r/interestingasfuck • u/Red_Lotus_Alchemist • 2d ago

/r/all A Chinese earthquake rescue team deployed drones to light up the night and aid search and rescue operations after the devastating 7.7 magnitude earthquake in Myanmar.

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u/jrm70210 2d ago

My cousin, a US Marine, just came back from vacation in China and told me that they're "100 years ahead of us."

This is what happens when you reinforce intelligence over ignorance.

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u/bion93 2d ago edited 2d ago

I have been in China last summer. I thought that China appears to my eyes just like the US appeared to my father in the ‘80-‘90s. Simply the future, amazing technology and social development. He was in the US very often at that time because he worked in the (small) Italian equivalent of NASA, so there were many shared job with NASA. He have always come back with stuffs that here in italy did not exist and it was always a WOW for me as a kid. Like the first mobile phone he bought in the US (here it was useless, there wasn’t a line still lol). Now, I have been in the same year in NYC and Shanghai. I don’t mean that NYC is a representation of the whole US, it’s just a city in a huge country. But I saw a decadent empire, a lot of social degradation (homeless, drugs, dirty, crazy traffic) versus the future: lights, cars showrooms, drone lights shows, absolute safety at every hour and efficiency.

It’s crazy that everyone marks chiana as a dictatorship and almost as a third world country. Yes, it’s not an example of democracy, but many people think that China is like Iran or North Korea. No way. People are happy there. Maybe our Eurocentric point of view of the history of the world makes us think that ours is the only possible form of government. It’s not. Is it the best? Maybe, but only future generations can tell. We should leave our idea that all world must be like the west!

EDIT: I can’t answer to every single comment, but I want to make clear that I’m not saying that China is perfect or everyone is happy there. I’m not saying that. I said that it’s different from our propaganda. People are free more than we think and regime is less oppressive than 30 years ago. For example the VPN ban is not strictly enforced and people can easily have instagram or google, but they simply don’t need our internet because they have better alternatives.

Also about the genocide of Uyghur: I don’t think that some genocides are better than others. A genocide is wrong, always. It’s a crime. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone“ I would say. It’s better if we stop our crimes (see Palestine and the countless wars the western world caused in the last century) before talking about others with our superiority judgment. I am sure that also the smallest European country dropped more bombs than China in the last 100 years.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago edited 2d ago

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u/toteslegoat 2d ago

No, a vast majority of Chinese citizens are actually pretty happy and proud of the ccp.

There’s a reason why the ccp is able to become so powerful, it’s cause they actually brought results for their citizens and moved China into contender for world number 1. Contender might need to be dropped soon.

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u/callisstaa 2d ago edited 2d ago

Yeah I've been living in China for a few years and people here are happy. It turns out that the freedoms people really care about are the freedom to walk around at night in safety, the freedom to go for a meal without being shaken down at every opportunity and the freedom to work a menial job and buy a house in their 30s.

China has 50,000 kilometres of high speed rail that it operates at a loss yet continues to expand because infrastructure is something that people actually want, more than the freedom to burn cars or talk shit about Trump to literally no avail.

The only thing I missed initially was smoking weed but it's a small sacrifice to live in a society that feels just like the West felt prior to 9/11.

The other major difference IMO is that the average Chinese has respect for the Western world and wants to see us prosper whereas Americans have to think that 1.4 billion people on the other side of the world are suffering just to have something to smile about.

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u/Alternative-Mix7288 2d ago

Buddy I value my freedom to talk shit about Trump, so don't underestimate that. However, we have lost that freedom here in the U.S. You can be denied entry and put into a concentration camp if they find these things on your phone at the airport. Elon Musk even said they'd be going after people pushing "propaganda". Our country is cooked, and at least China is living in the future.. but "China Bad" I'm sure.

