ah, so the mascot wars have borne fruit (context)

sample image:

no it is not demeaning, 华人 is like the widest net/semantic space with regard to “chinese person” (eg anyone who has chinese heritage, encompassing of any chinese ethnicity not just han, also encompassing any nationality). it’s standard/politically correct to say “海外华人” for overseas chinese

I don’t speak canto but this comes close? 竹升 afaik sometimes it’s used derogatorily (unsure of slur status) but i’ve also heard there’s some like reclamation of it idk (also I see that wikipedia thinks that “banana” is a Thing but I’ve literally never seen anyone call a bobalib “香蕉人” irl)

also funny they think lemmygrad is/should be representative of lemmy as a whole and wish to become mainstream???

Canadian Born Chinese not china-born chinese (would just denote as chinese national or former chinese national)

when it’s people you think should be your friends it’s incredibly isolating. In the last 5ish years of increased sinophobia ive had both trans and asian friends who are “left” of democrats try to get me to affirm sinophobic stances (eg through jokes) and the sad thing is, this is the norm. most westerners can expect ABCs (and CBCs) to pop out with some assimilatory “I’m one of the good ones” signifier.

anyway as an ABC I’ve definitely noticed that the torchbearer of sinophobia is other chinese diaspora. I loathe it so much, but it’s definitely an avenue towards personal success, particular in careers related to media, writing, art, etc. white society audiences crave to hear their sinophobia affirmed through a chinese face. I dont even have to scrape the gunk on the bottom of the barrel, the whole “container” is just infested, like these are just two randos I found on goodreads (diaspora writing in english on topic of china) (1) (2). on the flip side, if you don’t give them that (sinophobia affirmed through a chinese face), and stay quiet or ambivalent on the topic of the mainland, well that’s the hard road of proving yourself through pure merit. on the worst end, if you as a chinese diaspora dare say that communist china is actually good for chinese people, you don’t get a platform, you get brushed aside and more or less forgotten. han suyin (who published in english) is out of print since the cold war ended and the nonaligned movement evaporated. meanwhile pearl s buck’s the good earth is still being taught as required reading in american high schools.

yall have no idea how mad I was that I couldn’t see 30000 miles from Chang’an on big screen theaters when it came out because no theaters in the US was putting it on, at least in my area. tbh I was surprised that Nezha 2 is getting any screens in the US now

iceberg moment or whatever but the first movie had insufferable fandom 🫠

movie itself was fine, both 2 and 1 have some kid-level basically fart jokes or whatever, overall agree that the direction had/has younger target audience

1/ unsure for every case

2/ don’t have enough data but just stating the trend: the top ranked schools are all public, just check out the rankings, tip top ones are all public nonprofit.

3/ I’m not super familiar with the entire landscape to know if all public schools are strictly better or not; I’m just aware of general public opinion that private schools are more expensive and more mid. Generally, less prestigious. However, at least as a personal observation, wealthier parents tend to choose to find a way for their kid to go to an overseas university if they don’t like the private schooling options after midling gaokao results. (as american born chinese these wealthy “princess complex” international classmates colored my impression of mainlanders for a while during my uni years… i suppose that’s both to my own and their detriment :/ it is what it is)

iirc rural area hukou students and ethnic minority students get boosted points for gaokao also, there’s definitely affirmative action in that regard.

edit: clarity

the gaokao competitiveness for top schooling actually is inverted (monetarily speaking) compared to the west. The top schools are usually publicly funded and have lower tuitions compared to private schools. (that said gaokao is very intense, I had a cousin who spent a whole year to redo it to try to get better placement)

Just this week, the US State Department removed from its website the statement, “We do not support Taiwan independence.”

Just need to highlight this line.

Recently revisited an old video (originally posted back in 2022? one of the first times I was exposed to the mechanisms of dollar hegemony) to compare its analysis (overall pretty good) and was reminded that it predicted that trying to move TMSC to Arizona was preemptive measure the US needs to try to secure its supply of chips manufacturing before moving to more fully provoke the Taiwan question

“this trifold only folds twice! false advertising” really kills me lmfao

I mean, purely on the medical part, I’d say no. Dentistry and lowering infant mortality rate along with lowering maternity mortality rate is a very very very recent thing, although dispersal and access to these qualities aren’t evenly distributed today, globally and even among class divides in the imperial core.

