5 ms·

＞ With the current political climate and state of affairs in mainland China, many Gen Z-ers and Millenials (mostly from Guangdong Province), as I consider Macau

＞ With the current political climate and state of affairs in mainland China, many Gen Z-ers and Millenials (mostly from Guangdong Province), as I consider Macau, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to be separate territories) who hail from mainland China but don’t refer to themselves as Chinese, instead calling themselves Cantonese. While some simply wish to preserve personal identity, there are also many who dissociate themselves simply because they believe the rest of China to be inferior. There's a lot of Chinese stereotypes being trotted out here, but I'll address this one. Those who refer to themselves as Cantonese do not feel superior, but they have generally felt pushed around by Beijing. Guangdong was, and still partially is, the economic powerhouse of China. This has made the North nervous at times. Beijing has continually pushed their political weight around to try and stifle any sense of original Cantonese cultural, from suppressing the language and media to installing leaders that are happy to oblige with these policies. For the most part they have been successful, and it's quite sad. The homogenization of China is seen as necessary to bind the country, but has destroyed the cultural beauty of the country.

baybal2 5y ago
> There's a lot of Chinese stereotypes being trotted out here, but I'll address this one. As an ethnic Chinese who been in, and out of China every year since childhood, I'd yes, it's very superficial. I do not feel he lived in China for long enough outside of the insular expat bubble. Chinese Americans have self-invented insecurities about being "identity-less," but Chinese in China have very real insecurities about being "identity-less" This "identity searching" crowd looks very strange to me. Besides us speaking languages of the same linguistic family, is as easily different as India, and UK. For me, who spent nearly all childhood in Russia, and whose parents were separate from China for 5, and 4 generations, Chinese Americans do still feel more similarly wired than mainlanders today, which are their own completely brand new type of people. It's very similar with my experience meeting overseas Russians from immigration waves from before 1917 in America. For some reason, to me they felt "more Russian" after 4-5 generations in the US than people whom I knew back home. > 1. I visited a prison in Jiangxi to discuss a potential prisoner safety solution. In a meeting with the vice-warden, he tacitly mentioned how Adidas shoes were being made in the prison that he was running. We quickly pulled out of that project. I haven’t bought Adidas- or Nike-branded shoes since. This gave me a chuckle. I don't know what to get off people like him. In China I've seen a lot of very strange Western types who scream "there is no Democracy in America!," and then ran to China out of all places to find a big surprise.
- emmelaich 5y ago
  You sound like you have some interesting stories to tell too. Please write them up!
- another_story 5y ago
  > Chinese Americans have self-invented insecurities about being "identity-less," but Chinese in China have very real insecurities about being "identity-less" Well said. I have my own ideas, but why do you think this is?
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago
  >but Chinese in China have very real insecurities about being "identity-less" No idea what you mean by that. I didn't read the entire article but the fact that he said he considers Macau separate speaks for itself to me, he probably doesn't know much about it. Hong Kong was truly separate until recently, Macau had been under Mainland control even before 1999 so it's been decades now. The influence is clearly visible to anyone who knows the country. There also weren't any meaningful protests when the CCP broke the two systems agreement as there were in Hong Kong. That said, I don't see any reason to ad hominem attack the guy. China is a closed off society and increasingly so again under Xi. A foreigner will not understand everything after living there for a short time. Of course that's true for any place but it's especially true with China. It's a running joke among expats that new arrivals who've only been there a year or two have the complete opposite view of the country than they're going to have a couple of more years down the line.
- contingencies 5y ago
  Adidas have a highly automated shoe factory outside Guangzhou which is amongst the best in the world. I think it's safe to say they are moving from manual labor toward automation. Perhaps pressure from bad media like this will accelerate that process.
ethbr0 5y ago
Is the Taiping Civil War part of common Chinese awareness and discussion? Curious how relatively recent regionalism plays in modern Chinese thought.
- bene_legionary 5y ago
  I can't answer your question (I left China at a very early age), but I think that it's a shame that the Taiping Civil War isn't widely known as things like the Russian civil war or even the Chinese civil war. People might have a different understanding of China if they knew anything about the Taiping or KMT-CCP wars. Hopefully others can answer your question.
screye 5y ago
In some ways, it sounds similar to the Catalonia - Madrid divide in Spain.
- another_story 5y ago
  This is not a bad analogy considering Guangdong has historically been the seat of many internal conflicts.
dragonsh 5y ago
> Those who refer to themselves as Cantonese do not feel superior People who call themselves cantonese and not chinese are mostly from Hong Kong. People in Hong Kong always thought of themselves as superior to mainland Chinese and not just that they openly discriminated against them and darker skin people from south asia many of whom hold Hong Kong passport. If you want to talk about regional differences like Newyorker or Californian then it does exist in China today where Shanghainese consider themselves at top and mostly disliked by Beijinger or HongKonger and others. Efforts for unification of China started in Qin empire (221–206 BC) [0], which includes language standardisation and still a work in progress given there are still large number of dialects and ethnic groups in China. Lucky for China many of its historical culture remains along with language, cannot say the same for native Americans, whose language is not even part of official languages in North or South America. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_dynasty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_dynasty
