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In Chinese media it is common to make fun of how foreigners look and how they speak Chinese. The Chinese don’t see such poking fun as a problem, nor do a great
by OfSanguineFire 3y ago
In Chinese media it is common to make fun of how foreigners look and how they speak Chinese. The Chinese don’t see such poking fun as a problem, nor do a great many other peoples on earth. Parts of Western culture, like yourself feeling such things interrupted the flow of the Dahl book, are the odd ones out here, and one might ask oneself if it has to be this way. Of course, I agree that there are powerful corporate motivations to avoid anything that might turn off potential consumers.
- civilitty 3y agoMoral relativism aside, there’s a taboo against “punching down” in humor and comedy. It’s obviously a fuzzy heuristic but in general, people from Western imperial powers making fun of the people they’ve exploited is pretty far in the unacceptable column. A caricature of a French, British, or German person in American media, for example, is much more acceptable than a caricature of a Chinese person.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoEven that taboo against punching down is a peculiarity of (some parts of) modern Western culture. The blind, deaf, crippled, and mentally retarded are a favourite butt of jokes all over the world.
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoKindness and compassion seem to be lacking in that kind of behavior. Are those only western values? I don’t think so.
- bluefirebrand 3y agoMore and more, I find that sugar coating everything and coddling everyone is not kind or compassionate. I'm not saying that we should be going out of our way to make fun of everyone every chance we get, but this idea that "oh, those people are different so they are off limits for jokes or criticism" is a good way to make sure those people never develop any level of resilience.
- amanaplanacanal 3y ago“No really, us making fun of you is actually for your benefit.”
- kelnos 3y agoThere's a difference between poking fun and outright bigotry, though. I'm not saying Dahl is one thing and the Chinese media is another, but I think we need to look harder at all of these things to figure out what place it's coming from. And even then, poking fun, to me, is a personal thing. There are poking-fun-type things I might say to a close friend that I would never say to an acquaintance. Making fun of a random-stranger foreigner who is doing you the honor of trying to learn your language is just mean-spirited, no matter how you look at it. Makes me wonder about the kind of people who would do that. As to your specific statement: > In Chinese media it is common to make fun of how foreigners look and how they speak Chinese. To me that just sounds like propaganda. The Chinese media is promoting the idea of Chinese superiority. "All those people from other nations look funny, and are too stupid to speak our language properly." Anecdotally, an ethnically-Chinese friend of mine who lived in China for a few years (and traveled around the country quite a bit) used to tell me that many, many native-born Chinese people speak Mandarin poorly, some to the point of being difficult to understand. So poking fun at foreigners for their bad Chinese is ironic, perhaps to the point of being a little sad.
- a_techwriter_00 3y agoIn terms of ethnicity, isn't China something like 91% Han Chinese? I wonder if that has anything to do with the incentive structure behind why their media denigrates other races.