• manxu@piefed.social
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      3 days ago

      were they supposed to just work for you for fraction of a cost forever and don’t learn anything?

      It was a rhetorical question, but they actually really believed that. Racism may have been a huge part of it: People as backwards as “China man” would never be able to come up with complicated tasks like setting up a factory on their own.

      Anyone not racist saw it coming a thousand miles away. It’s weird how much bigotry there was and is in the C-suite of major corporations.

      • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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        3 days ago

        They are still talking in that “intellectual property domination” and “intelligent jobs” tone. A lot of the supposedly new and liberal globalization was about global segregation.

        And even many people on Lemmy don’t get that the western militaries’ PR is the same - small forces, technical superiority, organization and logistics are supposed to be equal to Russian or maybe Turkish standing armies of hundreds thousands of people with mass training and mass-produced cheap weaponry.

        That’s why they can’t even decide on trying to shoot down jets violating their air space, protected by such superior and organized forces.

    • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      I think in many people’s heads China is this cheap backwater third world country.

      While there are problems over there such as tofu dregs, their production is very modern. But the Western world sees China through their tofu dregs.

      • DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        I’m from mainland China and I think most westerners believes two of the extremes:

        1. That China is very very poor, similar to North Korea. They probably think as if its still Qing Dynasty or something.

        Nope its nowhere near that bad.

        Or

        1. China is so ahead of everyone, so futuristic and completely crime free.

        Nope, also not true.

        The truth is somewhere in between.

      • 4am@lemmy.zip
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        3 days ago

        Yep, they all imagine China as a black & white photo of a man carrying two buckets of water on an stick up from a muddy river with one of those conical straw hats and a begrieved look on his face and think “yep, those people make all the cheap plastic crap at Walmart, suckers”

        Their mental image is like 50-60 years behind reality

    • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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      3 days ago

      i swear they think all people except themselves are NPCs

      That’s the famed western thinking in general. I’ve only seen one western movie where ridicule at that even reminisces the real perception by non-westerners, it’s “Romancing the stone”.

      Marc Twain described that for Americans, that was in a time when USA was simultaneously a weird overseas industrializing village and half the world GDP. So then it could be explained by such a contrast. Now - I don’t know.