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Three Common Misconceptions About China

103 points by Thevet 8y ago

Paraesthetic 8y ago
Propaganda piece by the Chinese government more like.
RobertRoberts 8y ago
Is it odd that I have never heard of any of these misconceptions? Are these common for any "westerners" to have even considered?
- jpatokal 8y ago
  If you have even a casual interest in China (say, read the international section of any major newspaper), you'll almost certainly run into them. Random samples from the New York Times: "China is home to the longest continuous civilization in world history" https://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/q-and-a-william-c-kirby-on-can-china-lead/ https://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/q-and-a-will... "For three millennia, since 1000 B.C., the Chinese had been supremely confident that they were the center of civilization, the Middle Kingdom..." https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/opinion/13iht-edgardner.1.13693509.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/opinion/13iht-edgardner.1... "China insists it has no fights to pick. Its evolving foreign policy maxims -- principles of peaceful co-existence, peaceful orientation, peaceful rise, peaceful development -- have the same emphasis." https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/weekinreview/the-two-faces-of-rising-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/weekinreview/the-two-face...
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    Referring to a group of 1.4 billion people, the economy, the government, the economic pressures driving each of them, et cetera as a single entity can reveal a level of ignorance about these components of a society.
    - RobertRoberts 8y ago
      Doesn't that apply to every single modern country right now? Why do you think it's ignorant to view China the same as every other country?
      - stephengillie 8y ago
        The ignorant probably do view all countries through this same lens.
- nwhatt 8y ago
  The Chinese government has something to do with it too. The 5,000 years of history narrative helps prop up the idea of “One China” as well as claims to Tibet and XinJiang.
  - tiatia123 8y ago
    It is doubtful that China has 5000 years of history that gives them so much of their cultural arrogance. Some carved bones 5000 years ago do not make a high civilization. 1. 5000 years ago Egyptians had a high civilization. China did not. 2. During the empire of Rome, China was on the same level. 3. During middle ages, China did indeed have a much higher standard of civilization compared to Europe. 4. This changed with the industrial revolution (the the precursors like the Renaissance) in Europe. Part 4 and the problems that economic, cultural and military weakness of China brought with it, are a major trauma for China. Now they are on the rise again and start feeling the world is theirs. A random guy that worked in industry described it as: "When I met Chinese in the 80ies they had their believe of cultural superiority mixed with an inferiority complex because they were so far beyond. Now they have their believe of cultural superiority mixed with arrogance." This will not end well. China is in a much weaker position that they want to make you believe and I don't see their culture (that has its strength!) well suited for the future. You should not be afraid of the strengths of China. It comes with too many problems. If you are from Europe (like me), you should be more worried about your own weakness.
- westiseast 8y ago
  It's more like he's refuting the claims you usually hear from the CCP as part of their external (and internal) propaganda and national narrative.
cttet 8y ago
For the first part, I still think that Chinese culture is quite special with culture that passed on for that long. As a normal Chinese with standard Chinese education till 10th grade (then move to a foreign country), I can understand fragments of writings carved in stones 1500 years ago in museums, which I felt quite amazing.
- pdpi 8y ago
  > As a normal Chinese with standard Chinese education till 10th grade (then move to a foreign country), I can understand fragments of writings carved in stones 1500 years ago in museums, which I felt quite amazing. Is this unusual, though? Fairly certain most romance language speakers can understand at least some latin if they put their minds to it.
  - interfixus 8y ago
    And so, for that matter, can we from the cold, benighted, Germanic north.
  - realusername 8y ago
    > Is this unusual, though? Fairly certain most romance language speakers can understand at least some latin if they put their minds to it. Yes it works for basic texts, you can understand some words here and there.
    - 394549 8y ago
      > Yes it works for basic texts, you can understand some words here and there. Even as an English speaker, which is not a romance language, I can understand quite a few Latin words here and there, due to the fact that something like 50% of English vocabulary was borrowed from Latin or other romance languages.
