The cultural differences wouldn't display by leaving of your friend :) there's so much more than "obedience".

They do not riot, because they, too, understand, that the capacity of hospitals is quite low comparable to the density of people.

The other points: You can't just leave the country without being a foreigner. Chinese people need a Visa for the countries they want to enter.

The social score / if you participate in riots, you for sure will get identified.

The fear being hurt.

No other possibility, because the Chinese officials are really hard in that terms and they don't care if one get hurt.

No other possibility, because the doors are locked by the officials. No one can go to riot.

They use an app to track one's location and track whether one's in "red area". If so, you lose. Everyone have this app. Without app you can't even buy things on the market.

And of course, the CCP. They have a high membership rate. You can't do some jobs like teacher/professor without being a CCP member. So, they're full on the line of party, because they really believe in that. My exgirlfriend entered the party on her 18th, because her father was a doctor at a military hospital. Being a non member gives you some disadvantages in some parts of live (indirectly, but there are some).

So, you have to speak the language (me do) and have to have lived there for a while (me did) to understand why they're doing it and why they're is not much withstanding of the people.

One of my girlfriends (haha) just arrived two weeks ago in europe. She says it's crazy over there. No end of the 0-covid in sight... Her flight was cancelled 8h before flight because of lockdown of the airport. She had to rebuy the tickets, go to Shanghai and start off there.. But she does not criticize or get angry when talking about this. Her family is still there. She is just happy to be in Europe, because of me and main purpose studying - not because of the measures.

But, yes. It's crazy.

I appreciate the perspective.

Maybe it's just something about being an American, but even while I was in the Army I had a "fuck you" attitude about most everything that the brass (i.e. the leadership, if "brass" doesn't translate) made us do. Now that I'm a "civilian" again I still retain this attitude. A lot of important business leaders do too. I'm not really sure if this is a feature of American culture or not, but it's certainly a truism that has existed for a loooooong time.

I share that "fuck authority" idea with you, but I think it's important to remember that the context you grow up is very important in setting cultural norms. In many ways, even the things it's possible for someone to believe are based on socioeconomic circumstances.

If you're blasted with propaganda constantly, if the means and mode of productions are set up in a certain way which encourages certain behaviour, it becomes very difficult for people to even realise there are other possibilities.

This is a feature of every society, including in the West. We have a strong individualist "fuck you, I've got mine" tendency, but just like China and Russia, there is a large portion of the population that also lauds the people who exploit us because they are seen as something to aspire to.

Don't get me wrong, I'd rather live in the West, but personally I see many similarities when you look at the life of an average person.

I meant no disrespect to other cultures with my comment.

I agree with this point:

> We have a strong individualist "fuck you, I've got mine" tendency, but just like China and Russia, there is a large portion of the population that also lauds the people who exploit us because they are seen as something to aspire to.

There's a problem when "fuck you" is taken to scale and is the operative means for running a government. It's a hard problem to solve, since I want a responsible and competent republic to maintain a reserve of "fuck you" people because, and let's be honest here, they're the ones who fight wars.

To be fair, people in any culture observe certain unwritten rules and not others.

The consequences are where the biggest difference lie. Look what happened to Jintao a week ago. You are truly never safe issuing criticism in China.

My hypothesis is this attitude is one reason for the US’s economic success.

You can have some immigrant like Elon Musk tweet insults to the president and people complain but nothing happens. You can have companies create new businesses directly in violation of laws (Uber, AirBnB). There are very few sacred cows and we tend to root for the underdog.

From living in Asia, deference plays a big role in social relations - deference to parents, deference to elders and definitely deference to authority/government. And it’s often not for a rational reason but just because “you should respect your elders”.

I hear lots of people say it’s “well they are more group oriented and think about what’s best for everyone” but one look at the piles of trash randomly dropped or people shoving to the front of lines makes me think it’s not that.

It’s more of acceptance that what the government says is how it will be. They’ll bitch about it, happily break rules if they can get away with it, but if the government comes in and says “dont do that or you’ll be punished” they won’t push back and will defer to the governments authority.

> And of course, the CCP. They have a high membership rate.

You can't study at a university without your membership card. Just in case why you wondered why everybody you meet is a CCP member.

Yes. That's true. But only applies to the universities run by the state (f.e. Jin Hua university, which in fact is the Harvard of China)

But all the other schools run by privates, it's not an big issue.

