What do y’all think about China’s socialist core values?
I’ve lived in China now for almost a month, and when walking about you will see many political slogans plastered everywhere including stuff about socialist construction and great rejuvenation. The thing I see the most however is the ‘socialist core values’ which list the following:
富强、民主、文明、和谐 prosperity, democracy, civility, harmony 自由、平等、公正、法治 freedom, equality, justice, the rule of law 爱国、敬业、诚信、友善 patriotism, dedication, integrity, friendship
I always found these a bit weird and I don’t really understand their purpose and I also don’t quite see why they should be plastered everywhere. I have some ideas but I would like to hear all of your guys’ opinions.
Btw, I don’t need a vpn to access lemmygrad funnily enough
Yeah, thinking about some of these concepts take me to places I've only accessed through psychedelics/meditation.
Tenet is an absolute masterpiece. Change my mind.
Yes, I have to start with the obligatory: the first time I watched the movie I was disappointed, but upon rewatch I realized how deep the rabbit hole goes, and after tens of hours of studying this movie, I can finally see what a masterpiece it is.
After having spent tens of hours with this movie, I've finally sorted out most of the major questions and have a pretty good idea of what's actually going on. The movie is so hard to wrap your head around though because you basically have to think in four dimensions, and you have to build a mental model for a crystallized universe and keep track of all the actors at all times, and their motivations. Our brains are not made to comprehend stuff like this, so it's understandable that people were frustrated with the movie. However, I think I reduced my odds of developing Alzheimers by 95% during the process of studying this thing and the process itself was very gratifying. Still though, I'm not done building more intuition for the movie so I will definitely be spending even more time grasping the details. I highly recommend committing yourself to the process 👍
It's without a doubt my favorite movie of all time.
come at me brah (or just throw me some questions idk)
AI-powered machines are taking on some of hardest jobs on the world’s biggest high-speed railway network.
Did you even read the article you linked? The only concrete claim this article makes as to government monitoring citizens' internet activity is that services are required to log user data (messages sent, browsing history) for around 6 months. This is literally standard practice around the world.
The sentiment seems to vary quite a bit based on which platform you're on. While scrolling Douyin (tik tok) I saw lots of pro-LGBT content and openly homosexual couples, lots of pride flags and so on (this compilation includes some of that). I also looked up the Baidu Baike articles on 跨性别 and 同性恋, and I thought they were really good. When it comes to state media, they also made some documentaries showing the LGBT community in a positive light. I also found this SCMP article quite insightful. Of course, we also shouldn't forget that China has the world's biggest gay dating app: Blued.
Of course you can use it, don't be silly! The government doesn't actively monitor your apps or internet activity.
Highlighting this quote from the research paper:
The research for this report was funded by the “China Network’s International Programme (Open Societies) Fund 2022/23 (£68k). The report and all contents reflect the independent work and conclusions of the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of the funders, the British Embassy Beijing, or the U.K. government. The authors wish to extend their gratitude to the individuals and organisations who supported this research by providing concrete feedback for revisions on the report, offering suggestions and advice at the planning stages, and offering ongoing collaborative and moral support while conducting this research: Elise Anderson, Campaign for Uyghurs, Freedom House, Tim Grose, Ondřej Klimeš, Julie Millsap, David O’Brien, the Rights Practice, Radio Free Asia, Isabella Rodriguez, David Stroup, Hannah Theaker, Emily Upson, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, the Uyghur Transitional Justice Database, the World Uyghur Congress, the Xinjiang Documentation Project, the Xinjiang Victims’ Database, and Adrian Zenz.
China Network’s International Programme (Open Societies) Fund is funded by the UK government and offers research grants for the following:
All projects should aim to support improvements to and/or increase understanding and awareness of contemporary human rights in China. Issues on which we welcome bids include but are not limited to: Freedom of expression, including media freedom and countering disinformation Religious and cultural rights, including for minority groups. Technology and human rights, Criminal justice reform, Civil Society resilience.
And of course, the research is supported by Radio Free Asia, Adrian Zenz, and a bunch of the classic NED funded Uyghur activist groups.
Btw, if you're curious about what the comments going across the screen are saying, you can hover over them, click the copy button in the middle, and paste it into DeepL or google translate or something. Otherwise, you can turn them off by clicking on the tiny TV with a checkmark at the bottom-middle of the screen.
selfish redrawing of territorial lines
Who was it that drew the 11-dash line? (spoiler: not the PRC)
Exactly! but the funny thing is, I've only seen these disclaimers on non-political videos.