  - MaxBarraclough 8y ago
    It pivots on what we mean by "understand fragments". The average English speaker cannot make sense of Latin prose. Picking out a few words here and there, isn't the same thing. "Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur." All but 'Latine', and perhaps 'dictum', is gibberish to the average English speaker.
baxtr 8y ago
There are great TED talks (generally not a big fan because too sensational) to learn about China and Asia in general. For example this one: https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_jacques_understanding_the_rise_of_china https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_jacques_understanding_the_r...
stephengillie 8y ago
The misconception I carry is that the Rule of Law[0] doesn't hold the same weight as in America or Europe, due to extreme Selective Enforcement[1] - basically the person in power can arbitrarily apply the laws against those they personally dislike. This leads to the dependence on guanxi[2], where your families have been so close for generations that you're like siblings - who will arrest their own brother or sister? And people who can't leverage these guanxi relationships have barely more social leverage than a foreigner - so they diasporize. And leveraging a Chinese person with few guanxi relationships is a common mistake of companies doing business in China. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi
- delinka 8y ago
  Are you saying "the Rule of Law doesn't hold the same weight as in America or Europe" is your misconception? Or rather that you assume the rule of law would hold the same weight, it does not, and therefore "rule of law holds the same weight" is your misconception?
  - exelius 8y ago
    Single-party systems by definition have either rule-by-decree or rule-by-consensus as a feature; so I’m not even sure the “rule of law” applies in the same sense when the rules are that the people in power are a hegemony that can change the rules whenever they want. Because those who abuse power often do it through selective enforcement, and because the population has no “acceptable” way to depose those who abuse power, you get a situation where the things you do matter less than who you are. I wouldn’t claim rule of law systems are immune to this type of influence, but a feature of a strong democracy is having checks and balances on who writes the rules vs who enforces them. You don’t have that in China, and there are definitely different sets of rules for different people.
    - delinka 8y ago
ConfusedDog 8y ago
"the Xin dynasty, set up by a usurper named Wang Mang who might have made a decent emperor but had absolutely shit luck with natural catastrophes." I like the writing style...
dalbasal 8y ago
I think one piece of Chinese narrative history that's curious and possibly relevant is: the "line of civilization" bit. The Anglo-American "history of civilization" traces itself back through British, Roman, Greek periods. It's self aggrandisement and bias, but it demonstrates how hard it is to have a totally nationally centered history of urbanism/civilization if you want to go back a few millenia. From at least the early bronze age (5000 ybp), the other great urban eurasian-african cultures had a lot of contact. Hindu Valley, Hittite, Persian/Sumerian, Egyptian, Mesopotamian. Their "suburbs" stretched into Greece on the edge of Europe, half of Africa... China had the silk road and were aware of these distant consumers, but civilisational rivalry isn't a big part of the story. The important rivalries are either internal or "barbarian" facing. Everything was invented in China. There is no Plato (for example) sharing knowlesged sourced from india. China was always a great power, but they were never a world power (until now) because there wasn't a world, in a sense.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- torstenvl 8y ago
  Everything was invented in China. There is no Plato (for example) sharing knowlesged sourced from india. Buddhism was absolutely sourced from India, and had a profound impact on Chinese culture, spirituality, and political thought. The Lieh tzu adopts a lot of Buddhist thought and adapts it into (already Confucian-influenced) Taoist thought.
  - dalbasal 8y ago
    Good point. I suppose my points are less valid, the closer to the present we get.
personalite 8y ago
