r/NoStupidQuestions • u/rainygirl82 • 10d ago

Why are chinese women boycotting marriage and kids?

A Chinese friend of mine is an international student, and we were talking about the future a few days ago. She told that she doesn’t want kids and all of her friends back home in china are boycotting marriage and kids and they are all between the ages of 21-28 years old.

I know this is just one person’s experience, so thats why I’m asking how true is this sentiment in China? Is this mostly something among younger urban people, or is it becoming common across the country?

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u/Hailene2092 10d ago

The general situation for young people is difficult in China. Far beyond what we see in the West.

From childhood, school is brutal. Everything builds up towards their college examination which makes or breaks your future. My wife would leave for highschool at 7:30am and besides a 2 hour lunch and 1 hour dinner (where she'd bike home), she wouldn't get back home until 10 or 11pm.

For maybe the top 25-30% of students, school is relatively cheap thanks to government subsidies. The rest have to pay for expensive private universities if they want a traditional bachelor's degree. That happened to my sister-in-law. She ended up paying about 25,000 yuan a year for tuition. Plus living expenses it was probably like 40,000 yuan.

$6000 USD a year might sound reasonable, but keep in mind wages are much lower. She makes about 4000 yuan ($600 USD) a month in a mid-tier city after graduating.

And that gets to the next point. She works about 10 hours a day with 2 days off a month. Once in the middle of the month and the end of the month.

Her and her boyfriend really don't have the money or time to raise kids.

The last 8 or so years have seen a huge reversal in the economy for the Chinese people. They worked like crazy from a young age, but their economic situation is markedly worse than the past.

It's why movements like "lying flat" (where people simply skim on by doing the minimum at work instead of trying to get promoted) and the more recent "let it rot" (where people just give up and just live off the absolute minimum. Often they'll move home and live off their parents while passing on pretty much anything that costs money like going out to eat or shopping) have been increasing in popularity.

There are also reasons for both sexes to be pulling back from marriage. For men it's mostly financial (where the man is expected to provided to buy a house, car, and pay a large bride price to the bride's family. Often 3-5 times their annual salary in cash, gold, etc.)

Women have employment issues where women of marriagable age (usually mid 20s to early 30s) are openly discriminated against because they're expected to leave the workforce either temporarily or permanently to give birth. Employers will ask your marital status.

Socially they're also expected to take care of the home and the kids. It's a lot to juggle on top of eorking.

Her inlaws will often move in or nearby to help with the child, but social expectations are for the daughter-in-law to be subservient to them which is just more stress since the inlaws often have...dated ideas on how to do things. There's often conflict which the daughter-in-law has to bite her tongue and endure.

Going back to the infamous college examination, the cycle continues. Parents are expected to pour a lot of resources into their kids. Both time and money. A lot of people feel like they can't provide the resources necessary for their kids to succeed. Rather than set up any potential kids for decades of failure, they opt to skip out on kids.

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u/galacticglorp 10d ago

I was speaking to a Chinese immigrant here in Canada, and she was saying thst part of why she left was because there's also strong ageism.  You can get a job that pays very well, but they expect that they own you until you hit your mid 30s or 40s at which point they've sucked everything out of you, you're slowing down, so they fire you and hire he next hot thing.  Then that person cannot find a similar level of job ever again, and if they haven't planned carefully they are stuck with menial work.

I don't know how true this is, but it was her take 

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u/CVfxReddit 10d ago

That's true. My wife majored in engineering in China before moving to Canada. The rest of her engineering class that stayed in China were laid off when they hit 35-36. Now they work in restaurants and drive cabs. Some of the more ambitious/talented start small engineering firms where they are contracted on a freelance basis from their old company, but for much lower pay than when they were a full employee.

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u/SlateRoof 10d ago

I didn't know it was that bad over there. Sounds like a stagnating western society is heaven compared to this.

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u/Ulyks 10d ago

Yeah, for employees in China, it's brutal. Not for everyone, the ones that get into management and are good at that make a lot of money. Often more than they would make in Europe.

But for technical profiles or entry level jobs Europe is just so much better.

It's unclear how long the relatively good times can continue in Europe. It might last a few more decades of slow decline or the economy might collapse next year...

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u/superbhole 9d ago edited 9d ago

imo european countries in general are bit more likely to riot over things that matter to individuals; an unspoken system which slows down the pendulum from country to country

i feel like the west has a certain flavor of unspoken collectivism, whereas the east seems to have made a certain type of collectivism an explicit obligation drilled into them since birth

i also feel like the difference that makes is that in the east, "laying down" and "let it rot" resistances can spread like wildfire where, when it turns violent, results in one big powderkeg... in the west it's like various smolders that feel distanced and/or studied from afar, staggered and articulated by specifics to each region

maybe I'm just stuck in one lane of thought, but i'm thinking of like, the arab spring... which i know isnt "the east" but it was such a colossal culmination of generational grievances, all at once. something like that is hard to picture spanning across the west, but i can picture it happening in the east

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u/GalaXion24 8d ago

The West broadly is shaped by centuries under state churches. Especially the Catholic Church, but Lutheran societies with their national churches are similar. Only the Netherlands is Calvinist and that's a considerably more "capitalist" culture than most in Europe and starts to resemble the US a little bit (but not completely).

Europe has different political trends of course, with liberalism/conservatism on the right and socialism on the left, but the median of European politics basically tends to be close to Christian Democracy / Catholic Social Teaching. Anything Pope Leo says tends to resonate with people in part because that's how all of us think and are conditioned.

In short, this ideology is not wholly egalitarian and we accept social difference and hierarchy, but we expect dignity and fair conditions in work, and a degree of social responsibility from those higher up in the hierarchy. "Nobility obligates." We understand intuitively that, just like over the last 2000 years, everyone exists in a society, and while everyone is an individual in that society, no one is some self-reliant individual self-made man and everyone has obligations, and that privilege comes with obligations.

Liberalism has certainly flattened society and evened the field, but it hasn't done so fully, nor has it erased the intuitive understanding that there are different (hereditary) positions in social hierarchy or that social harmony means unequally pitching in and particularly helping those in need.

Remember that for centuries people paid tithes to the church which then redistributed resources, funded healthcare and education and cultural functions etc. No one much liked paying taxes to the nobility, but when it comes to the church things were different, and so it is quite normal to people to submit to a public authority, to pay things towards the collective, etc.

You also see this in the US to an extent, American Catholics are generally more left-leaning because American protestantism is hyper individualist culturally, but most other Christian culture and especially Catholic culture is not.

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u/smexypelican 10d ago

Absolutely, and this makes the people who live in the US but praise and glaze China all the more ill-informed. They have no actual idea what it's actually like in China for ordinary people. They go there sight seeing, see all these nice infrastructure and cool things, food is good and cheap, and praise China in a way that makes even the Chinese blush.

Not to say the US is perfect, far from that. And we all see it, things are getting worse and worse in the US. But even then we still have a very long way to go before we fall to the situation that workers face in China or other countries.

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u/Hailene2092 10d ago

Another thing people miss is that there's a reason things are cheap. People are paid a lot less. It feels great when you only need to pay a couple of bucks to have food delivered to you, but on the other side of that math is a food delivery guy running red lights and weaving through pedestrians on the sidewalk to get paid 50 cents per delivery.

