Ask Lemmy

They made cheap low quality goods and had a lot of rural poor people. Through the 80s and 90s their reputation for making knockoff versions of things improved.

As a sweatshop, where civilized at all.

And that mostly went for Asia as a whole in the average American portrayal.

Early aughts in international relations class they were still teaching students about China being a “sleeping giant” just beginning to come into its own economically speaking. At the time it was emphasized that they had a huge army but it was not well trained in combat. Tianamen and the transition of HK were in the very recent past so it seemed China was more interested in managing internal divisions than challenges on the international front.

60's and 70's had the term junky japanese as their products tended to be crappy. china was not even on the radar outside of ping pong diplomacy from nixon.

Growing up in the '80s and '90s in rural USA, here's what I remember:

• poverty and starvation are big problems (also how moms got kids to eat all their food)
• it was mostly extremely rural and undeveloped
• they were communist and not to be trusted
• they are not welcoming of outsiders at all

I have a couple of Chinese friends today and would love to visit at some point, but I'm not a huge fan of what's been happening in governance in the last decade and change so will probably hold off on that.

A place with lots of suspicious bath-drownings if a baby had the misfortune of being born a girl during the one child policy.

In the 90s, my dad and a lot of other guys in my area lost their machining jobs because the work was being done in China. My perception of China (only what I learned from people around me talking about it) was that it was a dirty place where everyone lived in squalor and worked in sweat shops for pennies a day.

I remember the late 90's saw a trend of making bad guys in movies Chinese instead of Russian like they typically were previously. It probably would have continued well into today, but 9/11 made it so the bad guys were now middle eastern.

90's teenager: Corrupt government that was a maker of cheap goods and claimed to be first in everything ever and had the most bestest smartest refined cultureal history compared to us heathen backwater westerners.

THere's reasons I struggle with looking past my own mindset whenever anything china related in the sciences pop up, as my first thought is 'is there independant verfication there to prevent it from just being government propaganda bullshit?'

....kinda like i'm having to start doing with any 'official' anything here stateside now.

Same thing happened with Japan.

This is before my time but I've known lots of older people who born in the 50s and grew up in the 60s and 70s.

Products made in Japan were once considered cheap things. I ride motorcycles so I talk to a lot of people about the history, especially with Honda and Yamaha. North American motorcycles were first British, German and American. When the Japanese started in the 50s and 60s, everyone laughed at them ... a common racist thing to call them back then was 'rice cookers' ... but within a decade, they took over and by the 80s they were dominating.

The same thing is happening in the EV market. Right now everything is even and the market is still new. But in a decade or two or less, the Chinese will dominate everything.

In the 90s it was seen as a backwater with growing power. There was a sense that China's economic growth would push it towards democracy. Tiananmen Square seemed like proof of that.

I want to say it was much less on people's minds in the U.S., but I don't 100% trust my memory.

80s into 90s it was starting to become obvious that economic might would shift from the West to China. Mostly because they sold us all of their shit plastics at first, then some good stuff along with even more shit plastics.

Starving Chinese kids were why I had to gag down my peas.

Nixon going to China was huge.

Growing up in the 70s and 80s: "Oh, that's where all the toys come from!"