:)

That's not true.

Why? I've been there and studied, too. So, would you please add what's not true?

On hospital beds, is the variant going on right now still omicron? The likelihood of such mild variant overwhelming the country's capacity is fairly low.

"Her family is still there."

Main reason is family first. The ccp will threaten your loved ones, if you do not comply. And family is all you got to rely on, as social network, as thrustworthy people, as pension plan, as everything in a culture optimized to pitch man vs man.

Its a mob, threatening the citizens. All the cultural factors amplify the mobs power, and no nobody believes the texts of the ccp. Its just that the don is always right.

The vast majority of Chinese people have no option but to continue to suffer the rules, although not a few are speaking up despite the likely consequences:

https://www.thestatesman.com/world/tibetans-march-on-streets... (note that the protestors are by and large Chinese, not Tibetan)

Of the remaining privileged minority, many are choosing to GTFO.

Other than the money leaving the country, would those leaving essentially be the grease on the squeaky wheel? If they have the financial freedom to have the courage to speak out, but then use that financial position to GTFO, that essentially helps the CCP as there's a much lower volume of opposition.

Such is the dilemma of living or leaving a dictatorship. Also, it's one thing to stand on the barricades and risk prison when you're young and single, but it's a whole different level when you have family and you know the CCP will not hesitate to use them as pawns. (In Xinjiang, it's all too common for parents to get sent to reeducation camps, and the children end up in orphanages.)

This will probably be an unpopular position, but I think some things are a matter of settled strategic win. The CCP has won. You shouldn't fight a battle which results in your meaningless destruction. The CCP can only have a semblance of vulnerability if it terribly mismanages China, and so far it seems to be rather competent.

Totalitarianism. Just that. You do not know what uou are risking if you protest. It may be worse that death or jail… Your family…

Edit: the ellipses are because there are other possible outcomes, just that.

I am not blaming the Chinese people. I am blaming the present (well, last 70 years at least) mode of government.

Read Soljenitsin or Ginzburg or Nadiezda Mandelstam and you wil see what totalitarian Communism is capable of.

More edit: I would be totally scared as well, by the way.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Is this really a political statement?

Was the French Ancient Regime a liberal government letting people choose their lawyers?

Was the French Revolution bloodless?

I'm commenting based on the direct remark made to me recently by one of the admins of this site, after I had also made some ideological/political comments, take it up with them (with the site admins, that is).

Those ellipses are doing so much ideological work for you. Those unspeakable, fantastical horrors cannot even be named. That's how bad China is.

Reality is much more boring. China a place with 1.4 billion normal people and it's amazingly not that much more different than anywhere else. Different enough to where they've prevented widespread death from COVID, but not different enough that they might effectively suppress the ongoing petty bourgeois protest against COVID restrictions in banking in Henan. You're the one stuck in Disneyland, believing in fairytale wonders like "totalitarianism." What exactly do you think happened off-screen to the speechless mass of animals after Scar was assassinated? The ellipses work wonders for Disney, too.

Here you go: one way to complete the previous sentence about what exactly happens to children in China when their parents are arrested.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/15/china-xinjiang-children-...

Much more interesting to follow live stories rather than throw around Adrian Zenz's crumbs years later. Here's the ongoing protest I was referring to, where "shattered lives" is a bruised back or (worse) the imaginary threat of becoming proletarian: https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/10/china/china-henan-bank-deposi...

It’s telling that you went from “show me historical precedent” to “history is off limits”.

China's vaccine doesn't work. That's why they continue to lockdown. It's not really more complicated than that.

Why are you responding to me with this?

You invented some weird strawman about how great China is and that's why they need to lockdown (1.2 Billion people or something). I'm pointing out that the reason they're locking down is because their science sucks and as a result the vaccine doesn't work, so Covid is still a thing there when it isn't in the West because we have working vaccines and also a lot of people with natural immunity.

Oh. Well more people died of COVID in the past two weeks in the U.S. (where COVID is no longer a thing) than have died of COVID in China ever.

My how the goalpost has shifted.

> Well more people died of COVID in the past two weeks in the U.S

because they dont want to take the vaccine, its their choice. The govt should not force you to take the vaccine.

