yall have no idea how mad I was that I couldn’t see 30000 miles from Chang’an on big screen theaters when it came out because no theaters in the US was putting it on, at least in my area. tbh I was surprised that Nezha 2 is getting any screens in the US now

iceberg moment or whatever but the first movie had insufferable fandom 🫠

movie itself was fine, both 2 and 1 have some kid-level basically fart jokes or whatever, overall agree that the direction had/has younger target audience

1/ unsure for every case

2/ don’t have enough data but just stating the trend: the top ranked schools are all public, just check out the rankings, tip top ones are all public nonprofit.

3/ I’m not super familiar with the entire landscape to know if all public schools are strictly better or not; I’m just aware of general public opinion that private schools are more expensive and more mid. Generally, less prestigious. However, at least as a personal observation, wealthier parents tend to choose to find a way for their kid to go to an overseas university if they don’t like the private schooling options after midling gaokao results. (as american born chinese these wealthy “princess complex” international classmates colored my impression of mainlanders for a while during my uni years… i suppose that’s both to my own and their detriment :/ it is what it is)

iirc rural area hukou students and ethnic minority students get boosted points for gaokao also, there’s definitely affirmative action in that regard.

edit: clarity

the gaokao competitiveness for top schooling actually is inverted (monetarily speaking) compared to the west. The top schools are usually publicly funded and have lower tuitions compared to private schools. (that said gaokao is very intense, I had a cousin who spent a whole year to redo it to try to get better placement)

Just this week, the US State Department removed from its website the statement, “We do not support Taiwan independence.”

Just need to highlight this line.

Recently revisited an old video (originally posted back in 2022? one of the first times I was exposed to the mechanisms of dollar hegemony) to compare its analysis (overall pretty good) and was reminded that it predicted that trying to move TMSC to Arizona was preemptive measure the US needs to try to secure its supply of chips manufacturing before moving to more fully provoke the Taiwan question

“this trifold only folds twice! false advertising” really kills me lmfao

I mean, purely on the medical part, I’d say no. Dentistry and lowering infant mortality rate along with lowering maternity mortality rate is a very very very recent thing, although dispersal and access to these qualities aren’t evenly distributed today, globally and even among class divides in the imperial core.

Anyway, I just can’t imagine likely dying to childbirth in the course of having 10+ kids where 3-4 survive to adulthood if you’re lucky being Better :/

!! Also no baby formula. If you have a hard time producing [enough] milk (this is a common problem!) your infant is likely to have a hard time thriving. Animal milks are NOT a substitute for human milk for an infant. Peasant women who recently had kids would often be the ones providing nursemaid services for higher class families. Many other points about pests (even royalty had fleas…) and hygiene also. I’m yammering a lot but obligatory: technological progress in these measures aren’t necessarily brought about by specific economic models, eg not specifically capitalism in and of itself.

哪吒！！！！！！！！！

hi hi hi!

The main drive behind my own further moving left/being less vibes&unserious was also related to me further investigating history, though, on the Chinese end, since my formal education had only like a single paragraph about both opium wars, brief mention of boxer rebellion, and a page or two of “communism evil and killed lots of people”.

It’s also very interesting to think of history, globally, in terms of coeval and similar temporally relative terms

• Marx gave his speech “On the Question of Free Trade” in 1848, only 6 years after the first Opium war ended and HK was signed away to Britain in the Treaty of Nanjing (the British used “free trade” as liberal ideal justifying the opium wars; however in the speech Marx makes no mention of China but does speak of the English mercantile economic extraction of its colonies).
• Lenin’s October Revolution (1917) heavily influenced the founding of the Communist Party of China (1920) of which, before, the left-leaning “anti-Old Ways” intellectuals were more predominantly either in the camps of republican democracy models exemplar of America/France, or anarchist social experimentation (particularly big “fandom” of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid)
• Less directly related: Indonesian mass killings (detailed in Bevins’ Jakarta Method #CIA interventions) were 1965-66 (iirc prior, Mao & others had advised the PKI to arm themselves); Chinese Cultural Revolution started 1966 and among the main currents of it was to denounce and destroy anything possibly liberal or bourgeois.
• And a similar vein (also not directly related) – decline and eventual fall of Soviet Union, particularly exacerbated by internal popularity of liberalization late 1980s :: official govt reaction to the june sixth incident (1989) in China, where many of the student protest leaders and some urban workers demanded liberalization similar to that of USSR.

