mazerackham

I used to think the writing system was horrible as well, but it actually has a ton of advantages as well. Pros and cons, like anything else.

seems like we could give him the benefit of the doubt in this case, no?

They would. Listen closely to how you and your friends tell stories next time. Race and gender are almost always used to describe people. "My landlord, who's a black guy, <STORY DETAIL THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH BEING BLACK OR BEING A MAN>"

So from a sample size of one, you thoroughly concluded that this was because of democracy vs dictatorship. Just to offset that for you, India is a democracy with pollution even worse than China (although conveniently not often discussed in western media).

The conclusion you came to that China is trying to curb pollution "mostly" because of foreigners visiting during the Beijing Olympics, again do you honestly believe that?

You don't think the CCP, even being one of those "communist dictatorships", cares at all about lowered life expectancy across its population? Why did the CCP lift most of its people out of severe poverty over the last 20 years? What evil agenda was it trying to achieve then?

I find it hard to believe that if you truly sat down and thought about it from first principles for an hour, that you would actually believe that

Wow...

sounds like cha-ye, or tea leaves in Mandarin

So you would rather watch your children eat mud to fill their bellies, slowly starving to death, and keep your freedom of speech?

cool

Just a few - world class manufacturing techniques - world class drone technology - world class civil engineering (high speed rail, bridges) - world class super computers

Haha don't reach for Orwellian buzzwords so quickly =P. A lot of successful Chinese tech companies don't succeed just because competitors were banned. Even when Google was in China, Baidu catered specifically to local needs whereas Google just paratrooper dropped their product in. Baidu was more successful. As for Wechat, given how Facebook messenger has been shamelessly copying Wechat features for years, I highly doubt Wechat was at danger of losing marketshare to Facebook.

Now you know how Chinese people feel when they read any articles written by white men about China, or when they go eat at one of those asian fusion abominations :)

But maybe not, and probably not.

We're hardly above colonizing. Just look at all of the wars America has fought over the last 50 years.