- enkid 5y ago
  Why do we have to bring Native Americans into it? This seems at best a non-sequitur, and at worst whataboutism to hide China's many issues with suppressing minority cultures. No one claims states in the Americas have a good history with this, why bring it up when it has nothing to do with the conversation? Both China and many other countries need to do better. Bringing up complaints about other countries does nothing but trying to distract.
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  I'm assuming you're chinese. Can you explain to me why chinese people - not just in the PRC but also Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia - seem so eager to eliminate every chinese language that isn't Mandarin? It's truly bizarre to me. Even people who want the EU to become a super state don't do things like call Dutch and French 'dialects' and demand the whole thing standardise to one language.
  - _tik_ 5y ago
    Not OP. For the Singapore case. The main reason is practicality. Mandarin and English considered more important in Global Business. English educated political leaders assumed learning Mandarin was hindered by speaking dialect at home. Singapore is a young nation then.
k_sze 5y ago
> Those who refer to themselves as Cantonese do not feel superior, but they have generally felt pushed around by Beijing. That's not even necessarily true, people all over China refer to themselves by their province, sometimes even prefecture or city, simply out of pride. People are proud of being from Shanghai, or proud of being from Fujian, etc. People are aware of tongue-in-cheek stereotypes regarding their own hometown among the larger Chinese population, and that makes each of them feel special and proud.
- Stevvo 5y ago
  I find it quite amazing how much people love to bring up the tongue-in-cheek stereotypes. This is a perfectly normal interaction in China; A) Hi, I'm from Sichuan B) Oh, great! It must be nice to sit around all day drinking tea.
- another_story 5y ago
  When it comes to suppression of the language, the exclusion of it in schools, the closing or attempted closing of radio and TV stations, and the hiring of outside officials to push Mandarin, they absolutely do. It wasn't long ago when you'd walk through districts like Liwan and see signs stating “no Mandarin” on restaurant signs or when vendors would refuse to speak to people in Mandarin. If you had lived in Guangzhou, especially in the 90s and 00s, you'd have experience this
  - Taniwha 5y ago
    Not really a new thing though, before (very roughly) 1900 most people in France did not speak French as we know it today, the French govt as a matter of policy forced everyone to speak the same language (and it's mostly worked). Here in NZ the govt tried to force people not to speak Te Reo, literally beating it out of children in school, happily we're past that now but, well, that's how cultural imperialism works
  - k_sze 5y ago
    Strangely enough, my family has been running a business in Dongguan (not Guangzhou, but close enough, still a major Cantonese industrial city of Guangdong province), since 1980s and we have seen nothing like that. You can't say they "refuse" to speak to people in Mandarin because they simply _can't speak_ Mandarin. Back then, many people simply did not have enough schooling to learn Mandarin, and so they simply couldn't speak it (at least not fluently). The government was not stupid. There was utterly no reason to enforce Mandarin and deprecate Cantonese when they were expecting so much investment from Hong Kongers (who usually did not speak Mandarin either) during that period. Cantonese TV stations and radio stations are still doing just fine today. And then of course you can't have just Cantonese when there's an influx of labour from other parts of China, which is why, as a simple matter of economic adaptation, Mandarin gradually picked up. But Cantonese is not being threatened in any way. In fact, there is now a more widespread understanding of the importance of Cantonese, because it is _closer_ to Middle Chinese from the Tang and Song dynasties than many other dialects. It's an important dialect for properly studying and appreciating Tang poems. I know people in more Northern parts of China who know Cantonese songs from the 80s and 90s of Hong Kong because they appreciate the more classical wordings and rhymes of the lyrics.
secondaryacct 5y ago
I m sorry but there is a Cantonese superiority complex, we see it here too in Hong Kong. It s not crazy, it s in a lot of other places (one american girl once told me Europe is boring, to which I replied for me all americans are morons: see a bit lol), but it s more than defensive and a big reason why we have so much trouble credibly communicating demands to Beijing.
- Module_compile 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - dandelany 5y ago
    facepalm You’re not helping.
    - Module_compile 5y ago
      And how is it you are helping? What is it that NASA does again with its annual $20B budget? Sleeping? ...Not putting people into space, that's for sure. Or maybe it pays others to put people into space? Is that how it works now? On the plus side, I saw one of your NASA T-shirts at Walmart - good job? ...No NASA emblems on spaceships though.
      - Module_compile 5y ago
        This ^ comment may have been a bit too savage. I'm sorry, but I'm not sorry. I'm not right, but I'm not wrong either.
  - MrsPeaches 5y ago
    > why did you steal all their intellectual property? Just as a side note the American industrial revolution was built on intellectual property theft [1]. So was the Byzantine empire [2]. The British empire (and it’s tea production) also did well out of IP theft [3]. [1] https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-europe https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_into_the_Byzantine_Empire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_i... [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fortune https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fortune

