omgeveryone9 said:
I think the ancient aspects of the culture are cool, but modern China has basically become a fascist wasteland. I tend to think about sweatshops, cultural thievery, people packed into tiny living spaces and sharing a single mat in shifts to sleep on, SARS starting due to people living in close proximity to their livestock, intense xenophobic racism, saber rattling about colonizing other countries as it builds up a powerful navy (both above and under water) with the explicit intent to project force. Oh yes and of course the "death vans" mobile execution chambers, allegedly developed with the intent of driving them up to prisons to perform executions (which makes no real sense, when you can just have the execution in the prison) and how they were later connected to goverment organ harvesting. A quick search for "chinese death vans" will get you the details, I've posted links before, it's actually years old.
It's one of those things where there are beautiful aspects to the culture, and a lot of beautiful things and places in modern china, but it's impossible to ignore the rest of it, or where it's going, or what it's doing. You take a look at the public face of China as the goverment wants you to see it, the educated elite it puts before the world, and then you remember the exposes on those factory workers and how the vast majority of people live, remember how SARS got started, look at the economic policies and theft, and even how China achieves those "public images" going back to things like how the goverment cleared away all the "unsightly people" taking away homes, and preventing people from going outside if they might give the wrong impression... all in preparation for the Beijing Olympics.
It's kind of funny because I'm a guy that kind of grew up with Kung-Fu movies, Hong-Kong Action Cinema, and all kinds of fantasy having to do with oriental mysticism and such. I loved China and the whole idea of it and it's culture as a kid, but as I grew up, learned more about it, saw more of what was going on, and actually met a lot of people coming over from Mainland China for business reasons... well let's just say impressions changed.
As a kid when I was growing up it was the USSR that was the evil empire, and we really hated them and said all these nasty things about them and what conditions were there. A lot of it was true, some of it was exagerrations. What's shocking is that we politically treat China more like a friend, or at least neutral party, as opposed to an enemy empire, and don't actually engage in the same kind of propaganda, yet what comes through is actually worse than a lot of the smack that used to be said about the Russians and the conditions of the people there, and the scary thing is that the stuff going on around the Olympics, the sweatshops and living conditions, SARS and how it started, etc... isn't being exagerrated, and if anything conditions are being understated for diplomatic reasons.
It's one of those situations where I feel a huge amount of pity for The Chinece People and want to help them a lot of the time, while I feel an incredible amount of anger towards the goverment and modern Chinese culture, especially as it infringes on and steals from my own.
