Zhongnanhai feels that the situation is sufficiently extreme to necessitate Direct Rule from Beijing and for the USA to view this as a provocative act.
The weirdest part is seeing boomers outright deny reality, I’ve seen wild claims about Hong Kong and it’s role in the Chinese economy with them claiming it is the #1 trading port in East Asia (it’s 5th in Asia, 4th in China), to saying it represents 10% of Chinas GDP (this was true like 20 years ago)
It’s they last heard about China in 1997 and stopped checking in on it
I guess some people simply can’t let go of the streetshitting dogeating China image that Mao created (or maybe just cemented, China was pretty shitty even before him)
The website is becoming a giant cargo cult for Red China. Godfree is making converts.
So HK is just the same as Brexit Britain or Trump US.
Brexit is irrelevant, the real generator of all the anger is GDP doubling in 30 years and median incomes going up 10% – or specifically, massive jealousy by the bottom 70% of how the top 30% have pulled out 95% of all the wealth increase in that time. (and ordinary folk can’t buy property anymore
Ditto US where Trump supporters hate the elites and see GDP doubling in 30 years and median earnings unchanged!!!
No wonder HK people are so upset. It isn’t even the local rich they are jealous off, it is a billion mainlanders who are rapidly catching up or overtaking them.
People who pick their martial art from movies should not be in real fights
It’s always good to move your body around and keep it healthy, but seriouly
just don’t
Video from a Chinese guy with a basic explanation of it:
tl;dw it’s started out as a real fighting style but once firearms became popular it turned into a theatrical performance, mimicking fighting (a martial art if you will)
Hong Kong was great for expats going there for a couple of months or years when young and partying. For the population it has always been a harsh environment, good life for some and a tough existence for most, typical trading post really.
The neocons in Britain have been advocating giving HKers British passports, presumably the purpose is to make their other open borders nonsense seem less nutty than it is.
I think the prosperity thing is just a propaganda talking about, what ultimately they care about is the fact that Hong Kong is no longer theirs to control.
I don’t know the terms of the treaty governing the relations between Hong Kong and the PRC, but so far as I can tell, there isn’t much keeping the PRC from flooding Hong Kong with nouveau riche beholden to Beijing. Also, according to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_policy_of_Hong_Kong
it might not be so easy to force British citizens out of Hong Kong, but presumably the laws can be modified over time or some loop hole found so that it became very undesirable for Hong Kongers to become British citizens.
I doubt that any “damage” is down when not everybody knows how to really fight.
Singapore is often pointed to as a the super successful model economically.
In the long-term, I think the West needs a real competitor to stand any chance of regaining its health, and that that may require some antagonism. And perhaps even war, which is a problem because we live in a nuclear peace – meaning that there will be no war.
But in the short-term, I think that the dominant message of any Tienanmen II would be a reassertion of the policy of open borders. For Chinese, but especially for Uyghurs and Africans and other Third-worlders “oppressed” by the Chinese.
In the scenario of a heated conflict, I really wonder if China would take a foreign relations stand against poz, or just encourage it further to weaken their enemies. This is why I am a reluctant Sinophile: the regime doesn’t seem to be invested in anti-poz.
Huge difference between Singapore and Hong Kong. Singapore has a good welfare system which makes public housing available and affordable to every citizen, and it has a strong government where it can formulate policies that serve the interests of its people. Hong Kong’s economy is controlled by the oligarchs, and any attempted reform by the government is undermined by opposing parties and different interested groups.
Are there really any benefits to living in HK compared to a Tier 1 city?
From my understanding there seems to be a lot of demand for living in HK. Is it just the passport? Or some sort of status address? Or the political fiction – same rights guaranteed in the Chinese constitution, I believe.
Well you never heard of Dr. Joseph Needham who spent 40 years of his life researching Chinese inventions as a sideline hobby while working as a biochemist at Cambridge University. He published seven volumes in twenty-seven books on the topic. I think it contains more that 3 or 4 things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_China
I’ve always wondered if the temples that the Red Guards vandalized were really that interesting or not – though I am sure they did a lot of damage in other fields. And, of course, it is still lamentable to lose anything of history or tradition.
The ones I’ve seen don’t seem to have any real architectural merit, on average. Maybe, it had something to do with general poverty, rather than lack of ability. Or maybe there was something particular about building castles in Europe that led to more inspired masonry in other buildings, like churches.
But was there anything like the dynamiting of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior?
Maybe nowadays in the age where so many practice mixed martial arts, which incorporate some of those Asian fighting techniques as well as western ones, kung fu doesn’t seem like a big deal. But when it first came to the west it was very useful except perhaps against very experienced seasoned street fighters or professional level boxers and wrestlers, but even so, the fact that most people weren’t familiar with these styles gave them the advantage of surprise. In real street fights strength and fitness are not that important as they’re usually over quickly – skill and experience count for more. During those early days I knew professional wrestlers who took up kung fu lessons just to broaden their repertoire.
It has been an English controlled trading station, not an independent country, or a city representing an elite of a larger region.
Its status is not like the independent Venetian Republic before Napoleon destroyed it.
I wonder if Hong Kong might be culturally interesting for Chinese people as it might more connection with pre-revolutionary China, as it avoided being part of the PRC until 1997.
Imagine if England had trading rights in Krasnodar, which then allowed the city to avoid all of Soviet history. It would be an interesting culture from that perspective.
Hong Kong’s insane real estate prices serves as a useful reminder that inflation does not take real estate costs into account, which is totally crazy. That is the biggest expense most people have.
Hong Kong’s high PPP-adjusted GDP is only possible because the cost of living is fairly low compared to most 1st world cities as long as you exclude real estate. As since real estate costs aren’t counted in inflation, it gives a misleading picture.
Either way, why would any ambitious Chinese go to Hong Kong today over Shenzen? The latter has high-tech innovation that Hong Kong cannot even dream of. And even Hong Kong’s softer advantages, such as the film industry in the 80s and 90s is much dimished. Most of the Hong Kong wealth was accumulated by real estate tycoons or financial intermediaries who got rich during China’s rich.
Would it? Real estate prices in Beijing, for instance, are starting to become completely crazy as well. In general, I am becoming pretty obsessed with how real estate became massively unaffordable globally from around the year 2000 or so
The coverage in the media takes it as a given, as if it would be an iron law we cannot change. Likely because many media barons are knee-deep in these markets themselves. I don’t know many countries which have solved this crazy housing situation. It would seem like a basic task for any government yet neoliberalism reigns supreme everywhere, with a hands-off approach that is clearly dysfunctional for everyone but tycoons and oligarchs. Berlin’s recent rent-control measure is something I will follow closely to see how it pans out. Singapore’s housing corporation is an interesting subject to be studied also.
Prime Noticer is clearly hyperbolic, traditional China did have a lot of impressive achievements (just like many societies thoughout Eurasia at some point had), even though it is not quite the mythos of the 5000-year unrivalled and continuous civilisation that the CCP indoctrinates people in.
But at the same time Needham also seems to confirm the view that being a scientist (or intelligent in general) does not preclude believing in bizarre things.
In addition, I have grown to be wary of foreigners (John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Takeuchi Yoshimi, Needham himself) who held positive views of mid 20th-century China, even when (perhaps especially) when they are intelligent.
that is true, Shanghai is a vastly better place to live than hong kong. Beijing not so much because of the pollution
Lack of cultural development is one of the most disappointing things of all the Chinese world, and especially extreme compared to the culturally fertile Japan.
Considering the number size of the Chinese population, it seems quite a cultural desert, at least in terms of what it exports to other countries.
Maybe there will be a cultural flourishing in China from the 2030-2050s? Or is that still too early and optimistic?
Hey I was shilling for the chinks before it became cool.
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/a-long-wait-at-the-gate-of-delusions/
Porcelain Tower was a architectural marvel, too bad it got burned down
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porcelain_Tower_of_Nanjing
In old times, a lot of people say tenant farming was eugenic. I’m not sure that is true of real estate now – that rarity and pricing produces anything but dysgenics.
The system of price discrimination to prevent diversity is obviously immoral when compared to the simple utility of segregation. It is impossible not to travel the highway during rush hour in the US and not see that, even if you are heading in the other direction. Of course, there are bigger pricing problems than just diversity, although in the US, it certainly is a major factor.
I do wonder what it would look like, just if the government got out of the loan business. Though, I don’t know enough to say if that is much of a factor in other places, I think it would make a huge difference in the US.
Porcelain Tower was a architectural marvel, too bad it got burned down
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porcelain_Tower_of_Nanjing
I can’t speak for Hong Kong, but in the USA real estate costs are part of the CPI calculation.
https://www.clevelandfed.org/newsroom-and-events/publications/economic-trends/2014-economic-trends/et-20140221-whats-up-in-inflation-shelter.aspx
This is, sadly, an overestimation of human intellectual abilities.
In general nearly any social condition is treated by most people as being a fact of nature.
I’m not aware of any countries that have solved the problem, but there are plenty of ones in which it never really developed.
What was so special about the cathedral? It was modern building, barely 50 years old at the time of demolition, no part of ancient history.
Many statues of Lenin destroyed in our time were older.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Christ_the_Saviour#Original_cathedral
There’s a whole lot of ice hockey going on in HK. Certainly way more than in all of Mexico:
http://www.icehockeyhongkong.org/ntdp/
http://www.hockey.org.hk/Content.asp?Uid=27
Interesting parallel to the destruction of churches during WWI because of their bell towers facilitating observation . I’m a bit surprised that they thought in those terms, without what I’d consider accurate, long range artillery. Never heard of it previously, that I can recall.
I vaguely remember a few things that the expeditionary forces did, during the Boxer Rebellion, but i never saw any pictures except of the Summer Palace, which, at least in outline, I believe, was designed by foreigners. And rebuilt.
I wonder if the Red Guards destroyed any impressive buildings.
To an American like myself, anything from the 1800s is old.
The Old North Church, the oldest still-standing church built in Boston, one of America’s oldest cities, is from 1723. It is not very big. The three famous big churches in Boston, such as Trinity Church, were all built in the 1870s.
Previous country my folks came from had most of their old churches destroyed in ethnic conflict. As well, as not rebuilt well (and later torn down), for the same reasons.
Looks like they put a lot of effort into building the Cathedral. It seems obviously better than the proposed Palace of the Soviets.
A lot of Soviet statues were uninspired. I personally would not have removed all of them, or destroyed any. But there was probably an overabundance, and statues do have a political element, as can be seen by the erection of statues of blacks in Western Europe and the taking down of statues of whites in the US.
Fighting is simple. The larger person has an overwhelming advantage. The best 140 pound fighter in the world will be dominated by a merely competent 190 pounder, or even a 160 pound opponent. Martial arts moves are screen worthy tricks but a competent boxer or street fighter will not be fooled.
It is getting tiresome watching movies where a 120 pound woman physically dominates a 200 pound thug. Some poor fools will think they can accomplish these things.
It didn’t work out well for Primo Carnera when he fought much smaller guys named Max Baer and Joe Louis.
A recent notorious case:
Definitely agree with this sentiment.
That is to say, in principle, though I don’t mind it as long as four conditions are met:
1.) the woman is reasonably attractive
2.) has acrobatic skills
3.) the action is stylized
4.) no message of feminism
In Hollywood, three and sometimes four of those points are negatives.
It is hilarious when the conservatives rant about “Communist China”.
Hong Kong has become a major source of warehousing and shipping Cuban cigars to the US–and using Chinese banks (out of reach of the US octopus) to process the transactions.
My personal experience always “trumps” propaganda–Hong Kong looks like a new cradle of liberty to me!
What? Are you being serious? Here is a whirlwind tour of Chinese culutre for you.
Definitely what you see in the movies is just rubbish, but I’ve seen competent martial artists do well in unexpected street brawls even when outnumbered. Although I’ve also seen some embarrassments too. Proper street fighters who fight in back street challenges are a different thing altogether, but they’re not the type of guys who’ll walk around attacking people for no reason, although some martial artists in the East also used to engage in street fight challenges.
While boxing is an important facet of combat sports, it’s utility in predicting the outcome of an actual fight is very limited since so many of the techniques which severely advantage the larger fighter (clinching, knees, takedowns and ground striking, even kicking [trying to deal with a devastating kicker when moving up a weight class is exceptionally difficult in mma]) are disallowed.