baybal2 5y ago

> There's a lot of Chinese stereotypes being trotted out here, but I'll address this one. As an ethnic Chinese who been in, and out of China every year since childhood, I'd yes, it's very superficial. I do not feel he lived in China for long enough outside of the insular expat bubble. Chinese Americans have self-invented insecurities about being "identity-less," but Chinese in China have very real insecurities about being "identity-less" This "identity searching" crowd looks very strange to me. Besides us speaking languages of the same linguistic family, is as easily different as India, and UK. For me, who spent nearly all childhood in Russia, and whose parents were separate from China for 5, and 4 generations, Chinese Americans do still feel more similarly wired than mainlanders today, which are their own completely brand new type of people. It's very similar with my experience meeting overseas Russians from immigration waves from before 1917 in America. For some reason, to me they felt "more Russian" after 4-5 generations in the US than people whom I knew back home. > 1. I visited a prison in Jiangxi to discuss a potential prisoner safety solution. In a meeting with the vice-warden, he tacitly mentioned how Adidas shoes were being made in the prison that he was running. We quickly pulled out of that project. I haven’t bought Adidas- or Nike-branded shoes since. This gave me a chuckle. I don't know what to get off people like him. In China I've seen a lot of very strange Western types who scream "there is no Democracy in America!," and then ran to China out of all places to find a big surprise.

emmelaich 5y ago
You sound like you have some interesting stories to tell too. Please write them up!
another_story 5y ago
> Chinese Americans have self-invented insecurities about being "identity-less," but Chinese in China have very real insecurities about being "identity-less" Well said. I have my own ideas, but why do you think this is?
trompetenaccoun 5y ago
>but Chinese in China have very real insecurities about being "identity-less" No idea what you mean by that. I didn't read the entire article but the fact that he said he considers Macau separate speaks for itself to me, he probably doesn't know much about it. Hong Kong was truly separate until recently, Macau had been under Mainland control even before 1999 so it's been decades now. The influence is clearly visible to anyone who knows the country. There also weren't any meaningful protests when the CCP broke the two systems agreement as there were in Hong Kong. That said, I don't see any reason to ad hominem attack the guy. China is a closed off society and increasingly so again under Xi. A foreigner will not understand everything after living there for a short time. Of course that's true for any place but it's especially true with China. It's a running joke among expats that new arrivals who've only been there a year or two have the complete opposite view of the country than they're going to have a couple of more years down the line.
contingencies 5y ago
Adidas have a highly automated shoe factory outside Guangzhou which is amongst the best in the world. I think it's safe to say they are moving from manual labor toward automation. Perhaps pressure from bad media like this will accelerate that process.

ethbr0 5y ago

Is the Taiping Civil War part of common Chinese awareness and discussion? Curious how relatively recent regionalism plays in modern Chinese thought.

bene_legionary 5y ago
I can't answer your question (I left China at a very early age), but I think that it's a shame that the Taiping Civil War isn't widely known as things like the Russian civil war or even the Chinese civil war. People might have a different understanding of China if they knew anything about the Taiping or KMT-CCP wars. Hopefully others can answer your question.

screye 5y ago

In some ways, it sounds similar to the Catalonia - Madrid divide in Spain.

another_story 5y ago
This is not a bad analogy considering Guangdong has historically been the seat of many internal conflicts.

dragonsh 5y ago

> Those who refer to themselves as Cantonese do not feel superior People who call themselves cantonese and not chinese are mostly from Hong Kong. People in Hong Kong always thought of themselves as superior to mainland Chinese and not just that they openly discriminated against them and darker skin people from south asia many of whom hold Hong Kong passport. If you want to talk about regional differences like Newyorker or Californian then it does exist in China today where Shanghainese consider themselves at top and mostly disliked by Beijinger or HongKonger and others. Efforts for unification of China started in Qin empire (221–206 BC) [0], which includes language standardisation and still a work in progress given there are still large number of dialects and ethnic groups in China. Lucky for China many of its historical culture remains along with language, cannot say the same for native Americans, whose language is not even part of official languages in North or South America. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_dynasty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_dynasty

