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First off let me get out and say it. I think China is much more free then America.
I don't feel paranoid walking around in the middle of the night in the big cities. In fact its encouraged! Night markets, food stands, entertainment, its all about the night life here, which I have to say, America just doesn't have.
The Chinese government is more open about its regulating of the population, while in America its more cloak and dagger. The government here openly states in newspapers what it is doing to regulate businesses, money, the internet, and what not. Does it show all its cards on the table? No. Does America? Patriot Act anyone?
The Chinese government is communist. Deal with it. Don't try to change them, understand that not everyone thinks and acts the same way as Americans.
The internet here is regulated and closely watched after by the government. I've asked people I know what they think about the government watching them online. They don't care. Why? That's just the way things are here. No one cares because complaining about it won't change anything. Plenty of people are complaining about Bush and Iraq. Nothings happened.
Free Tibet? Chinese laugh at this and wonder why its America's business. David…want to pitch in on this one?
China really is the polar opposite of America. What is rude here is polite there and vice versa. For instance interrupting someone here is a way to show that you are paying attention to them. Making a lot of munching and slurping sounds while eating is polite here because it means you are enjoying your food (took me a while to get use to this one). Finishing everything on your plate means you are still hungry. Wasting some food means you are stuffed. When you go out to a big restaurant with many people its unusual if you don't order 2-3 dishes per person, to do so means you are generous, not doing so means you are stingy.
Driving here perplexes and scares the hell out of me. No one drives in a straight line, everyone expects you to swerve in and out of traffic, so if you drive in a straight controlled manor on the streets no one can predict what you are going do. Many of the drivers here when they pull up to a stop light, or are going down a hill turn off their engines to save gas, little do they know that the act of starting an engine uses far more fuel then leaving the engine on since most modern cars use little to no gas when coasting or idling. And this is the thing that gets me most: China has widely adopted alternative fuels. Many Chinese cars, taxis, and busses run on alternative based on natural gas. Even many foreign car companies like Ford, Volkswagen, Audi, and Hyundai all sell converted models that run on the alternative fuel here. In America they say it can't be done. China has an energy crisis. The country is growing faster then it can support itself. Amazing what a little motivation can do. Yes there are still petrol based cars here, a lot of them, they typically get better performance and more gas mileage, but the alternative fuel here is cheaper and who needs to go 50 KPH in a city where a long straight road is about 200 meters long…
On the topic of cars, they are so incredibly expensive here. It's not uncommon to hear of the guy who just bought a 110,000 dollar BMW 5 series at 2-3 times the price in America. And the Mazda 6, which is a great car which someday I would not mind owning, routinely costs 10,000 dollars more here then in the states.
If you make 2-3000 dollars a month here you are doing pretty damn well for yourself and spend money like you just don't care.
Recently one of my girlfriends aunts sat on my backpack as well as many other peoples bags (they were all on a chair in a restaurant we were all eating at, why she decided to sit on them instead of one of the many other seats beats me) breaking my black Motorola V3 in half. It was amazing, I can't figure out how the pressure was applied to be able to break the phone in two right under the inside LCD screen above the hinge. Anyway, if I was in America and I broke your phone obviously I would compensate you. Well this is one of those odd Chinese social things I guess. Because we were all invited out to eat (it was a 3 way birthday party, a lot of people) by a different one of my gf's aunts and uncles, the aunt (who is not actually related) who broke my phone does not have to compensate me for breaking it, instead the aunt and uncle who invited everyone out would compensate me. The same would be true if I parked my car out side and someone smashed into it, whoever invited me to come would pay for repairs or whatever in that case as well. This confounds me a bit. Eye for an eye never seemed more complicated. To avoid this rather bizarre situation I just went out and bought the second cheapest phone I could find and never mentioned it again.
There are two Ferrari/ Maserati show rooms in Chongqing. A Ferrari F430 will run you just under 1 million dollars. Ouch.
In a local mall they have Michael Schumacher's F1 helmet on display and for sale. Price: 58,888 RMB (7361 dollars)
Chinese college students who have bf's/gf's routinely live with each other even if they have been together for less then a few months.