Mma is a much closer (though imperfect) approximation of a no rules fight, and the rule that size > all tends to hold true until you get to >240-250 lbs where fighters become too sluggish. Jumping 1 weight class up tends to meet little success, jumping 2 is borderline unthinkable (unless like rumble johnson they were mummifying themselves to make weight). And even in cases where there is success, it’s usually when the fighters can’t safely make the lower weight without dangerously dehydrating themselves, so they’re not really significantly “smaller” anyway.
I can’t decipher the moon runes on that video but I’m guessing it’s likely an example of:
a) The big guy (bodybuilder?) not really being very competent or experienced
b) That there are always outliers, there’s a very plausible scenario wherein that kick doesn’t land so perfectly, the big guy bundles him onto the ground and pulverizes him
A fight against multiple opponents at once is another very different conversation of course.
Please, stop. Next time, you will say that patriotic war movies where American Hero (TM) single handedly mows down hundreds of gooks, russkies and ragheads are less than realistic 😉
Yes, very true.
What? No, total bullshit. Japan is not ‘culturally fertile’, in fact everything Japan outputs is scant derivatives of the already derivative Chinese output. Thinking Japan is ‘culturally fertile’ is crazy talk, you need to cut down on the anime.
Apart from food paragraphs, almost everything in this Wikipedia article, is from at least 500 years ago.
So where is cultural productivity of more than 1,4 billion people?
Some people say America is culturally unproductive. America’s population was 150 million people in 1950, and were transforming in 1950 already almost every area of culture.
Manga / anime as one example refuting your statement
What kind of derivative of China? For example, Japanese visual culture was historically inspired by Chinese painting, but the cultural transmission happened in the past. This direction of cultural transmission is importing nothing new already by the 19th century.
Japan has the second* largest influence on mass culture now, after America.
–
What explains the GDP per capita in Hong Kong being above Japan?
You’re not the only one.
Andrew Anglin at his highly popular site Daily Sotmer is urging the CCP to send in the tanks like yesterday!
CIA Shills Put Pro-Hong Kong Terrorism Flag on Mount Everest!
https://dailystormer.name/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/SHUT-THE-FUCK-UP-TRAITOR-CHINA.png
Hong Kong not having a “vibrant music scene” TOTALLY detracts from it’s cultural heritage. My god, WHO GIVES A SHIT! That doesn’t prove a fucking thing you cunt.
Proper American action movies are a kind of stylized, slap-stick comedy. They are apolitical. Maybe, even a little conservative.
Not too sure it was believable when a ‘roided Scharzenegger in his prime could break a man’s neck, like he was turning a quater-turn spigot. Though I grant he probably could have broken a man’s neck with a struggle.
But you were just supposed to sit back, suspend disbelief, and enjoy it, and that he had massive arms helped – it was stylized through his use of steroids and one-liners. One problem today is that they have moved away from strong men and more towards slender men and gritty stories. This makes it less of a comedy.
The same thing is true of women in action movies. It is less of a spectacle, than when high-kicking and flipping Michelle Yeoh was a star of HK cinema. Chinese action movies aren’t the same spectacle they were either, IMO. No poor children in HK being pressganged into acrobatic performance troops and beaten when they can’t do full splits, as Jackie Chan basically was.
Also, camera technique is really bad nowadays, generally in both East and West. Quick cuts are like jokes without a set-up. They don’t work.
The median wage in Moscow is only 1000 USD. That’s a whole $500 lower, than the average wage, indicating huge inequality.
The median in HK was around 2200 USD in 2018.
https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/201803/16/P2018031500755.htm
The city appears to have a housing problem, but they do make more money.
GDP per capita being an utterly irrelevant metric?
Look up Ireland.
I swear I remember hearing once, about 20 years ago that culture was Japan’s #1 export, but I cannot find any figures on it. And I wonder how it would compare to America in dollar value and percent of the GDP.
Anyway, if it is true, it is impressive. I, for one, appreciate Japanese humor, which has a kind of unique quality that one cannot find in the West, at least in part because the West is too feminized and too PC.
As to anime or this or that being bad, I think Sturgeon’s Law is a pretty good adage. What is one who criticizes it comparing it to? American cartoons? American sitcoms? American TV has basically become pure prolefeed.
Japanese stuff is better for just the lack of diversity alone. But perhaps, that is changing a bit? Still, less is better, anyway you cut it.
Just like America exerts a heavy force upon British pop culture, so does Britain exerts (a more unnoticed) force upon American pop culture.
For an example, the novel series Game of Thrones is written by an American, the TV programme is financed by an American company, yet the acting is done in Northern Ireland and the actors are British.
Then are a lot of individual British actors who perform in Hollywood or Broadway.
Correction: Andrew Anglin’s site is called Daily Stormer.
His site is ranked 26,226 by Alexa in terms of ‘global internet engagement’, while UNZ is ranked 25,149 as of today, August 27, 2019.
So Anglin’s influence–he’s also on Tor, which Alexa can’t track– is pretty close to or may even surpass this site’s readership and popularity.
Anglin’s got another article about the situation in Hong Kong that is worth reading: Jewish New York Times Says Hong Kong is Already Tiananmen Square Part 2
The Jews are using this photo (below) from Hong Kong taken a few days ago as a meme and comparing it with the so-called “Tank Man” photo from the “Tiananmen Massacre” in 1989 in Beijing.
The more things change, the more Jewish perfidy stays the same.
(((They))) tried a color revolution in Hong Kong 4 years ago called the “Yellow Umbrella Revolution”.
Note the umbrella in the rioter’s left hand– incidentally, that would be considered a weapon and get him shot if he were in the USA.
The umbrella–in this context–is a Jewish Freemason symbol and identifier or “shout out” to the inner circle of high-ranking Freemasons. Cf. “Umbrella” – The Occult Masonic Connection
https://dailystormer.name/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/merlin_159694293_974908c6-1c73-408d-8ff9-eb2f23749fcd-superJumbo.jpg
You miss the fact that because HK has no taxation, ALL govt revenue comes from land sales. So the govt is only going to let land go for a WHOLE lot of money. So all housing is insanely expensive–it’s embodied both directly in land costs and in the types of housing they build as a result of that expense.
You get rid of that market distortion, and the general cost of living in HK is baaaaaaarely above the mainland. Then the average HKer would be very well off.
In Russia, there was a very publicized story where parents were trying to ban a certain popular manga, after the father claimed it was responsible for his daughter killing herself.
This girl has jumped from the balcony of this building.
https://s15.stc.all.kpcdn.net/share/i/12/5163388/inx960x640.jpg
https://s15.stc.all.kpcdn.net/share/i/4/635208/wx1080.jpg
https://s16.stc.all.kpcdn.net/share/i/4/635316/wx1080.jpg
Afterwards the father found the certain famous manga in her room, and said it was responsible for her killing herself.
But architecture critic might equally speculate their depressing new microdistrict where the family moved to had been responsible. Maybe you could said the oligarch Viktor Vekselberg is responsible because his company built the district where she was living, without adequate infrastructure.
And too much density…
https://newdaynews.ru/pict/arts1/65/24/652428_b.jpg
Connection between manga and suicides, is just numbers – millions of teenagers read manga and some also teenagers kill themselves – so inevitably some teenagers with manga in their bedroom, will also jump off the balcony.
People would rather live in a “cage apartment” in HK than an apartment on Shenzhen. That should tell you something.
There is a non-material, non-degenerate reason. They don’t want all their business taken over by CCP cronies. They don’t want all the Fulan Gong to be swept up and massacred. They don’t want ordinary people to start disappearing in the night.
This isn’t an uprising of a tiny elite. It’s a popular uprising–for a reason.
China has flooded both HK and all the Chinatowns of the world with CCP operatives and thugs. People are scared for a reason. Bad things happen in CALIFORNIA, never mind HK now, never mind how HK will be.
China’s stock market is meaningless, rigged, and opaque. The average citizen cannot hope to possibly invest with any success because so many reports are fake that you can’t know when that “great” investment is going to explode in your face. The people who know are all highly placed and politically connected. It’s only good for government wealth transfers to the right people.
Clearly, you know nothing about the Chinese economy. You don’t understand why the Chinese poured into bitcoin and into any real estate they could get their hands on rather than investing in the domestic stock market. The Chinese stock market it fake…and most of the economy is also fake! Empty cities boosting GDP…. Trade falls? Build more, debase more, it’ll all work out!
Surely, England is at least still the third major exporter of mass culture in the world.
But it’s very integrated with American mass culture, while Japan is much more independent. For example, most English pop music today does not different to American pop music, and English pop music is often even managed by American companies.
Also most recent English cultural exports, at least in the last 10 years, are not very original in my opinion, even if they are becoming more popular all the time. How many more Sherlock Holmes films do you want? (Obviously the world public just wants more and more Sherlock Holmes, but it’s not quite original 21st cultural creation)
Ireland’s GDP per capita is inflated, but its per capita actual individual consumption is basically Western European. Hong Kong’s would have to be inflated by much more to be below the typical Eastern European capital city.
Red China in the first decade 1949 to 1958 was doing quite well. Fast economic growth and lots of Sino-Soviet economic cooperation. It all went to shit with the Great Leap Forward in 1958. In any case I think there was something to praise about the first decade especially considering how badly off China was for the entire first half of the 20th century.
Typical dishonesty from the NYT.
The whole thing is recorded. The police had little choice but to pull out the gun. 6 against over 100.
https://youtu.be/fa_wgTXI5dA
My hats off to the cops. How could they be so restrained? From another incident
https://youtu.be/a-FYkmF9ZZ0
As someone who loves HK, it hurts me to say this: Stay away from HK for the next few months.
https://youtu.be/_eyaVgMJ6AM
https://youtu.be/x4UfTayozto
https://youtu.be/nNxqyUmykzk
You are confusing culture with pop culture.
???
I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. Do you have any names for these “Cold War cuckservatives” because I was living in East Asia during the turnover of Hong Kong and following the U.S. media reaction to it fairly closely, and I don’t remember that at all.
For the last thirty years, since the aftermath of Tiananmen, there has been very little anti-Communist animus among the conservative elite towards the PRC. Conservatives – those who around during the Cold War and afterwards – have been very cosy with China, very much willing to do business with it. When the Cold War ended, China got a free pass that Cuba, North Korea, and other Commie nations never got – other than perhaps the soft pass the Vietnamese commies eventually got.
For a current indication of this, look at how the Never-Trumper intelligentsia, many of whom are Neocons, have reacted to Trump’s tariff war with China. Nearly to a man, they have all been critical of it.
Of course I should’ve also mentioned that even before the Cold War ended the Chicoms were already getting a free pass from U.S. conservatives because of the PRC’s hostile relationship with the USSR dating back to the late fifties and China’s market reforms in the late seventies.
But at least that made geopolitical sense. Staying cozy with the PRC over the last two decades has made no sense.
Compare and contrast what would happen if it was in the JewSA.
Man holding a screwdriver is shot 5 times. From the video, you can see the man was not a threat, but the officer shot him anyway because he didn’t drop the screwdriver fast enough.
UC Davis, California Police pepper spray and drag away peaceful protestors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4
Occupy Wall Street protesters punished by NYPD.
PS
The shooting of the mentally retarded man was later ruled as a “justifiable homicide” and no criminal charges were ever laid against the officer.
Of course not. A 96-pound Vietnamese woman would trigger a deadly response from the police let alone a black man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Bich_Cau_Thi_Tran
The shooting of Bich Cau Thi Tran[1][2][3][4] (also known as Cau Bich Tran[1][5][6][7][8]) occurred in San Jose, California, on July 13, 2003. She was fatally shot by a San Jose Police officer in her home. Tran was wielding an Asian vegetable peeler at two police officers and was then shot once in the chest. The incident led to controversy among the Vietnamese American community in San Jose, accusing the officer of using excessive force.
She was 4 feet 9 inches (145 cm) tall and weighed 98 pounds (44 kg).[10] She had a history of mental health problems and had stopped taking anti psychotic medication.[5][11] Tran had at least nine interactions with police from 2001 to 2003 due to mental health issues and outbursts, and had been hospitalized at least three times for mental health issues.[12]
You are referring to a different faction of the Republican coalition altogether.
I am hardly the only one on this thread to mention the existence of Cold War cuckservatives, who think China is the USSR in every way, and still go apeshit at the fact that HK had to go back to China in 1997, or that China wants to unify with Taiwan.
They are ‘Democracy fanatics who think it is still 1980’, which is a different group than the one you are referring to.
