> First, the history is different. Chinese civilization has an unbroken history of five thousand years.<p>Despite that this is a inspired article, this sentence still interrupt my immersive reading. Such claim has always been ridiculous to me, but it is still too often spoken to be ignore. Chinese has unique own point of view to their history, which includes legends and myths. Check this ( <a href="http://camphorpress.com/5000-years-of-history/" rel="nofollow">http://camphorpress.com/5000-years-of-history/</a> ) if you have interests.
There's a short mention about food safety and how ordinary citizens worry about this - I'm in the USA and I and the people I know always inspect the food we eat for country of origin and never purchase anything from mainland China. On the one hand factory farming in the USA means we have to worry about stuff like e coli and safe food handling but that pales in comparison to the risk of feeding your children lead or melamine because the producer was purposely trying to pinch pennies.
Is it just me or do all of these things seem very reasonable, even tame by novel standards? All of the examples are exciting stories, but nothing that doesn't show up in your standard action movie.
Shades of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413849-nothing-is-true-and-everything-is-possible" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413849-nothing-is-true...</a>
This was a great article. Usually I get a distinct "translated from Chinese" vibe, but not here! I thought that the translation must be very good. Can Anyone who has read the original comment?
Any rapid growing/evolving country is a crazy and super-dangerous/disastrous evolution. You can't evolve fast and well, you can't avoid mistake when changes happen and the more concentrated changes the more mistake you'll get...<p>Often after some time evolution start to became for reaction an involution and if people in that country are lucky evolution+involution result after some time in a new stability "golden period", but that's rare...
Interestingly, while reading the text and with zero knowledge of the novel he's talking about, I always assume the text's author to be a woman. Does anybody know the guy? Are his novels also like this?
This article on China's recent crazyiness doesn't mention its long-standing oppression of minorities. It looks as though getting at the obvious root of the obvious problem is not on the table.<p>That said, there's plenty of madness at loose in the world. When we in the US get our own house cleaned up, finger-pointing will see less absurd.
> 3) It is has the quality of a fable or an allegory. Reality itself has the quality of a fable.<p>In recent years I have been seeing this over and over, not just in China but also in the West. Two examples are the rise of Trump and Brexit.
This sounds a lot like Pelevin's turbo-realism to me. It's probably not a coincidence that that movement arose in early post-communist Russia, when the present were similarly unmoored from the past.