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>Chinese people who study abroad are more often confused by the things missing in the west than they are liberated in the way you describe, in my experience. A

>Chinese people who study abroad are more often confused by the things missing in the west than they are liberated in the way you describe, in my experience. As someone who has never been to China could you list some things the West is missing?

nsl73 6y ago
Public transportation, affordable healthcare, & weechat are all things that are significantly better in China. — An American that spent a few weeks in China.
- jdm2212 6y ago
  I doubt you'd want to trade your healthcare for what is available to the average Chinese person (as opposed to wealthy urban elites and expats). The public transportation really is extraordinary though.
- esrauch 6y ago
  The healthcare thing doesn't jive with what I've heard from my native Chinese friends; I've heard if you have the right connections (and by association, wealth) you can get exactly what you need, but without that you can't get anything.
  - elliekelly 6y ago
    I can’t speak to healthcare generally but one of my college roommates was from China and she just could not wrap her head around the politicization of birth control in the US. I remember her asking us if Americans thought it was dangerous or addictive because she couldn’t understand why it was so controversial that the affordable care act required birth control to be covered.
    - i_am_proteus 6y ago
      The PRC perspective on birth control, specifically, is unique, since the CCP forced birth control and abortion on its population for decades as part of the "one child" policy.[0] [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
    - schoen 6y ago
      A sibling comment has already mentioned the one-child issue, but I wanted to say... Chinese culture is so deeply different from American culture about all sorts of things about reproduction and fertility. Chinese people's attitudes toward the one-child policy and also sex-selective abortion are complicated and varied, but they don't seem very similar to Americans' attitudes at all! In the U.S. it's common for people's religions to completely formally proscribe some forms of birth control and/or abortion. This has led to a big political debate about what the scope of their legal rights to avoid subsidizing these things for other people should be. It's not surprising that that debate should exist, but also not surprising that it would be uncommon in China where (1) the most practiced religions largely don't have these teachings and (2) people don't have a common expectation that the state will give their religious practices and beliefs a considerable amount of deference.
      - schoen 6y ago
        I want to add: I think a median American attitude is that nobody else should pressure you to have more or fewer children than you want to; if your religion encourages you to have children, other people are also largely supposed to respect that, and in modern times, if you just don't want children, other people are also largely supposed to respect that. (In blue tribe environments having many children is suspicious and in red tribe environments having no children is suspicious, but in both cases people are increasingly effective at pushing back socially against other people's scrutiny about this, and even at pushing back against their own families' judgments or preferences.) (These considerations don't necessarily apply the same way outside of opposite-sex monogamous married couples.) I don't think these norms are common in the same way in China or in Chinese cultures elsewhere. In particular, I think even if Chinese people don't all think their parents, or governments, should get to decide how many children they have, it doesn't seem like many will reach U.S. levels of offense that prospective childbearing couples' parents, or governments, have an expressed preference and actively try to influence this.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - HeavenFox 6y ago
    On the contrary, I believe most people will be better off with the Chinese healthcare system than the U.S. one, because nobody go bankrupt from going to the doctor. Office visit cost at most $20 - that's without insurance. Every thing has a fixed price, so you will never get a surprise bill afterwards. If you insist on visiting the best doctor in the field, wait time can be long; but otherwise you can walk into the hospital and be seen pretty quickly. Meanwhile, in the U.S., I have good health insurance through my employer, yet I am still terrified of going to the doctors, especially, god forbid, the ER. As for quality of care, obviously the facilities in the U.S. are nicer - they better be, you are paying 10x - 100x for that! For the treatment, most friends of mine from China complain the doctors in the U.S. don't do anything; they just give you some advil and send you home. However, antibiotics are probably prescribed too liberally in China, and IV injections used too much. Of course there are some drawbacks too. First, the flip side of "no surprise bill" is everything is due upfront, so it's not unheard of that critical treatment is delayed because the patient is trying to find money. Second, since healthcare is so cheap, people usually don't carry health insurance other than the government provided one, which has a maximum payout amount per year. As a result, if you get rare / serious condition you can still get ruined financially. Nowadays more and more people begin to purchase commercial health insurance - which are still an order of magnitude cheaper than the U.S. ones.
    - _AzMoo 6y ago
      Nobody will go bankrupt from going to the doctor, but no doctor will see you without cash-up-front. As a person coming from a western country with universal healthcare, it was very confronting navigating the Chinese hospital system. Every time we needed something we were first directed to an administrator who would take payment. eg, payment for initial consult, then payment for ultrasound, then payment for pharmacy services, etc.
    - philliphaydon 6y ago
      I see on the internet, especially on reddit, where there's praise for healthcare in china. But I've never spoke to a person from china who likes it. But I've heard lots of horror stories. I wouldn't want to end up in hospital in the US or china. Think the only countries I would feel at ease in are Singapore and Taiwan.
- malka 6y ago
  > weechat The sweet pleasure of being spied upon by the CCP ?
  - Dahoon 6y ago
    How is that different from using a service in the states where the NSA spies on everything?
    - Consultant32452 6y ago
      In China if you're discovered to have the wrong religion they'll put you in a concentration camp where they may or may not murder you and sell your parts. Don't worry about your family, they'll assign a rapist to your wife who will sleep in bed with her and reeducate your family. There's literally a WWII scale Holocaust going on in China right now. You have a lot of nerve asking "what's the difference?"
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    - dlivingston 6y ago