Anyway, I just can’t imagine likely dying to childbirth in the course of having 10+ kids where 3-4 survive to adulthood if you’re lucky being Better :/

!! Also no baby formula. If you have a hard time producing [enough] milk (this is a common problem!) your infant is likely to have a hard time thriving. Animal milks are NOT a substitute for human milk for an infant. Peasant women who recently had a child/still produced milk would often be the ones providing nursemaid services for higher class families. Many other points about pests (even royalty had fleas…) and hygiene also. I’m yammering a lot but obligatory: technological progress in these measures aren’t necessarily brought about by specific economic models, eg not specifically capitalism in and of itself.

哪吒！！！！！！！！！

hi hi hi!

The main drive behind my own further moving left/being less vibes&unserious was also related to me further investigating history, though, on the Chinese end, since my formal education had only like a single paragraph about both opium wars, brief mention of boxer rebellion, and a page or two of “communism evil and killed lots of people”.

It’s also very interesting to think of history, globally, in terms of coeval and similar temporally relative terms

• Marx gave his speech “On the Question of Free Trade” in 1848, only 6 years after the first Opium war ended and HK was signed away to Britain in the Treaty of Nanjing (the British used “free trade” as liberal ideal justifying the opium wars; however in the speech Marx makes no mention of China but does speak of the English mercantile economic extraction of its colonies).
• Lenin’s October Revolution (1917) heavily influenced the founding of the Communist Party of China (1920) of which, before, the left-leaning “anti-Old Ways” intellectuals were more predominantly either in the camps of republican democracy models exemplar of America/France, or anarchist social experimentation (particularly big “fandom” of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid)
• Less directly related: Indonesian mass killings (detailed in Bevins’ Jakarta Method #CIA interventions) were 1965-66 (iirc prior, Mao & others had advised the PKI to arm themselves); Chinese Cultural Revolution started 1966 and among the main currents of it was to denounce and destroy anything possibly liberal or bourgeois.
• And a similar vein (also not directly related) – decline and eventual fall of Soviet Union, particularly exacerbated by internal popularity of liberalization late 1980s :: official govt reaction to the june sixth incident (1989) in China, where many of the student protest leaders and some urban workers demanded liberalization similar to that of USSR.

TBH my history knowledge about WWI is somewhat in a similar state (not quite as dire but definitely many holes) as my former knowledge base regarding modern Chinese history, do you have recommended readings or media on that end?

tamen de gushi by tan jiu is really cute… (err its manhua not manga but, anyway)

my bad I got tesla mixed up with orwell it’s the hair OTL

white jesus, lincoln, roosevelts, fuckin george orwell… i dont think he got that spirit tbh

hold up. the only thing that holds here imo is ‘great man theory’

edit: got tesla’s hair mixed up with orwell sorry king

hmm, how to say this… XHS platform more attracts “instagram” type crowd and trends liberal, and until recently the community generally avoids political discussion. The more politically attuned Chinese netizens stick to bilibili and weibo, although there’s plenty of discourse and “fighting” there too, like, obviously a body of that many people will have a wide diversity of political opinions as well as acumen. Just wanted to point out biases inherent to certain platforms.

Anyway one of my favorite memes from the initial western invasion of xhs event:

that said of course there are some more politically attuned chinese netizens on XHS, my favorite being this guy

The short and medium term means of securing ideological security against the West might be better addressed by a careful toleration of nationalism.

good thing, I got an article for you (sorry don’t have an official translation afaik)(at a glance, deepL does a decent enough job at machine translating it)

Patriotism does not equate to narrow nationalism 爱国主义不等于狭隘民族主义 by 张 健 2016年08月18日10:16

additionally, both patriotism and nationalism in china are colored (in modern history) in anti-imperialism. I think that all kinds of nationalism that grows out of anti-imperialism must manage walking a tightrope on various forms of xenophobia that may also grow out of it; China is no exception. Article details more history specific to China.

segment & translation

对中国共产党人来说，则必须将爱国主义和国际主义结合起来，因为只有为保卫祖国而战才能打败侵略者，使民族得到解放，而只有民族得到解放，才有使无产阶级和劳动人民得到解放的可能

For the Chinese Communists, on the other hand, patriotism and internationalism must be combined, for only by fighting in defense of the motherland can the invaders be defeated and the nation liberated, and only when the nation is liberated will it be possible to liberate the proletariat and the working people.

Dongfeng missile program 🫡