There are certainly statistics about overall quality of products from the manufacturing industry, but I think it’s too broad to be very useful. For example, from this year’s statistical communique (http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202302/t20230227_1918979.html):

The qualification rate of manufactured products[64] reached 93.29 percent.

[64] The qualification rate of manufactured products is the ratio of the samples that have passed the sampling quality test, the process of which follows certain methods, procedure and standard, to the total amount of the sampled products. The survey samples cover 29 sectors of the manufacturing industry.

For more specific statistics you’d need a more specific question. About nepotism, the campaign against corruption has some statistics but I don’t think there’s a way to quantitatively reflect on the issue of nepotism.

On educational costs, this is a manufactured need as public education from kindergarten to grade 12 is practically free in China, and university costs are almost practically free. Now private education is where things can become very expensive as you can imagine, this includes private schools and private tutoring.

Some parents think that expensive private schools offer better quality of education, or think that they are better alternatives to some low-par public schools, but I think they just cost more. Private tutoring isn’t just about core subjects, some parents may also want to enroll their kids into arts/tech/sports/etc. training classes, that’s where some of that imaginary educational costs come from too. Unless private education is banned, this non-issue of educational costs will still be a problem for competitive parents.

I didn’t go too much into the cost of living, but the cost of housing may be the main concern for parents who want to enroll kids into schools in the mega-cities (e.g. Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen), but this is also a nuanced topic.

I know you’ve qualified it, but I’d be cautious of this kind of thing:

the inherent competitiveness of Chinese culture amongst the parents of this generation…

Seems like the kind of framing that could lead to some problematic conclusions/questions.

makes me wonder if this’ll become a wedge issue in aus as we’re trying to pivot extracted resource exports from china to india

India is a large shithole compared to China. Here most Hindus have the mentality of Nazi Germany of 1930s. I am a hindu myself but man, the racism, the sheer bigotry, the sheer indifference towards crime against Muslims , Christians and lower caste people is unparalleled in history of India. Rapists are roaming free, Mosques , sufi shrines are being demolished, poor Muslim households are bulldozed by Nazi state governments for protesting against the RSS/VHP. Unemployment is the highest, people resort to cyber crimes, hate propaganda for RSS to fullfil their stomach needs. Man, bourgeois democracy after fascism is the worst for humanity.

People in the west are largely nutjobs, I was in a Carl Zha twitter space where people from Australia and New Zealand were speaking about the arrests made in China linked with Covid protocol and disinformation. The tone was very condescending and bigoted towards Chinese people , as if westerners know about China more than Chinese themselves and they are “Chinese” more than the native Chinese people . And the diaspora of both countries are the worst in the west , Indian diaspora in the US are mostly bigoted and arrogant right wing nutters and some chinese also fall into the same category specially the correspondents of MSM.

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Yeah that’d be interesting to see, if young people are busy getting education instead of working that’s definitely a very positive sign.

Even with visiting a place, you’ll only get a tourist’s perspective of the places you visited, and not the whole country. I would heartily recommend traveling though, really helps you connect with other people from around the world and it is always a fantastic experience, even if you don’t always have the best time.

But don’t worry too much about being “objective” either. You’re biased, I’m biased, everyone has their own biases. What’s important is that you try to be aware of your biases and your blind spots and try to compensate for them (Which it sounds like you’re absolutely doing). The most subjective analyses of a situation come from those who have convinced themselves that their own biased viewpoint is the only unbiased one.

For an ‘objective’ understanding, there would need to be a thorough systematic scientific analysis. The first of which wouldn’t necessarily be enough, but which would improve through subsequent studies. It would need to be systematic because numbers and figures without sufficient context can be misleading.

You may have heard individuals claim that EVs are worse for the environment due to the nickel, cobalt, lithium, etc. While it is true that the procurement and refinement of the materials are awful ethically and environmentally, pointing at a point in the sequence of events a given thing encounters is not enough to make a meaningful conclusion. What is done is called a ‘Life Cycle Analysis’ where the material is tracked and understood at every point along the sequence. This can then be used as an evaluative standard against oil-derived fuels which have also been studied this way.

I don’t know if there would be enough resources available from the interested parties to conduct something so thoroughly. Typically internal data or external data are combined and filtered to create some kind of approximation. This works well enough, but it’s not something I would consider satisfying. In this area I am a layperson, I don’t have a good way to understand what is in these reports properly in context and what they mean.

For a given molecular compound or protein, let’s say in a cell, I can look at its metabolic properties, the DNA, the mRNA, how it may differ from organisms within the same species, across species, phyla, etc. This allows me to zoom in or zoom out so to speak and at any level have the appropriate context and tools to analyze it. If this is done piecemeal it becomes significantly harder, and much less accessible. Though certainly it can be done. The other thing is that there may be emergent or otherwise unknown confounding factors that slip between the cracks when the comparisons are not made holistically.

No?? Racism would be saying “Han people are inherently ugly because they have squinty eyes.” That’s not at all similar to what I said. What I did was I identified a behavioral pattern amongst a group of people from a shared cultural group, based on my own experiences, friends experiences, that match existing stereotypes about said group; which while not being sufficient to dictate an absolute conclusion, should at least justify having the desire to inquire about such behavior no? Especially since I am asking a community where said ethnic group has a positive reception, which should imply I am trying to learn instead of reinforcing prejudices in an echo chamber, I seriously don’t see how my question can be perceived as anything more than somewhat insensitive in delivery.