For such judgments it is necessary to know Chinese. The lack of fame in the international market does not mean the lack of original creativity. I can not speak for China, but for example in Russia, modern entertainment literature quality is not inferior to Anglo-American literature. However, Russian authors are almost completely unknown outside of Russia, but such authors as Scott Lynch and China Miéville (the level of works which is much much much worse than the level of books by the best Russian authors) have all-planetary success.
From my perch here in Bangkok, that statement is quite ridiculous. Swing on by during Chinese New Year and you’ll get the picture.
Concerning martial arts and the smaller guy winning:
In a real fight:
I am reasonably trained. If I get the first hit in, which is much more based on speed and aggression rather then size/weight or even training, I am reasonably confident about winning the fight (have to add 1v1 are really rare in practice) in a roughly +- 15kg band.I weigh 80ish kg, so thats a range that covers most non land whales.
Essentially, by landing the first real hit, and not letting up afterwards, you disorient the enemy and keep him progressively more disoriented by hitting him again and again. This builds up quite a bit of momentum.
Thomm,
I asked for names. You didn’t give me a single one. Perhaps because you don’t have any to give.
No American commentator or politician who I can think of believes China is the equivalent to the USSR. No one. And the PRC has never been treated like the USSR in my lifetime. Trump has been the most aggressive president toward China in the last fifty years, and frankly he ain’t all that aggressive.
Is China a serious geopolitical rival and potential threat? Yes. But even that realization is only slowly dawning on the right. If, as you believe, more Americans thought like “Cold War cuckservatives,” that realization would have happened much sooner.
I agree that diversity is a major factor in pushing up prices. I see it here in Stockholm, too. However, I think there are additional factors. When even largely homogenous cities like Hong Kong or Beijing have crazy prices it stands to reason that something is deeply dysfunctional.
You have also seen a very large price in prices in cities like Tel Aviv – 90% Jewish and largely secular. The same is true in many EE cities. Prague’s prices are out of control and Bratislava, Budapest and Warsaw are racing to catch up. All those cities have relatively little diversity.
I think a lot of these basic assumptions we have, such as foreigners investing in FDI in real estate, should be overlooked. Immigration is another. I would add that letting the private sector work on its own is probably a bad idea. Maybe good if you only look at high-end developments but affordable housing isn’t something most private corporations will care about. The profit margins are too thin and the prices too low. That is why Singapore’s housing agency is interesting because they took it upon themselves to deal with this.
I think the fucked up housing market – which seems to be a global trend over the last 20 years – is one of the most underreported stories. I mean reporting in a real sense, not just “oh uh this just happened” without any further context.
Anime is a very simplistic and repetitive genre, and it’s very derivative of Chinese culture anyways. (Read ‘Journey to the West’ and see for yourself.)
Commercial popularity and mindshare is not ‘cultural fertility’, because anime doesn’t create or inspire culture in other people and nations.
Beethoven is cultural fertility, Beyonce is not, even though she’s thousands of times more popular and commercially successful.
That, or statistics collection anomalies. Russia being Russia, the second is more likely.
I remember a story my friend once told me, when he was doing apprenticepship during the studies. They were in some goddamn village in the middle of nowhere and went to the disco. He said that some city boys got into the troubles with local village boys. The city boys were all packed, from the gym and had some basic martial arts tricks, with all high kicks, boxing etc. The locals were not impressed – one of them simply caught one city boy (who was taller and bigger than him) and then while grasping him by one hand, he just repeatedly punched him with the second hand. My friend said he never expected this would be such a one-sided fight; there was not even much blood and in fact looked quite hilarious.
The difference was, it seems to me, that the city boy in the gym worked out the particular muscle groups to look nice. The village boy was working all his his life in the fields and probably never ever went to the gym.
The size is not all which matters. Whether the size goes into the muscles or not matters a lot. Men have a lot more muscle size than women of the same size.
Number of felonious killings of cops in the US in 2018? 106. Number in Hong Kong over the past 30 years? 4. Extrapolating from 2018’s dead cop numbers, on a per capita basis, felonious killings of cops in the US are ~20x the rate in Hong Kong. That’s the primary reason US cops are more trigger-happy. American suspects are more murderous – a fact reflected in the fact that US per capita murder rates (5.1/100K) are – surprise – 25x Hong Kong’s (0.2/100K).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/05/08/the-number-of-u-s-police-officers-killed-in-the-line-of-duty-increased-last-year-infographic/#79ff50f61189
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallant_Garden
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Homicide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Hong_Kong
When someone comes at a cop with a weapon in the US, he’s looking to kill the cop. In Hong Kong, he’s just play-fighting, the way most physical altercations in Hong Kong don’t end up with serious injuries for any party. Whereas ER’s stateside are a great training ground for anyone looking to get a lot of experience with major trauma patients suffering from knife, bullet and blunt force wounds, a great number of which are crippling or fatal.
I heard there was a talking point that First the Russians were bigger targets and then Bin Laden etc became bigger targets and thereby China bought some 30 or 40 years of time.
For names, how about the Weekly Standard editors? And what about Sen. Rubio?
Are you serious?
Anime and Manga created entire generations of Japanophiles across the world
It also brought attention to the country in ways, for example, Bollywood can’t
Speaking from personal experience, but many kids learned about Tokyo before they learned about Berlin, Paris or Moscow, by seeing it in the animated shows that they watched
As a result, Japanese tourism gets large number of fresh customers that aren’t just Koreans
Calling it derrivative of Chinese culture is pretty ignorant, since Anime isn’t only Monkey King and Guan Yu ripoffs, and even if it were it’d be like calling Roman culture derivative of Greek
And I don’t see how Beethoven and Anime are comparable, shouldn’t it be Anime vs German Classical Music, or Mozart vs Miyazaki
The artistic skill, effort and devotion that goes into something like Kimi No Na Wa or Spirited Away is certainly comparable to the same that is required for Reneissance style realist painting or Russian ballet
https://i.imgur.com/qwiFt5y.jpg
We have also had a lot of debate on a so-called “masculinity crisis” in Sweden, but the conclusion drawn is that even the sad state of the average Swedish ‘man’ is too harsh.
https://i.imgur.com/oCDQaC3.png
https://i.imgur.com/WEK2YBo.png
I remember reading about Xi Jinping talking about blood and soil in a cultural speech some years ago. The guy is anything but a pozzed liberal. The problem for us is that given Chinese isolationism, they are more than happy to save themselves but will look on as global leftism creeps onwards in other countries. I don’t buy Peter Frost’s suggestion about an imminent africanisation into China.
In reality, the few nogs that China had are already being purged.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/08/life-drains-from-little-africa-as-china-dream-fades-for-its-fortune-seekers
Effort and devotion, yes. But claiming anime is on the same level as Russian ballet in artistic output is a statement only a weeabo could make.
An apposite Needham paraphrase – it does look as if the Communist Party is continuing a long tradition.
“The Chinese Empire enacted totalitarian control and was able to do so because of its great size. There were smaller independent states that had no choice but to comply with this control. They could not afford to isolate themselves. The Chinese believed in the well being of the state as their primary motive for economic activity, and individual initiatives were shunned. There were regulations on the press, clothing, construction, music, birth rates, and trade. The Chinese state controlled all aspects of life, severely limiting any incentives to innovate and to better one’s self.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Needham#The_Needham_Question
As if you watch either lol
But fine, still I’d say that the best of Anime can compete with the best TV series or Film from the West
Median wages are typically 66% or so of mean wages, though obviously that precise figure will differ based on inequality. But that sort of relation is not atypical. And in an case will not much affect this comparison, as Hong Kong is hardly very egalitarian either. I was using the statistics for mean wages for both Hong Kong and Moscow to compare like to like.
How old are you?
Here is a ranking of top 100 favourites based on a poll from NHK (Japanese version of BBC) from 2017 with 600,000 participants.
The only one, and near the bottom, based on Chinese culture is “The Twelve Kingdoms”. The rest are Japanese or European-American inspired.
Tiger and Bunny
Tiger and Bunny: Rising
Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Love Live! School Idol Project
Love Live! School Idol Project Season 2
Tiger and Bunny: Beginning
Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion
Cardcaptor Sakura
Love Live! The School Idol Movie
Osomatsu-san
Gintama
Joker Game
Legend of the Galactic Heroes
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion R2
Is the Order a Rabbit?
Mobile Suit Gundam
Digimon Adventure
Psycho-Pass
Sword Art Online
Clannad After Story
Girls und Panzer
Haikyuu!!
Detective Conan
Hyouka
Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie Part III: Rebellion
Attack on Titan
Space Battleship Yamato
Revolutionary Girl Utena
Bungo Stray Dogs
The Prince of Tennis
Love Live! Sunshine!!
34Cowboy Bebop
35Steins;Gate
36Natsume’s Book of Friends
Fate/stay night [Unlimited Blade Works] (2014)
Hoshi no Ko Poron
Future Boy Conan
Mobile Suit Gundam SEED
K-On!
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
The Castle of Cagliostro
45Bakemonogatari
46Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
Sound! Euphonium
Free! – Iwatobi Swim Club
Girls und Panzer der Film
Fate/Zero
Your Lie in April
Shirobako
Pokemon the Movie
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
Gintama
Uta no Prince-sama: Maji Love 1000%
Your Name
K-On!!
Laputa: Castle in the Sky
Sailor Moon
Re:Zero -Starting Life in Another World-
Free!: Eternal Summer
High Speed! Free! Starting Days
Katekyo Hitman Reborn!
Yu Yu Hakusho
The [email protected]
Haikyuu!! Second Season
Is the Order a Rabbit??
Mob Psycho 100
Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans
Fullmetal Alchemist
One Piece
Macross Frontier
Shounen Hollywood
Space Battleship Yamato 2202: Warriors of Love
Cardcaptor Sakura Movie 2: The Sealed Card
Angel Beats!
Mushishi
Urusei Yatsura
Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu
K Project
Kuroko no Basket
Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day
Hunter x Hunter (1999)
Pokemon
Armored Trooper Votoms
The Twelve Kingdoms
Kekkai Sensen
Hetalia: The Beautiful World
Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water
Mononoke
Kill la Kill
InuYasha
Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer
Dennou Coil
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders
Akira
Macross: Do You Remember Love?
Gan to Gon
The Tatami Galaxy
https://goboiano.com/here-are-japans-top-100-favorite-anime-of-all-time-part-2/
https://goboiano.com/here-are-japans-top-100-favorite-anime-of-all-time-part-1/
Considering the “best” TV series are now all woke SJW propaganda, anime is easily better. In anime you also see more white people (ok I know that some white looking characters are supposed to be Japanese), than in the works made in formerly white nations.
Is “The Nation Formerly Known As White” Americas rap name? XD
I’m glad you brought up the (former) Weekly Standard editors. Perhaps the most important of those editors, William Kristol, made news late last year by asking why regime change in China shouldn’t be an important foreign policy goal of the United States over the next couple of decades.
It was news in large part because despite Kristol having never met a foreign country he didn’t want to change (preferably with military force), he has largely avoided the topic of challenging China, even though he had a major media platform in which to do so over the last two decades – a time which spans almost perfectly the period in which I believe that China became America’s most formidable potential adversary.
Why so late? Why was Kristol initiating this public debate on Twitter only last year? Perhaps because he never focused on China to nearly the same degree he has the Middle East and Russia.
Marco Rubio, too, has been very late to the party. Until recently, China was only one among many foreign policy topics that the Florida senator habitually speaks about. He never spoke about China as the top geopolitical threat to the U.S. and mentioned it far less than even Cuba.
What’s certainly true is that neither Rubio nor Kristol approached China in anything close to the same manner that their counterparts thirty years ago would’ve approached the Soviet Union. The Cold War wasn’t just one among many foreign policy topics. It was THE foreign policy topic in the U.S. for over forty years.
9/11 probably changed a lot. People forget that, just months before the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, China had captured the crew of an American intelligence signals jet when it landed on the island of Hainan after an aerial collision between it and a Chinese military jet killed a Chinese pilot. I was hearing rumblings that the U.S., under George W. Bush, was going to become more focused on China. Then 9/11 happened.
I don’t really follow the legacy media anymore, but in the US, they weirdly used to regularly cheerlead the whole housing phenomenon.
I put it down to their main audience being made up of old people, who enjoyed the benefits of the insane rise in the value of their homes. Any news show on US TV had commercial breaks loaded, wall to wall, with old people drugs. But I’m not necessarily blaming boomers, just saying that it was perhaps a positive trend for them.