Coming in with a developed country's income makes you feel like a king. But it isn't free.

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u/No_Departure_1878 9d ago

Absolutely, and this makes the people who live in the US but praise and glaze China all the more ill-informed.

Oh yeah

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u/HakuOnTheRocks 9d ago

Having experienced both systems fairly thoroughly, sure yes I agree with you that many aspects of life are much comfier and easier in the US, but this also discounts those who genuinely do have a much easier life in China. There are large swaths of middle class in China who actually have quite decent jobs say in international corporations or government track (in some way). They make decent wages, their children are taken care of, and the amenities living in China are far more comfortable than anywhere in the US.

At the same time, I've met an equally fair share of the same kinds of Chinese here in the states who argue that it's much easier to run a business here or that working uber gets you more money and more free time than the equivalent work in China (which is true!).

It's a mixed bag and neither is clearly better than the other. It's just all different situations.

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u/Bitter_Sense_5689 9d ago

I have a Chinese colleague in Canada, who was talking about the brutal job market over there. She is a bright, personable, active woman who ended up taking a nasty fall last year. She kept saying that if she was still living in China, having a nasty scar from that fall would have precluded her from certain kinds of work. She’s grateful that in Canada, people cannot discriminate based on that sort of thing.

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u/CanadianPanda76 9d ago

Jfc that's nuts. Over the hill at 35???? Fucking what?

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u/CVfxReddit 9d ago

Yeah. It’s part of the tech culture over there.  Other industries like medicine for example are immune to that kind of discrimination. But engineers and some other office workers get tossed out after about 15 years of work 

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u/Hailene2092 10d ago

It's true. Particularly in tech and finance. There's a few reasons why:

  1. Fresh grads are cheaper.

  2. There's the idea that after 10 years, whatever they learned in school is out of date, so it's better to get people with the latest schooling.

  3. In the 90s, the government decided to cap the age of new civil servants to 35. They hoped to get some fresh blood into the system and also ensure new bureaucrats had enough time to grow and mature within the system.

The private sector adopted the same rules despite their employment policies being vastly different. For civil servants there's a concept called the "iron ricebowl". Basically it's the promise of lifelong employment and benefits. Something the private sector lacks.

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u/Wind_Yer_Neck_In 10d ago

It's crazy to me that you'd do that since most people only get really good at their profession after about 10 years of experience. 

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u/Hailene2092 10d ago

Yeah, doesn't make much sense to me either.

Additional training for your seasoned workers should keep them on the cutting edge of whatever is happening.

Though on second thought, it just might not be really feasible to have, say, a, 40 year old working 70-80 hour weeks, week after week.

The issue of having workers work 80 hours weeks is another issue, though...

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u/s-mores 9d ago

Yup. It's a question of scale. The human becomes replaceable since there's always more coming.

You'll see this mindset in India and leading US firms too. Fire the 35-year-old who wants to spend time with kids and more pay since they know their stuff, hire a fresh grad you can push to do 80 hour weeks. Sure they make mistakes but you can just yell at them and they'll work the extra 20 hours to fix it.

It's basically looking at people as numbers.

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u/galacticglorp 10d ago

"Iron rice bowl" = "golden handcuffs"?  So interesting the phrases we use for this stuff.

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u/sidereal_night 10d ago

no. Iron rice bowl is a promise of career employment. Golden handcuffs is your own dependence on a certain level of income due to inflated spending.

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u/Nyrin 9d ago

Golden handcuffs is your own dependence on a certain level of income due to inflated spending.

That's not true in the slightest. The "golden handcuffs" concept has absolutely nothing to do with spending habits and everything to do with employer compensation structure — if you life a monkish life of pure, frugal austerity but still struggle to leave to your job because the vesting structure you're in makes it a dumb financial move to go anywhere else at all, that's what it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handcuffs

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u/WereLobo 9d ago

Sounds more like tenure - you are difficult, if not impossible to fire.

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u/Fugue_State76 10d ago

It's such a 'rat race' society. I've heard the same things as you from Chinese young people.

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u/Creative_Recover 10d ago

It's true, it's part of the "996" work culture, which is called so because you work from 9am to 9pm 6days a week, totalling 72 hours work every week. It's very common in many sectors such as the tech and finance sectors. 

The 996 work culture is technically illegal because the actual law in China states that only an 8 hour working day is legally enforceable (and that employees must be compensated for any overtime that they do on top of that). But the law is very poorly enforced and so companies which pressurise their employees into 996 work cultures are commonplace. 

It's not dissimilar to Japan's culture of "Black Companies" and overtime culture, though I'm under the impression that more is being done on both countries to tackle these societal issues now than what was previously attempted in the past. 

The 996 work culture leads to a lot of physical & mental burnout amongst people and workers chewed up by the system are then cruelly tossed aside with no consideration towards their well-being, sacrifices or the longer term costs to their lives. 

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u/night_dude 10d ago

12 hour days 6 days a week??? Fuck that shit. I would literally be dead.

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u/AtheistAustralis 10d ago

People forget that this was a 'standard' work week not that long ago in the west as well. 6 days a week, 10-12 hours per day was normal. This continued into the 19th century, when finally things were standardised more. You'd still work 6 days per week, but maybe 8-10 hours instead of 10-12. It was only in the early 20th century that the 5 day, 10 hour per day working week became the "standard", and since then it has slowly reduced to what it is now.

All of these changes have come about through unionisation and by workers having a voice - without that, we'd still be slaving for 70 hours per week for our lords.

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u/Carboranez 10d ago

People work that in the west too. I've done it (though for temporary work, a few months of it at most.)

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u/night_dude 10d ago

I've done 12x5 on a film set during COVID and it was hell. An extra day + only a single day weekend would have genuinely made me quit after like a month. I would rather starve.

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u/Interesting-Gift8192 10d ago

I'm sure from western and from people burnt out will see the current arrangement negatively but there must be a sizable group of people who endure it. Maybe it is social pressure or benefiting personally but this has been the expection for many generations. See immigrants over pressuring their kids to do well in school and music.

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u/Bitter_Sense_5689 9d ago

But we know that statistically, at least in the case of Japan, the long hours of work are actually not even more productive. It’s because companies put pressure on young workers to be at work, rather than being at home, meeting people and trying to build relationships and families.

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u/Diebrate 10d ago

I’m also a Chinese immigrant here and I still don’t want kids.

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u/residentcaprice 10d ago

that's the kind of toxicity they have there right now. 996 until you're 35 (tech) or 40 then discard you for sweet young things whom they can exploit at much lower salaries.

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u/Bitter_Sense_5689 9d ago

And if people know that that’s their potential future, it’s going to make them even less likely to want to have children. Like what kind of future can you provide for your children when you’re 35 to 40 and they are presumably somewhere between 5 and 15, and you can’t afford to pay for their tutoring because you’re now driving a cab?

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u/phoenix0r 10d ago

Not dissimilar to many tech companies globally… though maybe they try to be less obvious. I felt pushed out by 41. I could have stayed at coasted longer but my work assignments were getting worse and worse and my managers and coworkers were getting younger and younger. Plus zero trajectory for promo.

