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Alex Xu's avatar

Hi Jasmine! Loved the post, recently went back to China in the summer of 2023 and my parents are from the Zhejiang region, so a lot of what you said resonated with me. I kind of felt it would as soon as you mentioned diaspora angst - I think a lot of my friends who deal with that feel like they don't "belong" to a group, but I luckily feel strongly tied to both my Chinese and American halves and pretty comfortable with both (probably thanks to having a good relationship with my parents...)

One of the things that is hardest for me to describe to my friends about China really is how much you can feel technological and economic progress as a normal citizen The rate of change is so, so fast there - when I visited my grandparents, they confessed to eating out a lot less nowadays because so many restaurants have converted to fully digital menus, and they aren't nearly as comfortable with the QR code ordering and using Alipay as people who grew up with smartphones are.

I feel like I’m a little more optimistic about the future of China's cultural output, even in the face of extremely heavy-handed government regulation. It's definitely something you feel while you're there, but I would argue that you probably shouldn't be expecting that much cultural output from China right now, anyway?

It took Korea and Japan getting rich first before they were able to really do their creative work; my understanding is that kpop’s breakout into the mainstream consciousness arose after Samsung and Hyundai and LG ate the world, and the same for anime and Japanese food and philosophy - they became smash hits after Honda and Sony et al made Japan a major player.

I feel like China is on its way - it kind of feels like the country is an uncertain adolescent teenager, that feels the need to prove itself. When the country matures and feels secure about its place on the global stage (not educated enough on the topic to speak about when it might happen or the implications of this for the rest of the world), I think/hope that's when we'll see China's creative scene come into its own.

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Noah Smith's avatar

"Instead, I looked toward writers like Peter Hessler. Hessler lived and worked in China for decades, so he’s no short-term tourist. But he’s also a longtime advocate of starting with ordinary people’s lives to understand China’s transformation."

I should point out that I did spend quite a bit of time in my post arguing that living in a place for years is very different than visiting it for a few weeks... 😉

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