I agree with your main points though: there is some sort of economic distortion involving multiple factors, and it is a major societal problem. I think there are similar trends with education and healthcare. Maybe, these latter two are not as big a problem universally, as far as pricing goes, but, even so, I think there are all sorts of distortions involved beyond ticket price, which are bad for society, and might be part of the essential problem of solving low TFR rates for civilized peoples.
You’re trying to convince me that anime is popular and commercially successful. Which is a fact nobody is disputing.
But you’ve said nothing to convince me that anime is somehow evidence of ‘cultural fertility’ or that it inspires culture.
In fact, it’s probably the opposite – people who get sucked into anime will probably never get to read real books, watch real movies or create anything artistic. Even if they start to get interested in art, anime will make sure they never learn real art but will forever be stuck on the highly stylized and primitive forms of anime.
So, in net effect, anime is not ‘cultural fertility’, it is in fact cultural herbicide that will leave host cultures poorer and more barren for it.
Have you actually read ‘Journey to the West’?
Do it and come back, maybe there will be something to discuss.
Agreed.
The international scope of the problem indicates an international cause–and that is excess investment money of the wealthy looking for high returns on their capital.
(That is caused by their cozy relationship with the central banks–as shareholders they get to use the newly created cash first as the central banks try to prop up their country’s over-leveraged financial institutions)
In most countries certain urban areas have the crazy housing markets while much of the country does not. Most folks (and virtually all media clowns) do not understand that it does not take that many investors buying to destabilize a housing market since the only a small portion of the housing market turns over at a given time.
Think of it as an auction where every price is reasonable until five billionaires show up and start outbidding each other.
Bodybuilders tend to be hampered by limited motion training and redundant muscle groups to be efficient strikers. Technique is important even in short and concrete licker street fights.
What causes knockouts is a force that forces brain matter to wallop inside the skull.
If one can manage punch/kick hard enough- he can potentially knock out anyone. Mike Tyson was 218 lbs at his prime and he would have knocked Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson weighting 420 lbs and towering him by 10 inches.
Zagreb is boring, I work there (although I don’t care for music). Coastal towns like Zadar & Split are much more entertaining &, in my opinion, better looking (Zagreb being a dreadful example of the worst styles we associate with Habsburg empire architectures).
But the topic is HK.
I don’t think we can still call most Asian (and some Latin American) metropolises “cities”. Even New York City, with all its wealth & glamour (sometimes, somewhere), is still a “city”- which can hardly be said about HK, Shanghai & Lima. These are huge & sometimes impressive, but still- anthills populated by, mostly, Darwinian zombies.
https://ceoworld.biz/2018/02/12/worlds-15-richest-cities-in-2017-new-york-london-and-tokyo-tops-list/
Why would a normal man want to live in those metro-shitholes eludes me….
This just happened this month(August). What’s your opinion about “Black Live Matter” protest?
How about the incarceration rate in the US? Do you think there is anything that the US government can do?
As for the HK protesters, they are not exactly harmless. One of the cops had a finger bitten off; another had a testicle fractured from a kick by a protester. About 200 cops were injured from the unrest, ranging from fire burn (causing from gasoline bomb) to stabbing.
Jeet kune do is actually a composite of everything lee knew. Actually is very good to know.
I’d really like to see China outputting counter propaganda, to the same degree that the US is making it. I believe their media regulations prevent any overt racism, which is really a shame because anti-racism needs racism to combat it.
LOL: Hong Kong protesters are just “play-fighting” with real bombs and bricks and stones and metal poles and umbrellas.
Hong Kong protests: Powerful homemade explosives found ahead of fresh rallies, Sky News, July 21, 2019.
Hong Kong is nowhere nearly as important to the rest of China as it used to be.
A few facts:
In 1997, Hong Kong generated approximately 20% of China’s GDP.
That figure is now down below 3%.
In 1997, about 50% of China’s international trade used to pass through Hong Kong. That has now fallen to about 12%.
Until about 20 years ago, Hong Kong’s stock market was twice the size of China’s other stock markets. That has changed, and today Hong Kong’s market has been bypassed by Shanghai’s, and Shenzhen’s is also poised to eclipse it.
Until about 15 years ago, Hong Kong’s port was the largest in the world. Today, there are three ports within China, Shanghai, Ningbo and Shenzhen, which are larger, and Chingdao is rapidly gaining on Hong Kong. A new port will open soon in Guangzhou, which will also have a large impact on Hong Kong’s port.
Beijing’s attitude: we would like you to continue to prosper, integrated with the other great cities in the Pearl River delta, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. It’s a great pity that you’re choosing to destroy yourselves, but if you insist, we will not stop you.
A serious question: Which do you prefer?
A social credit system that punishes people for outrageous public displays of cross-dressing, gender bending activism, “pride” activism, educating children about “alternative sexuality”, etc. (China)
or
A social credit system that punishes people for CRITICIZING outrageous public displays of cross-dressing, gender bending activism, “pride” activism, educating children about “alternative sexuality”, etc. (US, Western Europe, Canada, Australia)
“Is Journey to the West” worth reading?
I was thinking of seeking out a copy, but I hear “Dream of the Red Chamber” being much touted, and from descriptions of it, it sounds like it is really long and really gay.
Of course, a lot of the literature in the West that is touted is similar.
Play-fighting, my ass. Almost 200 cops were injured during this ordeal. Getting finger bitten off or getting testicle fractured sounds like playing-fighting to anyone?
Not only that, the private information of a couple thousand of police force personnel was released. Many of them and their family members have been threatened, harassed and abused.
Chief Superintendent David John Jordan talks about how his family was targeted.
https://youtu.be/jCQtXm4IMt4
Given that you are wrong on the majority of what you postulate here (as acknowledged by many commenters here, even those with otherwise divergent opinions), you may want to switch to a different style of argumentation.
Sad, really sad what the Jews are doing to Hong Kong.
I’m both surprised and relieved that they haven’t sent in their snipers to shoot at protesters and then blame the police.
It’s an old Bolshevik tactic they used in Kiev for their (((Maidan Revolution))).
That’s why the Emergency Regulations Ordinance may soon be invoked in Hong Kong.
On the other hand, the most googled TV show in 2018 was from mainland China.
That’s nice for iQiyi, but what does this have to do with Anime or Japan?
So what qualifies as anime? I see some Ghibli movies on that list, Princess Mononoke, Laputa Castle in the Sky and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, but none of the really popular Ghibli movies, like Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Totorro, The Borrowers, etc.
Are those also anime?
Thanks
What the fuck are they waiting for?
Something that Chief Superintendent David John Jordan said in the above audio clip does not make any sense:
Wrong! No international police force will allow a certain amount of damage or disruption before they move in. This is simply wrong and nonsensical.
Why is the Hong Kong Police Force allowing any damage and disruption at all? There should be a ZERO tolerance policy.
Again, I am reminded of what happened in Kiev 5 years ago when the police were restrained and we all know what happened there.
I smell a dirty RAT! Who is David John Jordan really working for?
Yes, they are all anime. I would consider all post-war Japanese animations to be “anime”. With older or foreign works it can get a bit blurry around the edges.
This is a lie. Median wage in Moscow is below 1000 USD.
Kiwi jockey Shane Dye once said that Hong Kong was a great place to live if you were on the up, but absolutely awful if you were down and out.
Depends. It’s basically anime in written form, even down to those ridiculous repetitive transformation sequences.
If you like anime you’ll probably enjoy it, but don’t expect too much. It’s basically shonen manga without pictures, not some grand philosophical treatise about the meaning of life.
Protip, going with the ‘majority opinion’ is a sure way to do it wrong. But go on being content by being part of the herd, sure beats thinking anyways.
Back to the point: you have nothing to contribute and no experience to impart, your only function here is to be a claquer for other claquers. Why do you persist? Do you not have real friends and/or family?
Is Journey to the West worth reading?
Are the Canterbury Tales worth reading?
Is Boccaccio’s The Decameron worth reading? Is Plutarch worth reading? Shakespeare?
I feel that reading a work of writing or compendium of works that offers a glimpse of the development of a culture, a people, a society over an extended period of time is extremely worthwhile. Journey to the West is such a work of art, as are some of the works I mentioned above, especially The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron. These works feature collections of stories that were compiled, not created, by their authors. Indeed, many of the stories date back to the age of oral storytelling, a prospect that is intensely interesting and stimulating to me. I imagine a biweekly market day in a bustling Chinese town. People are excited and happy to buy necessities, and have special foods, prepared by stall owners. A large group of children, old folks, and adults are thronged around an animated man who is telling a story; the audience is spellbound, as this man relates a tale of how the Buddhist monk, Tang Sanzang and his helpers, Sun Wukong (the Monkey King), Zhu’s Bajie (the pig/man who is driven by his appetites) and Sha Wujing (the Dragon Horse) meet and ultimately defeat the Demon King of Confusion. His version of the tale has been embellished by his own ideas and skills, and indeed, he has created a few adventures featuring the characters by himself. The Journey to the West, by Wu Chengen, was published in print form in 1592. It is recognized for its excellence, and has become the definitive version. After its publication, other writers stopped cobbling the stories together.
My market storyteller was weaving his stories in the year 1182. Archaeological digs from caves in China turned up written stories of the characters in a less developed form that were dated from the 12th Century.
Get a good translation and read it. You won’t be disappointed.
The Journey to the West is indeed manga-like. It’s fun if you’re into that, but it’s very childish and not a very good window into wider Chinese culture.
The Water Margin now, that’s interesting, and I’d say it had a much wider impact in Japanese storytelling, with its focus on dumb heroism and loads of simple but unique characters. If you had to read one Chinese novel, I’d say you should read this one first.
Don’t do it if you’re even a bit sinophobic. The degree of gratuitous violence and psychosis will shock you if you’re expecting some sort of genteel herbivore asian vibe like you see in Japanese stuff.
I will probably read it, after all.
I’ve heard that Chinese kids can regularly be observed pretending to be the Monkey King. I find that really fascinating, since I can’t really think of a close parallel. That is to say, I never see European kids enacting out their native mythic figures – it is all horrible pop culture that I need to have explained to me, and then need to forget.
I saw a Chinese movie with the characters once. It wasn’t good, but I suppose the same can be said for countless adaptations of King Arthur.
I’m probably more interested in myths than most people, and I think it is sometimes worth reading the bad parts to get at the good parts. Like, it is worth suffering through the tourney lists of the King Arthur mythos to find the knight who is in a daze contemplating how two drops of blood from a goose that got away from his hawk, remind him of the cheeks of his love. Or the king fringing his mantle with the beards of other kings.
Then, there is the Irish myth The Táin. It really is a mix. Parts of it seem juvenile or even scatological, and it is intensely violent, but, parts of it are very clever, and it has a theme which, as a nationalist, I find awe-inspiring.
I have a v close friend developing real estate in iskander, there is a huge amount of Mainland Chinese money pricing out local developers who normally have a much bigger piece of the pie, though it has slowed down since BN got thrown out of power
And tbh nowhere near as many Singaporeans want to move to the state as the govt wanted with this project, they still rightly see Johor as a shithole dangerous wasteland
Lol not only do maids not contribute to TFR, anecdotal observation from many of my hk friends with maids is that a lot of them start batting for the other side due to lack of men. Plenty of fat Filipina maids holding hands and making out in public gardens on their days off.
That, or the lucky ones snag a clueless 50+ Brit expat :DD
“and it has a strong government where it can formulate policies that serve the interests of its people. ”
Interests of it’s people, like interests of ants in a colony? No thanks. I prefer being an individual – one that doesn’t want anything to do with forced collectivism.
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. Ayn Rand
Say what you want, but: I’ve read “Dream of the Red Chamber”. And all I can say: I didn’t find virtually anything in it except trivial things & ….alien things. Mentality & morality are not just strange, there is something more alien as if dealing with people who see & sense the world as fundamentally different; of course, with regard to language & many cultural connotations I’ve been left clueless & without a key.
There is an “otherness” in Chinese literature I don’t think most Westerners could surmount.
Her name is Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
Now go post your satire somewhere else
Isn’t it a little bit boring if we restrict our discussion on Japanese Anime only? If you could talk about China’s culture influence on Japanese Anime in 2017, maybe I could also mention Chinese effect on international TV shows in 2018?