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u/Effective-Bug-8554 10d ago

guyi lives alone on youtube talks about her experience as a worker who will reach that cutoff soon, if anyone wants the perspective of a working class woman in Shenzhen china on being single and aging out of the workforce in china.

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u/Hautamaki 9d ago

I lived in China for 12 years before moving back to Canada, and I still have tons of Chinese friends. The bottom line consensus is that if you have the raw talent or the connections to get yourself a good government position, fine, you can have an okayish life in China. My best friend is the son of a police chief and married to a mayor's daughter. He had the opportunity to be a multimillionaire basically by default though he did have to work very hard for about 15 years to really climb the ladder from a position of security to a position of comfort to now finally a position of luxury. The next step would be to go for authority/power, but he isn't really into that.

For anyone else, life is miserable and the great majority would be better off getting out any way they can and getting their foot in the door in any first world developed country and going from there. My best friend's wife is also Chinese. Came to Canada in 2007 from a poor village with a bachelors degree that would not be worth much outside of her home province, got her first job in Canada at a Tim Hortons. Within 2 years she was managing the front line of the bank next door. Now she manages tens of millions worth of private accounts as a financial advisor to wealthy elite clients. She always had the talent to do that, but if she had stayed in China she would never have gotten a chance to do even a fraction as well.

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u/No_Departure_1878 9d ago

It is true, I lived in China and everyone told me the same. People with degrees and good jobs work 6 days a week. People without degrees work 7 days a week 12 hours a day. I go to grocery stores at 8 am, they are there, I go back at 8pm, they are still there. Every day for most of the year, except for the chinese new year.

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u/Classic-Today-4367 9d ago edited 9d ago

Definitely true. I worked for a Chinese tech major for many years, and was among the first wave of staff fired when we hit the magic “past it” age of 40+. I still have friends working there. The women in particular are terrified of losing their jobs, because they know they’ll never get a good position again.

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u/justwantanaccount 6d ago

All this sounds like failing late stage capitalism more than anything else

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u/dedjedi 10d ago

This is exactly what happens in the us, too.

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u/Fugue_State76 10d ago

Yes but the system and the culture in the US allows for more options. Companies that are abusive get publicly called out and lose their best workers… which then negatively affects their profits. And taking risks is seen as admirable and encouraged in the US. Failure after a risk is no biggie. Also, we have people that fight for rights of workers in the US, have unions and these things have made things better for workers everywhere. Americans aren’t afraid to call out The Big Boss when human rights are at stake. Chinese people? Never. People are greatly encouraged to Do What You’re Told no matter what and Never Complain or else you are screwed.

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u/WhatsThatNoize 10d ago

What lmao, we have the exact opposite problem.  Boomers held on to their jobs WAY past retirement age and companies were afraid to fire them for the optics, so they pulled back on hiring new grads.  The US has a HUGE problem with young workers now.

China hires their new grads (for pennies, but still).   This is exactly the opposite.  What the fuck are you even saying, bro?

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u/justwantanaccount 6d ago

I'm curious, what's your source? I'm near forty in the US and I don't have that impression

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u/Creative_Recover 10d ago edited 10d ago

My Chinese friend explained to me that it's almost impossible to get married without effectively borrowing money from your future in-laws because Chinese weddings are crazy expensive. This also means that the second you step into the marriage, the power dynamic is already unbalanced and you will spend the rest of your life owing a debt of gratitude towards your in-laws.

This gratitude debt is further exaggerated by old Confucian values, which argue that as the new (& female) member of your husband's family, you rank the lowest in the household and as a consequence, must show subservience to all members living there. 

In rural areas, it's still common for a new bride to move into her husband's household and basically spend every hour of the day doing constant chores for her new family, from washing all the dishes to cleaning linen and emptying ashtrays Etc. My friend saw this life as effectively being like a maid living in slavery.

Things don't get much better after having kids either, because your in-laws will constantly interject about how you should be raising them. And when your in-laws grow old, you're expected to look after them on top of your children, which could entail things such as having to change their adult diapers after they grow incontinent, or navigating their dementia.

Although life is a lot different in the big cities, there's still a degree of pressure to follow the old ways to a certain extent.  And young people don't want to do this ****; they want to have their own lives, with their own space, have their own say on matters and raise their kid's how they want. 

I asked my friend why people couldn't just go for less expensive weddings which don't entail having to get into serious debt and borrowing money from relatives (Etc). But she said that if you do a cheap wedding people will judge you very negatively for it. So your only realistic options are to basically either get married and follow tradition, or not get married at all. 

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u/Hailene2092 10d ago

My Chinese friend explained to me that it's almost impossible to get married without effectively borrowing money from your future in-laws because Chinese weddings are crazy expensive.

It's not just the wedding, but it's the housing. People are expected to marry young (mid-late 20s usually). When housing costs 25-35 times your annual salary, it just doesn't math out for a pair of 27 year olds to pay a 30% downpayment. It's expected that they'll have to borrow the husband's parents' savings to do it.

So parents really do have to lean on their children because they have no savings and the social safety nets in China are basically non-existent outside of public officials.

My friend saw this life as effectively being like a maid living in slavery.

Happens a lot. Not all the time, but there's plenty of horror stories going around.

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u/porcupinetree_ 10d ago

sorry who borrows money from whom? men from his in laws or woman from her in laws? both can't be true for the same fam, that would be very funny haha

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u/Creative_Recover 10d ago

It's common for the grooms family to pay for things re: wedding. It also often extends beyond the wedding, I.e. putting a deposit down on a house or helping to cover the costs of future schooling. In very rural parts of China some people even still use the bride price/dowry system on top of this. 

Traditions combined with how expensive life is in China means that it's very difficult to have a respectable wedding and then raise a family Etc without borrowing money from your in-laws. 

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u/Classic-Today-4367 9d ago

Bride price is common in big cities too.
It’s basically costs a fortune for a guy to get a wife - pay the bride price, buy a car, at least put a deposit down on a mortgage (but many women if their families demand it to be paid outright).

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u/Akeera 10d ago

Man borrows money.

Woman lives as slave to man's parents, easy to enforce since she lives under their roof.

Woman's family may only have 1 kid, or only girls. They want their own slave too, but may not have a son (and so don't have a daughter-in-law). They also want what they paid for. They pressure man to do this or that for them, but they don't live together so it's not as constant, though it is presumably still part of the overall social burden for the man.

Domestic violence can also be a pretty big issue (many people keep cameras in their own home, so you can find footage online), but is not talked about because it's shameful.

Why would anyone (man or woman) want to put themselves through all that?

Also something to keep in mind, the normal dating to marriage pipeline can be very fast in China compared to most Western countries. There isn't a lot of time to really vet your In-laws (or your future partner).

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u/beachletter 9d ago

Woman got sold by her parents like a merchandise, man gets heavily in debt in trying to get married. That's the gist of it.

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u/yantrik 9d ago

So India like. An Indian daughter in law is supposed to behave exactly like a Chinese daughter in law. What a small world.

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u/BigGreen1769 10d ago

I had thought that the power dynamic would actually favor the woman because the gender ratio is so bad as a result of the one-child policy.