      A key difference is that PRISM was a scandal, a massive stain on the reputation of the NSA, and behavior that the majority of Americans condemned and will roundly condemn again if exposed. Can the same be said about China on such state surveillance behavior? ---- On an aside, but related to the broader conversation, the YouTube channel AsianBoss regularly visits China and conducts very revealing interviews with Chinese people on similar topics to those discussed in this thread: https://youtu.be/sTzgE1nvxZs https://youtu.be/sTzgE1nvxZs
      - 6y ago
- eigenvector 6y ago
  Parent comment said 'the West', not America. Public transportation and affordable healthcare are the norm in most highly developed Western democracies such as the UK, France, Sweden, etc.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    This is true, although in China's case in addition to being high quality it's also absurdly cheap.
- unishark 6y ago
  Let's not forget china has 1.4 billion people and a median income less than Mexico. As a westerner visiting China, one tends to stick to the places most similar and accessible to people from the west.
- throwaway2474 6y ago
  Transportation, not healthcare. High speed rail is ridiculously good, it connects just about every major Chinese city, it’s affordable, very comfortable and fast. I would consider healthcare an exception, it may be affordable but outside of a few expensive clinics in Beijing and Shanghai it’s really bad. Mobile payments are way ahead of other places (you can pay any random person you meet instantly with your phone, and that’s been the case for at least 5 years). Any kind of logistics/delivery (food, online shopping, post etc) is very fast and cheap and this has a lot of flow-on effects in terms of convenience and lifestyle. Basic research in (for example) AI is probably on par with the west, I think it’s fair to say the engineering/applied side is ahead. This is helped by essentially zero concern for privacy = more data. WeChat translate CN-EN is miles ahead of Google. Any kind of large scale tech that has anything to do with surveillance, things like CV, deep-packet inspection, would be unmatched I’d say. It’s definitely not free of racism.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    > WeChat translate CN-EN is miles ahead of Google. That's interesting! At the same time, deepl.com is also miles ahead of Google, so I'm not all that impressed by Google Translate anymore. (Deepl itself is impressive is heck!)
    - throwaway2474 6y ago
      It may be a case of Google lagging behind others yeah, I’m not overly familiar with translators other than as a casual user. WeChat is very “smoothed” in that it gives you something that makes grammatical sense and sounds native, in preference to being a direct translation. Which usually works really well but occasionally gives hilarious results. It also seems to take the context of the conversation into account rather than just the message you’re translating.
    - ma2rten 6y ago
      Are you sure about that? I think DeepL was ahead for a brief time after it was released, but Google Translate has caught up.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
smacke 6y ago
American here. I spent a couple of months in China and have Chinese friends, so here are a few things off the top of my head (take with a grain of salt and consider talking with Chinese people for a more authentic perspective): - Reliable high-speed railway. - Night markets -- lots of people socializing in the street into the early hours of the morning, enjoying street food, beer, etc. - A sense of shared experience that's difficult to find in hyper-individualistic societies. The Chinese perspective, AFAICT, is that individual liberties are worth trading for prosperity and so-called "economic" liberties. I'm told that this is something that's difficult to understand unless you've experienced the sort of progress that China has observed firsthand.
- strictnein 6y ago
  There's nothing I am more jealous of than the night markets you see around the world. I'm sure there are downsides to them, and what I see on various travel shows are mainly the upside, but man the idea of being able to step out at 1 or 2 in the morning and get a beer and some tasty food seems pretty awesome.
  - smacke 6y ago
    They are a bit unregulated, and people warned me not to eat there too often. For example, I was told that people have died of rat poison after eating rat meat (for rats apparently captured from the street). Another issue is that the vendors would sometimes reuse their cooking oil (so-called "gutter oil"). That said, I got the impression that it was OK to indulge on the occasion, and it is true that the atmosphere is really great. Ironically, these night markets are disappearing a bit as prosperity goes up. For example, in Shenzhen, a lot more roads were built to accommodate the huge increase in the number of automobiles, and it seems that many of these markets have succumbed to the concrete jungle.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  > "economic" liberties I think that's a false dilemma. The Nordic states have roughly the same personal liberties as the US, but the welfare system means people are much more financially secure.
nmfisher 6y ago
> As someone who has never been to China could you list some things the West is missing? It's been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but it's worth reiterating - safety. China is one of the safest places in the world. I literally never had a single concern for the physical well-being of my mother, my wife, anyone - no matter what part of the city they were in, or what time of the day. Worth mentioning that I've found Singapore to be the same. Contrast that with life in Australia (Melbourne), where I was constantly on edge even in the early evening, I'd worry every time my wife was out late, not to mention the instances where I was physically threatened or assaulted.
- ImprovedSilence 6y ago
  > It's been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but it's worth reiterating - safety. Maybe if you're Chinese. Right after college, a friend of mine (white American) worked in a job where he spent time at a factory in China, until he got stabbed in the lunch room by some older worker. He's fine, and while there is may be a degree of safe, it's definitely a question of safe for whom.
  - nmfisher 6y ago
    I won't pretend that violent crime doesn't exist, I've certainly witnessed it first hand. I'm mainly talking random street violence, which is far, far rarer than somewhere like Australia. I'm fairly sure that applies to most of "the West", too.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      I'm curious how you know this. Neither Chinese statistics nor news are reliable at all, and especially won't be reliable about basic quality of life issues like this where the government is highly incentivised to make their society seem really safe and controlled. So that leaves anecdotes and personal experience. How many direct experiences of violent crime in both places have you had, and how do you know this generalises?
- MaximumYComb 6y ago