Maybe David John Jordan represents the less hawkish faction of the Hong Kong government, although I do not know where the hawkish faction of the HK government is? HK government and police are in a lose-lose situation. They will be damned if someone dies before they invoke the laws. They will be damned if someone dies after they invoke the laws. So maybe they should invoke the laws earlier rather than later?
“I didn’t find virtually anything in it except trivial things & ….alien things. Mentality & morality are not just strange, there is something more alien as if dealing with people who see & sense the world as fundamentally different; of course, with regard to language & many cultural connotations I’ve been left clueless & without a key.”
First, the “Dream of the Red Chamber” is not “Journey to the West”. I was commenting on the latter. You feel that your experience reading the former empowers you to pass judgement on not only the latter, but all Chinese literature. Okay…
Second, your quote above should serve as a learning experience for you. Unpack it. Deal with the fact that you live in a world in which there are many cultures and societies that are alien to you. There are cultures and societies that “see and sense the world as fundamentally different”. There are cultures and societies whose mentalities and moralities are beyond strange to you… they are alien.
What to do? Embrace the world that you live in, with its rich variety of human cultures and societies. Get on with your life; pursue your dreams in this world.
What NOT to do? Stop trying to force this rich variety of human cultures and societies to fit into your fucking mold! Stop trying to force them to be like you, to share your values, to share your mentality. This is the sin of the arrogant west, and it’s amusing that it continues and GROWS in tandem with the rise of the economies of the east and the leveling of the world.
I want to mention this.
Over about 1000 years before westerners came, Chinese culture export to Japan can be described as enormous while Japanese culture export to China was miniscule. Compare this to England vs Continental Europe, or Byzantium vs West Europe.
Also, other than a short invasion of Korea a few years before 1600, Japanese never bothered with Okinawa/Ryukyu or even Hokkaido(!) in its long history before westerners came. I knew that AK once used the Korean invasion as an example against Japanese being different in this regard, but this is truly a case of an exception proving the rule.
And, where did anime come from? It’s a strange, almost alien invention IMHO. Of course if you trace its development, you can see. But, still, the strangeness should’ve been remarkable if you just pause and think of it. BTW, I think that because there’re so many kinds of anime/manga, and some people may have saw one that they didn’t like and gave it up and now they think every pieces are of the same. Actually, the expressiveness of manga/anime is awesome. With a little bit of exaggeration, it’s like people giving up reading because of pulp.
I sometime wonder that if the Incas got a few more centuries, we may witness another very peculiar and rich culture phenomenon. Now we only got Machu Picchu.
You find buildings of more than a thousand years old in Rome.
It’s mainly about the materials they used. And the peculiar history of Rome. (It was center of the World, and then it was a forgotten village.)
But in remote places of China, there’re a few lonely buildings that’s more than a thousand years old. In general, old buildings were teared down, burnt down, replaced all the time. I think some of Leonardo’s bronze horses were destroyed because of war needs. And Last Supper bearly survived WWII. And Jesus’ feet in Last Supper didn’t survive local needs of the monks.
My point being that it is kind of a new thing of our time that old buildings are treasured that much.
About architectual merit, I mean, seriously, what are you talking about? If you have a big tall building, there must be a lot of merit going into it I’d imagine? (Even if it’s ugly.) Or, are you saying that if they do not look like a Gothic Church, then there’s no merit? I did hear once that some folk saying that the Hagia Sophia (or maybe the other one) had not much arch merit comparing to old stuff of Rome. Or that people saying Pyramids are trivial. (On the other hand, there’re people saying Pyramids are absolutely scifi crazy.)
One author I otherwise like very much once wrote an article saying praises of Eiffel Tower while denouncing the Shard of London.
Think about it in the other direction. Close to two hundred years of turmoil for Chinese to learn about the West. And the end is still not quitely in sight.
Parts of Journey to the West is Tom Sawyer level fun. I remember reading them in school classrooms and burst out laughing. In class.
But the CPC’s system is not set up to fight sex perversions.
Now the interesting question is: then why does it go this way?
Is that because it actually caters to the majority opinion? Now this is truly bizarre.
This is not true, historically. There’s a tendency to picture Mao as the essence of China. That is as true as Stalin vs Russia. Or Hitler vs Germany.
Many Chinese intellectuals of the 1980s can be caricatured as thinking that, because China has Mao, Confucius must be sick.
The worst episodes of CPC rule, the famine around 1960 and the cult revolution, were direct products of Communism thinking. Ie., imported Karl Marx and Stalin stuff.
Comment #140 is your response
If you’ve watched more than 20 anime you quickly realize that the plot lines and characters are recycled over and over in different series, to the point where you get quickly confused if you already watched this particular iteration of it or not.
It’s not like the Incas died out. There’s 10 million of them today, and a quarter of Peru still speaks Quechua.
Good points. I think fundamentally the Big Housing Dilemma™ is essentially a nexus of two powerful dogmas intersecting in the west: immigration and rampant neoliberalism, especially financialisation. Both dogmas must remain unquestioned, so their explanatory power in the housing crisis remain unmentioned in the media.
And as previously mentioned, many media barons already have deep stakes in the rent-seeking of this dysfunctional situation. Bonnier recently divested their TV assets to plunge deeper into real estate. Why would they question rent-seeking oligarchs profiting from a wildly unaffordable real estate “market” in their own newspapers, especially given their own role?
I prefer neither system. I don’t think the state should have that kind of power. Once you institute that level of granular control over people’s lives, a state almost never gives it up voluntarily.
To the extent a state should even be enforcing matters, it should always be in the context of upholding personal liberties and freedom of association. I don’t romanticise corporate oligarchy the way some libertarians do, either.
This is a naive answer. Simply, “Dream..” (I will not say anything about other works I haven’t read) is an offense to Western normative poetics & aesthetics (as are Indian epics, The Mahabharata being the primary example, which may be shortened 3-10 times & nothing significant would change).
As for “different..”- “Dream..” has only basic sensuality, childish stories reminiscent of fairy tales & not much more. It is simply a product of an underdeveloped mind, or a mind saturated with fantasies to such a degree that it hardly distinguishes between reality & fantasy. It is not an example of playfulness, but infantility.
And it is ill-constructed (I don’t buy post-modernist mantra of different, not inferior). For instance, Proust’s “Search” & Tolstoy’s “War & Peace” are magnificent even in this respect, because we assimilate without effort the multitude of characters due to authors’ adeptness in introducing us to them gradually; on the other hand, Pasternak’s “Zhivago” is, mostly, a failure because Pasternak was a poet who tried to write a novel & did it clumsily, cramming his work with characters galore with a result one can hardly know who is related to whom & who is whose mistress & why & where.
“Dream…” is similar, in some respects, to fairy tales (and fantasy, per se, is “not quite adult”); there is not much there either for heart, mind, “soul”, sensibility, … Unlike some works of early Chinese poetic philosophy, it is, I’d say, of historical importance only & does not give reading pleasure.
That said – let anyone read whatever he wants. This is just my opinion.
Your answer is the correct one. If you had to choose, though…
In addition, while the Chinese system is government run, the power centers driving the social credit system in the US does NOT originate from the government, although government agencies do adopt the prescriptions recommended by these power centers, which, in my opinion, are much less concerned with the lot of the common people in the US than the Chinese government is with the common people in China.
I remember being told that in Hamburg, in the Middle Ages, the churches were built, so that each new one would be able to fit everyone from the city into it. Maybe, that sort of thing is a cultural aspect of monotheism, which can tend towards large scale, at times, and would by itself influence the materials used.
Then perhaps, Europeans were competing against each other for bragging rights because of their fractured political nature.
I’ll define architectural merit this way: if it is destroyed, how easily could it be rebuild? Would it require a lot of skill? Or could you put a whip-hand to some Nigerian layabouts, show them a few pictures, and get it done in short order?
What I’ve seen looks like brick laid upon brick, in low profile buildings. Not much to distinguish one from another, and they could be built today and nobody would know the difference.
Perhaps, most old churches weren’t impressive either, and what you say about valuing old buildings being new is certainly true.
For the record, I think Hagia Sophia is pretty impressive, but probably not in the top 10. The pyramids have a certain unique cachet because their age, but if I could travel back in time and take them or the man-hours, I might take the man-hours, and do something different, like bury clay tablets of history.
That can observed in every form of story telling, the theory of every story ever told being based on seven different types seems correct.
Not true. Western pulp fiction may be shallow, but it is never repetitive, and certainly not to the point where you get confused by what series you’re watching like with anime.
The Eiffel Tower wasn’t much appreciated at the time. wikipedia:
Asians have literary culture of romanticizing suicide. They have higher proportion of teenage suicide right around the time teenagers start to read their literature for school. Hmmm.
Nope it is all about fighting spirit. City boy was a pussy and could not take a hit. Size matters. We also run under the assumption that both opponents are competent.
I am a local HKer. I met Ray Kurzweil in 2009 and started reading and following Singularity and human evolution. I am also very curious about Race and IQ like you. There is a vibrant tech and futurism scene but it is not in English which is probably why your friend is missing out on it.
Most people, especially whites, think their country is more beautiful, more cultured and better in everyway. Perhaps the language barrier is an obstacle to appreciating Cantonese music which is probably he has that impression. Cantonese and mandarin music scene is alive and well. My cousin is a death metal vocalist…
Just as in the US or europe, we have a big immigrant problem in HK.
You called them expats I call them immigrants that refuse to assimilate.
HK should follow western best practice and insist everyone learn some Cantonese before they can settle.
We were all libertarians when we were young and dumb but then you grow up.
It is extra bad in Anime.
Probably related to the large number of produced anime and the far more limited number of studios.
Immigration and foreign may be responsible for rises in some cities like Vancouver, but the bulk of transactions in most markets will be carried out by locals. And it is not a huge mystery that real estate has increased in value in cities with a mass of high earners when mortgage interest rates have collapsed since 2008.
Stockholm’s rises have been exacerbated by the rent control laws which discourage construction of homes for rent as opposed to owner-occupied units.
Better towheaded heroes than miscegenation.
Not likely to happen or as they used to say, not a Chinaman’s chance.
Just exchanged on my flat through Yopa, would say central London prices have dropped ten to twenty percent in the past three years, in the past three months a further five percent. I think a flood of Chinese money has had a big effect, prices are set at the margin, the price drops in places like Vancouver, Australia and London have coincided with that money drying up. Of course low domestic rates and immigration have also had an impact, am hoping that the stymieing of EU immigration and eventual higher rates will provide me with the opportunity to purchase another property at even more favourable price point in the future.
I really doubt the author since most of the riches of China swarm to live in Hong Kong due to one single word: much better environment.
I think he can stick to the mainland though.
I remember a very funny observation in B. Russell’s History of Philosophy tome … he was discussing Hegel’s Philosophy of History, “because Hegel knew next to nothing about China, he thought that The Chinese civilization represents the “moment of Nothingness/Negativity” in the Dialectic movement of the World History.” and same goes with India, too.
I don’t know anything about the Chinese culture, ERGO, there ain’t such a thing.
Well, I hadn’t read Hegel on China or India before so I used Brin’s engine on it.
It’s not an un-nuanced discussion for someone who probably knew about as much about China as Russell did. This is possibly the most incendiary quote:
and it echoes things I have heard Chinese say about their own society.
Which was more or less accurate at the time.
About Buddhism:
This seems to me to be a perfectly orthodox statement as regards Buddhism.
This above seems at least an interesting comment on Buddhism.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/lectures1.htm
Personally I don’t think Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber are worth reading. I would recommend Romance of the Three Kingdoms… I think this work continues to influence how the Chinese view politics.
Many Chinese people are fond of Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber though. I would rank the Romance of the Three Kingdoms first amongst the Four Great Classical Chinese novels, followed very distantly by Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber. Journey to the West is too ridiculous for my liking.
They haven’t stopped though. On Twitter they’re bashing Trump for not “standing with the protesters”
Look at these brave “freedom” fighters the West rhapsodize.
Attacking senior citizens in a subway car. (at 6:20) When the senior citizens fought back, they set off a fire extinguisher (at 8:31 ). Then attacked a woman, took her glasses and phone. (at 8:59 )
https://youtu.be/hlC0PS5lwk0?t=390
Destroying subway station and beating up passengers(at 2:20)
https://youtu.be/qp-WLx50tvw?t=144
Not really. It’s just that people see the West lying and moralizing constantly about everything, and so all the targets of the lying and moralizing–such as China–begin to seem kind of heroic and appealing.
