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Just want to say that I hate China.

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To understand why the Chinese government is the way it is, you kind of have to look at recent history that China had to go through. The amount of abuse and humiliation that China suffered in the 19th & 20th century from foreign powers (particularly European, Japanese, etc) is absolutely stunning. And if it wasn't foreign invasions, it had been constant civil wars, rebellions, and unrest in general.

There are many things that the Chinese government is not doing right, as you pointed out. But for most Chinese, they are doing a good enough job. They have brought stability to society (again, it's all relative if you compare to the turmoil they had to endure). They have brought economic growth to the country and many people are having higher living standards. It's easy to point fingers about the labor laws and the abysmal conditions (by American standards) that workers have to deal with, but for many, those are dream jobs where they can make a lot of money and even give back to family in the countryside. There are certainly pockets of people that are not better off, but do you really think any government/policy can create win/win situations for all 1.3 billion people? It's easy to complain about the environment issues, but if the alternative is less economic growth and lack of jobs for many people, it's not necessarily a clear cut decision.

Lastly, they are finally able to instill some national pride for the Chinese people, after a long period of constant humiliation in the hands of foreign powers. This is a big deal especially due to traditional Chinese culture that values "face" a lot higher perhaps than western cultures.

Again, not trying to justify some of the actions of the government in any way, and there are of course many issues that they have to iron out. But I think helps to put things in context. You really have to dive into some modern Chinese history to understand what's really going on and why things ended up the way they did.
 
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fuzzybabybunny said:
........
Weird how many people in the US have a problem with religion, while China's problem is *not* having religion.

You can say it's a problem of not having the right values and that it isn't a problem of religion, but how do you teach someone to do the right thing just because? It's much easier to convince people to do ABC because there's a supreme being watching over you than can damn your soul.
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I don't think thats true at all. Because until the recent decades China was doing alot better without religion and traditional Chinese 'religions' are really philosophies. Its only in recent times that China is hell bent on the globalization path and its citizens are feeling real stress from having much of the old social safety net disappear.

I doubt Americans or westerners behave the way they do because of fear from divine retribution but because of confidence in the social order that things can get better if they work within the system, and that took a long long time to work out.
 
Cutting in line, pollution, bureaucracy and corruption are all Asian big city things, not limited to China. I lived in Seoul for several years and people push and shove everywhere to be the first in line, with old people being the worst offenders. The pollution was horrible and anyone with power expects to be bribed to get anything done. It's one of the reasons people want to get out of the city. There are newer suburbs and smaller cities which are much better if you can afford to live there. It's not so much a religious thing - Korea has a high percentage of Christian church-goers but are probably as a whole less civil than the Japanese, many of whom are areligious.
 
If that's really how it is, then I'm not too worried about china. It's unsustainable. Saying that, if it's not unsustainable we're officially in Orwell territory.
 
diesbudt said:
For as much as countries bitch about America. They all want to and try to be like us.

Its the sad truth.

Its even funny knowing citizens in other countries get emotionally involved with our election. Debating on sites, and arguing for each candidate.

When was the last time we debated about the Germany leadership? (etc.)
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Err, there's 300 million people in America.
 
Every time I read an FBB post, reality suddenly takes a left turn. The biggest cutout for me is that the OP apparently didn't understand these things about China before visiting there. Well, it's never too late to learn. Hang in there.
 
MagnusTheBrewer said:
Every time I read an FBB post, reality suddenly takes a left turn. The biggest cutout for me is that the OP apparently didn't understand these things about China before visiting there. Well, it's never too late to learn. Hang in there.
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After this thread, hopefully, we'll hear back from him with another one of his obvious observations. But if you're going to talk badly about the Chinese Gov't, you usually do it after you've left the country, so who knows if we will.
 
I live in China.

I have a VPN installed on my router. I can stream Netflix and Hulu Plus no issue in SD. I have not tried HD, but I had issues with HD over wireless in the USA.

Anything inside China is really fast.

If you leave China and are not using a VPN, it goes through the "great firewall" so even unblocked sites are really slow.