nsl73 6y ago

Public transportation, affordable healthcare, & weechat are all things that are significantly better in China. — An American that spent a few weeks in China.

jdm2212 6y ago
I doubt you'd want to trade your healthcare for what is available to the average Chinese person (as opposed to wealthy urban elites and expats). The public transportation really is extraordinary though.
esrauch 6y ago
The healthcare thing doesn't jive with what I've heard from my native Chinese friends; I've heard if you have the right connections (and by association, wealth) you can get exactly what you need, but without that you can't get anything.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  I can’t speak to healthcare generally but one of my college roommates was from China and she just could not wrap her head around the politicization of birth control in the US. I remember her asking us if Americans thought it was dangerous or addictive because she couldn’t understand why it was so controversial that the affordable care act required birth control to be covered.
  - i_am_proteus 6y ago
    The PRC perspective on birth control, specifically, is unique, since the CCP forced birth control and abortion on its population for decades as part of the "one child" policy.[0] [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
  - schoen 6y ago
    A sibling comment has already mentioned the one-child issue, but I wanted to say... Chinese culture is so deeply different from American culture about all sorts of things about reproduction and fertility. Chinese people's attitudes toward the one-child policy and also sex-selective abortion are complicated and varied, but they don't seem very similar to Americans' attitudes at all! In the U.S. it's common for people's religions to completely formally proscribe some forms of birth control and/or abortion. This has led to a big political debate about what the scope of their legal rights to avoid subsidizing these things for other people should be. It's not surprising that that debate should exist, but also not surprising that it would be uncommon in China where (1) the most practiced religions largely don't have these teachings and (2) people don't have a common expectation that the state will give their religious practices and beliefs a considerable amount of deference.
    - schoen 6y ago
      I want to add: I think a median American attitude is that nobody else should pressure you to have more or fewer children than you want to; if your religion encourages you to have children, other people are also largely supposed to respect that, and in modern times, if you just don't want children, other people are also largely supposed to respect that. (In blue tribe environments having many children is suspicious and in red tribe environments having no children is suspicious, but in both cases people are increasingly effective at pushing back socially against other people's scrutiny about this, and even at pushing back against their own families' judgments or preferences.) (These considerations don't necessarily apply the same way outside of opposite-sex monogamous married couples.) I don't think these norms are common in the same way in China or in Chinese cultures elsewhere. In particular, I think even if Chinese people don't all think their parents, or governments, should get to decide how many children they have, it doesn't seem like many will reach U.S. levels of offense that prospective childbearing couples' parents, or governments, have an expressed preference and actively try to influence this.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- HeavenFox 6y ago
  On the contrary, I believe most people will be better off with the Chinese healthcare system than the U.S. one, because nobody go bankrupt from going to the doctor. Office visit cost at most $20 - that's without insurance. Every thing has a fixed price, so you will never get a surprise bill afterwards. If you insist on visiting the best doctor in the field, wait time can be long; but otherwise you can walk into the hospital and be seen pretty quickly. Meanwhile, in the U.S., I have good health insurance through my employer, yet I am still terrified of going to the doctors, especially, god forbid, the ER. As for quality of care, obviously the facilities in the U.S. are nicer - they better be, you are paying 10x - 100x for that! For the treatment, most friends of mine from China complain the doctors in the U.S. don't do anything; they just give you some advil and send you home. However, antibiotics are probably prescribed too liberally in China, and IV injections used too much. Of course there are some drawbacks too. First, the flip side of "no surprise bill" is everything is due upfront, so it's not unheard of that critical treatment is delayed because the patient is trying to find money. Second, since healthcare is so cheap, people usually don't carry health insurance other than the government provided one, which has a maximum payout amount per year. As a result, if you get rare / serious condition you can still get ruined financially. Nowadays more and more people begin to purchase commercial health insurance - which are still an order of magnitude cheaper than the U.S. ones.