I mean, really, all the whining about democracy in HK when in 2011 we stood by as Saudi tanks rolled into Bahrain–the home of our 5th Fleet HQ–and crush the demonstrators.
Endless hypocrisy just irritates people, and they tend to gravitate towards those who are assailed by the hypocrites.
That’s all it is. No cargo cult.
Insofar as just about everything is now made in China and then shipped to the USA, “cargo cult” is very accurate to describe the current situation; but not in the way you meant it.
See Wikipedia’s definition of Cargo Cult which originally describes what happened in Melanesia in the wake of contact with advanced Western cultures, but it also describes, I would argue, what has happened in America in the wake of your Jewish Oligarchs shipping all the major manufacturing jobs to China.
I refer you to this pertinent part from Wikipedia (I’ve inserted Trump and MAGA in the quotation):
No need to go so far as Saudi Arabia. In New York, the Jewish Banksters brutally beat Occupy Wall Street protestors and their MSM covered it up. RT (Russia Today) was the only major alternative news channel that reported and exposed it.
Look like mainlanders paid provocateurs to me. Both sides try to limit the violence.
This is hilarious considering people are whining about chinese cops being beaten here.
I guess cops being beaten in the US = GOOD!
Cops being beaten in Hong Kong = BAD!
Despite the fact they are both armed and dangerous?
Looks can be deceiving but once they open their mouths, you can tell where they’re from. Mandarin-speaking mainlanders who swear in pitch-perfect Cantonese like a native Hongkie…not likely. Not a Chinaman’s chance, and I mean that literally. lol
Murican cops are more brutal than their HK counterparts.
They are the same actually, as proven by video in this very thread.
Baton beating, checked.
Water cannon, not sure about US side.
Tear gas, checked.
Cop piling on people, checked.
But because one is in the US, and one is in Hong Kong, that’s where we decide who are the good cops/bad cops.
@MAOWASALAYI
There are mainlanders who speak cantonese too. Impossible to prove.
Cantonese speakers from Singapore/Malaysia, Guangzhou, Macau and Hong Kong have different accents and vocabulary.
It’s possible to try and pass yourself off as a local, but most people I’ve met from Hong Kong could tell I’m from SEA under three sentences exchanged. I’ve been told its the way I don’t stress certain tones because I’m used to speaking Mandarin.
I hope so, for a few years house price rises from my London place alone were outstripping earnings from my job which is v unhealthy for a productive economy. Anecdotally it seems stamp duty rises, the new tax regime for buy to let and Brexit have been bigger than Chinese cash drying up. Congrats on the purchase, I will likely be moving to Bristol so the next buy will probably be the four bed detached the wife wants to nest in.
I can tell that the cantonese from Gangzhou and Hong Kong are the same (except Hong Konger have more English word) never mind the fact that the very native Hong Konger can be an undercover agent provocateur paid by the police to smear protesters.
Many such cases in the Yellow Vest!
After their subway rampage an hour later these thugs were cornered by the police. Look at how they cried like a little bitch. Notice how the guy put his mask back on even in tears.
https://youtu.be/i-F1y6EI4SM
They all act tough when they have mask on and can gang up on innocent bystanders or anyone who has a different opinion than theirs.
Look at this guy. When the cops took off his mask .. “I cannot breath, I cannot stand up” .
https://youtu.be/KjlN2AOIau0
It’s all fun and games pulling emergency brake on a subway car. Not so tough when got busted.
https://youtu.be/Lq_iY6p7K-o?t=86
You can try to distinguish between elite culture and mass culture.
But China’s elite contemporary elite culture, just appears to be imported old culture from Europe.
Distinction between elite and mass culture does not make much sense in 21st century anyway, as most of the world’s elite culture (of any value) shut down production around 40 years ago.
So China is not producing mass culture of exportable value, and its elite culture – to the extent this exists – is imported from Europe.
I disagree with your idea this is something especially “alien” or exotic.
Chinese culture has simply been behind European by centuries, at least in recent centuries.
If you read European prose text from 14th century or even 15th century, they appear just as childish and illogical as any book you can find from China.
In Europe, it is only in the late 18th century, or perhaps even early 19th century, that the written prose suddenly seems very modern, intelligent and sophisticated.
So the higher level of consciousness, intelligence and civilization we expect from classic literature, seems like a universal cultural stage, that a few people in fifth century BC Athens could reach, as much as writers in 19th century Europe.
Warsaw today is very bourgeois. Centre of an economy which is transitioning to first world.
Tel Aviv has at least 60,000 illegal immigrants (probably low estimate as government has lost control), mainly from Africa. They also spread over large areas, which are a kind of wasteland areas of the city. Normal area of the city is quite limited in size.
But by far the main reason for higher property prices is absence of mass transit system in the city and poor transport infrastructure inside the city. (If you live in a city without adequate mass transit inside the city itself – then you might want to pay a lot to have an apartment near your work, so you don’t waste a large portion of your life in a traffic jam).
Explained in this documentary – because the government owns the land and sells it to raise its funds.
WTF are you talking about? A lot HKers live in Shenzhen. Some of them have school age children, and some of the kids go to school in HK Monday to Friday. Over 30,000 HK kids commute between Shenzhen and HK for school.
Shenzhen is not exactly cheap either, especially the areas that are close to HK. Those who live in “cage apartment” don’t necessarily have the wherewithal to live or work in Shenzhen.
What?
Beethoven’s music is vastly more popular than Beyonce, who people don’t listen to a 6 months after her “songs” are released. She’s popular as a celebrity – because women are interested in her lifestyle, relationships, or makeup, etc.
Beethoven’s music has been popular for two centuries now, and is ubiquitous, and is playing in 21st century Chinese hotels as much as adverts in Mexican television, and concert halls in Vienna (which will continue to be played as long as concert halls exist in cities like Vienna).
And that’s not including his influence on transforming music history, and most composers after him.
It is going to be Brexit completely… investors (I mean non-English people who want to invest money into England) do not usually want to risk savings for London property, until the outcome on value of the assets after Brexit is clearer.
It could even have implications and changes to tax, or mortgage rules, etc… so unless you can predict the future, why would you not wait some time?
Also, for example, a possible scenario if chaotic political effects of Brexit results in election of a more socialist government, which decides to raise funds by taxing non-English people who invested in London.
On the other hand, the cheaper prices as a result of devaluation of the British pound could compensate for the risks.
This is incorrect.
Guangzhou’s canto tones are softer and lower (I suspect because of mandarin-based education) and there are some sounds missing from certain words they use that makes their speech sound less.. harsh? Sharp? I’m not qualified to explain the exact difference, here’s an article I found that may explain things better:
https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-differences-between-Guangdong-Cantonese-and-Hong-Kong-Cantonese
Look, I get that you’re trying to paint a narrative here but frankly if the mainland is bussing in thugs they’d stand out like a sore thumb the moment they open their mouths.
In fact I haven’t actually seen ANY videos of black shirts caught on tape with mainland canto accents, which is interesting because I’m willing to bet the protestors would spread it everywhere for PR purposes.
To Anatoly ’s insular Croatian friend :
A closed mind is one that can’t see beyond what he knows. You wasted your time in HK if you think HK don’t have “music” diversity.
My cousin, one of the “violent” protestors made this. Don’t think your Croatian guy can handle it. Sorry, Go back to your Croatian country music.
I guess anything is possible for a country which lifted 800 million out of poverty in 40 years.
Your grandchildren might be speaking mandarin as his mother tongue.
Have you ever visited Asia or places full of Asians? It is not backwards, but just fundamentally different and alien. Asian literature probably reflects this.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I spent some time in Vancouver (full of Asians, in some areas we were the only white people) with friends from Texas. Vancouver was beautiful, orderly, excellent sushi, but not it was not “ours.” It felt for all of us as if we were among aliens (we once mistakenly wandered into the area full of heroin addicts – those were white). I asked my friends to compare to their Mexicans down in Texas – they said that unlike the Chinese, the Mexicans felt more familiar. They were more interactive, more “normal.” They are generally poorer, louder, less educated, but still “ours.” This is understandable, as they speak a European language and are Catholics. My friends visit Italy often, this probably contributes to such impressions of Mexicans. Overall, they said that they would probably prefer a Chinese family to a Mexican family living next door, but would rather live in Texas than in Vancouver.
This is alien Taiwan:
https://www.edreams.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/01/Old-Town-Jiufen.jpg
https://www.qsl.net/wu4h/pictures/taiwan/nightmkt.jpg
Mexico:
https://www.touropia.com/gfx/b/2017/07/tequila.jpg
https://www.tripsavvy.com/thmb/NuAA2ANuA0q6WaQRzvQ-B23CM3k=/3863×2578/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/pe-a-de-bernal-mexico-537325160-583f8ab43df78c0230237b99.jpg
I don’t know enough about the politics there to comment, but the scenes look like Maidan in Ukraine.
The Croatian is right.
The music in that video is totally derivative, unoriginal, and boring Death Metal, which would have been bad enough in 1995, but is just absolutely pathetic in 2019. It’s not a good example of music diversity; instead, it highlights the lack of originality that so famously characterizes the Chinaman. It’s also a mark of inferiority — for no matter how good your “friend” becomes (and I don’t think he’ll ever be very good, if that video is anything to go on,) he’ll never measure up to the Americans and Europeans, in particular the fucking Florida Jews like Chuck Schuldiner, who created and then transcended the genre.
That is an interesting way of seeing it, or thinking about it.
I’ve been to Japan twice (but nowhere else in East Asia).
In Japan, I would say I personally feel more like it is “close to my heart” than I feel in America. (but it feels less like “close to my heart” for me than France or England).
This could more reflection of how convenient or accessible the streets and shops, are in Japan, rather than a cultural similarity, though
.
It might be a stereotype, but Mexican people are usually one of the most sympathetic, extroverted and friendly nationalities, in my experience. I actually knew some Mexican people who I studied with in the IELTs exam preparation, and they were all friends with every nationality in the first day, or more like the first 15 minutes of the course.
While Chinese people, can seem one of the most difficult people socially, and least easy to talk to.
But Chinese people from Taiwan seem to be more developed or easy to meet with on average.
In Mexico, I have only visited Tijuana – it was a little scary there lol.
America feels quite alien to me as well, but this is not necessary a sign of cultural distance, but I think more with difficulty of its urban design for visitors.
American cultural products don’t feel alien (actually, the opposite), but the country itself is culture shock when I try to navigate there.
So? I’m sure contemporary Chinese culture is influenced by European culture. On the other hand, at least contemporary Chinese pop culture is not making its kids dumb, as American pop culture does.
Chinaman,
Your cousin made a pretty good video as far as getting sympathy for the rioters is concerned. Compliments. Starts off with some guy giving the same advice as onebornfree gave in the other thread. And it looks like your cousin took it by running to Taiwan. I suppose one can feel some sympathy with the rioters even if not agreeing with them. But then he was selective in preparing that propaganda piece – watching some other videos can make one absolutely hate the rioters, like those depicting typical extremely fascist anti-citizen behaviour.
Again, I maintain the opinion that Guangzhou cantonese AND Hong Kong cantonese are very similar to each other, but maybe new-age cantonese in Gangzhou are different, I haven’t seen much people speaking cantonese in Gangzhou when I visit their, mandarin is genociding cantonese.
Also, there’s the possibility of agent provocateurs being native HKer but paid by HK police/China to make trouble, so I’m not holding my breath, what matters is the other protesters try to calm these paid provocateurs down, even in the videos.
And how did they do it? By earning moneys from special Economic zones set up by America and European corporations and paying their workers FAR less than their american and european counterparts.
The jew corporations and the chinese government are connected in the hip in abusing chinese.
And yes, you flaunt your own genocide here by flaunting mandarin, I doubt you are a HKer.
That’s my impression also.
Probably, I’ve only known one such person.
Even though Germans are not so extroverted, one does not feel like among aliens when in Germany.
I visited a couple of times in the late 90s, before the 21st century epic lawlessness. There were some rough parts but also nice parts. We took a streetcar from Sand Diego to the border. The area near the border smelled like sewage. Beyond that were nicer areas, with boulevards, some shopping mall. The nicer parts reminded me of eastern Europe in terms of development. Rather than gypsies pickpocketing, there were little kids selling chicklet candies at 3 AM. I didn’t go to the bars where American sailors went. There was an incredible disco (Baby Rock) that resembled a cave, with fake stalagmites, elaborate lasers. My wife and I were probably the only non-Mexicans there, I think the local elites were partying there, the locals were well and expensively dressed and Spanish or Italian-looking, not Mestizos.