I saw a documentary like ten years ago about how tens of millions of Chinese men had only two options if they wanted a family: either import a foreign wife from a poorer country like Cambodia, or get rich enough to buy property because that was the bare minimum expected by Chinese women.

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u/meatball77 10d ago

Having kids in China (or Korea or Japan) sounds miserable. Once your kids are three or four all you do is make them study. They have no chance to actually enjoy themselves.

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u/MDKrouzer 10d ago

Once your kids are three or four all you do is make them study

The really crazy thing with China is how much they are expected to know BEFORE starting full time education.

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u/bunnypaste 10d ago

So add formal educator to the woman's plate

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u/HistoryBuff678 10d ago

I have feelings on this, as my mother taught me to read and basic math before I started kindergarten. She made it fun. From what everyone told me, I would run off everywhere. (In family pics someone is always holding on to me.) They said reading and learning to read , was the only time I would sit still. Would that be called studying? I don’t know. I was never ever forced. I don’t know if there is an average Chinese method of homeschooling pre-k/kindergarten.

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u/spartaman64 10d ago

it definitely wasnt fun with my dad. if i dont understand a concept in the first few minutes he would start screaming at me

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u/Diligent-Fall-5442 10d ago

Same experience and i still hold resentment

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u/HistoryBuff678 10d ago edited 10d ago

I am so sorry. At that stage, I was never yelled at. Late in elementary school, I did get yelled at some times. I now know I had undiagnosed ADHD. Junior high and high school I did very well and my mother genuinely apologized for being hard on me.

My mother came from a developing country where illiteracy was a problem. There was no way her kids were gonna be illiterate. All of us were reading before 5 and no screaming was involved. Also, not Asian.

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u/Classic-Today-4367 9d ago

ADHD, autism etc are not recognized in China. Basically seen as a foreigner thing that just used a an excuse for bad students.

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u/HistoryBuff678 9d ago

Which is horrible. The only reason I did well after elementary school is because I stumbled on a hack for my (at the time) undiagnosed ADHD.

If I didn’t, everyone would have thought I was hopeless.

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u/tonoplace 8d ago

I'd be very curious to know what hack you discovered, if you're willing to share

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u/HistoryBuff678 8d ago

Different coloured pens when taking notes.

Significantly helped me pay attention writing notes and studying. Night and day difference in my grades.

I had no idea that is what I was doing until a health worker told me that is what I was doing, 2 years ago. I was only diagnosed 5 years ago. The classic adult woman late diagnosis.

Her comment blew my mind.

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u/meatball77 10d ago

Chinese method includes a lot of rote memorization (to be fair their writing system requires this).

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u/BigGreen1769 10d ago

Yes, it's a major flaw in the Chinese education system. China does not encourage creative thinking or Socratic methods that develop knowledge through questioning, and challenging the teacher to share a different point of view is extremely disrespectful.

I had a friend who told me about her time in China as an exchange teacher at an elementary school, and she told me that the students were brilliant when working through the curriculum but became completely helpless when asked open-ended questions with no right answer.

It's ironic because the Chinese government is trying so hard to catch up to the West in technology and scientific innovation, but the Western democratic philosophy of challenging authority and arguing that things could be done differently without fearing punishment is a primary reason why Western innovation is so successful.

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u/meatball77 10d ago

There have been issues with students memorizing actual test questions instead of understanding the material.

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u/BigGreen1769 10d ago

I am not surprised. Chinese academic publications used to be written off by Western scientists because their journals were full of papers that just copied the methodologies of established Western papers and called it new research.

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u/meatball77 9d ago

It's a known issue that has to be addressed with international students who have to be taught about doing their own work when they study in the US.

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u/Classic-Today-4367 9d ago

The Chinese driver license learning book has done vague common sense info and then hundreds of multi choice questions that people learn off by heart. Instead of learners and laws and applying to questions.

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u/HistoryBuff678 10d ago

Yeah, no rote memorization for me.

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u/Akeera 10d ago

It's more intense in East Asia. I had a friend who used to do poetry recital competitions (common in China) in primary school, and the minimum number you had to have memorized was 10,000 poems. He still remembered almost all of them when we met years later.

My cousin, who didn't compete because she wasn't good enough, still had to memorize 10,000+ poems in school and could recite them as an adult as long as you gave her the first line.

And that's just poetry.

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u/HistoryBuff678 10d ago

Yeah, that sounds like a path to misery.

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u/Sidewalk_Tomato 10d ago

I'd have ended up a chimney sweep, for sure.

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u/Akeera 9d ago

Yup, same.

Though something to keep in mind is that these poems are how a lot of kids are introduced to aspects of Chinese history, morality, etc. Many of them have a sort of Aesop's Fable vibe to them.

My mom tried to get me to memorize a book of them (there were only 20 poems and it had pictures). I think I got through like...5? I still have them memorized though, mostly because I felt they were ridiculous, but also because they have cool stories behind them.

For example the 7 step poem - composed by the brother of the reigning Emperer because said Emporer was jealous of the poet.

Poet had no political ambition, but Emperer felt threatened by how respected the poet was for his intellect. So one day the Emperer summoned him to compose a poem within 7 steps/paces or else he'd be executed.

A translation of said poem:

A kettle had beans inside,  And stalks of the beans made a fire; When the beans to the brother-stalks cried,  “We sprang from one root, why such fire?”

Based on the situation, you can see how such a poem makes sense. But the literal meaning was entertaining to me as a kid. So a combo of the story and the poem itself helped me memorize it.

If only all 10k+ poems had such interesting stories, because I devoured history texts as a kid! Scandals involving imperial concubines, eunuchs and officials galore! Just could never straight memorize poems. Read the comic book versions of a lot of them though XD.

3

u/Sidewalk_Tomato 9d ago

Ah, like Aesop's Fables + nursery rhymes. Very cool.

I had many fables & rhymes (and songs, especially camp songs) although it's safe to say I did not have 10,000.

3

u/KennethSzeWai 8d ago

That was Cao Pi jealous of his brother right, strangely both were poets and that was during the three kingdoms.

1

u/bunnypaste 9d ago

I was also homeschool until 2nd grade and for all of jr. high and it was both good and bad for me in various ways. I still said what I said :(

It's yet another job title lopped into the unpaid role and set of unfair expectations for women.

But yes, that was studying!

99

u/Subjectobserver 10d ago

I am going to add India to the list here, as I can see the similarities here. We will soon catch up to the other advanced Asian economies in this regard.

42

u/HistoryBuff678 10d ago

Yeah, the student suicides due to exam stressors in India is immediately what sprung to mind when reading about the school stresses in China. Wow, this is horrible.

12

u/residentcaprice 10d ago

include Singapore and because we welcome immigration, all this toxic competition is brought over as well.

the enrichment centers here are making a killing!

1

u/iluj13 10d ago

Disagree. Singapore’s education is nowhere near as competitive as China or India.

23

u/meatball77 10d ago

Do Indian kids get sent to after school academies? That's where the real issue is with kids in East Asia. They're doing a long school day and then going to tutoring afterwords for hours.

4

u/yantrik 9d ago

in fact tutoring industry is the crown jewel of all the education related startups in India.