TBH my history knowledge about WWI is somewhat in a similar state (not quite as dire but definitely many holes) as my former knowledge base regarding modern Chinese history, do you have recommended readings or media on that end?

tamen de gushi by tan jiu is really cute… (err its manhua not manga but, anyway)

hmm, how to say this… XHS platform more attracts “instagram” type crowd and trends liberal, and until recently the community generally avoids political discussion. The more politically attuned Chinese netizens stick to bilibili and weibo, although there’s plenty of discourse and “fighting” there too, like, obviously a body of that many people will have a wide diversity of political opinions as well as acumen. Just wanted to point out biases inherent to certain platforms.

Anyway one of my favorite memes from the initial western invasion of xhs event:

that said of course there are some more politically attuned chinese netizens on XHS, my favorite being this guy

The short and medium term means of securing ideological security against the West might be better addressed by a careful toleration of nationalism.

good thing, I got an article for you (sorry don’t have an official translation afaik)(at a glance, deepL does a decent enough job at machine translating it)

Patriotism does not equate to narrow nationalism 爱国主义不等于狭隘民族主义 by 张 健 2016年08月18日10:16

additionally, both patriotism and nationalism in china are colored (in modern history) in anti-imperialism. I think that all kinds of nationalism that grows out of anti-imperialism must manage walking a tightrope on various forms of xenophobia that may also grow out of it; China is no exception. Article details more history specific to China.

segment & translation

对中国共产党人来说，则必须将爱国主义和国际主义结合起来，因为只有为保卫祖国而战才能打败侵略者，使民族得到解放，而只有民族得到解放，才有使无产阶级和劳动人民得到解放的可能

For the Chinese Communists, on the other hand, patriotism and internationalism must be combined, for only by fighting in defense of the motherland can the invaders be defeated and the nation liberated, and only when the nation is liberated will it be possible to liberate the proletariat and the working people.

Dongfeng missile program 🫡

Don’t know if we’ll be seeing chinese scientists in US under house arrest or worse again (hopefully not) but, for those unfamiliar: 钱学森 Qian Xuesen co-founded NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (1940s), later got the attention of McCarthy-ites and his family was subject to basically house arrest and surveillance for 5 years (deferred deportation), went back to China and led a bunch of programs and never looked back, became known as the “Father of Chinese Rocketry”.

the US attracted brain drain candidates for decades now, but would soon rather let anticommunism and racism get the better of them again and repeat the same “mistakes” and shoot themselves in the foot… honestly better for the Chinese people who can and did return as sinophobia ramps up (and probably will continue apace again in Trump’s 2nd term, not that the western media didn’t try to elevate sinophobia during Biden’s term between Pelosi’s flight to Taiwan, weather balloon, accusing zoo of fielding a man in a suit as a sunbear, etc). Space Race then, chips/AI now (article mentions Mr Sun returned during Trump’s first term, motivated by the racist ‘China Initiative’)

i was Not prepared to see where that redirected to. fuck

fuller nuance (love to see libs beat the shit out of that word) perspective from someone who is black and of black culture who i think has better angles on all points than I could - tumblr post. excerpts:

The Super Bowl will always be a bread and circus event that lines the pockets of white shareholders. The fact that they allowed Black people to perform is simply to give the appearance of empowerment and progress, thus assuaging our appetite for real revolution by letting spectators woop and cheer and have the feeling that something happened.

context: US flag and americana imagery:

At the end of the above, all African Americans should be wary of narratives that corral them securely within the frame of the United States. This is an intentional set of blinders that keeps you seeing yourself as belonging to this outsized plantation. We made connection to this land, but we were brought here in chains.

in essence I agree it’s resistance liberal politics

so, with the whole drake thing, it’s larger and not specific to drake himself but what he “symbolizes” which is why the line "you’re not a colleague you’re a colonizer“ comes into play regarding black culture/outsiders who would discard the people of the culture he used and wrung out like a wet rag once he’s ready to move onto the next thing/larger more mainstream stage

/ I think the whole superbowl thing makes it feel more assimilationist and unchallenging rather than liberatory or empowering. im not sure if kendrick was fully ironic or what when incorporating “the revolution will not be televised” while he’s being played on America’s most watched televised event.

maybe im too harsh. maybe im importing too much frustration from assimilationist tendencies from my own background (chinese americans/canadians) into this situation (wherein a certain YA novel author is my own “drake”). idk

actual article aside, I’ve never heard of this site before and i’m astounded in the sheer volume of regular comments on each post. interesting.

i forgor my daoisms

wait did you mean 唯物 weiwu (materialism) or 无畏 wuwei (fearless) or 无谓 wuwei (pointless)