LOL, I googled Baby Rock and found this, I guess we were partying with the local drug lords:
https://www.popsugar.com/latina/What-Like-Grow-Up-Tijuana-43423147
My karate instructor was an MP in Vietnam. He’s been in his share of physical fights. His karate teacher was a sergeant who taught hand to hand fighting at an army base in South Carolina.
These people know “real fighting” and choose to train in traditional Okinawan karate, which owes a lot to Chinese martial arts.
What you see in the movies isn’t what is taught in good martial arts schools. Also boxing and wrestling are sports and street fighting is not a sporting match. For self defense you don’t punch someone in the stomach – you hit them in the throat or kick them in the groin. You don’t grab their torso to wrestle them to the ground – you grab their head and try to break their neck.
All good reasons to stay out of fights in the first place.
He is 22. His mum brought him to Taiwan since I think he might be wanted by the police …no extradition agreement. I asked him to stay there so he won’t destroy himself and my city. Those who don’t like China or HK should immigrate to some place else, simple as that. Not sure it is the same advice as onebornfree.
These kids are HK’s future and It saddens me to know HK will be handed to them. Youth is wasted on the young, we were all stupid at one point . I think they will look back at this and wonder what have possessed them.
Music DIVERSITY or genre diversity is independent of music originality. You do understand the distinction, do you ?
I agree with you that my cousin’s stuff is pretty crappy and I could have picked a better example but I am sure Croatian never knew there was a death metal scene in HK. indeed, Death metal EVERWHERE around the world is for losers and a mark of inferiority. It kinds of draws angry white supremacist like you. I will check out the Florida Jews.
Funny you should say that, I guess all the black fellow reading you comment will be LOL since that’s what they wanted to say about the lack of originality from the pathetic “wiggers” and “whittie”who is trying to copy his lines. For me, The only true American art is Jazz and when Miles Davis and Coltrane played live in the 60s under the influence of lethal doses of illegal substances.
I am very happy to discuss cantopop with you if you want to discuss originality. There are some interesting people who have transcend the genre like Jay Chou.
Chinaman,
Violent youth protests were quite common in South Korea. There was a time when the huge national university in Seoul was a no go area for the cops but outside the students used to regularly battle with the police although I never knew what they were always protesting about. Many of the students used to get arrested and jailed during those demonstrations but after graduating used to get good jobs and even become executives. Nothing of the scale as now in Hong Kong but still quite violent. Don’t know if that scene has quietened down there by now. Even the Buddhist monks in Seoul used to have violent protests in those days.
Erasmus? Rabelais? Montaigne? Locke? Sir Francis Bacon? Descartes?
In terms of sales or radio airtime? Not a chance.
This is true, and it’s the difference between ‘culture’ and ‘pop culture’.
‘Pop culture’ is a top-down artificial social engineering phenomenon, made purely to keep some bad characters rich. As such, it doesn’t produce anything of value and people want to forget it as soon as possible.
I was talking about 14th century (and said also some 15th century texts can have that primitive quality).
Descartes is from 17th century.
Sir Francis Bacon is from 16th-17th century.
Locke is from 17th-18th century.
Montaigne – 16th century.
Rabelais – 16th century
Erasmus – 16th century
–
By 15th, 16th, 17th – century, all are changing in Europe to a level of very high sophistication. And in the end of the 18th century, we attain the modern level.
If we look at one of the most intelligent and modern English texts of the end of the 17th century, by John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Even the most sophisticated geniuses of late 17th century Europe, can sound like:
Obviously if you read few pages you can see how intelligent Locke is though (at a much higher level than existed outside Europe)
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/004897225.0001.005/1:5.7?rgn=div2;view=fulltext
And writers of middle 17th century, are often more difficult to read, not just because of strange words, but also train of thought. Here is one of the most famous European philosophy books – Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651):
I just click on a random part of this famous book which is one of the most intelligent of the 17th century.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm#link2H_4_0010
Oops this quoted block of text not from Locke (I made a mistake trying to find the text, and copy/pasted an 18th century text describing Locke’s text).
Here is the text I was thinking about and had wanted to quote about parrots (Locke is writing almost in a modern way):
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Essay_Concerning_Human_Understanding/Book_II/Chapter_XXVII
Germany feels to me as ordinary (I only have a limited experience of visiting Germany, and I had always no special impressions of this country; neither impressed by it, nor the opposite).
On the other hand, America feels quite exotic, and every day there is an interesting surprise (for the short-run tourist, at least, who is there for only 2 weeks).
To me, of few hours impression, Tijuana seemed definitely still close to a third world country, with lack of basic things like a mass transport system.
Obviously, it’s not representative of the whole country and Mexico many bourgeois people and areas.
But comparing to Japan – Japan feels a lot more normal for middle class person and a lot less shock for your mind than Tijuana.
And then with Tijuana. I don’t remember seeing all those prostitutes – but that reminds me of Spain where you see the prostitutes standing all along the centre of Madrid. But everything is exotic and tropical in Tijuana and seemed close to third world level.
I have to second that. Chinese are extremely hard to open up.
In what way did you find America to be exotic?
I wasn’t discussing middle class comfort, but cultural similarity and alienness. Certainly Japan would be more comfortable and pleasant than a Mexican lower class area (and much of Mexico is a lower class area). But it would also be more weird. And while a European can feel comfortable in an middle or upper class Mexican place, he will feel like an alien if he is in Japan long enough.
Walking around Guadalajara:
Walking around Kyoto:
This is the tourist district of Kyoto. It’s mostly Chinese tourists there, rent kimonos and get selfies…
But areas of even Kyoto, where people actually live – are quite ordinary.
It’s not very exotic, though, until you cross the river to the historical area.
It looks like this district, is a wealthy, 17th century Spanish city.
One of the most exotic travel experience I had anywhere, was to live one night in the historical district of Seville.
Streets were a labyrinth where you are lost trying to find your hotel for hours.
When I arrived at night before Easter, I did not know about this stuff – oranges are already ripe on the trees of every narrow street, and they were rehearsing all kind of mysterious processions at 1am.
There are multiple of these kind of processions rehearsing in the labyrinth of the city.
Among first world countries, America can be one of the most exotic you can visit (I imagine this is the situation also for Americans, who visit different cities they are not used to).
Just walk for a few hours in Los Angeles, or explore in the bus all over the city for a day.
Those are unique local customs, but overall architecture, food, way of life, speech isn’t so strange.
What did you see that was so exotic, though? And what parts of the USA did you visit? Genuinely curious, not arguing.
That’s my claim – that exoticism of the city like Seville doesn’t necessarily reflect overall cultural distance.
Today Spain is rapidly converging to world culture and EU culture. Young people in Spain are addicted to Netflix, shop in Amazon, wear clothes from H&M, eat Oreos and a significant proportion of them are weebs.
Some Spanish culture is still a bit exotic. For example, perhaps sexual views unusual (all the prostitutes openly selling in Gran Via in Madrid), or the fact so many young people do not leave their parent’s apartment until they are 35. However, there is far less separate in the culture of Spain than could be 50 years ago.
On the hand, Japan is still one of the most separated or independent general cultures, and they also have one of the strongest linguistic isolations. They are also original culture exporters, and might be even influencing world culture to be more like they are, than agreeing to converge.
Yet, – despite much greater cultural distance – when you are in Japan, quite a lot of things do seem usually very exotic, at least for me. (In America, the sensation was of having more a exotic “adventure” every day).
When you order ordinary salad in e.g. Bilbao, and they cover your salad with baby eels. When you order jamon, and they give you a plate all the way to the top with large pile of only jamon. In the restaurants, they can still be unusual in Spain.
But it’s true, in the supermarkets, Spain is quite converged. For example, Aldi, is just selling all the same things in Spain as in the rest of the EU.
I have not travelled very much in America.
More recently I visited San Jose/San Francisco/Palo Alto, Los Angeles, San Diego. And in previous times – years ago – to New York and Washington DC.
Personally, I find it one of the most exotic first world countries to visit. But this is probably a reflection that I only visit for a short time.
In Los Angeles, for example, it is really an adventure just walking from Hollywood to the Japantown. And I thought in San Francisco, there is equal variety.
I had a feeling every morning when I woke up in the morning in America, that I was going to see something new.
Although in San Jose/Palo Alto, I explored everywhere for a couple of days on bicycle, and could see it would rapidly (within a week) become very ordinary and non-exotic.
Generally, Chinese seem quite difficult to talk to and can be unfriendly, while Japanese are the opposite even though they are quiet people. (Every Japanese person I have met was externally friendly, even if they cannot understand a word – they are at least externally or superficially acting friendly)
Why are Poles generally so unusually talkative and friendly (even if in an eccentric way). But people from e.g. Scandinavia, so difficult?
That’s the complete opposite of what most people with experience in East Asia believe. The Japanese use politeness as a shield, even with other Japanese, whereas the Chinese are more Western in their relationships.
Yes, the Japanese are among the most polite people I have ever met, but it’s superficial. (Which is fine, by the way. Manners are all superficial customs. In most circumstances we are more concerned with people being polite than we are with worrying about why they are polite.)
But affability? The Chinese are more affable than the Japanese.
Making friends? The Chinese are easier to make friends with than are the Japanese.
The Chinese are also far easier to upset (and to forgive) than are the Japanese.
In short, the Chinese are more understandable to Westerners than are the Japanese.
I’m not sure about most people, and perhaps my sample is unrepresentative.
But all Japanese people I have met (to extent I can remember now) have been friendly, responsive, and they seemed adequate, while with Chinese people my experience has been more mixed (to say it politely).
If you view Western as implying more unpolished or uncultural people.
But there is wide variety in the West. For example, in England, the bourgeois population can be very polite to you, and start to apologize to you even when they didn’t walk into you.
I’m not sure that is true. When I studied English, in multiple different summer courses (multiple years), Chinese people usually didn’t make friends with us, with an exception of a girl from Taiwan. While the few Japanese people integrated more with us (i.e. with people of different races).
Most Chinese people are still a third world nationality, while most of the Western countries are at a first world level.
In my opinion, it will be another generation before there will enough similarity of experience between Western and Chinese populations, for any easy understanding between them.
I’m sure it will happen, and Chinese will also become much more socially skilled people in the future. But this is something ongoing and very far from currently attained.
I don’t disagree with your point that there’s a positive uniformity to the Japanese character when you compare it to both Western and Chinese types, both of which have more variation and a higher likelihood that you’ll develop either a good friendship with someone in the group or bump into a complete asshole.
But the Japanese positive traits you mention are superficial; there’s not much depth to them. The Japanese are super-polite and helpful, but you aren’t likely to break through to any deep and meaningful friendships or even have serious and intelligent discussions with them. With at least some Chinese, you can.
No, I’m talking about the variation in character type that we in the West generally associate with individuality. I see more interesting individuals among the Chinese than I do among the Japanese.
I agree with that. But the same is also true of the Chinese. It’s far less true of the Japanese.
I can’t speak to your individual experience, but I lived in Taiwan for over ten years and during my time there I traveled extensively in East Asia and met many Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans. I also had many American friends who studied or worked in both China and Japan and told me about their experiences. Even before I became fluent in Mandarin, I could see the different types of East Asians pretty clearly.
The Taiwanese are easily the friendliest of the various Chinese groups. Singaporeans and Hongkongers, perhaps reflecting their colonial backgrounds, are generally colder, but polite. Mainland Chinese are pretty rough, disputatious, and sometimes standoffish, but warm up quickly and are quite approachable if you’re friendly to them. I’ve had interesting English-language discussions with many individuals in all these groups.
I’ve had no interesting discussions with the various Japanese I met.
One friend of mine, who I met in Taiwan and who had lived in both Japan and Taiwan, told me that he hated living in Japan because of what he called their weird social dynamic. He described stepping onto an elevator in Tokyo filled with Japanese who appeared to not know one another because the elevator was so silent. But as the elevator began its trip up, one Japanese after another would make a short sideways’ comment to another Japanese in the small space. Only then did my friend realize that every Japanese in the elevator already knew each other and they were just being silent out of social custom.
That’s true, but we were talking about personality type, not wealth.