The teachers and officials at my college are deeply in denial about what the world around them is really like. When I asked my uncle, who is the head of the foreign affairs department of this school what the attitude of the school is towards the students living with each other he simply said "no they don't". When I asked him what the school thought about the students constantly cheating on their exams and homework he said "I don't think that happens". And of course two years ago when a student jumped off the 14th floor of the main school building to her death, "nothing happened".
Speaking of cheating. There are two different angles I want to touch on this subject. First boyfriends and girlfriends cheat on each other here so much that it's amazing. Its routine to find one of your friends here has 3-4 different people who share their bed on different nights of the week. Second, exams and school work. So much of it is cheated or copied. You give your ID card to a friend who kind of looks like you and they go take your English exam for you. You got some big project due soon, download someone else's work online and turn it in, this happened in my photo class. Two people turned in work they downloaded online, a few images were the same. Go to the local printing places around the school and you can ask for copies of other peoples papers that they printed there.
I got a lot more other things to say but ill save them for next time.
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One big deficit for me would be the language, I'd be lost in translation if I would have to get around with older people, with younger . . . I guess some of them know better english than me. And f course it would take some time for my stomach to get used to the food, but hey, I know a cool german local in Shanghai, doing my favourite meals . . . so
The political system . . . hmmm, ther eis no perfect political system. Some provide higher social standards, some provide better health care, some treat human rights different than the others . . . well, basicall it's the same shit but in a different package.
China is a country of big differences . . . on the one side you have the modern china, which beats every other country in the world in most things, and than the traditional china, where soem people live at the existenz minimum, but if you look at the US . . . hell it's the same there. You have those newly rich people ( musicians, actors etc ) who burn cash like they would never run out of it . . . and then you have people who lost everything due to the last couple of years ( war, hurricane etc. ) So, again it's lamost the same.
In China it's so, if you shut up your mouth, nobody'll harm you, if you rase up your voice, you'll probably dissapear for a looooooong loooong time. I think this is one of the big problems why most countries in the world look at China like . . . well, dont' agree with them in most cases . . . and also because the chinese industry copies all technology and puts their cheaper copies on the world market.
About the cenzorship . . . they say what they're doing, but I'm sure there are some things they're not saying, like in other countries . . . but it's better to know on what you are then to know nothing at all waht's going on in your country.
Here is one difference between Germany and the US ( yeah I say Germany cos I dont' know how it's in China . . . well this point will go to China ). How many times since the Us is in those two wars, you've seen pictures of dead American soldiers ? ? ? Let me say this, on one German TV station you saw such picture more times than on all US channels together. Why . . . war is a big business payed with blood and with the peoples money kept in the unknown about the whole situation over there in Iraq and Afghanistan . . . This shows your already mentioned "freedom".
- If China has a new misile, they test it live on TV . . . . "Yeeeehaaaaa. Let see wot this babi doin ven flaj" . . .
- In the US . . . "Eeeeeeerm, eeeerm, it's eeeerm, it's top secret what we're doing here. Please leave this area alone, if you dont' do it wi'll arrest you. . . . Oh no, we got a security breach . . . Oooh no, it's a terrorist trying to sabotage the test. Get eeeeem . . . Kill eeeeem . . . Oh no wait, Kill em and then get em"
The gas stuff . . . Well after a couple of years in war, the US gas price aint that cheap anymore. When my sister and her husband were in the US one gallon was around 80Cent ( Not related to 50Cent ) and today, hell, it's over 2$ if I remember right what I saw on the news some weeks ago. You can imagine what a profit it is to sell this oil to a country with more than 1.3 billion people, where oil is used like it would fall from the sky. Since the Chinese use those hybrid cars almost all that oil goes to the Chinese goverment and they use it for building up China . .. Hmmmm US companies, doing business with a communist republic. Hmmmmm, there was a time in history where you would have got killed for doin this, but not today. Money rules the world and makes your ( political ) enemy to your best friend. Going back to your car situation, yes if they want it, they can and will do it. But a hybrid, energy saving car isn't the American dream. The American dream means XXL ( well if you look at the population then it's XXXXL ) . . . you dont' want to have a house with 3 rooms and a bath . . . no, why should you if you can have a house with 6 rooms, three baths, a pool and a garage for five cars and each car is a monster truck. I castle, a big car and bling bling . . . not a small house, fake brillies and a smart.
