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I came back to China after being in the US for 10 years and just want to chat about stuff (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

56 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Sooo... yeah! I don't really have IRL friends to chat about this so I figured I'd make this post. Didn't want this to be super consequential like hosting an AMA or anything since it's just me going back to where I was born but yeah

A few funny observations and maybe conversation starters:

Everything I read in the US seems to talk about how China is simultaneously a futuristic paradise and an authoritarian hellscape... both seem fairly overblown. There are a lot of public transit and the food is amazing though
The rumors are true, in China they really use Wechat for everything. Wechat is used for payment (almost no one uses credit cards or cash), booking tickets, ... and all of these are tied to your national ID and your face recognition. It's a bit terrifying
There are sooooo many ads everywhere! Heck my parents' apartment building has an ad billboard right in the elevator, and this is apparently the norm. On the app store the Microsoft Edge browser literally got a 5-star rating and was praised for not running ads... it's that bad.
My god the internet is atrocious compared to the US, and having to do half of the stuff I need to with a VPN doesn't really help. It's so bad that I was missing my Gentoo days of compiling packages from source...
I thought there would be a ton of anime stuff, especially since I had the impression that Mihoyo games (the company that developed Genshin Impact, Honkai series, etc) is a topic of national pride... I think I have made a mistake. I have met three cosplayers just walking on the street so far though, so the culture definitely is there
I like rhythm games and I'm delighted to find out there are maimai DX cabs everywhere, this thing is impossible to find in the US. Haven't found SDVX or IIDX cabs, or even CHUNITHM cabs though... Also China apparently has their own Pump It Up clone (not DDR, PIU) with four more outer arrows. Imagine the five PIU step keys and four more outside...
Lemmy.world is somehow not blocked by the Chinese internet firewall. Not that I feel safe browsing Lemmy with the type of posts I make... On that topic, my own little web domain isn't blocked lmao I can still use SearXNG as usual

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (2 children)

Late reply but how harsh is the censorship? I was born in Mainland China and immigrated to the US when I was a kid; And I couldn't imagine the life of not having Youtube. Like, I'm not even talking about the political content, there are so much Youtube Science and Educational content and some Youtubers are actually interesting to watch (Jacksepticeye, Markiplier). I'm a naturalized US Citizen, but I kinda feel like I'm in such an awkward place, being both a dissident in PRC, and also a dissident here in the US. Like, I used to like the US a lot, the cultural diversity, a lot of parks and I see a lot more trees and nature, the air and water is (I mean, before 2025) cleaner, now its really only just the still somewhat free access to the internet that I like, everything else seems to be falling apart with all the immigration raids happening, and the EPA and FDA being filled with yes-men, and I'm not sure my Citizenship will even hold, and China doesn't have dual citizenship, meaning I could end up stateless if they go through with the authoritarian denaturalization efforts that they seem to be planning (I hope that doesn't happen). Both are just terrible capitalist authoritarian regimes. 😓

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 minutes ago

When my grandparents got cremated, we watched them go in, and took pictures of them right before they went into the furnace.

When they came out, my cousin tried to take pictures, but the official stopped them. As in, she asked if that was the case, but didn't ask why. I knew why, of course, because I've been outside for so long (skeletons).

One of the computers I brought back, my uncle was worried about the Windows 10 install, because it was "unsafe".

When the censorship is super harsh, the population won't even know it's happening, it's just a giant black hole of "this isn't allowed".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

Oh boy... first of all sorry to hear that.

I guess by your metric the censorship is pretty harsh here as most of the popular "foreign sites" are not accessible without a VPN/Tor connection/etc. Not having YouTube is indeed quite annoying, I watch a lot of edutainment and silly videos for relaxation... and for the past two weeks I am mostly limited to my copy of modded Skyrim (which doesn't require internet)... aaand maybe the two gacha games I'm playing if my VPN plays nice (I think I have to drop one of them now, the game server keeps refusing to log me in)

I haven't been in China long enough to try things out yet, but I think the philosophy seems to be block all foreign sources and create Chinese versions of them. So for locals there are stuff like Bilibili and Youku which in theory would offer similar levels of entertainment/edutainment so... I'm still planning to stay in the EU as a next step, but if that doesn't pan out then I will try to adapt to Chinese culture a bit more

On the topic of statelessness... I honestly don't know. I am sure the PRC does not like ppl who openly speak against the government though, so I guess that is no longer an option... maybe, just maybe even Vietman and Thailand would be better places to live, they might also be authoritarian in naming but at least they are not this ridiculous

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Btw, do you mind sharing, when you were in the US, what visa you were on or like did you have permanent residency? Did you leave because of the um... US politics recently? Or was it other reasons?