  - _AzMoo 6y ago
    Nobody will go bankrupt from going to the doctor, but no doctor will see you without cash-up-front. As a person coming from a western country with universal healthcare, it was very confronting navigating the Chinese hospital system. Every time we needed something we were first directed to an administrator who would take payment. eg, payment for initial consult, then payment for ultrasound, then payment for pharmacy services, etc.
  - philliphaydon 6y ago
    I see on the internet, especially on reddit, where there's praise for healthcare in china. But I've never spoke to a person from china who likes it. But I've heard lots of horror stories. I wouldn't want to end up in hospital in the US or china. Think the only countries I would feel at ease in are Singapore and Taiwan.
malka 6y ago
> weechat The sweet pleasure of being spied upon by the CCP ?
- Dahoon 6y ago
  How is that different from using a service in the states where the NSA spies on everything?
  - Consultant32452 6y ago
    In China if you're discovered to have the wrong religion they'll put you in a concentration camp where they may or may not murder you and sell your parts. Don't worry about your family, they'll assign a rapist to your wife who will sleep in bed with her and reeducate your family. There's literally a WWII scale Holocaust going on in China right now. You have a lot of nerve asking "what's the difference?"
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dlivingston 6y ago
    A key difference is that PRISM was a scandal, a massive stain on the reputation of the NSA, and behavior that the majority of Americans condemned and will roundly condemn again if exposed. Can the same be said about China on such state surveillance behavior? ---- On an aside, but related to the broader conversation, the YouTube channel AsianBoss regularly visits China and conducts very revealing interviews with Chinese people on similar topics to those discussed in this thread: https://youtu.be/sTzgE1nvxZs https://youtu.be/sTzgE1nvxZs
    - 6y ago
eigenvector 6y ago
Parent comment said 'the West', not America. Public transportation and affordable healthcare are the norm in most highly developed Western democracies such as the UK, France, Sweden, etc.
- jbay808 6y ago
  This is true, although in China's case in addition to being high quality it's also absurdly cheap.
unishark 6y ago
Let's not forget china has 1.4 billion people and a median income less than Mexico. As a westerner visiting China, one tends to stick to the places most similar and accessible to people from the west.
throwaway2474 6y ago
Transportation, not healthcare. High speed rail is ridiculously good, it connects just about every major Chinese city, it’s affordable, very comfortable and fast. I would consider healthcare an exception, it may be affordable but outside of a few expensive clinics in Beijing and Shanghai it’s really bad. Mobile payments are way ahead of other places (you can pay any random person you meet instantly with your phone, and that’s been the case for at least 5 years). Any kind of logistics/delivery (food, online shopping, post etc) is very fast and cheap and this has a lot of flow-on effects in terms of convenience and lifestyle. Basic research in (for example) AI is probably on par with the west, I think it’s fair to say the engineering/applied side is ahead. This is helped by essentially zero concern for privacy = more data. WeChat translate CN-EN is miles ahead of Google. Any kind of large scale tech that has anything to do with surveillance, things like CV, deep-packet inspection, would be unmatched I’d say. It’s definitely not free of racism.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  > WeChat translate CN-EN is miles ahead of Google. That's interesting! At the same time, deepl.com is also miles ahead of Google, so I'm not all that impressed by Google Translate anymore. (Deepl itself is impressive is heck!)
  - throwaway2474 6y ago
    It may be a case of Google lagging behind others yeah, I’m not overly familiar with translators other than as a casual user. WeChat is very “smoothed” in that it gives you something that makes grammatical sense and sounds native, in preference to being a direct translation. Which usually works really well but occasionally gives hilarious results. It also seems to take the context of the conversation into account rather than just the message you’re translating.
  - ma2rten 6y ago
    Are you sure about that? I think DeepL was ahead for a brief time after it was released, but Google Translate has caught up.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