Four current common misconceptions about China. 1.) China is a communist China is now a dictatorship. China added term limit for its president in 1982, after mao's disastrous rule as a dictator. However, the parliament voted to remove the limit in may - giving xi jing ping 2958 votes and only 2 votes against 3 sustained - giving the president the ability to rule for life. xi jing ping has been adding his own thoughts into the constitution, making him as powerful as mao. 2.) China will overtake US as the most powerful country of the world That might have been slightly remotely possible in 2008, when US suffered the great recession and the world saw China's economic growth faster than US. However, nowadays, with dollar still the hegemony, US has bounced back from the recession to have healthy jobs rate, gdp growth rate, investments rate, etc. Meantime, China's economy has stalled, its gdp lauded as fake, it suffered stock market crash, capital outflow, huge shadow debt, middle income trap, yuan depreciation, and foreign direct investments decline. With dictatorship came extreme censorship, concentration camps, social credit score, and public monitoring. Its per capita gdp has stalled at around $8000/year, nowhere near US's $56000/year. 3.) Chinese citizens have high savings rate "what do we actually find when we look for the mythical Chinese saver in the real Chinese economy, rather than in the macroeconomic assumptions? Bank balances offset against enormous, rapidly rising, bad debts, a property bubble out of all contact with reality, a closed capital account to prevent money draining overseas while it still can, and an unregulated shadow banking sector where vast pools of notional value endlessly gyrate on air currents of uncertain origin" https://www.forbes.com/sites/douglasbulloch/2017/04/26/the-myth-of-chinas-excess-savings-is-weighed-down-by-excessive-debt/#1aa15b40458a https://www.forbes.com/sites/douglasbulloch/2017/04/26/the-m... 4.) China's peaceful rise South China Sea, island building, arming the islands with military weapons, threatened invasion of Taiwan, harsh crackdown of democratic demonstrators in Hong Kong, concentration camps in XinJiang, controlling buddhism in Tibet, interference with Australian and New Zealand politics, strong handed approach to other countries airlines in changing the official names of Taiwan, one belt one road as a way to finance dictatorships around the world and also bankrupt countries and steal their vital ports and infrastructures.
- jeffreyrogers 8y ago
  With regards to your first point, that doesn't make China a dictatorship, although it could evolve that way. The US didn't have term limits for its President until 1951 (22nd amendment) and we were still democratic.
eternalban 8y ago
If you haven't seen it, recommend watching 'The Emperor and The Assassin": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_and_the_Assassin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_and_the_Assassin
poutrathor 8y ago
The 2nd point is indeed a view I hold (held?). Interesting though I need more proof to change my knowledge. But first and third points are dispelled just by reading the Wikipedia article on China history.
wenc 8y ago
Somewhat off-topic but peripherally related to misconceptions about China: In the U.S. we are conditioned to think that Amazon is the most innovative/out-of-box-thinking retailer in the world. But there are some new ideas out of China in the retail and surveillance spaces that are pretty impressive/scary, beyond anything we've seen from Amazon so far. There's a bunch of articles/videos/images on this Twitter feed [1]. I like the idea of the compactible smart locker [2] though. Also, the parking garage gate that scans your license plate [3] and automatically raises the barrier arm -- it sounds like an invasion of privacy except (1) apps like Spothero already know my license plate number; (2) license plates are visible publicly. On that note, some misconceptions that we have about China's innovation mindset are addressed here [4]. [1] https://twitter.com/conniechan https://twitter.com/conniechan [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsuDDBcJ18c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsuDDBcJ18c [3] https://twitter.com/conniechan/status/990730265239654406 https://twitter.com/conniechan/status/990730265239654406 [4] https://a16z.com/2016/02/16/mindsets-for-thinking-about-innovation-in-and-competition-from-china/ https://a16z.com/2016/02/16/mindsets-for-thinking-about-inno...
- Aunche 8y ago
  That's not exactly a fair comparison. China is the largest country in the world. Amazon is just a company. There's plenty of innovation coming from drone delivery and checkout-free grocery stores.
  - wenc 8y ago
    China is a country that many of us believe is only capable of copying and not innovating, hence the misconception. Size doesn't really come into it. If it did, we would expect similar outcomes with with other large countries like India (which is innovative in its own way, but not to the same extent), Indonesia (large market, but little visible innovation), etc.
- muro 8y ago
  License plate scanners automatically raising the arm were in some Sydney supermarkets at least 3 years ago.
sli 8y ago
This article reminds me of a line from Bojack Horseman: "Uh, this is general knowledge?"
Pica_soO 8y ago
I had the impression when going there- that many of the misconceptions where copy pasted from the Japanese stereo type of mid 80s fame. At the southern coast, china actually has a Mediterranean, Italian/Cote d Azure flair- and the people seemed to have a similar relaxed attitude to live.
Bromskloss 8y ago
Are you sure these are actually common?

