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Imma preface this by saying that it’s not all Westerners I’m taking about, but a large subset.
Many Westerners who live and work in China (and to a lesser extent other places in East Asia) have a condescending view of the local people. A whole lot of them think of themselves as a white savior, come to civilize the savages with their first world skills and human rights.
Most of these people don’t think much of breaking laws or flaunting local customs. Most people in Asia give them a pass because we don’t necessarily expect outsiders to know about our rules and cultures, and they take that as vindication for their exceptionalism.
Go to any Asian country specific subreddit like /r/China, /r/Korea, or /r/Japan and you’ll find them to be absolute cesspits of arrogant racism. Even worse are the “circlejerk” versions of those subs, which add sexism, homophobia, and even more blatant racism into the mix behind a veil of “ironic humor”.
You can also see this arrogant exceptionalism in the way Westerners refer to themselves as “expats”. A Westerner in Asia is never an “immigrant” or a “migrant”, they’re always an “expat”. When was the last time you heard someone call an Asian immigrant to the West an “expat”?
Anyway. A lot of these people also have exceptionally twisted and chuddy views of the world. Many of them are here because they can’t get laid back home and came searching for a “traditional submissive Asian waifu”.
They don’t learn the language, don’t integrate, and spend most of their time getting drunk with other westerners while complaining about Asia.
These people also happen to be a large proportion of the voices about China the average Westerner can access about China. Almost every time there’s a reddit thread about Asia or China, these people come out of the woodwork claiming “expertise”. They propagate their twisted and shitty view of Asia and China and most other Westerners lap it up uncritically.
Any actual Chinese voice that pops up is almost always dismissed as a 50 cent drone if they disagree with the prevailing Western narrative.
I have a relative that lives and works in China. Luckily they’re not anything like the typical expat-brained chauvinists. They also learned the language before moving there. They actually complain any time they come back to the US about how shitty the infrastructure and healthcare system is here.
They’re a good person, a rare trait in my family.
There are also lots of cool Westerners in China. The problem is that cool Westerners who are happy with their lives don’t spend their time on Reddit bitching about where they live.
The people bitching on reddit can go fuck themselves. Aside from their shit politics, they’re personally awful people as well. They also seem like they genuinely want to live in a foreign concession from which they can subjugate their own little colonial fiefdom.
My first exposure to these assholes was through a video of one of the ex-expats on youtube claiming that he’d been the target of an attempted assassination in China because some people on a forum complained about him. Like no shit, who wouldn’t want to kill these people after listening to them speak for more than two seconds?
It’s really shocking the amount of 傻逼老外 that are accepted as China experts on Reddit. I spent most of my life in China and it was always a trip meeting people like that.
I’ve also noticed there’s a notable chud contingent of Americans in Taiwan. I met one who thought if Taiwan allowed everyone to own guns they could stage an effective guerrilla war against a Chinese invasion. Weird shit.
I mean probably one of the reasons Taiwan disallows guns is for that very reason. Something like 35% of Taiwanese prefer China over the USA.
I’d imagine the reasons for the preference are very identitarian and something like a civil war could end up collapsing the Taiwanese regime.
There are layers to it. Western capitalists are afraid of not being the dominant economic forces in the world. Look at the Tiktok thing. Do Western companies really care if it spies on people? Fuck no. Because Western apps spy on people. They’re just mad it threatens the social media domination of SV. If China has killer apps, then Zucc can’t take over (and therefore America can’t take over).
Then you have the military shit, which is related to the capitalist shit. If the US military isn’t the dominant world power that everyone uses, that’s a financial loss. The US also can’t just wave its dick around every time it needs to secure a resource rich area or a socialist government is poised to take over a region.
Both of those things trickle down into the population and the culture. You get your chauvinism, racism, xenophobia, nationalism, and moral panic. I would argue most people at this level don’t really understand why they’re afraid. It’s just some vague panic based on the top two layers filtering through corporate media and commentators. You even get people on the left caught up in this for various reasons. Which I guess there are some valid arguments even if they’re not widely agreed upon. But your average person doesn’t get much past the ism stuff.
I also increasingly get a feeling that we in “the West” are so used to politicians talking shit for their own gain that it’s hard to believe that any political party actually believes in their own ideology. It’s nearly impossible for us to look at someone like president Xi and not think “he just wants power” and look at China’s foreign policy and not think “they just want raw materials” because that is the world we grew up in. Where we are told one thing but the actions of the powerful reveal something completely different. That might also be a factor that scares the ones in power. It sets a different précédent and thus holds the world to a different stander.
That may be true in the west but it’s also true for pretty much all of human history. Most ideology exists in the first place to justify unjust hierarchies.
People are afraid that China are going to do to them exactly what colonial powers have been doing the whole time. They are scared of someone doing to them what they have always done.
if China becomes #1 it undermines the racial hierarchy that is one of the last sources of self-esteem for whitey
Yeah, racism is definitely a huge part of it. It’s especially bad in places like Australia, which has been biting the Chinese hand that feeds Australia’s economy with no discernable motivation except racism.
I also think this kind of attitude has infected parts of the left. You know, the kind of person who is really really pro-vietnam but is anti-China because of the billionaires or some State Department sanctioned agitprop.
I think that on some level, they perceive a difference between a small Asian socialist country an ocean away with no real economic or military power projection differently from a powerful Asian socialist country that can impact their lives.
