🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦 / is on Nostr

Half-German, Half-Chinese, Half-Canadian, all-bad at math, currently living to her consternation in the People's Republic of China.

Pronouns: 同志 / 同志 / 同志的
Pixelfed: https://pixelfed.social/i/web/profile/317266702658310144
Writefreely: zhang.dianli (npub1ukc…z88m)

Last Notes

2024-06-21 06:57:26

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As a side note, when I was interviewing for a school, I talked to the outgoing foreign teacher. He was bitterly disappointed in China ... for the same reasons I found it EXCITING.
I'd found more optimistic energy in China (especially Wuhan) than I'd found in decades of living in Canada. He, on the other hand, came to China to find quiet, wise kung fu masters or some such thing. So he was disappointed and I was invigorated.
That's one of the weird things that stereotyping brings.

2024-06-21 06:39:56

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Most of the rest of the misconceptions are in this vein. A lot of it stems from the kind of ignorance that's inevitable when dealing with people so far away.
So I don't get offended by "Chinese people eat dogs" (because some actually do; I stress SOME, though).
I don't get offended by the stereotypes of Chinese people as inscrutable mystics. Hollywood is a powerful force, and most exported Chinese pop culture also reinforces that.
I just quietly smile and nod.
🧵 (10/10)

2024-06-21 06:37:05

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More offensive to me at every fucking level than the vilification of the Chinese is the agency-stripping of the Chinese. It's incredibly fucking insulting to hold the attitude that the Chinese are docile sheep who need to be guided by (almost invariably white, most times male) western saviours.
Fuck. Right. Off.
People with that attitude undermine any influence they may ever hold over Chinese people in seconds when that gets exposed. Just fucking stop it!
🧵 (9/n)

2024-06-21 06:34:38

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One of the things that repulses me all the fucking time when I see westerners talking about China is the removal of agency from Chinese people. The way even well-intentioned westerners babble, you'd think the Chinese were programmed robots.
Any time I see people talking about the Chinese as if they were docile robotic sheep, my mind instantly gives me the sentence "Tell me you've never met a Chinese person without actually saying it."
🧵 (8/n)

2024-06-21 06:31:30

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I've actually written about this before¹. Twice². The Chinese have five thousand years of recorded experience with despots. That means the despots have five thousand years of experience in knowing how to do despotism right, but it also means the people have five thousand years of knowing how to deal with despots.
(Protip: Sometimes dealing with them gets REALLY fucking bloody!)
🧵 (7/n)
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¹ https://wordsmith.social/zhang-dianli/china-and-authoritarianism
² https://wordsmith.social/zhang-dianli/palliative-hotel

2024-06-21 06:28:14

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This leads to astonishing diversity in styles of leadership and management and leads to things like people who see, say, how COVID-19 was handled in Shenzhen extrapolating GROSSLY inaccurately to how it was handled in Chongqing or Wuhan or Beijing or Shanghai or Kunming or ... you get the drift.
So let's move on to the next misconception. #3 is only peripherally related to #1/2: the Chinese live in fear of their government and follow its dictates without question or thought.
🧵 (6/n)

2024-06-21 06:24:46

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It is literally impossible for a single person or small group to navigate the fractal complexity of Chinese local culture. Attempts to do so in the past invariably led to disaster. And since the Chinese are almost obsessive record-keepers, these failures are all well-known to the current despots in power.
As a result the Chinese style of authoritarian governance is to set policy and goals and leave it up to the local authorities to get it done.
🧵 (5/n)

2024-06-21 06:23:34

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And this leads to misconception #2: the government is a monolith.
This is very hard for people to understand who haven't experienced it, but despite China being a massively authoritarian state, there is almost scary amounts of local autonomy. Part of this is cultural¹. The rest is practical.
🧵 (4/n)
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¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_is_high_and_the_emperor_is_far_away

2024-06-21 06:19:03

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This gets down to weird levels. For example the two dialects I have the most direct experience with (Wuhanhua and Jiujianghua) are both Mandarin dialects, and most of the time they're mutually intelligible, but either can, at the drop of a hat, switch into a mode where mutual intelligibility is gone. In this regard it's like German. It's all dialects of Hochdeutsch in most of Germany, but ... when they want to people in Bavaria can make themselves unintelligible to others.
🧵 (3/n)

2024-06-21 06:16:08

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(For those interested, that's Mandarin, Yue/Cantonese, Min, Wu, Gan, Xiang, Hakka, Jin ... and two others I can't think off off the top of my head at the moment.)
Famously Yue and Mandarin differ about as much as French and Portuguese. But even within the groups there are mostly-unintelligible dialects. For example Min has Minbei and Minnan (north and south), and these are about as different as, say, Spanish and Catalan.
🧵 (2/n)

2024-06-21 06:13:03

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The single #1 misconception I keep seeing, and the one that underlies most others, is that China is monolithic.
It isn't.
Even within the (overwhelming) Han majority of China there are huge differences from one group to another. Evidence: language is the carrier of culture. There are ten mutually-unintelligible major dialect GROUPS in China alone. That's a minimum of ten cultures sufficiently differentiated that they need what amounts to different languages.
🧵 (1/n)

2024-06-14 00:07:13

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I'll be starting in Ottawa and going cross-country to northern B.C.

2024-06-13 13:25:28

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This is one thing I'm going to dread when I go to Canada in July. Because I will be masking the fuck up in enclosed public spaces, and I just KNOW there is going to be some limp-dick who thinks they have the right to tell me what to do.

2024-05-20 08:54:52

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That's very similar to my final conclusion on PbtA-style games: not for me. For very similar reasons.