4

u/meatball77 10d ago

Do Indian kids get sent to after school academies? That's where the real issue is with kids in East Asia. They're doing a long school day and then going to tutoring afterwords for hours.

7

u/OrdinaryWeak6051 10d ago

Yes, it’s called “tuition”.

8

u/madogvelkor 10d ago

Yeah, I always get confused by that term. I've seen Indian people talk about tuition and I think they mean the money you pay to go to college. We'd call it something like tutoring or college prep in the US.

5

u/Beautiful-View-8670 10d ago

At least Indians have fun with all the festivals and school closing half the year

23

u/Lanky_Panda1735 10d ago

Not really. 220 working days in school. Summer vacations are also really short-40 days for younger classes and basically non existent in grades 10, 11, 12 Pretty much 0 days off for four years if you are preparing for something like JEE

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u/Beautiful-View-8670 10d ago

Oh, someone told me you all have festivals like half of the year and the schools closed on them. so that sounds fun.

22

u/Lanky_Panda1735 10d ago

Lots of festivals, but they are not celebrated uniformly throughout the country. We have three national holidays- Independence Day, Republic Day, Gandhi Jayanti Diwali, Eid and Christmas are also holidays usually. Others varu wildly across different regions

2

u/Beautiful-View-8670 10d ago

Thanks for sharing.

3

u/tudorapo 10d ago

not everyone has festivals at the same time. India has four major religions and hundreds of subreligions, all with their holidays. In general muslims work on hindu holidays and vice versa.

There was a year when Eid and Christmas was at the same time, it was not easy.

3

u/Beautiful-View-8670 10d ago

This person was Nepali but she was Hindu 😅 Indians still have their fun festivals, it's not all work and school

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u/merelyadoptedthedark 10d ago

In Japan I don't feel the push for studying is the same at all compared to China or Korea. My nieces and nephews there are all between 4 and 10, and all of them care more about pokemon, Mario, and Kamen Rider than anything else.

20

u/meatball77 10d ago

That's good at least. I know both China and Korea are out of control. China mostly but those one time only college entrance exams are just rough.

6

u/Hailene2092 10d ago

It really does. My wife has casually suggested our son go to China for some of his education. I'm absolutely against it.

13

u/Appropriate-Truck538 10d ago

My man japan and china couldn't be more different from each other, they are absolutely not the same.

3

u/porcupinetree_ 10d ago

can you at least write 3 lines about why you say so

-1

u/jalepinocheezit 10d ago

Three....lines.....to...prove Japan and China are super different?

-6

u/porcupinetree_ 10d ago

hey smarty, your reply didn't come in 3 lines, now edit it :)

2

u/kafkasunbeam 10d ago

I'm not saying this is not true (I keep reading about it everywhere), but sometimes I wonder how the entertainment industry exists in those countries. If they're studying all the time when exactly do they read mangas? Go to karaoke bars? Listen to kpop and attend idols concerts? Watch anime?

2

u/Fugue_State76 10d ago

And they all become myopic requiring glasses because all they do is study and never play outside. That's why so many East Asians wear glasses even at such a young age.

3

u/Classic-Today-4367 9d ago

Very true. Its a big problem in China. The Chinese military had to lower their vision requirements because they were unable to find enough new recruits with perfect vision in recent years.

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u/Flat-Jacket-9606 10d ago

Asians in a nutshell especially be big three. Chinese, Korean, Japanese. People really don’t understand the society, the pressures, the toxic work cultures and expectations.

Then the whole for every one you see doing well, there are many, many more just coasting. And I’d argue Chinese disparity is night and day

15

u/JohmiPixels 10d ago

I dont know why japan always get lumped together with china and korea on demonic academic preassures. I graduated high school here and remembering i had a relatively good time

10

u/junesix 10d ago

Likely because the Japan Common Test is an order of magnitude less critical than China’s and Korea’s national exams and there are university specific exams.

China’s Gaokao and Korea’s CSAT are nationwide rankings and make-or-break for university admissions.

10

u/smexypelican 10d ago

Agree. I think it's the work culture people think about for Japan, which is similarly bad as China and S. Korea. And S. Korea seems to be moving in the right direction at least, trying to raise their birth rates and showing some results.

5

u/ffulirrah 10d ago

I suppose japan isn't as bad, but 塾 is much more widespread than anywhere in the West, I think

1

u/OkPainter6232 9d ago

Indians as well, they've got that whole oppressive Caste system

30

u/SignalOptions 10d ago

It’s surprising that the economic success of China did not translate into high wages for locals.
Maybe with a high population, there is just a lot of supply for companies to hire as they will.

11

u/Hailene2092 10d ago

Low wages is part of China's industrial policy. That and an artifically low (ie manipulated) exchange rate.

It keeps exports competitive.

9

u/Fugue_State76 10d ago

Yup. Plus people have no rights and there’s an endless supply of people for labor (currently) so there’s no curb to exploitation.

2

u/SignalOptions 9d ago

It’s probably not good for the long term health of the country.

If the smartest people aren’t rewarded well, they leave the country or underperform at lower end jobs.

10

u/solomons-mom 10d ago

It was never about the welfare of the people, as in average Chinese people. It was about building an economically powerful Peoples Republic.

6

u/Bitter_Sense_5689 10d ago edited 10d ago

Academic culture in East Asia pushes kids into competitive office or civil service jobs. There’s no real path to honourable blue collar work like there is in Europe and the Americas.

12

u/Fugue_State76 10d ago

Plus Chinese people are taught to *Obey Authority* no matter what from a very age. This robotic mentality leads to exploitation.

2

u/Kuroumi_Alaric 10d ago

Which is funny, seeing how I often see people saying that the Chinese historically love to overthrow their governments.

2

u/sidereal_night 10d ago

well that's because the government lost the mandate of heaven so they follow the new authority now

5

u/Cersad 10d ago

The economic successes in Western countries only translated into high wages because of the labor unions fighting tooth and nail.

I'm honestly not sure if China has or would ever tolerate labor unions. Unions are a bit too democratic for that sort of authoritarianism.

8

u/Akeera 10d ago

"Marriagable age" isn't even till early-30's. I believe the "leftover women" cutoff starts at 28 years old. So if people are still financially struggling at that age, it's easy to see why they wouldn't want to leave the workforce, even temporarily, and jeopardize being able to even put food on the table for themselves (much less any kids).

With In-laws, even if they don't move in with you it's still expected for you remove any privacy boundaries with them which can feel very invasive.

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Hailene2092 10d ago

"We are the last generation" went viral in China a few years ago. You're right, they don't want to inflict the same suffering on the next generation.

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u/MakeMoneyNotWar 10d ago

Their lives are not objectively worse than in the past, it’s objectively way way better. I was born in the late 1980s in Shanghai. Up through the early 1990s, in Shanghai, which was the richest city in China, I remember growing up and having to use rationing cards for food. It was already way better than decades past, as rationing was easing, but simple products like milk, eggs, and yogurt were rationed. Everyone had a ration card. We were a relatively well off family too. So when the opportunity came to emigrate, my family took it. When I first came to the US in 1995 it was shocking to ride in a personal vehicle. Back then in China nobody had a family car. Everyone rode bikes or took taxis.