If you use a VPN, it depends on the service provider and their bandwidth and the time of day.

In the last week, they have been aggressively blocking the standard UDP port for OpenVPN, TCP still works but is a little slower. General expectation is that it gets better after the big leadership change congress in Beijing is over.

I can stream youtube over 3G, but not always. Same as the USA, actually.

Michael
 
fuzzybabybunny said:
Rant Begins Now:

There's not a day that passes that I want to get the hell out of this country. But I've still got a lot to see so I'm sticking around.

I've gotten my shit stolen.

I've been conned (unsuccessfully) by the chop shop equivalent of a camera repair store promising to fix my camera.

I've gone a month plus without getting a single breath of truly fresh air.

I haven't been to a single public restroom that didn't stink overwhelmingly of stale urine and smoke and mothballs and sometimes ammonia that makes my eyes water.

I feel like I haven't gone a singe minute without hearing the noises of something man-made.

The internet has been next to unworkable for a traveler without access to fast residential internet. I have to work daily and what normally takes me an hour back in the states takes 5 hours here.

Sites within China are blazing fast like the sites that stream pirated shit such as movies. The biggest video streaming sites are exactly like our YouTube but host blatantly pirated versions of movies (movie box cover and all) from all countries. There is absolutely no respect for global intellectual property at all. You think PirateBay is bad? China is the worst offender by far and the government doesn't do shit to even give the impression that they care or respect the intellectual rights of others.

All foreign websites are either blocked by the national firewall or heavily throttled.

All of Google is blocked. Talk, Voice, Gmail, Chat, GoogleMaps, Search, Translation.
YouTube
Vimeo
Facebook
Whenever a news site publishes something negative about China, such as government corruption, it immediately gets blocked.

I have to use a VPN to access all of these things but the connections are so heavily throttled that I can't even stream Pandora (only requires 64kbps). No Vimeo. No YouTube. I can access them but they are effectively useless.
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No need to address all of your issues, especially the ones about the govt. I mean seriously China has been kicking Americas ass in the financial sector, with America taking loans out from China. Is it perfect, absolutely not, but neither is the great USofA. So no need to get all upset about how they run things. Your only visiting anyways.
But now to your other complaints:
1. You got your stuff stolen? I know that would have never happened in america. 🙄
2. There are many reputable places to get stuff fixed and you can check for authorized dealers and repair shops. If you didnt do that then yes you will need to be careful. Glad you saw through their scheme.
3,4&5. Absolutely correct. Its just the way it is. Different country different ideas of normal. And all the big cities are polluted heavily.
5. So your upset that you dont have access to fast residential internet and are complaining that the slow internet is slow. Where are you trying to work from? a coffee house? Yes youtube and stuff is blocked. But Ive used vpn on a good internet speed and things are pretty fast, just as fast as when I dont use the vpn and just the chinese ip address. No problems. If you dont need to access u.s. sites go to a internet bar...extremely fast speeds.
Plus I personally dont see YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook as necessities for work. But even if you want to access them you can. And I can have more than one playing at the same time along with other users in the house streaming video without any hiccup. Like you said...you have slow internet. Its not a China problem its a someone isnt paying for a fast internet problem.
 
Obviously OP has been brainwashed by Liberals and is in need of re-education. What he has experienced was the miracle of Capitalism. Without the entitlement obsessed masses allowed to kick around the corporations and government with all their "minimum wage" and "child labor laws" bullshit, they were actually able to make low cost goods and become a lean, mean, manufacturing machine.

A breath full of smog is the smell of productivity. The sound of lazy societies cries at being moved off their land is the sound of prosperous business expansion, without the kind of Liberal regulation maze that chokes businesses trying to break new ground for their factories here. The sight of a corporation speaking their will to the politicians in large volume is the sight of a corporations freedom of speech being liberated from those Liberals here that would seek to silence them.

We should all only be so lucky.
 