Does anybody else have experiences with psychedelics?
I've probably tripped around 20 times throughout my life. I did it mostly because I bought into the idea that psychedelics would improve my life and habits in some way. I don't believe that anymore, and I don't think psychs really changed my life at all except it gave me lots of cool memories. I kind of feel some level of nostalgia for that reality-bending feeling of being on psychs, even though the last time I took it was only a couple months ago. It's just so different from everyday experience.
If we're talking about cultural exports, then I would highlight the three body trilogy, which is a Sci-fi trilogy which actually did become quite popular in the west. China of course also has quite a big gaming industry (genshin).
Thank you for your service 🙏
I mean, China has lots of 'cool' things, but it is actively suppressed by the media landscape in the west. It should also be noted that China lacks soft power only in western countries. According to the Bennett Institute, China is more popular in the global south than the US.
Does anyone actually understand the appeal of these streams? Is it just kids that watch it? or is it an NPC fetish like moist says?
Yeah it seems that the discourse varies a lot based on which platform you're on. I've heard a lot of bad things about the Baidu forums lol
Cyberpunk 2077 and Witcher 3 have FULL Chinese audio dubs
I started my third playthrough of Cyberpunk a couple days ago, playing it with the Chinese dub, and I have to say that it has worked really well as an immersion resource! You can enable the Chinese audio dub by right clicking on the game on steam, then click 'properties', then under 'general' there will be a 'language' option where you can choose a number of languages.
I don't know about the Witcher 3 since I haven't played it, but Cyberpunk is really dialogue heavy, so there is seriously like hundreds of hours of dialogue to go through (and then there's also the shards to read). The game makes heavy use of poetic language as well as highly informal language, which has really put strain on my current abilities, so I'm having to jot down new words all the time.
While the marketing and release of this game was scummy to say the least, there is actually quite a good game here if you just try to take in the story, the scenery, as well as delve into the sidequests (the sidequests are honestly a lot more interesting than the main story). One of my favorite moments I've had while playing any video game has to be when I accidentally fell into the 'hidden' park that's hidden 'underneath' the city center, subsequently going for a calm walk, being amazed by the scenery, and then stumbling upon a buddhist monk who gives a short guided meditation.
Even though I have 140 hours on this game, there are still so many sidequest lines to go through. Since I'm using the game as an immersion resource now, I'm definitely going to be replaying the game.
I would much rather recommend you to find words to learn instead of characters, since this will actually let you understand the characters a lot better. Learning the words and the characters they are made out of will help you map the underlying meaning of the characters a lot better, since characters in themselves are hard to define using english words. Take for example "面" which if you look it up in a dictionary will be translated as: surface, flour, noodles, aspect, side. The meaning of this character will depend on what characters it is used in conjunction with, and so how will you be able to understand which of these meanings it has if you don't know the words and grammar?
Also, I would strongly recommend that you start with focusing on listening instead of reading, since this will help you develop a better accent and it will make learning the characters a lot more effortless.
Additionally, understanding comments on social media is actually kind of an advanced skill, since you need a very good understanding of the culture and references.
China embraces walkability, public transport and urban green space
Many have the impression that China is a very car-polluted country with heavy traffic and wide streets occupying much of the cities. I think this impression mostly comes from the fact that much of the imagery one sees while hearing news about China is that of multi-lane streets going through cities. What you don't see in these shots however, are the enormous blocks that lie in between these streets. You can look at the map of any Chinese city, and you will see that the blocks are usually around 500x500 meters. In Soviet fashion, these blocks are big enough to have all of the services one would need during the day, as well as green space. At the same time, there are usually larger parks in the vicinity as well hosting various community activities. All of this is reflected in the fact that China has a very low motorization rate.
If you're wondering about why these wide streets exist in the first place, one has to understand that these cities are big, and these wide streets are kind of a rare sight when looking at the cities as a whole (although they are very much necessary for car traffic). I would much rather like to see wider streets at a lower cadence than frequently having to wait at shorter crossings. Here in Stockholm, crossings feel like such a headache since they're so frequent.
These green space developments are most obvious when you go just outside the city center. Here, you will usually find very high density tall housing as seen in the picture above. Having these tall buildings then leaves good amount of space for greenery.