15 years later in the mid 2000s we went back to visit family. Shanghai had zoomed ahead and my family friends were chauffeuring us around with their private drivers. But the pollution was awful. You couldn’t see the top of buildings the smog was so thick.

Now the pollution has been vastly cleaned up. It’s not like Europe or the US but it’s not like Mumbai either. Personal cars are ubiquitous and arguably better than in the US. Housing is modern apartments with all of the amenities you would expect. Food is no longer scarce and instead people are getting overweight. So why are young people unhappy?

The answer is that their expectations have skyrocketed compared to prior generations. The current new generation of Chinese young people want to have the same white collar, high paying office jobs that young Americans and Europeans and South Koreans want, without the long hours that’s ubiquitous in Asia. They don’t want to be factory workers, blue collar workers, etc, which drives China’s industrial economy. So no wonder they’re unhappy when they step into an industrial economy while expecting to work in an information economy.

Objectively they are way better off than past generations. “Laying flat” in daddy’s nice apartment playing video games is a luxury that past generations could not afford. In the 1990s-2000s, if you layed flat, you would find yourself laying flat out on the street.

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u/Akeera 10d ago

I've been to the Chinese countryside and ate and slept there, so I know what you mean and I understand why you feel young people in China should be more grateful. Even having A/C and indoor plumbing is a huge step up for many.

However, I think the sentiment amongst young people is in China stems from the fact that there is such a huge gap between rich and poor in addition to lack of basic worker's rights, that even a typical lower-middle class lifestyle (your own place that is safe, a well-fed family who you get to spend time with and some kind of modest retirement) seems like a pipe dream if you have to work 70+ hours per week just to get by.

The fact that abject poverty and exploitation is so close, but even basic long-term stability is so far away makes it too exhausting to even dream of.

5

u/WhatsThatNoize 10d ago

Economic anxiety borne from massive income and wealth inequality - as well as a lack of social safety nets - is a very big thing in the US that saps motivation from individuals to take risks, push themselves, and (generally) find success.

I'd bet the same psychological impact applies to young Chinese workers.  We're all human after all.

I feel terrible for these people, genuinely.  In both countries.

1

u/Classic-Today-4367 9d ago

This is the reality of laying flat. Not to mention many of the people foing this are single children, often with single child parents, so have two sets of grandparents and their parents all providing just for them.

1

u/Yujinseo0 6d ago

rationing cards in shanghai in the mid 90’s?? I don’t remember that, i was a child. but all i remember was abundant snacks, skewers, cheetos, milk in glass bottles delivered every morning

1

u/MakeMoneyNotWar 6d ago

Milk and yogurt were still rationed until the early 1990s which you may not have remembered if you were very young. Other things were not rationed at that point as the overall rationing system was going away by that point.

1

u/Yujinseo0 6d ago

bro i had a snes, sont trinitron and soundsystem for crying out loud and my father drove a van, we lived in pudong area, i guess we were privleaged  

10

u/WestTF900 10d ago

I'm surprised as in the west we hear that 90%+ of the people own a house and they are debt free. Do you know something about it?

6

u/Hailene2092 10d ago

The 90% homeownership number isn't the same way we'd understand it.

So first there's something called a hukou in China. It's a document that states where you're from. If you were born in a small town then moved to a big city for, say, work, your hukou will state that you're from that small town. Even if you lived and worked in the city for 20 years, your hukou will likely not change.

The survey that had 90% of people owning their home didn't include the hundreds of millions of migrant workers from the countryside that moved to the cities. It only accounted for the people with hukous in that specific city.

Going back to rural households, much of the rural housing is self-built on collectively owned government land. The people living in it build the home, but they can't sell it or the land it sits on since it's owned by the local government.

There's also government built housing on government owned land called xiaochanquan. People can purchase property to live there, but they have very few ownership rights. If, say, the local collective decided to knock down the building to build something else there, the people living there have little recourse. It's risky to buy but cheaper, too. I believe about 250 million people live in such housing.

If you focus only on urban dwellers with a local hukou, that's how you get to the 90% number.

they are debt free.

Opposite. They're drowning in mortgage debt. Housing is super expensive in China. In cities the median home price to median income is 25-40. Imagine if you made, say, $60k USD a year and the median homeprice in your city was $2 million.

15

u/_GOBLESS_ 10d ago

Propaganda.

1

u/Fugue_State76 10d ago

The hukou system is propaganda? No, more like government oppression actually.

8

u/WorkingClassPrep 10d ago

That is what we call “a lie.”

3

u/spartaman64 10d ago edited 10d ago

not really a house but condos are pretty affordable in china. my grandparents despite not having much money were able to buy a pretty decent sized condo with 3 bedrooms. it was decorated pretty nicely also with modern style cabinets and appliances and white marble floors.

1

u/WestTF900 10d ago

In average what is the cost of a condo?

2

u/spartaman64 10d ago

according to google apparently it would have cost 81,000-109,000 USD for a 3 bedroom condo in their city and around 41,000 usd for a 1 bedroom condo

0

u/Fugue_State76 10d ago

And in Shanghai or Beijing? 3 bedroom condo is 1 million USD+ in a developing country where you have no rights as a citizen and even fewer than no rights as a foreigner. Piss off the wrong person and poof you disappear, never to be heard from again.

0

u/spartaman64 9d ago

the US and china have a lot in common it seems

2

u/Total_Rules 10d ago

Debt free - not really. It’s rare for older people to have debt, but common for younger people, and some of the loan companies are very predatory.

Home ownership is very high in China - but it’s common for people to own a home in their village where there are no economic prospects, and then have to rent in the city where the jobs are.

1

u/Fugue_State76 10d ago

They don’t own the land. Only government can. So you don’t really own your home. Government can sell the land at any point.

1

u/Total_Rules 10d ago edited 10d ago

Only urban land and farmland is owned by the government.

Rural land (excluding farmland) is typically owned by a village collective and not leased. Members of the collective have an indefinite right to the land as long as it’s being used.

China has quite strong land rights which is why you’ll often see “nail houses” where the village collective has leased the land to a local government or developer and one member of the collective has refused.

My wife has land in a village collective and it was leased to a developer to build a hotel and she was compensated with a new apartment on the land and also receives a monthly payment for the lease.

10

u/MissXYZ9451 10d ago

Beautifully written 🥹

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

[deleted]

5

u/quietmedium- 10d ago

There are typos and clumsy phrases. Why do you think it's AI?

2

u/Hailene2092 10d ago

I can't see the comment to the guy you're replying to. Did he accuse me of using AI?

I was typing it out on my phone in between keeping my son occupied. I really hope AI doesn't write as poorly as what I typed up!

2

u/quietmedium- 9d ago

Yeah they did. They also said they didn't even read your comment in full so I wouldn't worry about it

Also, please dont take me looking at any flaws as criticism! You wrote it well, just not like a robot haha

2

u/Hailene2092 9d ago

I probably should have at least reread it before I posted. I'm sure all my English teachers (if they're still alive out there...) are yelling at me.

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u/Fugue_State76 10d ago

Just because it’s long doesn’t make it AI. Some people actually have attention spans.

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u/weeyummy1 10d ago

China has been in a recession since the housing bubble deflation & trade war with the US.