Difference between China and US in this case is . . . The US industry consumes a lot of energy like the US citizens . . . in China the industry consumes a lot of energy, it consumes that much that for the citizens there is almost nothing left.
Hey a question . . . How much people in the US drive to their work on a bike ( not a chopper, harley or other motor bike, a bike moved by the human power ) ? I guess not that much like in China.
About the cultural thing . . . well it's not nice to make your co worker down in front of other people if he/she did a mistake. In US, the more peopel know the better for you and the worse for the poor hummiliated person who'll probebly never find a decent job in the country.
About the denial . . . the examles you said about the school . . . it's a total denial. "There was no such thing" that's it case closed, we look forward and teake the next step into the future. In most other countries things are bought back, which makes people depressed and whis again makes some people called "shrink" to rich people . . . This fenomenon is nowhere else developed like in the US
The cheating thing . . . well people cheat that much maybe beacuse of the one child politic China has . . . you want to learn to know as much people a spossible to have the right person to have this one child with . . . on the other side . . . it's sex and sex makes fun
Cheating in school . . . well in some countires it's more extreme than in others
Here is an axample how we did it in schol, lets say chemistry. 4 classes had the same teacher, 3 classes had the test days before my class. Each test had 6 groups of questions, from a - f . . . We got those questions for each group, went home, wrote the answeres for each group of cours on different papers. When we had the test, we wrote some stuff on thepaper and when the end of the class came, we ust switched the papers with the one we wrote at home. Of course some people mixed up some groups from time to time, but they got the mark by answering a question from a differnt group as a proof that this person realy learned. Of course it could be that you had the same group but not the same questions . . . It could happen that cour finished D group had questions from A, B and C group, so you were screwed a little bit. But while writing those false test you learned automatically the questions and the answeres . . . always the same questions, but could happen that they were mixed up . . . basically 6 groups with 6 quesitons, so all you had to do was learn 36 questions and their answeres . . . and again, if the questions were different, you had a problem.
I was basically cheating on the easy stuff, because I didn't wat to waste time on learning, eeerm I mean to manifest the easy stuff. I went to a scholl where it could happen that we wrote 7 tests a week and had like 4 orals in the same week, even if the goverment says not to write more than 3 or 4 tests a week. So I had to decide, learn everyhting and mess up or forget things, or cheat on one or two tests . . .btw I did it only in the last year of highschool.
Cheating in way that I send someone else instead of me to write the test . . . well there is nobody that looks like me, except Vin Diesel
I might be wrong about many things I wrote here, cos I've never been to the US nor China, but this is what impresison I have after seein' all those documentaries and reports. So if soemthing's not true I wrote here, than don't blame me, blame the Tv for providing my with inacurate information.
MORE FREE????
...I'm sorry you've never lived in a safe American city that has a nightlife
You're always going to run into trouble if you defend one problem by pointing fingers somewhere else. The fact that the West has it's issues too simply means that our human-animal ability to come up with a perfect governing system has not happened.
It doesn't mean that China is a paradise.
But hey, it's great that you're happy! Count your blessings for that. I myself am happy that I am not a Falun Gong practicitoner. Life for foreigners in China is much more pleasant than life for Chinese who are not following the herd.
and yeah, I know im nuts, and its good that people disagree with me, what a boring world it would be if everyone agreed with everything I said...
that said yes there are a lot of those on tv and media things that are less controlled in the states and yes it can be said that there is a closer eye put on you here but ya know what they say, if you got something to hide then you wont want anyone else to see it.
ps. I didnt hear about that bush bash on tv, wonder if I can find a copy on emule...
i suppose the matter about this "if you've got something to hide" is that when you start introducing censorship in a heavyhanded way, the need to hide is created.
I met so many creative people who had to operate (artistically) underground. This is binding your own feet to prevent progress. Allowing innovative and creative thinking is something that could really help push China off the list of "middling" countries.
But you know, maybe after the olympics they'll start allowing some reforms....it could happen.
Where were you in China anyway???
i think the medium also influences how something 'questionable' is recieved. some is more direct than others...