> West because we have working vaccines

PRC vaccines work about as well as western ones in preventing serious cases, which is to say western vaccines suck as much as PRC vaccines post delta when they couldn't do the one thing that distinguished themselves - preventing spread (which from recent Pfizer drama they didn't even test for so mRNA was... never substantially superior). Hence the entire narrative around superior mRNA wank is ridiculous considering how little benefits it has especially with extra cold chain requirements or just the geopolitics of trusting unreliable foreign govs.

Combine with west being systemically incapable of containing covid and PRC still left with only obvious choice of exercising superior state capcity to zero covid which prevents millions of deaths using stats of mRNA effectiveness in neighbouring east Asian countries. They're still locking down because state capacity > science, including the wests. Plenty of people are still dying from covid every week while 1/5 has long covid. Capitulating to living with covid due to lack of choice =/= covid's over.

The scope of Science has been set by private capital, but the Chinese lockdown is very clearly a scientific endeavor. Might as well compare vaccines vs. lockdown as two scientifically-informed tactics, although the two aren't mutually exclusive, as in the case of China.

The CCP has setup quarantine camps for COVID in Tibet: https://twitter.com/songpinganq/status/1571790317950763008

And red COVID QR Codes can destroy you: https://twitter.com/songpinganq/status/1562803858916933638

All I am seeing on HN are people being careful to not offend, but at some point it stops being "cultural differences".

> All I am seeing on HN are people being careful to not offend, but at some point it stops being "cultural differences".

That's exactly my problem, too. Thankfully, someone in the replies to the tweet you sent finishes his sentence without ellipses. "Which is more sad: that they are locked up, or that they allow themselves to be locked up?" But this time he hides behind the rhetorical question mark! Just say the two things already: "Chinese people are docile and weak" and "Chinese people are evil, greedy liars." Let's just skip right to the Myth of the Jew. I just want people to take their beliefs seriously instead of hiding behind vague gestures and "fill in the blanks."

> "Chinese people are docile and weak" and "Chinese people are evil, greedy liars."

No one is saying Chinese people are evil. My advice to you would be to stop making strawmans like this, that's not what people mean when they expose these atrocities. The CCP is the problem here and the authorities that are expunging basic civil rights in the name of COVID needs to be condemned. COVID is an excuse to control the population under the banner of 'zero-COVID policy'.

That's right. So the "cultural difference" you were referring to is the capacity to commit horrendous atrocities against basic civil rights that the West is too benevolent to grasp. You just used the words "expunging basic civil rights" and "atrocities" instead of "evil." You're one step further in the logical progression than the people you were annoyed with in your first reply to me.

This unfolding progression is why we cannot take people at face value about what they "really mean." People don't know what they mean! See below: "I honestly couldn't imagine people in the West putting up with that, however I'm yet to fully understand why Chinese people continue to suffer the rules without riot." See? They don't understand it. Why not? What is being repressed, that their conscious could form these highly abstract and grammatically correct sentences, but yet they don't know from whence they came?

Most of us are capable of distinguishing Chinese citizens from the CCP. It would be helpful to this discussion if you were to do the same.

The final step, you've unified the two sentences: "Chinese people are docile and weak or are evil, greedy liars."

Please point to where that unification took place. Be precise.

Well one difference with where I live is that we don’t jail doctors for trying to alert people of a new virus. We also get free elections that allows us to boot officials if they apply unpopular policies.

AFAIK they need to lock down because their vaccine is shit. It kinda works for the younger people (around 70% efficiency compared to 90++ of the MRNA ones), but it does really bad for the most vulnerable population (80+ year olds). They either lock down or have tens of millions of deaths.

Xi said that they will end lockdowns in 2024, the same year they will come out with their MRNA vaccines. I dont know why they arent buying western vaccines though. Trade restrictions? Xi's pride?

Fosun (a company in the PRC) [1] has a license for manufacturing of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine [2], so I have been puzzled for well over a year as to why it is not deployed. The few channels I have into the PRC keeps telling me that there is also a general unwillingness to vaccinate among the population (but no clear reason as to why). In general, I remain perplexed as to how the PRC can enforce the strictest lockdowns in the world; yet apparently be completely inept at getting the population vaccinated, when countries such as Japan has never had any lockdowns and never mandated vaccinations and are now doing seemingly far better. I just want to know what piece of the puzzle I am missing.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosun_International

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID%...