This is a picture of Shijiazhuang, which is far from a tier-one city, and it is also far from being known as a city with greenery (it is stereotypically a polluted city). After looking around a bit in the city center, this was pretty much the most concrete-looking part I could find. You can still see, however, that each block has some amount of green space, and besides, there are big parks just outside of this frame. Shijiazhuang is the city which I will be living in during the coming year due to my upcoming exchange year.
As for public transport, I think we all have an idea of what the situation looks like.
Traffic does seem to be greatly improved, and that's like the main reason I'm hyped about this game. Now, you'll have to care about parking, cost and comfort of the transit, meaning that I can put all of my knowledge gained from watching RMTransit and NotJustBikes to good use. Also, you can now build walking-only streets in the base game
Anybody else hyped for Cities Skylines 2?
I can't wait to build hyper-walkable cities and make parking space non-existent.
However, it feels like all games I've ever been hyped about have turned out disappointing, like Cyberpunk and KSP2. However, the CS2 devs seem to be showing off their game without much restriction and they aren't exactly making out of this world promises which makes me feel that this time it might turn out diffirently...
Been studying mandarin intensively using Refold method for 2 years and have achieved comfortable fluency. I'd like to share some advice!
Hi everyone! For the past two years I've been studying mandarin intensively pretty much every day (544 day Anki streak at least). I've reached the point where I can talk about most topics without much issue (that includes more advanced topics like AI or general geopolitics), and I can also consume news and social media.
I followed the Refold method, since it's by far the most fool-proof and efficient way to learn a language in my opinion.
I started out immersing in gaming content, since it's very visual and you don't really have to understand what's being said in order to follow along. Some popular gaming channels on Bilibili include: 中国BOY, 徐大虾, and 老番茄. It is during these beginning stages where I would say learning Chinese is the hardest, because you will have a very hard time hearing the tones and you will also likely have a hard time hearing the difference between for example 'xiang' and 'shang', or 'chi' and 'zhi'. In order to be able to hear these sounds, your only option is just to bash your head against the content until your brain magically figures it out at some point or another. As long as you keep immersing and don't get too upset at yourself for not hearing the difference, your brain will kind of magically sort it out eventually.
The same thing is true for the speed at which you can comprehend words. At first you will have to seriously make an effort to decode all of the sounds and convert them to meaning, and so you will feel that they are talking way too fast for you to comprehend. Eventually however, your brain will start to do this conversion from sound to meaning automatically and consuming content will feel more effortless. This is why it's important in the first couple of months to just have some 自律 and push through the immersion and trust the process.
Once I started to feel quite comfortable with gaming content, I started moving towards consuming dating shows like 新相亲大会 and 非诚勿扰 (these can be found on youtube). These shows are seriously great sources of immersion for three reasons:
- The shows are very predictable so it's easy to follow what's going on even if you've missed multiple sentences.
- There are hours upon hours of content for you to consume, and I would even recommend you to rewatch episodes.
- The shows are seriously fun to watch! There are some really great moments from these shows and you usually don't need very advanced vocabulary to follow along. I would say that 新相亲大会 was *the *show which improved my Chinese the most. Watching through all the seasons let me get a natural sense of Chinese grammar, it propelled me to conversational fluency, and I finally felt comfortable with all of the sounds of the Chinese language.
The next step of my immersion journey involved watching the news as well as consuming political and educational content on Bilibili. I'm still at this stage today and so I'm just slowly widening my vocabulary and building more of a cultural understanding of things.
To give some more general tips on language learning, I'll start by saying that the most important thing to do is to build a language learning habit. You should worry less about progress or if you're doing it "right", because if you do immersion for long enough coupled with some speaking practice later down the line you are guaranteed to reach the level of fluency you want to be at. In order to build a habit, you need to do what is fun for you and worry less about if it's the right level of difficulty or if your study method is correct. I'm also sorry to say that if you can't build the habit of immersion, then you aren't going to reach fluency as there are no shortcuts to this process. You simply have to put in thousands of hours if you want to reach fluency, and for most of those hours you are going to be seriously doubting yourself if it's even possible to reach fluency in the first place.
I would also recommend everyone to learn more about the science of language learning. There are tonnes of great Youtube channels which talk about the science of immersion learning, but a classic is of course Matt vs Japan and also the Refold Youtube channel. Also, it can't hurt to watch some Xiaoma for inspiration. I kind of cringe watching his videos nowadays but back in the day Xiaoma was really the person who got me on the path to learn Chinese in the first place, so I'm still very thankful that his channel exists.