Are your friends all under the age of 20?
Foreign branded cars were the go to for anyone who could afford them from 1990s to just before 2020s. Crazy to say that China favoured local brands before.
Side note, modern South Korean nativism is derived from Japanese nativism. The Japanese nativism is the product of the right wing nationalists who were never removed from power after the Allied victory. Former SK President Park Chung Hee (in power for 20 years) was an enthusiastic participant in the Japanese colonial army and adapted the Japanese right wing politics for Korea.
Which is why I said many people here don’t understand China , so they just have opinions based on some erroneous news they receive . I didn’t mean they say Chinese favored local brands especially not back in the past when nobody even talked much about China as such just a decade ago. I think it was around 2018 when news media started regurgitating more of the China threat and how China is favoring local brands and how the CCP has some evil designs to evict all western companies from China etc etc. Many people bought this views and as Chinese companies moved up technology and improved their products and some foreign brands started losing some market share, some use this as an excuse to justify their views even more. lol without taking the time to think why this shift is happening .
one thing I believe everybody should be doing is travel more to different countries and spend some time in various cultures/places. There is no better teacher in life than travelling and experiences first hand different cultures and way of life. It broadens your life perspectives and views a lot. I can tell when I talk to people who haven’t travelled much, their views are often very narrow minded and one sided. This includes everybody in every country on earth from China to India to Vietnam to Japan to Africa to Latin America etc etc. The best way to make people learn is to give them the opportunity and standard of living to at enables them to travel the world. Else most people tend to be very naive /bias and narrow minded when they haven’t left much of their country before .
One really critical observation I have made, and something I find rather Ironic is that, based on cultural observations I have made in my time in China and Japan(including even Korea) China is more similar to the US regarding the hustle mindset, work ethic, cutthroat capitalistic competitive mindset, social interactions etc, in some ways I could argue that Chinese culture shares certain similarities with American culture that differ from the more regimented Japanese and Korean societies. Japan and Korea are seen more aligned with each other in terms of high-context, group-oriented behavior, but I admit all three was asan countries still differ significantly from the US in foundational social structure.