Indeed, it's a bit puzzling. In Hong Kong, people could freely choose between Sinovac and Comirnaty ("Pfizer" for most in the West, but "Fosun-BioNTech" to those in Hong Kong), both were widely available during the main vaccination drive. Roughly half choose Sinovac, anecdotally due to scare stories on social media at the time about the "experimental, unproven" mRNA tech vs the "traditional, tried and tested" inactivated virus tech of Sinovac.

The biggest COVID problem in Hong Kong (and also to a large extend in China) I gather is that the vaccination rate among the elderly was the lowest, which is a reversal from most other countries. That creates huge problems for hospitals, as the elderly are massively over-represented in COVID hospitalisations. It's not completely known why the elderly vaccination rate is relatively known, but I suspect misinformation and conspiracy stories (which proliferate just as much on the Chinese social media platforms as here on Facebook) is a significant contributor.

> I dont know why they arent buying western vaccines though.

2 reasons.

1) Because while they bought MRNA vaccines for themselves (top CCP officials) they want their own local made vaccines to appear good. In China when you have vaccines for kids and such, people who have money pay to use western versions of the vaccines, while those who can't afford use the free local ones. This is mainly due to the issues with fake vaccines in the past.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/world/asia/china-vaccines...

2) Xi and the CCP are trying to save face, they cannot admit to the number of cases, deaths, or that zero covid is hurting the economy and failing spectacularly. They have spent 3 years trying to convince the world they were right and that they are the success story while everyone else is a failure.

Internally they have the benefit of controlling 100% of the media so they can control the narrative. But videos and such leak out of China and those can't be scrubbed, they rely on the spreading of their own propaganda on Twitter and Youtube to discredit anyone who talks negatively about China. Any video that shows a door being welded shut with people inside, or a person being put in a box, or dogs being killed in the streets, this is all "western propaganda". It sucks that the CCP giving China a bad name when majority of people there just want to live their lives and are good people.

Xi's project was Xiongan New Area and its an epic failure. Essentially his baby, is slowly being swept under the rug and pretending it doesn't exist. Since 100% of the media in China is state owned and controlled, when things fail like this they just pretend its either going well or it never happened.

Americans riot because their protected right to riot is so inculcated in them since birth that they do not really even think that it's a matter of perspective.

There's a difference between protesting and rioting tho.

Americans empirically do have the right to riot. Almost nobody involved in the 2020 BLM riots suffered any legal consequence from it, and short of the people who actually did things like steal Nancy Pelosi's laptop, most of the Jan6 people will get off scot free as well.

In a culture that values doing what's best for the people as a whole, I can imagine people seeing it as a duty rather than in infringment of their individual rights.

I can also see those people struggling to understand the American style of fierce individualism that creates so much pain and interpersonal conflict for seemingly little gain.

Individualism versus collective good seems to be mostly a false dichotomy.

I can also see those people struggling to understand the American style of fierce individualism that creates so much pain and interpersonal conflict for seemingly little gain.

Fierce individualism in some aspect, maybe. But don't forget that the state is extremely powerful in enforcing and reinforcing certain patterns of living.

Theres an extremely obvious difference that jumps out just from your description. You do know what it is, right?

People are not contempt with it.

> A friend of mine worked in China for many years, but after several months of being locked in their apartment block and tested every 72 hours they chose to leave China.

Had a co-worker who also moved back to Singapore after spending many years living in Shanghai. They gave her 4 eggs and a bag of lettuce to last for 1 week, thankfully the apartment block she lived in had a person sneak in every few days with groceries for the building because the local authories didn't care. Being woken up at 5am daily for mandatory testing.

Another factor to understand is that China has a foundational myth which influences behaviour. Essentially the idea is not to rock the boat because history shows so much pain and bloodshed in the founding of the country.

A demonstration risks not only destabilision of this myth, it risks bloodshed and massacres because stability was won after so much pain.

To be Chinese in a certain way is to work against chaos. As much as to be British is to maintain the dignity of individual persons.

It's kind of hard to find a western equivalent which uses the hard lessons of history. Maybe something like the rule of law?

Two years ago, I would have thought people here in Québec wouldn't put up with 7pm curfews and vaccination passes to access walmart, yet they did, and they even cheered for it. So I would be cautious about assuming an intrinsic difference in how resistant/tolerant we are to authoritarian hysteria.

The government here even outwardly admitted that there was no scientific proof or support for curfews, and yet nothing happened, and they just got re-elected a month ago with a crushing majority.