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.
this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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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.
I read China watched the US invasion of Iraq (2003) and shit their pants how easily Iraq fell.
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.
That's who I saw things growing up in the 70s-80s. China was full of starving farmers and not much else. And yeah, Japanese products went from having a well-deserved bad rap to Americans going, "Holy shit! They're out competing us! Make it stop!" (In cars and electronics anyway.)
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.
I worked there a while.
Feel free to visit, but also feel ready to be disappointed.
They're broken in a very fundamental way, a sad way. There are good people there, but also a lot of sociopaths.
Shanghai is a wonder of the world though, I recommend everyone visit, truly beautiful.
I really want to go to Xi An and some other historical/archaeological sites. Shanghai is also on the list as I've met some cool folks from there over the years. I used to watch a YouTube channel about cooking that I think was short there (日食記 or something similar).
Oh, you should see the history, it's incredible.
But ... the modern culture is... sad? Like a horrible cheap 70s ripoff of capitalism, but in a mean way.
For the modern culture, I recommend Taiwan heartily.
Yeah, wife and I are talking about going to Taiwan. I've seen it before (from Yonaguni on a clear day), but never been there.
In my opinion, it is chinese culture as it would and should have been without the CPC.
So take that as you will.
A place with lots of suspicious bath-drownings if a baby had the misfortune of being born a girl during the one child policy.
Unfortunately, the harsh truth was more often a doctor who was tasked with second pregnancies whose job details made all the other hospital staff realise he was a monster.
While that definitely happened, the thankful reality is that many families raised their daughters unofficially.
Really? That's the most wholesome thing I read about China
The demographic charts suggest otherwise.
China, and maybe some other Asian countries have a household registration ( hukou 户口) system.
Only people born into the system get to exist for things like schools, national insurance, etc.
So any unofficially born second children (or hidden first born daughters) didn't get to legally count under this.
Also; children born out of marriage don't exist for state schools or benefits, either.
Where your hukou is limits your options for access to housing, claims on social security and health insurance, and the like. Mostly if you were born into a very rural area your only pathway to legally having a place to live and for your children to go to school in another part of the country is via university graduation.
There are pushes to change this system, and smaller cities are removing their requirements for non-rural hukou. But Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities you have probably heard of are yet to do this.
https://www.newsweek.com/china-hiding-population-secret-1926834
The 2000 census came up short, so officials launched a campaign to add tens of millions of "missing" people, bringing the official population close to initial estimates, Yi said. But a closer look at demographics showed a glaring disparity, Yi said. Around 164.24 million babies were born between 1991 and 2000. After accounting for these births and subtracting deaths and net migration, there were about 40 million fewer Chinese than reported.
They killed so many girls the population fell more than expected.
Did you read that article, or just post the first news link you found with a headline that agreed with you?
'No Evidence' "Dr. Yi is an early and courageous individual to criticize China's harmful birth control policies," said Feng Wang, sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine.
But Wang disputes Yi's conclusions. "Scholars in China and at the U.N. have analyzed these and other data. Not a single person has 'discovered' such a huge discrepancy."
Everyone agrees to not accept China's figures, but no one can find anywhere near such a big gulf. And you'd think that if they could, more US and Taiwanese sources would be reporting on it, wouldn't they?
My point was more that some people did the right thing, not that it's enough to eliminate a statistical slump.
Some people of the time would think the Chinese were heartless people to do what they did, and some quietly raised their other children, that's all.
And if even that isn't true, so be it, as I could have fallen for propaganda and cannot locate the original source, but here is another showing that some people didn't just fall in line.
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.
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