enkid 5y ago
Why do we have to bring Native Americans into it? This seems at best a non-sequitur, and at worst whataboutism to hide China's many issues with suppressing minority cultures. No one claims states in the Americas have a good history with this, why bring it up when it has nothing to do with the conversation? Both China and many other countries need to do better. Bringing up complaints about other countries does nothing but trying to distract.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
I'm assuming you're chinese. Can you explain to me why chinese people - not just in the PRC but also Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia - seem so eager to eliminate every chinese language that isn't Mandarin? It's truly bizarre to me. Even people who want the EU to become a super state don't do things like call Dutch and French 'dialects' and demand the whole thing standardise to one language.
- _tik_ 5y ago
  Not OP. For the Singapore case. The main reason is practicality. Mandarin and English considered more important in Global Business. English educated political leaders assumed learning Mandarin was hindered by speaking dialect at home. Singapore is a young nation then.

k_sze 5y ago

> Those who refer to themselves as Cantonese do not feel superior, but they have generally felt pushed around by Beijing. That's not even necessarily true, people all over China refer to themselves by their province, sometimes even prefecture or city, simply out of pride. People are proud of being from Shanghai, or proud of being from Fujian, etc. People are aware of tongue-in-cheek stereotypes regarding their own hometown among the larger Chinese population, and that makes each of them feel special and proud.

Stevvo 5y ago
I find it quite amazing how much people love to bring up the tongue-in-cheek stereotypes. This is a perfectly normal interaction in China; A) Hi, I'm from Sichuan B) Oh, great! It must be nice to sit around all day drinking tea.
another_story 5y ago
When it comes to suppression of the language, the exclusion of it in schools, the closing or attempted closing of radio and TV stations, and the hiring of outside officials to push Mandarin, they absolutely do. It wasn't long ago when you'd walk through districts like Liwan and see signs stating “no Mandarin” on restaurant signs or when vendors would refuse to speak to people in Mandarin. If you had lived in Guangzhou, especially in the 90s and 00s, you'd have experience this
- Taniwha 5y ago
  Not really a new thing though, before (very roughly) 1900 most people in France did not speak French as we know it today, the French govt as a matter of policy forced everyone to speak the same language (and it's mostly worked). Here in NZ the govt tried to force people not to speak Te Reo, literally beating it out of children in school, happily we're past that now but, well, that's how cultural imperialism works
- k_sze 5y ago
  Strangely enough, my family has been running a business in Dongguan (not Guangzhou, but close enough, still a major Cantonese industrial city of Guangdong province), since 1980s and we have seen nothing like that. You can't say they "refuse" to speak to people in Mandarin because they simply _can't speak_ Mandarin. Back then, many people simply did not have enough schooling to learn Mandarin, and so they simply couldn't speak it (at least not fluently). The government was not stupid. There was utterly no reason to enforce Mandarin and deprecate Cantonese when they were expecting so much investment from Hong Kongers (who usually did not speak Mandarin either) during that period. Cantonese TV stations and radio stations are still doing just fine today. And then of course you can't have just Cantonese when there's an influx of labour from other parts of China, which is why, as a simple matter of economic adaptation, Mandarin gradually picked up. But Cantonese is not being threatened in any way. In fact, there is now a more widespread understanding of the importance of Cantonese, because it is _closer_ to Middle Chinese from the Tang and Song dynasties than many other dialects. It's an important dialect for properly studying and appreciating Tang poems. I know people in more Northern parts of China who know Cantonese songs from the 80s and 90s of Hong Kong because they appreciate the more classical wordings and rhymes of the lyrics.

secondaryacct 5y ago

I m sorry but there is a Cantonese superiority complex, we see it here too in Hong Kong. It s not crazy, it s in a lot of other places (one american girl once told me Europe is boring, to which I replied for me all americans are morons: see a bit lol), but it s more than defensive and a big reason why we have so much trouble credibly communicating demands to Beijing.

Module_compile 5y ago
[flagged]
- dandelany 5y ago
  facepalm You’re not helping.
  - Module_compile 5y ago
    And how is it you are helping? What is it that NASA does again with its annual $20B budget? Sleeping? ...Not putting people into space, that's for sure. Or maybe it pays others to put people into space? Is that how it works now? On the plus side, I saw one of your NASA T-shirts at Walmart - good job? ...No NASA emblems on spaceships though.
    - Module_compile 5y ago
      This ^ comment may have been a bit too savage. I'm sorry, but I'm not sorry. I'm not right, but I'm not wrong either.
- MrsPeaches 5y ago
  > why did you steal all their intellectual property? Just as a side note the American industrial revolution was built on intellectual property theft [1]. So was the Byzantine empire [2]. The British empire (and it’s tea production) also did well out of IP theft [3]. [1] https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-europe https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_into_the_Byzantine_Empire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_i... [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fortune https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fortune