This is such a roller-coaster of a paragraph to read. But yes:

“Mannerisms and emotional intelligence of the average person.”

Comes off as just a tiny bit insensitive to this English speaking comm, maybe even a bit infantalizing. Cultural stereotypes are like wet sand. You can provide any sort of “meta-historical” explanation for why the “average person” is like that and be pleased with yourself. I understand if that wasn’t your intention, but it was not a good way to frame your question, nor was your reply.

Sorry, I unfortunately know nothing about illegal tutors.

I think only for-profit tutoring is illegal. A friend who is from China and visits there frequently said that non-profits were still allowed to function. Incidentally he lost a good deal of money invested in an educational tech company.

I thought so, but I wanted OP to clarify they were using that statistic.

That explain a lot. Lots of western analysts seem to be making a big deal of the number. As other comment stated, would be nice to see a more detailed distribution, though.

On a different but related topic, getting info from a liberal associate of mine that, to quote, “China will no longer publish data on the country’s youth unemployment rate.”, citing this tweet I’ve screenshoted below.

Can you provide further context, explanation, or correction regarding this? Thanks in advance.

Yeah that was the consensus I obtained from reading western news sources on the issue. I understand now reporting the unemployment rate of people still in school age is pretty disingenuous. However like my response to an above comment, I want to ask is there statistics showing the distribution of where the unemployment comes from in this 16-24 age range? I’m specifically interested in the 22-24 age range as that would be the average new-grad, and this would paint a much more interesting picture to analyze.

No sources outside of being chinese myself (although I grew up and live in a western country), but i feel that it’s about the same as most countries right now.

A lot of what you see as poor quality chinese products on the internet are, of course, budget options, which also appear in other countries with equally low levels of quality I’d say.

In specialised fields such as mechanical keyboards, chinese products can often be equal to contemporaries, if not slightly higher quality.

All in all, i think the quality floor can be quite low, BUT the ceiling has risen much higher than before, especially in technological areas. And the floor probably isnt much lower than in other countries, mostly affected by really bad copycat products, which i think are being phased out anyway by huge companies such as xiaomi which can offer decent qulaity but cheap phones. There are some areas where they (xiaomi, that is) can beat out other flagship models for cheaper prices, although i think thats quite rare tbh. The privacy issues and selling of data to the chinese government (and also the other things mentioned in your post) is a separate issue to what’s being asked, so i won’t consider it for now, but of course, it’s always a factor. Up to the consumer how much weight they put into it ig.

Tbh, i dont have any evidence, but this is my personal opinion. I hope this helps you a little regardless of the lack of actual solid data, sources etc.

As a warning, i haven’t been back to china in ages, and most of what i do know is second-hand from relatives, so a bit of bias is probably in there (except the mechanical keyboards but thats mostly known inside those communities also). But still, ig it can represent how a very very small portion of the residents feel :).

E: Addidng on for some other points mentioned.

Nepotism im not too sure about, but my family does indeed put quite a high value in making connections to move up in businesses. To be fair, i assume the same is true for most of the Western world, including the uk where i grew up, but i might just be a bit cynical.

Point 6 feels unfair, as a few others have mentioned. I feel there may be a few more rude tourists from china than average but not by much, its probably more to do with those weird psychological biases people have where they are told to look out for sth (e.g. oh, be careful of chinese tourists, i hear they are shitty) and then tend to notice it more. Although, as a personal anecdote, since i have grown up in the uk and go to uni there, i do tend to jotice that the chinese foreign students do stick with each other more than other foreign students. As in they will walk together in a group and tend not to talk to other british or other students, whereas students from other countries tend to socialise more with other groups. Could be biased, but that is my personal experience. Its always a bit funny when i can understand them chatting shit about other people using chinese, although I’d assume most people would do that anyway as i sure as hell do in english regardless lmao.

Sorry if my formatting and grammar are shit and if my mostly second-hand and anecdotal evidence didn’t really help. I just thought I’d add my ideas in while i saw this on my phone.

How about you show the comments those replies were directed towards? Again are some people such sheltered snowflakes that you expect to freely insult someone without getting shit back? Isn’t this internet 101 to expect an equal amount of respect directed back towards you?

As for the post I got banned from GenZeDong for. How about you bring up the original context of the post? I started the post explicitly saying I don’t buy into the western narrative on Xinjiang, so I found a set of very robotic and eerily similar pro-China Xinjiang videos all sharing the same characteristics in their title very weird. And that post was in the format of a question because I was confused whether this was a 2-way western made psyop or a very poor outreach piece conducted by a local government branch in Xinjiang, and was looking for input from more knowledgeable people.

I even got DMs after the post was removed from some people who didn’t believe I was fairly banned, and proceeded to have some productive discussion on the topic of my post.

Jesus christ if I didn’t have some good faith discussions with people initially when I just posted this thread I would think this was the Vaush subreddit from how much some of you purity test others.