Sophitia said:
Obviously OP has been brainwashed by Liberals and is in need of re-education. What he has experienced was the miracle of Capitalism. Without the entitlement obsessed masses allowed to kick around the corporations and government with all their "minimum wage" and "child labor laws" bullshit, they were actually able to make low cost goods and become a lean, mean, manufacturing machine.

A breath full of smog is the smell of productivity. The sound of lazy societies cries at being moved off their land is the sound of prosperous business expansion, without the kind of Liberal regulation maze that chokes businesses trying to break new ground for their factories here. The sight of a corporation speaking their will to the politicians in large volume is the sight of a corporations freedom of speech being liberated from those Liberals here that would seek to silence them.

We should all only be so lucky.
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Heil, Comrade Mao!
 
fuzzybabybunny said:
Another thing about a lot of Chinese. They only think of themselves.

The Starbucks has only one bathroom at the end of a short hallway. It's occupied, so I patiently wait about 4 feet from the door to give the person exiting some space. I wait for a few minutes and as soon as the person exists some 20-something year old walks past me and goes right into the bathroom.
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I heard they don't really care about lining up and will just cut in front of people who don't speak up.
 
elitejp said:
5. So your upset that you dont have access to fast residential internet and are complaining that the slow internet is slow. Where are you trying to work from? a coffee house? Yes youtube and stuff is blocked. But Ive used vpn on a good internet speed and things are pretty fast, just as fast as when I dont use the vpn and just the chinese ip address. No problems. If you dont need to access u.s. sites go to a internet bar...extremely fast speeds.
Plus I personally dont see YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook as necessities for work. But even if you want to access them you can. And I can have more than one playing at the same time along with other users in the house streaming video without any hiccup. Like you said...you have slow internet. Its not a China problem its a someone isnt paying for a fast internet problem.
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I'm working from the hostel and coffee shops. As a traveler I never have access to residential. The internet bars only allow you to use their computers, so it's useless for me since I need my apps to do work with. Where else can I go? You tell me since the problem is so obvious to you.

You personally don't see YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook as necessities for work. That is because you don't use these for work. I do. I'm using PandaPow, reviewed as one of the fastest VPNs available next to Astrill.

The hostel gets 700-800KB/s download speeds for Chinese sites. The internet is not slow here. I can stream everything on Youku or PPTV at HD resolutions.

As soon as I go outside of China speeds become unbearable. Just today and last night I had frequent DNS issues where I couldn't get to ANY foreign site.
 
yuchai said:
To understand why the Chinese government is the way it is, you kind of have to look at recent history that China had to go through. The amount of abuse and humiliation that China suffered in the 19th & 20th century from foreign powers (particularly European, Japanese, etc) is absolutely stunning. And if it wasn't foreign invasions, it had been constant civil wars, rebellions, and unrest in general.

There are many things that the Chinese government is not doing right, as you pointed out. But for most Chinese, they are doing a good enough job. They have brought stability to society (again, it's all relative if you compare to the turmoil they had to endure). They have brought economic growth to the country and many people are having higher living standards. It's easy to point fingers about the labor laws and the abysmal conditions (by American standards) that workers have to deal with, but for many, those are dream jobs where they can make a lot of money and even give back to family in the countryside. There are certainly pockets of people that are not better off, but do you really think any government/policy can create win/win situations for all 1.3 billion people? It's easy to complain about the environment issues, but if the alternative is less economic growth and lack of jobs for many people, it's not necessarily a clear cut decision.

Lastly, they are finally able to instill some national pride for the Chinese people, after a long period of constant humiliation in the hands of foreign powers. This is a big deal especially due to traditional Chinese culture that values "face" a lot higher perhaps than western cultures.

Again, not trying to justify some of the actions of the government in any way, and there are of course many issues that they have to iron out. But I think helps to put things in context. You really have to dive into some modern Chinese history to understand what's really going on and why things ended up the way they did.
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uhmmm no, what Chinese government do have nothing to do with the history, those communist party politicians do what they do for the simple reason to protect their own power and continue to rob from the Chinese people. In fact, they are abusing the past history and the Chinese people's national pride to misdirect any criticism of their corruption, their abuse of human right, their lack of respect for IP and freedom of speech.

