Comments on: Living without trust

By: Bren

Bren — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:29:16 +0000

I’ve lived in China for 10 years, and I can’t believe the comments I’ve just read on this blog. I’ve had the best 10 years of my life, and learned tons about an entirely different civilization. If I had read these kinds of comments before going, I would probably be afraid to even set foot there – as it is, I can barely recognize you are talking about the same country. Not many Marco Polos here. I guess if any of you had gone to China in the last 3000 years, your reports would have been far far worse. Back then, people would be ecstatic at the chance to live abroad- is it just too easy nowadays? C’mon people, travel is an adventure, life is an adventure..if you wanted all the comforts and amenities of your home countries, why bother coming in the first place? You can read all the ‘horror stories’ in the front pages. The world is whatever the world is, why not be optimists and understand it for all its good AND bad, then work to change it. We live in ONE world, avoiding going to China and being armchair critics is not going to change anything.

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Button sexes it up post de-sexing | A China Blog on Suzhou Expat Life — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:09:43 +0000

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By: @riceagain

@riceagain — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:08:18 +0000

mate, the most lauded vet you speak of is a greedy f**kr who preys on wealthy expats.. there are western vets in Shanghai with far better qualifications for your $ as kellen said.

If i recall correctly there have been a few recent Chinese blog posts and writeups in the Chinese press questioning Chinese morality or lack thereof.

By: From toronto

From toronto — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:16:52 +0000

@FOARP:
Exactly, as I said above, every society has its good and its bad, you can not use a single incident to generarize …

By: From toronto

From toronto — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:43:51 +0000

“Exploiting public endangerment for profits or political ends is a terrible practice of Western media, but having the power to keep it silent is the more dangerous of the two.”— really? I guess this is only your personal opinion

By: From toronto

From toronto — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:25:10 +0000

1. Not reporting is better than reporting fabricd..
2. Western media has a reputation of fairness, unbiase, people like me trusted western media, but the longer I live here, the more disapppointed I am, just no difference as controled Chinese media.
3. Chinese media is well known as controled.

The fact is, in China, peopel don’t believe what CCTV, ect tell them and they are sneaking around to get a different version of reports other than the state controle media. But here, in Canada, in US., people believe what media tells them blindly, without second thought.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:17:43 +0000

@FOARP: All good points and likely if I lived in Canada I’d be complaining about health and safety issues there and referencing Denmark or some other Nordic wonderland. But I really think that while both/all countries test positive for reasons not to trust your safety in them, if we bean-counted it, I’m certain that China would have way way way more beans. That is, of course, just my opinion based on my own experiences and biases.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:13:36 +0000

Nope, I caught that. Hey From Toronto, can you answer me a question that’s been nagging at my mind for some time now? Are fenqing given a playbook from which they have to pick all their arguments and repeat them verbatim with no flexibility at all? Really, just curious.

You are, like Tom, complaining about the quality of Western news; which I fully admit is largely terrible. But unlike what your playbook says, it wasn’t a co-ordinated Western conspiracy to keep the sick man of Asia sick. It was simply bad journalism and ignorance of other cultures — two things not at all absent from Chinese media, it’s just not in the English-speaking spotlight like CNN is.

But wrong and crap or not, it was at least reported. In China it was shut down and switched off. Not at the media level – I know several Chinese journalists and they are all top notch – but higher than that. A free press is just not available to Chinese.

By: FOARP

FOARP — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:23:08 +0000

This might be true if the ’safety net’ was actually that much more in existence. You think you can recover against negligence/foul play through legal action? Get ready to spend a year or more of your life hoping that you don’t get proved wrong. Hell, I just spoke to a guy who had spent a year trying to fight a suit for damages based on a non-compete agreement which a hand-writing expert had certified as having a 99% likelihood of being a forgery. This guy had had his entire livelihood put at risk by his former employers on the basis of an agreement on which his signature had been forged, and even after the court had decided for him he was left £8,000 out of pocket, as he wasn’t able to recover more than 8/10ths of his expenses. This is not because the English legal system is particularly bad, but because we have balanced things in this way to prevent injustice – but some degree of injustice is inevitable.

The net in the west is larger and the mesh somewhat tighter, that doesn’t mean you wont get lied to and given the run-around by lawyers, accountants, doctors, police, judges, vets, teachers etc. In China I approached many things with suspicion, but I won’t say that my attitude has changed all that much now I am in the UK. What I’m saying here is that you really weren’t that much better off in Canada, not so much that you could really say that trust existed in one place and didn’t in the other. In both places there is good reason to keep your wits about you and “trust, but verify”.

I see a lot of people ref’ing last year’s milk scandal – ask yourselves: was that that much worse than he failures to act/warn about BSE? Thalidomide? Tobacco? It was bad, but was it so much worse that you cannot see such a thing happening in a western country – say, before an election?

@From Toronto – And, I guess if you’re just trying to say that one country is worse than another, you missed the infamous incidents in Nanjing hospitals back in 2004-2005 of new-born babies being stolen to order. Malpractice is part of medicine, cannot be eliminated, and is in fact encouraged in some ways by potential legal action.

By: From toronto

From toronto — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:12:16 +0000

You must missed the opportunity to witness how western media fabric, distort facts when they reported riots in tibet, torch relay, oversea chinese demostrations last april and may.