穹顶之下: Rolling 中华人民共和国 / People's Republic of China (PRC) Thread

things that are rare (to be eaten or otherwise) can get you a degree of social prestige, yes, but also certain animals are supposed to have particular medicinal qualities (not just as an aphrodisiac) which combine with the "you have to be rich to afford this" factor in a way which parallels alleged "superfoods" in the west.

Ok, thanks. Is the "wild"ness of the animal a factor in its having these medicinal qualities?

I know a little about bushmeat practices in Africa but little about them in China, except for the little I've gleaned from time spent in Chinatowns around the world.

CHANG: And why are wild animals so popular as a delicacy in China?

SI: Eating wild animal is considered a symbol of wealth because they are more rare and expensive. And wild animals is also considered more natural and, thus, nutritious, compared to farmed meat. It's a belief in traditional Chinese medicine that it can boost the immune system, you know? Of course, some people eat wild animals just because they were driven by curiosity.

CHANG: (Laughter).

SI: It's really difficult to change the mindset of, you know, eating wild animals is better than eating farmed animals. But it's a common kind of mindset in many parts of China.

Ok, this clarifies things a bit more. The wildness is thought to contribute to its naturalness, and thus its goodness. I don't know much about Chinese Romanticism but now I want to!

I live with it, my wife is training to be (eventually) a TCM doctor (but not the bad kind that use animals! there are a few very different schools of TCM, I have found out)

http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/

He adds that certain species, including primates, bats, and rats, are higher risk than others, because of the number of diseases they harbor and the likelihood of those diseases making the genetic leap required to infect humans. “Some of the Southeast Asian rats are quite big and I’m sure they’re very tasty. There’s nothing wrong with eating them per se, but rodents carry a large number of viruses with zoonotic potential—having them in the food chain is really, really high risk,” he says.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, though, interest in these foods appears to be rapidly diminishing: a survey of almost 100,000 Chinese conducted in the midst of the Wuhan outbreak found that nearly 97 percent of respondents opposed eating wild animals, up from about 50 percent in the 2014 study.

“These are not traditional habits,” says Kang, citing, as an example, how a drink made from antelope horn, a traditional remedy given to children to treat colds, has become a widely consumed daily tonic. “It’s a combination of traditional concepts with business people promoting a modern concept of, ‘We should try interesting new things because we have more income’. Eating exotic species is about people showing on social media that they are cool.”

China’s propaganda machine has recently gone into full gear to undermine that idea. Kang says a spontaneous social media backlash has also driven the point home. A hashtag that translates as #TheSourceoftheNewCoronavirusisWildAnimals quickly racked up 1.2 billion hits on Weibo, the main social media platform in China.

“In my friend circle, there is a person who in the past liked to showcase his experience with wild animal food on social media,” says Kang. “Previously, my friends would say nothing, or they’d say ‘cool’. But now he can’t post those things, because people would say if you continue to do that, you’re not cool.”

https://thefern.org/2020/03/can-asias-infectious-disease-producing-wildlife-trade-be-stopped/

https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=231522type%3D1%26t%3D10%26q%3D%23新型冠状病毒来源是野生动物%23&extparam=%23新型冠状病毒来源是野生动物%23&luicode=10000011&lfid=231522type%3D1%26t%3D10%26q%3D%23新型冠状病毒来源是野生动物%23

I am seeing plenty of racism against Chinese online of late, especially from supposedly left-wing animal rights people. Bit depressing, though I knew it was under the surface anyway.

Animal rights people sus af to begin w

Yes. The thing I have been trying to explain to people today is that "wet market" doesnt mean "exotic meat slaughterhouse" and that the vast majority of what is sold there is vegetables, just with some live chickens in one corner, and that if you are "campaigning to shut the wet markets" you are campaigning for factory farming and supermarkets.

I have never found “trying to explain” to be a profitable use of time but the problem is likely on my end

it's true that I am probably wasting my time.

I mean not everything we do has to be profitable

China are using this unprecedented time to make another power grab in HK. There is rioting going on at the moment.

More tear gas rounds are fired in Causeway Bay, near the Sogo. pic.twitter.com/UlNmUiJ5NL

— Hong Kong Free Press HKFP (@HongKongFP) May 24, 2020

Close to $100bn wiped off the edtech market today, following a leaked document saying that the government intends to force tutoring companies to go not-for-profit and ban foreigners from online teaching. The bricks-and-mortar tutoring sector has already been crushed by COVID.

The rationale for this is supposedly the idea that intensive tutoring is stressful for kids, makes education more expensive at a point when the government is trying to encourage people to have more children and makes it easier for wealthier parents to get their kids into selective schools and universities. The more cynical take is that too many middle-class kids are competing for those places with the genuinely well-off, who will still be able to afford 1-to-1 tutoring.

Leaving aside the general academic stuff, it’s hard to see how this wouldn’t lead to a fairly hard stop on the growth of English proficiency, particularly in smaller cities, or even a regression. State provision of English is variable but generally a lot weaker than the private sector can offer and companies like VIPKids that recruit teachers from the Philippines deliver a pretty good, affordable service to millions outside of the big cities, in places where traditional private language schools have been patchy. If New Oriental and others are forced to scale back, it may also impact the number of students going to university abroad.

Which would be a blow to the cashflow of a lot of large universities…

These last few months have seen a series of increasingly troubling announcements from Beijing, not sure if calling it the "second cultural revolution" is right, but the direction is certainly not great.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/chinas-cultural-crackdown-few-areas-untouched-as-xi-reshapes-society

My in-laws have not been allowed to renew their passports, and at work all of the Chinese students have decided to work virtually rather than travel to the UK.

the growing cultural authoritarianism of Xi seems very dangerous, but the extreme violence and mass murder that occurred during the OG cultural revolution ... well that was the cultural revolution to end all cultural revolutions or perhaps not. I heard this bizarre shit on the radio a few weeks back on CCCP rappers doing propaganda raps about how great the govt is etc. They can't foist any of that shit on K-Pop ultras!

My sister works at a NGO and scuttle among the world traveller, NGO, panglobalist crowd is that some sort of Taiwan action will occur in the next year or two (my sister bets that it'll happen right after the Winter Olympics in February)