smacke 6y ago

American here. I spent a couple of months in China and have Chinese friends, so here are a few things off the top of my head (take with a grain of salt and consider talking with Chinese people for a more authentic perspective): - Reliable high-speed railway. - Night markets -- lots of people socializing in the street into the early hours of the morning, enjoying street food, beer, etc. - A sense of shared experience that's difficult to find in hyper-individualistic societies. The Chinese perspective, AFAICT, is that individual liberties are worth trading for prosperity and so-called "economic" liberties. I'm told that this is something that's difficult to understand unless you've experienced the sort of progress that China has observed firsthand.

strictnein 6y ago
There's nothing I am more jealous of than the night markets you see around the world. I'm sure there are downsides to them, and what I see on various travel shows are mainly the upside, but man the idea of being able to step out at 1 or 2 in the morning and get a beer and some tasty food seems pretty awesome.
- smacke 6y ago
  They are a bit unregulated, and people warned me not to eat there too often. For example, I was told that people have died of rat poison after eating rat meat (for rats apparently captured from the street). Another issue is that the vendors would sometimes reuse their cooking oil (so-called "gutter oil"). That said, I got the impression that it was OK to indulge on the occasion, and it is true that the atmosphere is really great. Ironically, these night markets are disappearing a bit as prosperity goes up. For example, in Shenzhen, a lot more roads were built to accommodate the huge increase in the number of automobiles, and it seems that many of these markets have succumbed to the concrete jungle.
dehrmann 6y ago
> "economic" liberties I think that's a false dilemma. The Nordic states have roughly the same personal liberties as the US, but the welfare system means people are much more financially secure.

nmfisher 6y ago

> As someone who has never been to China could you list some things the West is missing? It's been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but it's worth reiterating - safety. China is one of the safest places in the world. I literally never had a single concern for the physical well-being of my mother, my wife, anyone - no matter what part of the city they were in, or what time of the day. Worth mentioning that I've found Singapore to be the same. Contrast that with life in Australia (Melbourne), where I was constantly on edge even in the early evening, I'd worry every time my wife was out late, not to mention the instances where I was physically threatened or assaulted.

ImprovedSilence 6y ago
> It's been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but it's worth reiterating - safety. Maybe if you're Chinese. Right after college, a friend of mine (white American) worked in a job where he spent time at a factory in China, until he got stabbed in the lunch room by some older worker. He's fine, and while there is may be a degree of safe, it's definitely a question of safe for whom.
- nmfisher 6y ago
  I won't pretend that violent crime doesn't exist, I've certainly witnessed it first hand. I'm mainly talking random street violence, which is far, far rarer than somewhere like Australia. I'm fairly sure that applies to most of "the West", too.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    I'm curious how you know this. Neither Chinese statistics nor news are reliable at all, and especially won't be reliable about basic quality of life issues like this where the government is highly incentivised to make their society seem really safe and controlled. So that leaves anecdotes and personal experience. How many direct experiences of violent crime in both places have you had, and how do you know this generalises?
MaximumYComb 6y ago