103 points by Thevet 8y ago

Propaganda piece by the Chinese government more like.

Is it odd that I have never heard of any of these misconceptions? Are these common for any "westerners" to have even considered?

jpatokal 8y ago
If you have even a casual interest in China (say, read the international section of any major newspaper), you'll almost certainly run into them. Random samples from the New York Times: "China is home to the longest continuous civilization in world history" https://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/q-and-a-william-c-kirby-on-can-china-lead/ https://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/q-and-a-will... "For three millennia, since 1000 B.C., the Chinese had been supremely confident that they were the center of civilization, the Middle Kingdom..." https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/opinion/13iht-edgardner.1.13693509.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/opinion/13iht-edgardner.1... "China insists it has no fights to pick. Its evolving foreign policy maxims -- principles of peaceful co-existence, peaceful orientation, peaceful rise, peaceful development -- have the same emphasis." https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/weekinreview/the-two-faces-of-rising-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/weekinreview/the-two-face...
- stephengillie 8y ago
  Referring to a group of 1.4 billion people, the economy, the government, the economic pressures driving each of them, et cetera as a single entity can reveal a level of ignorance about these components of a society.
  - RobertRoberts 8y ago
    Doesn't that apply to every single modern country right now? Why do you think it's ignorant to view China the same as every other country?
    - stephengillie 8y ago
      The ignorant probably do view all countries through this same lens.
nwhatt 8y ago
The Chinese government has something to do with it too. The 5,000 years of history narrative helps prop up the idea of “One China” as well as claims to Tibet and XinJiang.
- tiatia123 8y ago
  It is doubtful that China has 5000 years of history that gives them so much of their cultural arrogance. Some carved bones 5000 years ago do not make a high civilization. 1. 5000 years ago Egyptians had a high civilization. China did not. 2. During the empire of Rome, China was on the same level. 3. During middle ages, China did indeed have a much higher standard of civilization compared to Europe. 4. This changed with the industrial revolution (the the precursors like the Renaissance) in Europe. Part 4 and the problems that economic, cultural and military weakness of China brought with it, are a major trauma for China. Now they are on the rise again and start feeling the world is theirs. A random guy that worked in industry described it as: "When I met Chinese in the 80ies they had their believe of cultural superiority mixed with an inferiority complex because they were so far beyond. Now they have their believe of cultural superiority mixed with arrogance." This will not end well. China is in a much weaker position that they want to make you believe and I don't see their culture (that has its strength!) well suited for the future. You should not be afraid of the strengths of China. It comes with too many problems. If you are from Europe (like me), you should be more worried about your own weakness.
westiseast 8y ago
It's more like he's refuting the claims you usually hear from the CCP as part of their external (and internal) propaganda and national narrative.

cttet 8y ago

For the first part, I still think that Chinese culture is quite special with culture that passed on for that long. As a normal Chinese with standard Chinese education till 10th grade (then move to a foreign country), I can understand fragments of writings carved in stones 1500 years ago in museums, which I felt quite amazing.

pdpi 8y ago
> As a normal Chinese with standard Chinese education till 10th grade (then move to a foreign country), I can understand fragments of writings carved in stones 1500 years ago in museums, which I felt quite amazing. Is this unusual, though? Fairly certain most romance language speakers can understand at least some latin if they put their minds to it.
- interfixus 8y ago
  And so, for that matter, can we from the cold, benighted, Germanic north.
- realusername 8y ago
  > Is this unusual, though? Fairly certain most romance language speakers can understand at least some latin if they put their minds to it. Yes it works for basic texts, you can understand some words here and there.
  - 394549 8y ago
    > Yes it works for basic texts, you can understand some words here and there. Even as an English speaker, which is not a romance language, I can understand quite a few Latin words here and there, due to the fact that something like 50% of English vocabulary was borrowed from Latin or other romance languages.
- MaxBarraclough 8y ago
  It pivots on what we mean by "understand fragments". The average English speaker cannot make sense of Latin prose. Picking out a few words here and there, isn't the same thing. "Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur." All but 'Latine', and perhaps 'dictum', is gibberish to the average English speaker.

