China also has a more efficient energy transfer system than elsewhere in the world, so the loss is a lot less than you would expect, lower than, for example, it would be in US.

It appears China and Russia are visa-free for each other’s tour groups since 2023.

I only realized it’s NOT an armband after you pointed it out x)

I think you can do it using boost right now…

A society literally dominated by chaebols… The system doesn’t work well 😔

I really need a “hide read post” option 😺

OK, here’s a couple more that are famous and great for touristic reasons of history /culture /good food /great landscape /etc

Xi’an (one of the ancient capitals of China, starting point of the traditional and new Silk Road), Guilin (every single time they show China in cartoon, with giant mountains and winding rivers, they’re basically showing here), Shenzhen (the new hyper modern high tech city), Guangzhou (old English name was Canton, as in Cantonese food), Suzhou and Hangzhou (historically famed for being chill and beautiful, lakes and canals etc), Hainandao (Chinese version of Hawaii), Nanjing (another ancient capital of China, lots of culture), Harbin (lots of Russian architecture here, and a FANTASTIC and huge ice sculpture show every year)

Was not expecting 济公 here along with the Marxists xD

…sounds grim and surreal. Pretty sure I’ve read post-apocalyptic fiction with similar backgrounds :|

有没有 have or not have 时间 time 陪我 accompany me/accommodate me 聊聊天 chat a bit

It’s a way to turn any action into a question. It could be a more casual and informal, more endearing /soft way of questioning something (depending on the actual emotional tone you say it with, if course) .

看没看过？have…seen it? 吃没吃过？have… eaten it? 玩没玩过？have … played it? 读没读过？have … read it?

是不是 （很好玩）？isn’t it (fun)? 好不好 isn’t it good? 看不看xyz–do (you/we/they) wanna watch xyz? 知不知道xyz–do…know xyz?

Etc.

To sound less like a robot, here’s my suggested rewrite for you ;D

你好，我叫xxx，我正在学汉语。你好吗？你会说普通话吗？有没有时间陪我聊聊天？

Etc.

If ALPS, this fancy amazing mysterious process, has actually successfully filtered out all 64 potentially irradiating elements in the water that had touched Fukushima’s exposed core, the inventers should be awarded ALL the prizes in the world for science, peace, betterment of humanity , etc. They should publish their process and results in all the science journals for the world to admire. For ye, all our nuclear fears are solved! Let nuclear energy proliferate hereon!

But no. Japan refuses to let any other country do testing at release points. They budget 70 billion yen for PR purposes for a release program that only cost 34 billion yen (cheapest option out of 5). They conduct a test for only 2 elements, saying their safe levels mean the water itself is entirely safe.

All this can be resolved SO EASILY if they just allow scientists from affected countries to check the process and test the water at regular intervals, then publish their result to indicate continued safety. Korean people won’t have to demonstrate on the street by the 50,000, China/HK/USA/etc will instantly permit importing their seafood again. Folks will stop hoarding salt, and all can take a deep breath and chill. Win win.

But they won’t.

There was a period when foreigners, especially English-speaking white foreigners, were treated effusively in China, elevated above all Chinese people and often far above the natural social place these folks had back in their own countries. They got better jobs, better job situations and benefits, and Chinese people in general gave them respect and admiration based on their whiteness and exotic Westerness alone.

Then China opened up to the world at ever increasing pace, Chinese people became more sophisticated, and an entire generation of previously-fêted foreigners lost their elevated place in society. They crashed back to earth and drifted back to the social positions they always would have had based on their personal abilities and talents.

Laowhy and Serpentza lived through the tail part of that shift. The good and easy time they’d had in China soon ended, they were barely making ends meet, and soon had to leave. They became deeply bitter, and attributed that natural change in society to the CPC ruining the good times for everyone, not just themselves. Thereafter they fell in with various anti-China crowds within and without China, and also found just how lucrative anti-China videos are on yt.

So it’s a combination of both a personal sense of being wronged, plus the good grift, that resulted in their channels and stance today. They were always grifters at heart, the change in money merely changed the nature of their content.

It’s the SCMP, Lol. The content is occasionally objective, but the readership is like 80% anti-China.