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u/Icyrow 2d ago

Buddy I value my freedom to talk shit about Trump, so don't underestimate that.

as i cba re-writing the comment here just read this first i wrote it at the end though looking back over my comment: i get that i'm agreeing with you on a lot of points, just sorta adding ot your comment, not intending to say you're wrong, though in looking over my comment it sounds pretty aggressive, just know that i think we think the same thing and it's not intended.

americans say this, but while i'd say you have more than china in this regard, it is not absolute. like we're literally dealing with people getting their facebooks scrubbed to say if they said anything bad in deportations and if you want to test it, write out a comment detailing (doesn't have to be a lot) how you would end someone at the top of the country, like, look at where they will be in a few weeks and write something out, see what happens.

no country has absolute freedom, at some point it's freedom to do over the freedom to be safe, i.e, your freedom to drive a car that we know is more dangerous to those around you, the freedom to shout "fire" in a movie theatre, freedom to detail a dumb ass plan to do something very dumb.

like shouldn't your kids be free to go to school without being shot?

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u/Alternative-Mix7288 2d ago

Yes, I think we agree mostly. I'm reminded of Ben Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"

I believe the key word here being "essential". I'm not an anarchist and value liberty over freedom. Yes, we 100% should be responsible for protecting our kids at school. This is where liberty trumps freedom. Children should have the liberty to go to school and not be affected by others' freedom to own overpowered and unnecessary weapons. Free speech is an essential liberty imo and one of the things I would criticize China the most. However, I do understand that the U.S. has been fed massive amounts of propaganda and they likely have more freedom than we perceive here. Unfortunately we've given up freedoms here in this country without receiving any of the safeties or other benefits China has received in exchange.

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u/OutrageousFocus9008 2d ago

Aint nobody buying a house in a major city on a menial job in China lol...

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u/TDaltonC 2d ago

The CCPs power came well before the delivered improvement, not after.

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u/toteslegoat 1d ago

Yea but I’m speaking to the fact that they’re mostly uncontested and citizens aren’t complaining about them strictly cause there’s results. If their corruption was at a point where it was holding science, tech, economics back; im sure it’d look different there when it comes to civil unrest.

Ppl are majority/mostly content w how things are. Ppls are happy 🤷‍♂️

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u/TDaltonC 1d ago

The Tiananmen Square protest were not about a lack of results (often called "output legitimacy"). It was a lack of process legitimacy and input legitimacy.

I think it's disingenuous to say that the lack of people volunteering to become tank tread lubricant indicates that the CCP is "uncontested."

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u/ArkitekZero 2d ago

How many points did you add to your social credit score with that one?

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u/heart-aroni 2d ago

How many points did you add to your social credit score with that one?

"social credit system/scores" isn't real and is propaganda. Ask any Chinese person from China and they wouldn't know what you're talking about.

People's understanding of what China is and what it actually is so skewed with propaganda. That's why you get such starkly different narratives of "poor, cllapsing, backwards totalitarian hell" vs "advanced society with roaring economy and industry producing leading edge technology" floating around at the same time.

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u/callisstaa 2d ago edited 2d ago

The big recent one was when Trump threatened to ban TikTok so US 'TikTok refugees' went over to Rednote instead and saw young, fashionable middle class Chinese girls sharing their lives online. The Chinese users welcomed the Americans with open arm seeing it as a great opportunity for a cultural exchange without censorship. The Americans responded in kind and had their minds blown by how different China was through the eyes of actual happy Chinese people rather than the grim Communist hellscape that the western media promoted. Duolingo said that people studying Mandarin on their app increased 200% at the time.

It's probably one of the most wholesome things that has happened on the internet in a while.

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u/taco_blasted_ 2d ago

Lmao this thread is full of Chinese bots.

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u/ArkitekZero 2d ago

Sounds like something someone who doesn't want to lose points for wrongthink would say.

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u/Aemort 2d ago

I don't know, what's your credit score? Yanno, the mostly arbitrary number in the USA that decides whether or not you're allowed to get nice housing or a new car.

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u/ArkitekZero 2d ago

It's good, of course, because the rules are well-defined, and I can't lose points for things my uncle said that the ruling party doesn't like.

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u/toteslegoat 1d ago

If we are talking bout credit score here i can assure you it’s prob better than yours lmfao. Pretty hard to own real estate in nyc otherwise.