baxtr 8y ago

There are great TED talks (generally not a big fan because too sensational) to learn about China and Asia in general. For example this one: https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_jacques_understanding_the_rise_of_china https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_jacques_understanding_the_r...

stephengillie 8y ago

The misconception I carry is that the Rule of Law[0] doesn't hold the same weight as in America or Europe, due to extreme Selective Enforcement[1] - basically the person in power can arbitrarily apply the laws against those they personally dislike. This leads to the dependence on guanxi[2], where your families have been so close for generations that you're like siblings - who will arrest their own brother or sister? And people who can't leverage these guanxi relationships have barely more social leverage than a foreigner - so they diasporize. And leveraging a Chinese person with few guanxi relationships is a common mistake of companies doing business in China. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi

delinka 8y ago
Are you saying "the Rule of Law doesn't hold the same weight as in America or Europe" is your misconception? Or rather that you assume the rule of law would hold the same weight, it does not, and therefore "rule of law holds the same weight" is your misconception?
- exelius 8y ago
  Single-party systems by definition have either rule-by-decree or rule-by-consensus as a feature; so I’m not even sure the “rule of law” applies in the same sense when the rules are that the people in power are a hegemony that can change the rules whenever they want. Because those who abuse power often do it through selective enforcement, and because the population has no “acceptable” way to depose those who abuse power, you get a situation where the things you do matter less than who you are. I wouldn’t claim rule of law systems are immune to this type of influence, but a feature of a strong democracy is having checks and balances on who writes the rules vs who enforces them. You don’t have that in China, and there are definitely different sets of rules for different people.
  - delinka 8y ago

ConfusedDog 8y ago

"the Xin dynasty, set up by a usurper named Wang Mang who might have made a decent emperor but had absolutely shit luck with natural catastrophes." I like the writing style...

dalbasal 8y ago

I think one piece of Chinese narrative history that's curious and possibly relevant is: the "line of civilization" bit. The Anglo-American "history of civilization" traces itself back through British, Roman, Greek periods. It's self aggrandisement and bias, but it demonstrates how hard it is to have a totally nationally centered history of urbanism/civilization if you want to go back a few millenia. From at least the early bronze age (5000 ybp), the other great urban eurasian-african cultures had a lot of contact. Hindu Valley, Hittite, Persian/Sumerian, Egyptian, Mesopotamian. Their "suburbs" stretched into Greece on the edge of Europe, half of Africa... China had the silk road and were aware of these distant consumers, but civilisational rivalry isn't a big part of the story. The important rivalries are either internal or "barbarian" facing. Everything was invented in China. There is no Plato (for example) sharing knowlesged sourced from india. China was always a great power, but they were never a world power (until now) because there wasn't a world, in a sense.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
torstenvl 8y ago
Everything was invented in China. There is no Plato (for example) sharing knowlesged sourced from india. Buddhism was absolutely sourced from India, and had a profound impact on Chinese culture, spirituality, and political thought. The Lieh tzu adopts a lot of Buddhist thought and adapts it into (already Confucian-influenced) Taoist thought.
- dalbasal 8y ago
  Good point. I suppose my points are less valid, the closer to the present we get.