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Adding on to this nonsense...

Most of the futuristic paradise is just chinese government propaganda overflowing. Most of the authoritarian hellscape isn't really seen by normal citizens. My aunt saw police catch a pickpocket once. She felt sorry for the pickpocket because they were beating the crap out of him.
Wechat, yes, sometimes they will ask for your national id in places, but not often because nobody fucking carries that. The good news is I had family all over the place, so they just paid for everything out of their accounts.
Ads are everywhere, but most ads are just walls of text. I can't read chinese, so it's actually very easy for me to ignore it anyways.
The last few times I went, we went from dialup to ISDN to DSL. I remember the first time I went back, we got a microwave. We couldn't use it for a while because it would blow the apartment circuit breaker.
A lot of the niche cultures are just hiding in places. There's a lot of hiding places. Over the times I went back, Beijing went from 3rd ring highway to 5th ring. I had to take like two hours of bus ride to get to a Magic: The Gathering store.
Chinese PC gaming sucks ass. It's either rebranded western games, or just pay-to-win gacha games. It's been like that since the 90s. Black Myth Wukong is a big deal, because it's one of the first big time non-gacha chinese games.
Most of the younger generation are very global. They've had a taste of the unfiltered internet and cannot go back. That's not to say they have the correct perspectives on things, but there is a distinct lack of the imperialism that the older generation has. Some of the older generation is global too, especially on western movies. My uncle liked to watch western movies that I snuck in.
Every time I go, somehow, there always happens to be some government bigwigs in town, which makes all the factories shut down. The air is actually very clean without the factories.
One of the best and worst things the government did was preparation for the 2008 Olympics. They tore down every single building in the city that was only one story high (and some higher ones), and rebuilt them into at least two story high buildings. In the process, they also redid the streets, which also included clearing out the street vendors. RIP tricycle cooks and kebab vendors.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oh boy on the point of Black Myth Wukong and Beijing's loss of culture...

I don't even know if ppl in China can play Black Myth Wukong without going to a specialty arcade due to the nature of its release, which IMO would feel so wrong for ppl who live here...

On the part of Beijing losing its culture, my parents decided to take me on an extended trip to Southern China, and I'm so surprised to find ancient Chinese temples and stuff here... Beijing tore all of those down... I guess Beijing is just miserable to live in now lol

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

One of the things my cousin asked for when she came over was a laptop, which she proceeded to install World of Warcraft on. When she got tired of a job, she just quit, because fuck 996. A lot of the younger generation just hole up at home and work occasionally.

The other cities are still ok (for now). Whichever city my mom's family is in had street vendors that use QR codes, so there's at least some integration into "Modern China".

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Great Fire Wall nowadays doesn't just filter by IP, it actively parses the packet and uses machine learning to detect encrypted content's type. If the traffic seems like a bypass, the destination server will be blocked. That's how shadowsocks based bypassing died and why most VPNs don't work.

For open source software, there are mirrors usable inside the firewall. The most widely used one is https://mirrors.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/

A larger problem is the potential of completely blocking GitHub, which happened temporarily a few times before.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

Interesting... I guess I didn't give them enough credit, China has some of the most advanced machine learning research afterall

I guess that means my own little Hetzner server will probably be safe, but I guess that also means I should consider some backup VPNs... In any case I don't plan to settle in China forever so I guess it is only temporary

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I haven't been to China in about 10 years, are you in Beijing or Shanghai? How's the smog these days?

Are you a native speaker? If not how did you learn?