They continue to brain wash Chinese people, and admittedly lots of Chinese are more interested in economic gain than freedom, democracy, fairness and justice. Every freaking single chinese politicians and their circle of people are damn rich, if you check out the vip list of casinos in Macau, most of them are Chinese government officials.

But anyway, don't mistake Chinese politicians with Chinese people tho, there are shit governments throughout Chinese history but China continue to be the only surviving ancient civilization. What you see in China is similar to what happened in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore 20~30 years ago when they just started to become economic powers, and those government were also authoritarian. But things changed, and we all hope for the sake of the world, this country with 20% of the world's population will change for the better.
 
rchiu said:
uhmmm no, what Chinese government do have nothing to do with the history, those communist party politicians do what they do for the simple reason to protect their own power and continue to rob from the Chinese people. In fact, they are abusing the past history and the Chinese people's national pride to misdirect any criticism of their corruption, their abuse of human right, their lack of respect for IP and freedom of speech.

They continue to brain wash Chinese people, and admittedly lots of Chinese are more interested in economic gain than freedom, democracy, fairness and justice. Every freaking single chinese politicians and their circle of people are damn rich, if you check out the vip list of casinos in Macau, most of them are Chinese government officials.

But anyway, don't mistake Chinese politicians with Chinese people tho, there are shit governments throughout Chinese history but China continue to be the only surviving ancient civilization. What you see in China is similar to what happened in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore 20~30 years ago when they just started to become economic powers, and those government were also authoritarian. But things changed, and we all hope for the sake of the world, this country with 20% of the world's population will change for the better.
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I spent the entire night last night reading about the recent history of China, from the Cultural Revolution onwards. I think both yuchai and rchiu are right. It's a mix.

But holy shit.

Mao Zedong was severely misguided at best and the entire system was nuts. Here's what I can recall off the top of my head:

1. Mao was extremely suspicious of intellectuals and bourgeoisie philosophies. He also believed that more people meant more manpower and thus, more might and productivity. He told everyone to breed like rabbits and even awarded people with large families. Hence China's overpopulation problem.

2. He believed that the key to a prosperous China was to maximize grain and steel production. He thought that it would be easy to catch up to a country like the UK in 15 years.

3. His game plan was to make all of China produce grain and then use that money to industrialize and produce more machinery and steel.

4. He took all private land away. Farmers could no longer work for themselves and they were all forced to live and eat in communes. IN ALL OF CHINA, a country larger than the US. Imagine every one of us living in a commune.

5. He put all of them to work producing grain and placed party members in charge of reporting on production numbers in their respective areas.

6. He enacted new farming methods that did not work.

7. The party members all wanted to gain favor with Mao, so they always over reported grain production (sometimes by a factor of 10) and reported that Mao's new farming methods were actually working.

8. Mao saw these numbers, figured production was huge, and proceeded to export 1/3 of the reported grain while refusing imports of food and aid. He even gave grain away to allies for free. And of course he had shipments of grain sent to the capital.

9. So he exported away 1/3 of the over-reported amount of grain. This meant the *actual* grain that was shipped out of the countryside was almost all the grain the people had.

10. People all over the place started to die of famine because Mao was shipping away all their food due to the over-reporting. When they said they were starving Mao thought that it couldn't be the case (he was only take 1/3 of the reported amounts, right?) and thought some people were hoarding food. So began a series of violent investigations to find who was hoarding food.

11. Meanwhile the party members continued to over report food production.

12. Mao figured everything was peachy so he moved a lot of farmers away from food production into steel production. He didn't know jack shit about making steel and believed some guy who said high quality steel could be made in small backyard furnaces (it can only be made in huge refineries).

13. Mao took away a lot of these farmers and turned them all into impromptu steel-makers making steel from these tiny backyard furnaces.