Many people have the same reaction as your Taiwanese friend to the Japanese social dynamic. In fact, on these Unz comment boards I have seen so many comments to the effect that Japanese hate people from other countries and cultures. I find this unfair and overcritical, and it grows out of ignorance. Your explanation is pretty good; people who have lived in Taiwan for a long time (I’m currently at 32 years here) cultivate a better understanding of the surrounding East Asian cultures.
The pedagogues of cultural differences, for example the trainer who is preparing a soon-to-be expat going to Japan for a long-term assignment with the company there, explain the Japanese social dynamic in a pretty compelling and clear way:
Imagine Japanese society as a series of concentric circles, like an archery target. The smallest circle, the bulls-eye, represents the family. The second circle represents close friends. The third from the center represents colleagues/schoolmates. The fourth from the center is more distant acquaintances. You get the idea. The interesting thing about Japanese culture and society is that they don’t like to mix the circles. Perhaps there are cases in which they will mix socially with people from two adjacent circles, for example a family event that includes a very close friend, but they will never invite acquaintances and new friends into the bosom of the family.
Now imagine American society as a sliced pizza. The more distant acquaintances and new friends are often invited into the family home for a dinner party or barbecue immediately after meeting them. That is because the social dynamic is constructed in a different way.
Needless to say, there are many factors that contribute to this, but I’m amazed at the over-the-top, judgmental tone that many western people adopt when addressing Japanese culture. They don’t hate you; they simply follow their social practices and customs. I just visited Japan this summer, and I continue to admire their society and culture. They value their own culture and society, and they take action to protect it.
The differing societies and cultures in the world make it a great place to live. The worst thing that could happen would be the continued homogenization of the world’s cultures into a single culture. Variety and diversity are good things, when they occur organically, in separated countries and cultures that show mutual respect and strive for understanding. Runaway diversity in ONE nation, on the other hand, leads to instability and competition for resources.
I agree. I don’t dislike the Japanese. In fact, I find their culture very attractive in many respects. But the Japanese are more alien to me (as a Westerner) than are the Chinese. More alien, more remote, more distant, less explicable.
Where do you live in Taiwan? I spent all my time in Taipei, and most of that in the Xinyi district.
I cannot see how being friendly, polite and helpful, can be described as a negative trait. It’s a bit of a sign of civilization, in my opinion.
Formal social rules – can be interpreted as oppressive, or as a sign of civilization.
On the other hand, peasants, proletariat, and tropical peoples, who have fewer social rules, can be liberated by that as well, just like eating food with your hands on the table can be more relaxing than fork and knife. There’s a benefit and cost to anything like this.
Economic development is one of the causes of the personalities we encounter.
I think one reason mainland Chinese people often seem rude and primitive, to an extent, is because of their poverty, and even greater recent poverty.
It’s unfair to expect people from such difficult environment as Chinese, to be like gentle Englishmen of a Jane Austen novel – in China, the population lived in a terrible economic and political environment for multiple centuries. Rough and primitive Chinese personality, has a lot to do with a rough history.
On the other hand, Taiwan was governed kindly by the Japanese Empire. And after independence from kindly and responsible Japanese rule, they became a developed economy already by the 1980s.
This is likely one reason why Taiwanese people, on average, might seem more adequate or less hard, compared to people of mainland China.
Anyway, I’m sure in less than a generation – if the economy continues to develop -, mainland Chinese will seem a lot less rough than today.
For example, a Northern Spanish colleague, has explained to me the strange and closed social customs of his region of Spain.
Every person in this special region of Spain is supposed to have 4-5 friends, which is described as “cuadrilla”.
This cuadrilla of closed friends is set by early 20s, and can never be modified.
If you want to invite another person to go out with your cuadrilla , then it requires consent of all members of the cuadrilla.
If you invited another new person out without consent of cuadrilla, – this is considered a betrayal of your friends.
For a person from another culture, or even another city in Spain, it would be almost impossible to enter into the cuadrilla of the local peoples’ closed friends.
However, the cuadrilla does not always socialize together, and it’s the other days of the week when they can take a guest out.
I live in Kaohsiung, but I spent my first twelve years here, from 1987 – 1999, in Taipei City. Funny that you mention Xinyi District, as I had dinner with an old friend there on Anho Rd. one week ago. Taipei is like a different city these days; my wife and I had dinner with my old friend and his wife in an Italian restaurant run by a fellow from Rome. The entire area is full of interesting restaurants, many of them owned and run by foreign people.
Peace
A quadrilla is the group of people assisting the bullfighter or matador.
Your friend must be a Basque, as this is a common term for a group of friends in that area.
I like this custom. It keeps the friends close together over the years by ensuring that they regularly have meetings of just the cuadrilla. On those occasions, it would be wrong to invite a stranger in. I’m guessing that the bonds of the cuadrilla are not too tight; these are old friends who probably trust each others’ judgement about those not in the group. Observation of who your closest friends are hanging out with is an opportunity to make sure that they are keeping their sanity. In addition, as you said, it is only the “cuadrillo nights” that should not be impinged upon by outsiders. On other social occasions there is no problem having other friends.
I would not equate this with the Japanese social system, which is much more comprehensive throughout the society.
Peace
I didn’t say they were negative. I said they were superficial, which means they are largely on the surface of things. Politeness, helpfulness (but only up to a point), and even friendliness (on the surface) are all good things, and I personally value them. But they only go so deep in the Japanese and are often ritually used to keep other people, including other Japanese, at a distance. There’s nothing evil about that, of course, but it is very different from how Westerners and the Chinese relate to both each other and others.
As the Japanese practice them, they’re both. The Japanese have an impressive society and culture, which I respect a great deal. But don’t fool yourself. Japanese society is very different from anything in the West. And you can’t measure its distance with economic stats.
Not really. The Japanese have loosened up a bit in the last few decades. As wealth increased, some social rules were relaxed.
And some of the friendliest places I’ve been to on earth have been quite poor. Bhutan, for example, is as nice a place as anywhere I’ve ever been. GDP per capital in that country is just over $3,000 a year. Less than a tenth of what it is in Japan.
The Cultural Revolution didn’t help. Nor has 70 years of Communist rule.
Nice to meet a fellow Taiwan expat.
I lived about a block away from Taipei 101. It was great. In less than ten minutes, I could walk to numerous restaurants, a movie theater, the MRT, and several department stores. Not to mention the tallest building in the world (at the time). I loved it.
As my colleague describes this social system, it’s almost impossible for a foreigner (including people from other parts of Spain) to penetrate to a close circle of friends. Even when they are married to people from different regions of Spain, or that move there from different regions of the country, they will find it difficult socially.
Culture of Western nationalities, are not the same in their relation to politeness. Civilized politeness of bourgeois (but not proletarian) English people, is very different from charming and warm politeness of Italians.
One of the most mysterious and misleading politeness in the Western countries, is perhaps the American one (as I hear from people I closely know who have worked in America).
Sure, some nationalities are on average acting more friendly, and some not. Some of this is quite mysterious (why are Poles, on average, so talkative? why are often Finns or French, so rude?), while in other cases – especially tropical peoples – it would be strange if they were not.
But in the context of the Chinese, it is unfair to expect some polite or socially very adequate people, considering their industrializing society, recent extreme poverty, and recent political disasters.
I agree with that, but if you were to arrange all the Western countries and Japan on a scatter plot of politeness, the Japanese would still be outliers.
Again, I have no serious disagreement with you here. Except I wouldn’t say it was politeness in America that’s misleading, so much as Americans’ casual friendliness and outgoing nature.
You originally mentioned the relative lack of wealth of the Chinese (compared to other East Asians) as a factor in their lack of politeness. I don’t think that has anything to do with it. You can travel to many SE Asian countries, which are far poorer than China, where the people are extremely friendly and warm.
Now you add in China’s industrialization and recent political disasters. Okay. I think those certainly contribute to the fact the Chinese are rougher than, say, the Taiwanese.
There are different kinds of polite as well. Western countries have a huge variety between them.
Finns are famously rude (or considered as so, by people who are not from Finland and knowledgeable about their social code). But their awareness of personal space, and requirement in this, is considered the highest in the world.
How Finns queue for the bus…
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CwlPvS8XEAAN3ix.jpg:large
http://blog.liu.se/keelywitherow/files/2016/11/busstop.jpg
I thought Americans are very responsive and helpful. But I have heard described by people who lived more 3 years in America – after Americans are extremely friendly and warm to you, they can turn their head and pretend you don’t exist. And that making friends with native Americans is not easy.
This “hot-to-cold” friendliness of people can be a quite strong culture shock for visitors. Although, Americans seem to be so habituated to it that it is not something you read about on American websites.
But not carefully mannered like Japanese, or upper middle class Englishmen.
I’ve already acknowledged all that, but geographically, linguistically and genetically the Finns are on the margins of the West. Still, any American would have harder time adapting to Japan than to Finland (or China).
The way I would put it is that the casual friendliness and warmth of Americans can fool some non-Americans, who assume that casual friendliness and warmth means there’s a friendship between them.
But even among the Japanese and uppercrust English, manners were more prominent before the modern age. Both have become less mannered over the last few decades as their wealth has increased.
Manners were only emphasized for the English, in the elite classes – landowners and bourgeoisie. They not were important for peasants and proletariat of England, who until recently constituted a great majority of the English race.
Today (or in the last 50 years), the bourgeoisie of England will be far larger than ever before in the country’s history.
So at least, in absolute numbers, there will more Englishmen saying “sorry” to each other when they collide bodies on the train, than ever before.
We know the elite of Japan had the sophisticated court life, since already in The Pillow Book. And then they have written endless books on correct manners, and codification of social etiquette in the 14th and 15th century.
But when does this obsession with manners extend beyond the aristocrats, who are only a small part of any country. I can read that bourgeoisie begin to seriously study manners in the Edo Period.
My uneducated assumption, is that it will not be until the 20th century, that the majority of the population (former peasants and proletariat of Japan) becomes habituated to these manners.
While it is an interesting conversation with you, I cannot understand this part of the sentence.
Japan is one of the more convenient and easy countries I have visited, despite not understanding any Japanese except “arigato”, “konichiwa”, “onegaishimasu”. In addition, every Japanese person I can remember meeting has been friendly and responsive.
On the other hand, China (while I have not visited) is still third world country, and most Chinese I have met have been difficult to interact with.
So I find it difficult to believe it would be easier in China.
Same person I know who works in America (actually family member), has also no American real friends – although working there for 3 years… So it’s not necessarily such an easy social environment for the non-Americans.
If not Finns. How about Denmark? Denmark is definitely not on any margins of the West?
However, Denmark is supposedly difficult for foreigners to live in, and the Danish personality is also a bit difficult.
https://rottenindenmark.wordpress.com/2013/06/06/why-i-could-never-move-back-to-denmark/
By the way, I work in a Western European country (have lived total of two Western European countries now). My experience is that where I live is socially pleasant, but because of other gastarbeiters – mainly from other European countries. We don’t really know local people very much. Gastarbeiters are mainly only friends with multinational gastarbeiters, as if it was a continuation of an international school. I would advise anyone moving to another country – the presence of many gastarbeiters is one of the main things that will make socializing in a new country easier, and which you should look for.
Does Bernie know about this? He admired Denmark and wants America to be like it:
The Racism
Ahhh, Denmark, the Mississippi of Europe. While living here I was constantly confronted by casual ugliness (‘you’re visiting Turkey? But it’s full of Turks!’), bone-headed public policy (If you want to marry a Dane and get a visa to live here, you have to speak Danish and your spouse has to pay a $10,000 bond), and Mad Men-era political discourse (one of the political parties ran an ad this year that published the names of all the foreigners who had been granted Danish citizenship with the tagline ‘One person on this list is a danger to Denmark’s security’).
Just in the four days I was visiting, two friends told me about ethnically motivated beatings that had taken place in their neighborhoods and two other friends told me they were moving to the suburbs because the local schools didn’t have enough white kids left. Another friend got mugged recently, and the first question everyone asked when he told them was ‘were they black?’
This shit is exhausting. Sometimes living here is like following your Republican friends on Facebook.
Scandinavians were typically rural and very isolated from each other for most of their history which encouraged introversion.
Bernie Sanders is senator of the wealthy and bourgeois region of Vermont.
Attitude to immigrants there could be a little analogous to Scandinavia’s contradiction? I.e. saying that you like them for virtue-signalling, but in real life not actually liking them?
And if not, then there is probably some analogy in other areas. In some of the comments below the article, they describe Denmark’s economy, as like very similar to situation Bernie Sanders/Andrew Yang want to convert America’s economy to.