Raoul's China Saloon (V5.0) Beta
The Bar Room => The BS-Wrestling Pit => Topic started by: Calach Pfeffer on July 01, 2014, 04:51:38 PM
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Forum Trends: Things the West could learn from China (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2014-07/01/content_17593917.htm)
1. A huge majority of Chinese people are incredibly tolerant and patient.
There's no place where this is better revealed than in their driving habits. To honk your horn in traffic in China, you are simply letting others know where you are so that you avoid an accident. In the West, honking your horn is usually done out of anger for how the other person is driving. You hear of numerous cases of 'road rage' in the U.S. Americans are impatient and become easily angered while driving. Sometimes, in extreme situations, they become violent. And, since Americans are allowed to own guns, these situations can become quite deadly.
I think that there are several reasons why Chinese are so tolerant and patient. First, they have to share their space with a lot of other people. Second, I think it’s part of the Chinese culture to live more harmoniously with others. It seems to me that tolerance for others and patience is part of the mindset of Chinese people.
Yeah, you could honk. People could jump out of the way. Or, you know, you could just not hit them. It's a coin toss, for sure.
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I honk all the time. Pedestrians are not predictable. They don't look when they step out on the street and they don't necessarily take an obvious route across the road. Two wheeled transport often do not follow any traffic rules at all.
Just not hit them? Good idea. The horn helps me do that.
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Walking - can avoid most collisions without shouting.
Driving - lose the ability to judge distance, speed, your own place in the world.
Perhaps the exhaust is venting into the cabins.
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10. Chinese news is much more optimistic and rather than pointing out faults with their country like in the West will simply make up positive things
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Incidentally, people the world over considerably over-estimate their ability to pilot a car. There was some comparison done once, somewhere off in the land of I-forget-where-I-read-this, where normal drivers and race car drivers were asked to rank their skills from 1 to 10. Normal drivers consistently gave themselves higher scores and race car drivers gave themselves lower, or some such urban legend. My point being, people in cars are amateurs. They get hysterical like amateurs. They think they have rights like amateurs. In industrial settings, if you move large weights around you have to wear hard hats and pretty orange and yellow jackets. On the roads, you can do it in your shorts.
The conventions of car driving are not natural laws. They are the barely-thought through contrivances of setting lethal force in motion so you can go shopping.
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I will agree with the tolerant and patience thing with getting on the bus. You can push and elbow and squeeze your way in and I feel like no one is actually mad at me for it.
Although asking someone to move so you can squeeze into the window seat seems like an exhaustive burden for some people.
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CP - it's called the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it applies to everything.
I actually took a square blow to the chest today while driving my moped. A guy was standing next to a car talking to the driver, when he wildly gesticulated and hit me while I was going about 20 km. I just kept moving along. I'm lucky he wasn't holding anything.
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An ebike-taxi-man was hauling his victim errr customer through a walking street, this astute and convincing gentleman decided to try and drive through my girlfriend and I while we were holding hands and walking down said walking-street. I grabbed his wrist, trying to pull him off the bike, but managing only to pull off his knock-off wrist watch.
He looked at me questioningly, asking my girlfriend in CHangsha dialect, what he'd did wrong.. llllllllll....... I told her to tell him next time he did that to me or her I'd wallop him upside his head. :D bhbhbhbhbh
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Seriously though, what country learns lessons from other countries? Don't these dimwitted authors know how culture works? At best they are suggesting there are lifestyle or attitude advantages in this system that they like better than the one they came from. And these stooges are seriously suggesting they enjoy the courtesy of being honked at?
But wait, the honking is supposed to demonstrate Chinese patience and tolerance. So, like, what Texas Michael is saying is, holy shit, does being honked at get right on my tits but darn if I can turn around and give the finger or reach for my holster I left in Houston because look at these fucks, none of them are getting annoyed. Thus "a huge majority of Chinese people are incredibly tolerant and patient."
The next one, Chinese people are more open and accepting to people regardless of their social or economic status, my eyes rolled hard I saw the back of my own head. Thus misdirected, the other 8 entries made so much more sense.
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At first I thought it was 'tongue in cheek' humour... until I read the actual article and realized this fucktard - MichaelM - was serious. Perhaps he also thinks the West should adopt using Chinese baby pants to save on diapers?
bibibibibi
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Seriously though, what country learns lessons from other countries?
Only ones that have been colonized by people of that country I would imagine. Such as the difference between Hong Kong and the rest of China.
