what is funny here is you both claim to have lived in China for a decade and your experiences are so vastly different.

Here's the thing, one of you is lying and it is clear which one it is.

Had you spent any actual time in China, and not a major metropolis you would realise two things:

1) Their electric system is.. lets just call it "shitty". 2) The vast majority of the population cant afford an electric stove, or the electricity needed to run it.

So tell us, from your decade of experience in China how do they cook?

I've been married to a Chinese for 25 years, own a home in China and have been there many times...

Our house in China lacks an electric stove, and in fact NO ONE in our entire apartment complex has an electric stove. Probably because the complex itself almost certainly cant support the power draw to run all those electric stoves.

I never checked, but i'd guess the kitchen doesnt have the hookup for an electric stove...

> Here's the thing, one of you is lying and it is clear which one it is.

Not helpful.

* * *

Please make your substantive points without crossing into flamewar or personal attack. Those things are not what HN is for, and destroy what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Edit: we've had to ask you this more than once before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32655788 (Aug 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24256585 (Aug 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23950934 (July 2020)

Worse, it looks like you've been using HN primarily to post this kind of thing. Please stop! We have to ban accounts that do that and I don't want to ban you.

Interesting. Maybe it's a north/south thing? I was in Beijing. Or maybe it was an affluence thing? I can totally imagine an indication stove being a status symbol. But they are far from ubiquitous and common in the country overall, of that I can assure you.

I lived in Shanghai and Shenzhen, and I think it was mostly indicative of how new the building was. Anything built after ~2000 usually had the option of plumbed gas or electric, but in older buildings I saw a lot of those standalone bottled gas hobs with the purpose-built alcove in the kitchen.

In Hong Kong, it was really down to personal preference. My first apartment came with a normal resistive stove that the landlord swapped to an induction cooktop at my request, and that building (on HK island) didn't even have plumbed gas. It'd been disconnected during a renovation years before I moved in.

> But they are far from ubiquitous and common in the country overall, of that I can assure you.

I actually agree with you here, I was just making a point about the precariousness of using personal anecdata to support a position as broad as "people in China rarely have electric stoves." In a country that big, even the outliers make for an enormous group.

Indeed. I was responding to the claim that they are just as ubiquitous as in the US. Seems a bold claim given my personal experience. I would bet that they will become ever more popular in China as they push heavily toward electric infrastructure with new nuclear power plants and heavy investment in electric cars.

I know absolutely nothing about the type of stoves they use in China, or in the US for that matter, but remember that experiences may go out of date quicker than you'd might expect.

Before I moved to the UK I had literally never seen an electric stove in my life, much less used one, as gas was ubiquitous in the Netherlands. I'm sure you could find it, but it was rare. In the last few years things changed rapidly though, and when I moved back last year there were a number of apartments that had electric or induction) stoves.