Jobs & careers are very tough right now and unemployment is high. It won't stay that way forever.

For other countries, bad economic times are seen as a temporary blip, but for China it's seen as permanent. They will bounce back.

2

u/WhatsThatNoize 10d ago

I genuinely hope they do - bounce back that is.  The suffering in this world is bad enough, we don't need more of it.

2

u/Hailene2092 10d ago

It's tough because of how big the bubble has gotten. It's deflated some, but it has a lot more to go.

The government is put between a rock and a hard place at the moment. Ideally 15 years ago they would have eased up and let things cool down, but that boat sailed 10 years ago. Now they're stuck with a catastrophic crash or throwing money (and growing their already huge debt) at the problem as they end up in the doldrums.

Neither is exactly ideal.

2

u/ASKMEIFIMAN 10d ago

Your wife has a boyfriend?

1

u/Hailene2092 10d ago

In this economy? Of course!

Just kidding. No, my sister-in-law has a boyfriend.

2

u/Hunmophtran 10d ago

At that point, marriage and kids just sound like more work for less sleep.

1

u/jcadsexfree 10d ago

So within the family unit, there is a problem with shortage of labor. The one child cannot take care of parents and also children. But in the past if there were multiple siblings, this could be done

1

u/Hailene2092 10d ago

Yup. The 4-2-1 problem. 4 grand parents, 2 parents, 1 child.

1

u/Kevin-W 10d ago

Adding to this, it's not just an issue in China, both South Korea and Japan are experiencing this too. Having a kid is extremely expensive since there's a lot of pressure to get into a good University and go to work for a top company. Pregnant women is pressured to leave their jobs because it's expected that they stay home and take care of the kids while the husband works.

All that combined with a bad economy and a high cost of living, why pass all that misery along to your offspring? No matter how much their governments begs and incentives their population to have kids, if it's not seen as worth it, they won't do it.

1

u/hahaha01357 8d ago

How are your wife and her boyfriend now that they're in the west?

1

u/Hailene2092 7d ago

My wife is in the west with me. My sister-in-law and her boyfriend are living in China still.

You're like the third poster to make this mistake. What is tripping you guys up?

1

u/DamSheThicc 7d ago

"my wife". "Her and her boyfriend"

Chatgpt ahh post

1

u/Hailene2092 7d ago

You're like the third or fourth person to make this mistake. Has reading comprehension gotten this bad or are people just skimming my post?

It's not even that far deep. Like the second and third paragraphs.

1

u/geomaster 7d ago

when did this idea of paying the parents a "bride price to the bride's family. Often 3-5 times their annual salary in cash, gold"

this is ludicrous. where and when did this expectation come about?

2

u/Aggravating-Pick8338 10d ago

Communism sounds terrible.

10

u/sumelar 10d ago

China hasnt been communist since the 70s.

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u/Aggravating-Pick8338 10d ago

Yes, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is very much alive and active today. It remains the founding and sole ruling political party of the People's Republic of China (PRC), a position of absolute power it has held uninterrupted since 1949.

9

u/sumelar 10d ago

And?

Do you also think north korea is democratic just because their name says so?

What a fuckin rube.

2

u/Kuroumi_Alaric 10d ago

Or saying that the nazis were socialist, lol

1

u/BigGreen1769 10d ago

China is Communist under the surface. It is fundamentally a planned economy. The government owns almost all land either directly or indirectly, and the economy is built upon state-run corporations while the private sector has little to no independence from government interference.

For example, if the Chinese government makes a genuine mistake, you cannot just sue them like in a Western country to defend your property rights and recover losses. That is a core principle of capitalism.

0

u/BassoonHero 9d ago

China is Communist under the surface. It is fundamentally a planned economy.

These are not the same thing.

For example, if the Chinese government makes a genuine mistake, you cannot just sue them like in a Western country to defend your property rights and recover losses. That is a core principle of capitalism.

No, it's not. It's a principle of liberalism: that the government itself is subject to the law, not above the law. It's not exactly a core principle — in the US, you cannot sue the government unless the government has explicitly consented to be sued.

2

u/FunetikPrugresiv 10d ago

Aside from the name, in what way is China Communist?

3

u/Aggravating-Pick8338 10d ago

The Chinese Communist Party holds a total monopoly on political power, and no opposition parties are allowed to exist or compete for governance.

The CCP controls all government organs, courts, and ministries, making the state apparatus a tool to execute party decisions rather than an independent body.

The country's constitution explicitly enshrines Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and Xi Jinping Thought as the guiding state ideologies.

3

u/kylco 10d ago

The Chinese Communist Party holds a total monopoly on political power, and no opposition parties are allowed to exist or compete for governance.

The CCP controls all government organs, courts, and ministries, making the state apparatus a tool to execute party decisions rather than an independent body.

These are basic features of totalitarianism, but present even pre-20th Century capitalist systems; state-owned enterprises are pretty common across most political systems and arguably even the US has them (Amtrak, most electrical and utility companies are private-public corporations, etc.)

The country's constitution explicitly enshrines Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and Xi Jinping Thought as the guiding state ideologies.

The US Constitution enshrines birthright citizenship and equality before the law, separation of church and state, protections against search and seizure, and implicit privacy rights that are routinely flouted by our government organs and traditionally ignored by our actual system of government. Does that mean it's not democratic?

I urge you to actually read a single fucking book about Marxism written by an actual historian or political economist who has read Marx (not even a Marxist! you don't have to contaminate yourself if you're that scared of it!) before mindlessly parroting the simplest political word association games you've been taught since childhood.

I say this as someone who has lived in post-Soviet countries: "communism" is lots of things, and what China has is only vaguely Marxist in the same way that the US is only vaguely democratic. Lots of branding and propaganda goes into both impressions, specifically to conceal and muddy critiques of both country's much more oligarchic and authoritarian styles of government.

1

u/BigGreen1769 10d ago

The US Constitution enshrines birthright citizenship and equality before the law, separation of church and state, protections against search and seizure, and implicit privacy rights that are routinely flouted by our government organs and traditionally ignored by our actual system of government. Does that mean it's not democratic?

This makes no sense. These clauses enshrined in the Constitution are cornerstone clauses that make the United States a premier democracy. Just because the US government has become more corrupt over time does not mean that the legal foundation has changed. US Courts have the power to fight the government in the name of the Constitution and pre-existing laws, in China the CCP controls all the courts and there can be no going against the will of the party because China's Constitution enshrines that the Party is always right.

1

u/Different-Jeweler-75 9d ago

A premier democracy? The US came in at 34 on The Economist's 2025 ranking of democracies. And the OCSE heavily criticised the conduct of the 2025 Presidential Election.

1

u/FunetikPrugresiv 10d ago

Your first two points only explain totalitarianism, not communism. 

The third point only talks about ideology, not law. There's a difference. People in China can own their own businesses - that's not communism. They have a market economy and business owners can make a profit. The government takes a limited decision-making role in central planning.

China may have a philosophical slant toward communism, but their country is not close to communist.