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well in that case, China is quickly learning from HK and Taiwan. It is, in a sense, being colonized culturally by the 2
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When I was a kid in England we were always being told how we should learn to be more positive like Americans and have better food like our European neighbours.
Come to think of it David Cameron went to China a couple of months ago and said that we could learn a lot from the Chinese about education (presumably keeping the poor kids without perfect scores out and ruining the smart kids lives)
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Countries, even whole mythical regions, "the west" to name one, can learn from other countries if they understand at a basic level what's going on there. And that doesn't happen unless you're keyed into the culture and it meshes with your own. And since when does that happen? Meanwhile, when people say "we can learn from...", they are, more than anything else, emphasizing their own cultural values. They're saying, look here, I've identified an optimization within our own system. You can look at the MichaelIM crap and see it happening there. He is for the most part not even talking about China at all.
As to why China engages in propaganda of the cultural one-upmanship variety, it is at heart protectionism. It's not really any kind of cultural analysis. You can in fact tell it's politics by just how intellectually bankrupt it is.
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Yeah I think I get what you're saying, look at the way other countries do things and say 'we could do that'
You can't be taking ChinaDaily seriously though, the people who write for it definitely don't. It's even worse than the tabloids back home. I know that this kind of chauvinism/blinkeredness really is a thing in China but it just drives you mad paying attention to it. I'm trying to ween myself off most of the China based stuff I read by laowai and Chinese because it's 90% depressing
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It bothers me because it's become the China narrative. All of these China narratives seem so obviously designed to obfuscate and obscure, and they should be easy to see through, but somehow they're not. Somehow, these kinds of lie are the dominant narrative. This is wrong. It is illegitimate. And it's part of the creation of power. If these bullshit narratives become the guidelines for dealing with China, who, except for China, doesn't lose?
See, soft power? It's when other peoples and nations find your country admirable. How is there even any soft power narrative for China at all?
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Well there is a weird thing from a western perspective at the moment where noone is calling them out on it. Chinese government has always been hated abroad but at the moment noone can afford to mention why. I don't think it's going to last though, the 'Chinese Miracle' is running aground and I don't think that they have done enough with it to keep up their world leader status into the future
From a personal perspective, I want to get out of China, partly because I agree that the government seems to be becoming less stable, but also just because I think I've been here too long and it's never had the pull on me that it has with some people
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I'll admit that there are some Chinese drivers who use their horns to announce their presence, even if no one is nearby. ahahahahah
Then there are the ones who continuously outdo even the most aggressive Americans by honking at anything that impedes their ability to drive as fast as they like. I'm sorry, but honking at the car in front of you that stopped for a red light is unlikely to make that driver willing commit suicide to block the cross traffic and let you through the intersection more quickly. kkkkkkkkkk Also, that large rock laying in the road really doesn't care how loud your horn is. ahahahahah
What does amaze me about Chinese driving are large intersections with no traffic lights or signs. Somehow everyone goes at once and none of the cars collide. That could NEVER happen in the US.
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A surprising map of countries that have the most traffic deaths (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/01/18/a-surprising-map-of-countries-that-have-the-most-traffic-deaths/):
* China has roughly one-third as many vehicles as the United States does, yet it sees about 20,000 more traffic deaths a year. Many drivers tend to ignore traffic rules, which has prompted the government to impose strict new laws such as a controversial new measure making it illegal to run a yellow light.
Also, according to worldwide road death stats (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate):
Half of the world’s road traffic deaths occur among motorcyclists (23%), pedestrians (22%) and cyclists (5%) – i.e. “vulnerable road users” – with 31% of deaths among car occupants and the remaining 19% among unspecified road users.
That is, what saves you isn't the horn they honked at you. It's being in armour bigger than theirs.
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China, incidentally, doesn't have world power ambitions. At least, not the kind of ambitions that entail concomitant responsibilities. They're willing to organize the taking of resources, but not to engage with international institutions like the construction of adequate law for all. They want to stay with their power base. None of the narratives about Chinese legitimacy describe how actual government takes place in China, except for the one that describes the primacy of The Party. And how does that translate to an international context?
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I'll wager the incredibly low rate of seatbelt usage makes those death statistics a lot worse. kkkkkkkkkk
Oddly enough, the vast bulk of the accidents I've seen are minor fender-benders. In town, the speeds don't get high enough to take out too many occupants of vehicles. I did once spot a roughly person-shaped impression in the front of a van that was pulled over. From the depth of the dent, it looked like a probable pedestrian fatality.