personalite 8y ago

Four current common misconceptions about China. 1.) China is a communist China is now a dictatorship. China added term limit for its president in 1982, after mao's disastrous rule as a dictator. However, the parliament voted to remove the limit in may - giving xi jing ping 2958 votes and only 2 votes against 3 sustained - giving the president the ability to rule for life. xi jing ping has been adding his own thoughts into the constitution, making him as powerful as mao. 2.) China will overtake US as the most powerful country of the world That might have been slightly remotely possible in 2008, when US suffered the great recession and the world saw China's economic growth faster than US. However, nowadays, with dollar still the hegemony, US has bounced back from the recession to have healthy jobs rate, gdp growth rate, investments rate, etc. Meantime, China's economy has stalled, its gdp lauded as fake, it suffered stock market crash, capital outflow, huge shadow debt, middle income trap, yuan depreciation, and foreign direct investments decline. With dictatorship came extreme censorship, concentration camps, social credit score, and public monitoring. Its per capita gdp has stalled at around $8000/year, nowhere near US's $56000/year. 3.) Chinese citizens have high savings rate "what do we actually find when we look for the mythical Chinese saver in the real Chinese economy, rather than in the macroeconomic assumptions? Bank balances offset against enormous, rapidly rising, bad debts, a property bubble out of all contact with reality, a closed capital account to prevent money draining overseas while it still can, and an unregulated shadow banking sector where vast pools of notional value endlessly gyrate on air currents of uncertain origin" https://www.forbes.com/sites/douglasbulloch/2017/04/26/the-myth-of-chinas-excess-savings-is-weighed-down-by-excessive-debt/#1aa15b40458a https://www.forbes.com/sites/douglasbulloch/2017/04/26/the-m... 4.) China's peaceful rise South China Sea, island building, arming the islands with military weapons, threatened invasion of Taiwan, harsh crackdown of democratic demonstrators in Hong Kong, concentration camps in XinJiang, controlling buddhism in Tibet, interference with Australian and New Zealand politics, strong handed approach to other countries airlines in changing the official names of Taiwan, one belt one road as a way to finance dictatorships around the world and also bankrupt countries and steal their vital ports and infrastructures.

jeffreyrogers 8y ago
With regards to your first point, that doesn't make China a dictatorship, although it could evolve that way. The US didn't have term limits for its President until 1951 (22nd amendment) and we were still democratic.

eternalban 8y ago

If you haven't seen it, recommend watching 'The Emperor and The Assassin": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_and_the_Assassin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_and_the_Assassin

poutrathor 8y ago

The 2nd point is indeed a view I hold (held?). Interesting though I need more proof to change my knowledge. But first and third points are dispelled just by reading the Wikipedia article on China history.

wenc 8y ago

Somewhat off-topic but peripherally related to misconceptions about China: In the U.S. we are conditioned to think that Amazon is the most innovative/out-of-box-thinking retailer in the world. But there are some new ideas out of China in the retail and surveillance spaces that are pretty impressive/scary, beyond anything we've seen from Amazon so far. There's a bunch of articles/videos/images on this Twitter feed [1]. I like the idea of the compactible smart locker [2] though. Also, the parking garage gate that scans your license plate [3] and automatically raises the barrier arm -- it sounds like an invasion of privacy except (1) apps like Spothero already know my license plate number; (2) license plates are visible publicly. On that note, some misconceptions that we have about China's innovation mindset are addressed here [4]. [1] https://twitter.com/conniechan https://twitter.com/conniechan [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsuDDBcJ18c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsuDDBcJ18c [3] https://twitter.com/conniechan/status/990730265239654406 https://twitter.com/conniechan/status/990730265239654406 [4] https://a16z.com/2016/02/16/mindsets-for-thinking-about-innovation-in-and-competition-from-china/ https://a16z.com/2016/02/16/mindsets-for-thinking-about-inno...

Aunche 8y ago
That's not exactly a fair comparison. China is the largest country in the world. Amazon is just a company. There's plenty of innovation coming from drone delivery and checkout-free grocery stores.
- wenc 8y ago
  China is a country that many of us believe is only capable of copying and not innovating, hence the misconception. Size doesn't really come into it. If it did, we would expect similar outcomes with with other large countries like India (which is innovative in its own way, but not to the same extent), Indonesia (large market, but little visible innovation), etc.
muro 8y ago
License plate scanners automatically raising the arm were in some Sydney supermarkets at least 3 years ago.

sli 8y ago

This article reminds me of a line from Bojack Horseman: "Uh, this is general knowledge?"

Pica_soO 8y ago

I had the impression when going there- that many of the misconceptions where copy pasted from the Japanese stereo type of mid 80s fame. At the southern coast, china actually has a Mediterranean, Italian/Cote d Azure flair- and the people seemed to have a similar relaxed attitude to live.

Bromskloss 8y ago

Are you sure these are actually common?