14. What resulted was that there was now even *less* farmers producing food for a country that was already in deep, deep famine. And the farmers who were now producing steel were making shit quality useless value-less steel from their useless backyard furnaces. Even more people died. But of course Mao didn't know the reality because the reports were all lies designed to gain favor with him.

15. Mao also had a deep distrust of intellectuals. To him, this meant anyone in middle school and above. So he shipped EVERYONE with a middle school education or higher to the countryside where they can "learn" from the farmers and become re-educated. My parents' entire family were among these people. This is the "lost generation" that you hear about. All they managed to do during this period of re-education was avoid starvation and work in the fields. Many people died.

16. Also during this time a group of you college students indoctrinated with Mao philosophy began spreading the word of Mao within the intellectual community. Mao liked this and officially backed them. Groups formed throughout the nation, and thus formed the Red Guard. Yes, the Red Guard was a bunch of young students.

17. Mao sent the Red Guard to re-educate and persuade non-believers to believe in Mao's teachings. The Red Guard did this through violence instead.

18. Factions built up within the Red Guard and they were causing enormous discord, so Mao ordered them to go back to school. Those that persisted were squashed by the army.

19. Even more people died, obviously.

20. Eventually Mao lost power or some shit and the government came to its senses and enacted some capitalist principles. They also squashed religion and superstition, telling the populace to only trust reason and science. They had a propaganda war on religion and the old ways. Books were burned. Museums destroyed. The religious were persecuted.

21. The economy started to recover but it was mismanaged and there was rampant inflation.

22. Many people, especially students, demanded reforms in government. Greater transparency, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. They went on hunger strikes across the nation, most notably Tienanmen Square.

23. The Chinese government tried at first to compromise with the protesters but everything was too disorganized and there were too many demands.

24. The government, fearing it was building up to a coup, sent in armed soldiers and tanks. They used live fire to kill and clear out the protesters.

25. Rebellion squashed.

26. As a result, the government learned from this mistake and freedoms *decreased* and censorship *increased* and transparency *decreased.*

27. Modern China.
 
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My company does business in China. I am very glad I have yet to be sent. Based on the stories of co-workers who have been, I have no desire whatsoever to ever visit it.
 
Svnla said:
Saw this earlier tonight on PBS = http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/world/july-dec12/china_11-13.html

and = http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/world/july-dec12/chinafood_11-13.html

Water pollution = http://www.pbs.org/newshour/multimedia/china111312/5.html

Imported grains = http://www.pbs.org/newshour/multimedia/china111312/9.html

1,600 ft down to get water = http://www.pbs.org/newshour/multimedia/china111312/10.html

No way China will able to continue in the same path/rate.
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That's the sad thing. All of our crap is produced in China which means our environments are still mostly intact.

China, on the other hand, is going to crumble in the next century due to pollution. It's going to become a wasteland. It's going to be sad. The babies in China now are going to suffer tremendously.

But it doesn't matter to Chinese leaders. The only thing that matters is that they control power and the economy continues to grow - even at the expense of the environment.

Our economy might be collapsing but it can be rebuilt. The Chinese environment is collapsing - it might never be Ok to live there.
 
It's sad, but China will have to maintain its subpar standard of living, if the environment is not going to collapse overnight. Yes, I know, Americans are the worst perpetrators, but imagine all those Chinese insist on having hot water or a cellphone. It's interesting how the environment is so fragile that it cannot even support everyone having indoor plumbing, and so most of the world's population will have to make do with pooping out in the open, even if it ultimately leads to outbreaks of cholera and death of millions annually. As the world's resources become more scarce, people are increasingly finding little room for compassion for others, especially if they're half-way around the world.
 
I've noticed this a lot more lately due the high influx of Chinese immigrants but why do so many of them cut on line or rudely push people out of the way so often? They also speak obnoxiously loud everywhere they go without any regard for other people. I can't think or do anything once their nonstop and bellowing conversation starts. I hate to generalize but it affects my day to day often. I have yet to see such blatant and crude manners from any other immigrant ethnicities no matter the social status.
 
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