I’m not surprised to hear that. I understand that a quite large chunk of the costs they listed for this water release program is actually, when parsed, the cost for the PR campaign to make it all seem aboveboard and acceptable.

This is water that actually touched the exposed core from Fukushima during the disaster, and not the typical water used to cool nuclear cores as had been released for 60 years.

The release is extremely controversial in Asia, there have been riots and sit-in’s in Japan and Korea, and accusation of receiving bribes for the organization that testified as to the radioactivity. The price of salt in Korea is inflating as well (people are hording fearing future salt will be contaminated). Korea has set up a program to inspect radioactivity every two months, at 10 potential contact points, despite saying they’re OK with the release. Japan has refused all requests for inspection of their treatment methods, nor fully released the details.

This event has been really downplayed in all the English media I’ve seen, while highlighting China’s response as though it alone is being hysterical. Some analyst have speculated that this might have been one of the items Japan requested in the recent meeting with Korea and US at Camp David.

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Of course China is authoritarian. It’s an iteration of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Lol.

To be more serious. Every single citizen of a country will have lots of complaints about their own country, even those who think most things are working ok. By sheer nature of living somewhere, you become intimately aware of its problems and weaknesses, and wants to see certain changes and improvements. Does this mean they dislike the country as a whole? Or love another country more than their own? No.

The CPC is enjoying an unprecedented high approval rating due to being a highly efficient government capable of implementing long-term plans to improvement the country. Many people have witnessed those changes with their own eyes, lived through them personally, and mostly approved of the results.

In addition, a part of the CPC’s mission is to protect and revive China and Chinese culture, which it has done so by alleviating poverty, strengthening the economy and the military, and enhancing China’s influence and reputation in the world. Not every single Chinese person is a socialist or at all interested in politics, but a great majority (even including overseas Chinese) DO resonate with that mission, with seeing how the country has improved, how traditional cultural elements are being preserved and incorporated with modern elements in creative ways in all forms of media, architecture, art works, ways of life, all the scientific achievements, etc.

Yes, there is censorship and an element of authoritarian control. Moreso in the past, and a little more relaxed in the present, but it’s definitely there. Arguably, the Chinese people is more familiar, even comfortable, with an authoritarian government (how else does one keep a vast country with huge population together throughout the thousands of years). However, because the government is vested with more power in general, the people have higher expectation for it to perform and to take care of everyone. It’s part of the Confucian social contract that hides deep in the structure of society. That being the case, when people fall through the cracks in various ways, they blame the government personally for failing them, more than a typical Western person would in a similar situation.

Also, the government makes policies primarily based on what benefits the society overall, and not the individual (by this, I do not mean ethnic minorities or classes of people, who are protected as part of a harmonious society; but the concept of individualism itself). If you’re an individual who happens to not conform with what is considered to be socially beneficial, or who wants to be disruptive in some way (and it may even be a perfectly acceptable type of disruption in the West), you would feel the boot of repression upon your neck.

With 1.4 billion people, even tiny percentage of unhappy people is tens of millions of unhappy people. Each have their own story, and justification, and many grievances are valid. Because no government is ever so perfect as to take the best care of every single person, no government is entirely free of corruption or negligence or ineptitude. The CPC has made mistakes that massively affected some people’s lives for the worse. It has also dramatically improved things in other ways. For some people, the two did not even out. For others, they imagine the West to be a shining beacon that is far better, more free, where people can truly make money and live a good life. Simultaneously, a current trend is for Chinese netizens to say they never realized how great their own country is and how much they love it, until they broke through the Great Firewall via VPN and started to see how the outside is doing.

Overall, the only way to determine how a country’s government is doing is to analyze vast statistics, and in comparison with other governments. In that light, the CPC’s numbers are pretty good, but there are always room for improvement.

At that point of wealth you aren’t thinking about spending money as an individual, or even an individual family (even including hangers on and staff). You are essentially a representative of a power that parallels governments, with worldwide reach, and will think along those lines. You want to implement worldwide policies, dictate the tides of capitalism, play with your own regime change politics, break the barriers of old age, gene manipulation, and get the process started on astro-mining and colonizing Mars.