Funny article thread

[BoraTas]

First and foremost, that may not be the best source considering the person claims to be against China's totalitarian repression.

Secondly, I disagree. China's reputation was trashed since 1949. Western Europeans and Americans have mental panic attacks when they hear the word, "communism". In addition, prior to 2017, China's reputation was further c**ped upon. Did you forget about Liu Xiaobo, Tibetan independence, Chinese sweatshops with child labourers, Dalai Lama, FLG organ harvesting, "Made in China" junk, "Chinese copy and steal", and etc? These labels were ubiquitious. A person who identifies as mainland Chinese were constantly made fun of because of that. Why do you think there are still so many anti-China mainlanders just like the one you cited? Finally, just because you see a bunch of foreign tourists in China doesn't mean they like you. Look at Serpentza and ADVChina. Those guys were in China for a while. Yet they repeatedly piss on China as a whole. To be frank and extremely sharp, the thought of using tourism to boost one's image is prostitute-thinking. China's international reputation was never recoverable to begin with for the superior powers deemed the nation to be undesirable.

I'm personally ok with China being a strict with tourism and foreign entries. It forced China to focus on more complex industries to boost its growth and deceloping domestic talent. Tourism just offers the easy way out and stunts a nation's overall development. Japan is a really good example of this. They have become so dependent on tourism that they changed their culture and behavior to make themselves more tourist-friendly.

I can understand this argument. But I disagree. China's unpopularity is indeed an American-made phenomenon. Yet, China isn't even putting the effort to at least blunt the impact. Having friendly groups outside is important. Even peak China will be a fraction of world's economy and population. Therefore, it would obviously gain from popularity both in terms of security and prosperity. As I said before, if China was popular in Japan and Australia, these countries' US client governments would have a much harder time justifying their military spending increases during a global economic slowdown.

I think the Chinese government is aware of this too. It spends billions annually on soft power, failing to get any results. GT and CGTN are arguably the worst state media outlets in the world. At least among the countries you could show on the map. But successful examples are extant too. For example Genshin Impact has recruited more "Wumaos" than Chinese state media ever did.

I am not proposing here that China should become like Thailand. I am merely saying it shouldn't be this hard to visit and should market itself. You can find a lot of stories about how people were essentially stranded in China after the landing. Phones don't work without astronomical costs, cash is useless, your cards don't work, you have to download a bunch of Chinese apps to do anything,... Most types of tourism are good in multiple levels, and China has immense potential.

Note: I was going to send the original post to the world news thread. It'd better if this discussion is moved to there.

 

[vincent]

My biggest pet peeve for this is 鲁棒性 for robustness because I still thinks it reads like an euphemism for male masturbation.

I suggested 耐操, but my wife has an issue with that translation.

 

[Feima]

It's not just kanji, it's also the entire vocabulary being used.

For example, contrast a line taken from the Japanese declaration of war against United States and British Empire: "朕茲ニ米國及英國ニ對シテ戰ヲ宣ス", with its translation in modern Japanese (that I found on Japanese Wikipedia, so standard caveat applies): "私はここに米国と英国に対して戦争を行うことを宣言する". Notice the difference in vocabulary. And like I said, I could mechanically translate the original line into something actually resembling Classical Chinese: "朕茲對米國及英國宣戰", where as modern Japanese... not so much (in pseudo-Chinese form it would probably look like "私此処対米国及英国宣言戦争行事". Don't quote me on it though.).

This is because formal writing of that era was evolved from sōrōbun (候文, the original pseudo-Chinese, if you will), which looks like something like this: "新年之御慶目出度申納候" (Well, not exactly. What is printed out as computer-readable text is a lot more normalized than what was actually written out with a brush pen), which in turn was ultimately evolved from Classical Chinese.

Going further back, Togo's exhortation at the battle of Tsushima reads exactly Chinese: 皇国兴废在此一战，各员一层奋励努力

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

I can understand this argument. But I disagree. China's unpopularity is indeed an American-made phenomenon. Yet, China isn't even putting the effort to at least blunt the impact. Having friendly groups outside is important. Even peak China will be a fraction of world's economy and population. Therefore, it would obviously gain from popularity both in terms of security and prosperity. As I said before, if China was popular in Japan and Australia, these countries' US client governments would have a much harder time justifying their military spending increases during a global economic slowdown.

I think the Chinese government is aware of this too. It spends billions annually on soft power, failing to get any results. GT and CGTN are arguably the worst state media outlets in the world. At least among the countries you could show on the map. But successful examples are extant too. For example Genshin Impact has recruited more "Wumaos" than Chinese state media ever did.

I am not proposing here that China should become like Thailand. I am merely saying it shouldn't be this hard to visit and should market itself. You can find a lot of stories about how people were essentially stranded in China after the landing. Phones don't work without astronomical costs, cash is useless, your cards don't work, you have to download a bunch of Chinese apps to do anything,... Most types of tourism are good in multiple levels, and China has immense potential.

Note: I was going to send the original post to the world news thread. It'd better if this discussion is moved to there.

you'll be surprised how effective GT and CGTN are forcing western media to go on the defensive in 3rd countries and still failing to achieve their objectives.

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In a 2018 report entitled ‘China’s Pursuit of a New World Media Order’, Reporters Without Borders (or RSF, from the French form of the name) made fifteen recommendations to democratic governments, journalists, media outlets, publishers and social networks in order to limit China’s growing influence over global media. The RSF report singled out Africa as one of the regions where Chinese media have been most active in recent years.

End result:

As for China being unpopular in Japan, its been that way for decades. Japanese view of China has always been >80% negative. Australia was avoidable, but they were the ones who started the shit, so you can't wake someone pretending to be asleep. Instead of wasting disproportionate effort and time on countries solidly in the US orbit, it is better to spend that same effort on much higher ROI activities in Africa, ASEAN and Latin America.

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[BlackWindMnt]

Im highly sceptical about survey based stuff its not so hard to change the publics opinion. Most people are just npc when it comes to diplomacy and politics. You want to know what each of the ASEAN nations leadership thinks about US vs China. Will they go with the US and potentially becomes ASEAN ukraine or baltic level nation or will they go with trade with China hell China has to economic weight to determine which ASEAN nations can develop to a western European nation state level in prosperity.

 

[ACuriousPLAFan]

Elon versus Zuck - The Good Ending:

View attachment 115930

Elon versus Zuck - You-Will-Never-Unsee-This Ending

Spoiler: You have been warned

 

[emblem21]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1679894869169385490

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1679994957640388610

Oh for goodness sake, are you seriously trying to induce shrinkage in me at a time when I didn’t want that shrinkage, talk about a bed room killer

 

[zbb]

Congressman August Pfluger smugly makes fun of Biden's energy and EPA officials for not knowing the annual electricity consumption of the US.

The problem is, not only did Pfluger confuse watts with watt-hours (power vs energy), the number he gave (4 terawatts) was off by a factor of 1,000! Actual electricity consumption in the US is ~4,000 terawatt-hours per year.

Making it even more hilarious, the youtube comments are filled with people praising Pfluger's intelligence and acting like they are so much smarter than the Biden officials.

 

[Zhejiang]

according to this person Chinas GDP is only 8 trillion, and we now that by China night time lights because higher GDP means more night time rights and best part is it is peer reviwed so that means its true. according to this western person who has no biased at all and whos messurement is 100% true.

 

[theorlonator]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1681014704515469312