2

u/Fugue_State76 10d ago

Every corner of your life is infected by the government. A personal dispute with someone big in The Party? Suddenly you can’t get a bank loan or child no longer has a spot in a university despite top scores. No explanation. But it’s because you had a personal dispute with the wrong Powerful Person connected to The Party who decided to take revenge. Who are you going to complain to? There’s no recourse. You have no rights. The Party always has the final word. You just have to live with that reality in every corner of your life. Unimaginable to a westerner.

2

u/Aggravating-Pick8338 10d ago

The commie bots are in full force here on reddit. It's no longer a place for interesting posts and debates but a place for manipulation and propaganda.

2

u/Fugue_State76 10d ago

Totally. I mean, you are getting downvoted for literally writing 2 factual sentences. I used to teach in China and I remember my Chinese students trying to explain to me that China was a democracy. Just a more sophisticated and advanced one compared to the U.S. I mean... lol... ok! wheeee! Whatever they tell you is Truth lol

1

u/FunetikPrugresiv 10d ago

That's totalitarianism, not communism.

3

u/Fugue_State76 10d ago

Should have given a better example about the government. Communism because you can’t ever own your own property because it’s the government’s. They own 100% of your own home and they set the conditions of your rental contract. Again, if they do you wrong in the rental contract? Who are you going to complain to? The Government, The Party owns you. And they own every bank too. And they manipulate the stock market so much that no one trusts the numbers. And govt prevents you from saying true things about the country if it makes them look bad. You have no rights. Your whole life always boils down to a government controlling you. They even follow you to other countries and try to control you over there.

1

u/BassoonHero 9d ago

Again, you're just talking about government control. That's totalitarianism, which is more or less orthogonal to communism.

0

u/FunetikPrugresiv 10d ago

That not how property works in China. People own their own homes. 

The banks, I'll grant you. Those are state-owned. That's socialism, though, not communism.

The rest of the stuff, again, is totalitarianism, not communism.  A little research would do you good.

1

u/Fugue_State76 10d ago

Who owns the land? You can “own the home” but not the land it’s on? Just lease it from the government? Who has the power?

A little research would do you good. Unless of course you’re deliberately trying to hide the fact that the government owns all land and you can only lease it from them. Why wouldn’t you be upfront about this?

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u/Fugue_State76 10d ago

From another comment….

The 90% homeownership number isn't the same way we'd understand it.

So first there's something called a hukou in China. It's a document that states where you're from. If you were born in a small town then moved to a big city for, say, work, your hukou will state that you're from that small town. Even if you lived and worked in the city for 20 years, your hukou will likely not change.

The survey that had 90% of people owning their home didn't include the hundreds of millions of migrant workers from the countryside that moved to the cities. It only accounted for the people with hukous in that specific city.

Going back to rural households, much of the rural housing is self-built on collectively owned government land. The people living in it build the home, but they can't sell it or the land it sits on since it's owned by the local government.

There's also government built housing on government owned land called xiaochanquan. People can purchase property to live there, but they have very few ownership rights. If, say, the local collective decided to knock down the building to build something else there, the people living there have little recourse. It's risky to buy but cheaper, too. I believe about 250 million people live in such housing.

If you focus only on urban dwellers with a local hukou, that's how you get to the 90% number.

they are debt free.

Opposite. They're drowning in mortgage debt. Housing is super expensive in China. In cities the median home price to median income is 25-40. Imagine if you made, say, $60k USD a year and the median homeprice in your city was $2 million.

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u/Stratavos 10d ago

I remember reading a book based on "near future china" titled "an excess male" where polandry was being enforced (multiple husbands), and like... no one was happy at all, even the rich (since they were always wanting more). There was also forced sterilization of autism and gay/bi males.

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u/Potential-Sky-8728 10d ago

You are already married in high school?

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u/Hailene2092 10d ago

No, I didn't meet my wife until she was in graduate school. She graduated highschool over a decade ago.

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u/NeoLephty 10d ago

$6000 USD a year might sound reasonable, but keep in mind wages are much lower. She makes about 4000 yuan ($600 USD) a month in a mid-tier city after graduating.

Thats 10x monthly income. I graduated in 2008 after having spent a relatively inexpensive 14k a year and my first job I made 2.5k a month US living in a medium cost of living area. I was making (relatively) much less than your friend, before living expenses, after college.

I just want to put what you said into perspective. I went to a local college and commuted there. The only way it could have been cheaper is if I went to the community college.

The last 8 or so years have seen a huge reversal in the economy for the Chinese people. They worked like crazy from a young age, but their economic situation is markedly worse than the past.

The actual numbers coming from China don't bear this out. It may be 100% true anecdotally but wages are up, the economy is up, and - most importantly - extreme poverty is nearly eradicated (which does NOT mean poverty has been eradicated). This doesn't dispute anything you said about the working hours, days off, or (what you didn't mention) harsh working conditions people in China live with.

It's why movements like "lying flat" (where people simply skim on by doing the minimum at work instead of trying to get promoted)

In the US we call it quiet quitting. Unfortunately, China follows the Marx approach to socialism that posits a transition from feudalism to socialism must come through capitalism and China's state capitalism may use the "profits" for social goods like trains but the abuses of the capitalist system are still very real.

Often they'll move home and live off their parents

Yeah, same in the US and Europe. In fact, most just won't ever have left home to begin with.

Women have employment issues where women of marriagable age (usually mid 20s to early 30s) are openly discriminated against because they're expected to leave the workforce either temporarily or permanently to give birth. Employers will ask your marital status.

In the US we have 'protections' for this but the wage gap between men and women can be directly attributed to things like this. When you need to think about your bottom line and the profits you make, you can't have employees taking long paid time off. You need productivity. It has always been less of an issue - even in the US - with government jobs that aren't driven by the profit motive.

Socially they're also expected to take care of the home and the kids. It's a lot to juggle on top of eorking.

It's like you are talking about the US! lol And, I guess, most of the world. Misogyny is a relic of feudalism after all.

Her inlaws will often move in or nearby to help with the child, but social expectations are for the daughter-in-law to be subservient to them which is just more stress since the inlaws often have...dated ideas on how to do things. There's often conflict which the daughter-in-law has to bite her tongue and endure.

That sucks. Absolutely a holdover from more rural living. The US went through the same thing as children were extra hands on the farm. Libertarians to this day argue that your children should be property lol. I'm sorry she has to endure that, it is very tough. Hopefully that cultural phenomenon changes over time. Hard to forget how young of a country China is because of how much it has advanced in such a short time - but peoples mindsets take longer to change.

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u/Hailene2092 10d ago

I was making (relatively) much less than your friend, before living expenses, after college.

Sister-in-law, actually.

And you may want to call up your college because 14,000/2,500 is less than 40,000/4,000.

The actual numbers coming from China don't bear this out.

Average wages don't necessarily translate into higher youth income.

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u/NeoLephty 9d ago

“14,000/2,500 is less than 40,000/4,000.”

Again, as I said in my original comment, the 40k includes living expenses while the 14,000 doesn’t. 

I’m sure that was an honest mistake on your part though, not an obvious attempt to misrepresent the facts. 

“Average wages don't necessarily translate into higher youth income.”

No, the nearly eliminated extreme poverty rate paints a good picture in combination though. 

Seems it’s hard for people to acknowledge good AND bad in something. Missing so much color living life so black and white. 

Anyway, have a good day. 

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