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I was born and raised in Beijing, so... yeah. I couldn't imagine anyone learning Chinese from scratch though, the language is brutal to learn

Apparently the smog situation has... improved? I think the air quality is still not ideal but it is definitely better than what I remembered growing up

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Chinese is pretty easy for English speakers as long as they don't care about reading it. It's about one tenth as hard as Japanese.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

My goodness don't get me started on that. I find Chinese hard to learn because as a native speaker I had to learn how to actually write the language, but at least Chinese has very lax grammar & things generally make sense... I am fluent in Japanese, the language is a nightmare to get used to

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

If you pinyin your way into the language, yes. If you have to write and read(accurately pronounce the word), then i'm pretty sure it's extremely difficult for english speaker.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

I don't find the pronunciation all that difficult as long as you're the type of person that can do imitations of other people

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

China always sounds wildly cutthroat capitalist to me (like the ads everywhere and the gacha games), is it counterbalanced by good government services at least?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago

Not really. There are some government services that are better than the US (much better public infrastructure, government seems to do some spending), but then the US is also cutthroat capitalism...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (3 children)

The app payment is rather common in Asia, particularly in South East Asia. Here in Malaysia we have various e-wallet thing to chose from, and we scan the QR to pay in physical shop. The QR, which we called it National QR, works across all apps and even bank app so they have to get creative with retaining people in their ecosystem. We basically leap into cashless payment and honestly i think it's awesome. SEA is working together now to make the ewallet usable cross country, like the one i use, i can use the exact app in China, Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Macau.

My sister frequently went to china and one thing she noticed that some area will not accept cash, so you will need to do your homework if you wanna travel there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I tried setting up an alipay account and a WeChat pay account abroad, it just doesn't work, I don't think you can even deposit money

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

Nope, you have to have local bank account to make a deposit, which mean you have to be a citizen. There's some service where they can deposit money into your account and they take a cut, but i'm not sure where to look for.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Can you use blocked sites with a VPN or is it more complicated than that?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Using a VPN is fine. The only complicated part is that a lot of the VPNs themselves are blocked so... you kind-of have to figure out what VPN works and have it set up while outside of China

The blocklist seems to be implemented in a very straightforward fashion IMO, and if the government doesn't know a website they wouldn't have it on the list. Heck I think Lemmy has every right to be on that list but it isn't blocked so... probably because it's not popular enough that they haven't noticed

Edit: nevermind see the other comment, maybe they do have some "more complicated" things after all

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Was gonna ask, if you're in mainland China how can you chat?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Lemmy.world is not blocked whatsoever. But yeah I bought like half a year of Mullvad VPN before coming here. I think Reddit's r/chinalife has a megathread on VPNs that are working as of now

Edit: I think the "Great China Firewall" is a comprehensive IP block that some government employees are adding one-by-one. Obviously stuff like Google/Facebook are blocked, but lots of other Western world sites are either not blocked or overlooked

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Do you get paranoid/scared if you try to go to a website and find out it's blocked? Does that get automatically reported or something?

I guess in general, how "watched" do you feel?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

I'm still using a VPN (Mullvad nontheless, I think it is as private as it gets) to browse Lemmy even though it is not blocked; I've literally set up a selfhosted Matrix instance so I don't have to video chat with my parents a year or so ago; there are surveillance cameras everywhere and a lot of things scan my facial data. So... I guess the answer is "very"

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Wechat is used for payment

How reliable is it to set up Wechat and link it to payment? Are you using it as foreign visitor or citizen? Is it linked to a domestic/foreign bank account, pulling money in-and-out for every transaction via ACH, or does it work as a bank account of its own that you charge up with money for later use? That's my fear with visiting China - it's nearly impossible to set up a "domestic" account even as a long-time resident because of the amount of documentation that needs to be put together. And even a "foreigner" account is difficult to get through the setup process and takes many days to activate. And some visitors complain how their account arbitrarily gets disabled anyway randomly a few days later, possibly stranding them in the middle of a trip. What if you are a permanent resident/citizen and your domestic account gets randomly disabled? How do you get through life if everything uses Wechat and cash is not even accepted? Do you become a non-person?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

So I am a Chinese citizen... Wechat is linked to a person's national ID (Shenfenzheng), and all the payment systems assume you to have that link between your national ID-Wechat in order to work. In fact a lot of times it would also scan your face/fingerprint/etc assuming those are linked... I think if there is a parallel, it would be Elon Must/Peter Thiel's wet dream where Paypal actually killed the credit card industry and became the primary payment system in the US

So the funny thing is... I barely saw any foreign persons during the past week at all; the only ones I can tell who are obviously foreigners (clearly not ethnically Chinese) seem to be either living close to the embassy/consulate district in Beijing of clearly here for work. And with all the surveillance and everything expecting you to have a real ID, I genuinely don't know how a foreigner could survive in China in this day and age...

Unironically if everything goes haywire I would just ask my parents to drive me to their hometown where I have relatives who live off a farm so... I don't have an answer as to "account gets randomly disabled". I guess if that happens you would really just become a non-person as you said

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

It's surprisingly easy to survive. Alipay and wechat both allow for foreign bank cards to be attached, you just typically also have to do a verification when you charge something through them (which is fucking annoying when you have to verify getting a water at 3am after a night of drinking). Never got a random deactivation though I do see it happen. Usually to people who don't get on much. If I needed to use transit that requires an ID like the high speed rail or a flight, I just take my passport and it gets sorted out pretty easily.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

I've not ever ran into a situation where cash and credit fail because I didn't have weixin.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I work with a lot of chinese (not children. Ducking autocorrect) people, and can confirm the WeChat popularity.

Voov seems to be an equivalent for work meetings.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

cheers man thanks for the insights!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (4 children)

So, not a lot of anime stuff in China? Why would there be any? That’s a Japanese thing, so obviously Chinese people couldn’t care less.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Not sure why you are getting downvoted but this is actually a really interesting point of discussion...

Even when I was growing up, I think China was one of the first major international consumer markets for Japanese culture. Lots of ppl were into anime/otaku culture, lots of anime got ported over

As an extreme example, Bilibili (basically Chinese Youtube)'s namesake is the nickname of a very popular anime character in the 2010s (bonus points if anyone guesses who it is!), and back when the site first started you needed to pass an 100-question anime knowledge exam to even register an account on Bilibili

And in recent years I think China is... trying to emulate Japan? Manhua became a thing; malls and fashion seem to closely follow Japanese culture as well

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

popular anime character in the 2010s

wait, it can't be Railgun, is it?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yes! The site is named after Misaka Mikoto, since funny coin flip goes bilibili (Japanese onomatopoeia) I'm not joking

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Not sure why you are getting downvoted

Because of their dismissive/condescending attitude towards something they clearly don't know mich about.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

Anime is massive in China. Slam dunk is widely credited with the NBA making in roads and at one point every convenience store in the country was adorned with one piece (haize wang) stuff. I've seen twenty year old women just watching anime casually in public.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Look "donghua" up - there is some anime production in China, even if way less than in Japan. And some rather good manhua stories to adapt; I'm still waiting for donghua versions of two. (Fairy Captivity and My Wife is the Demon Queen.)

Plus anime fans are everywhere.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

I mean, they state their reasoning right there in their post, if you care to read it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Do Chinese people really like gimmicky stuff?

We have a few people from mainland China in our office. There's this gal that I'm quite close with. I noticed that her cubicle is filled with random objects that look like toys but are supposed to be useful for something. Some of her drawers are filled to the brim with them. They look like the stuff from those Chinese videos. The other colleagues are not like that tho.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I don't know if that is the case... but places in China do sell a lot of gimmicky stuff. So maybe it's just that there is a supply? I mean I could buy all of that from Aliexpress outside of China too so

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

The office is in Singapore, so we wouldn't even need Aliexpress for that..

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (4 children)

I’ve been starting to learn Mandarin Chinese using the “Hello Chinese” app. What are your recommendations for where I might be able to speak mandarin with native speakers online?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I don't know lol... I'm not good at making friends with Chinese people either (and that is me speaking as an ethnically and legally Chinese person), and some of them really do reinforce the negative stereotype of Chinese ppl being nasty scumbags... And the Chinese social media circle is pretty insulated from the rest of the world

But if you want, I thought there are like Chinese ppl in just about every corner of the world? So maybe it is just a matter of being able to make friends with some of them. Also I know there are like Mastodon servers for Chinese speakers and subreddits for language learning and stuff

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Find other learners, form a Mandarin movie club, watch Chinese movies and discuss the movies only in Mandarin. Using Translator is acceptable. That will help you develop an ear and also practice pronunciation. I have found it to be extremely difficult to find native speakers to just chat, so that was my workaround to improve conversation.

I ended up losing a lot of it in the long run anyway.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

How's the health care?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

CT scan, plus meds for a nasty sinus infection and bronchitis cost me around $100 out of pocket with no insurance. Previously an ultrasound and meds for another infection cost me like $30. It's all pretty quick depending on the hospital.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

I haven't been sick enough to try one yet, but I'm hoping to do a somewhat cosmetic surgery (skin issues, nothing "cosmetic" at all) in the next month or so. We'll see by then!

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