but we don’t have the 996 mentality here by a long shot
When I was in China I have memories of my mom taking me to her workplace when I was a kid (I think because nobody was at home, grandma was supposed to be watching us but I can’t remember why she wasn’t available for some reason), she worked in some electronic store doing sales.
I remember play some (probably bootleg) games on a portable DVD player and like you put this disc in it then you connect a controller and voila…
I remember feeling so lonely just by myself in this sort of mall-like place with a lot of people walking by, while mom worked, barely had time to check on me… I mean I don’t remember it vividly as in every detail, I was still like either like preschool/kindergarden age or 1st/2nd grade, but I remember the general vibe around there. I had an older brother but he wasn’t there so idk whete the hell he was.
But yea mom was so busy, dad had trouble finding a stable job, constantly jobseeking.
“Childcare” is just finding relatives, usually the kid’s grandparents, according to my mom, it’s said that my paternal grandparents, US permanent residents, refused to watch over us even during their short visit from the US.
Mom worked overtime a lot. Like I remember sometimes just being at home and mom and dad come home so late.
My aparment had this weird child-proof lockthing that my parents could just lock in from the outside incase no adults was home since they didn’t want their kids to go wandering outside. (firehazard lol, jeez dad wtf)
ERs accept everyone, but all they can do is basic treatment of acute conditions.
Not sure how they are as of right now, but in China, for a long time, they’d require you to pay before getting ER treatment
Medical debt is incredibly hard to collect on too.
In China, they can go after family members…
Americans just don’t understand how good they have it
Lol I remember my family didn’t have internet until we left China…
I lived in a very slum-looking area of Guangzhou right next to the 白云山 (Baiyun mountain). I asked recently about the internet thing and my dad said they were just starting to install internet like very late, like around 2010 around when we left, my dad said it was expensive… so for us, we never got internet in China
Never got to experience the “golden age of internet” that most of y’all talk about… cuz I didn’t even get an internet at all.
Parents didn’t really use internet until like 2014 and smartphones became ubiquitious and then soon afterwards they installed Wechat. That’s like the only thing they use lol.
There’s a lot of like worker safety stuff that China just doesn’t have, also no independent unions and strike-action was uncommon and almost unheard of until we got to the US and then hear about strikes on the news so often it’s kinda a culture shock.
Food safety was so… meh…
Mom mom used to warn me about the food safety thing all the time, stories about people smuggling in milk formula from Hong Kong because there was so much fake milk in mainland. My mom didn’t trust the milk and she said she just breastfed me. Water needs to be boiled… When I found out that Americans just drank from the tap, that was sort of a culture shock.
So after I found out about that, I often drink from the tap cuz I’m often thirsty and didn’t wanna waste time boiling water, also didn’r like warm water… I mean why not, we’re in the US after all (as long as “Flint, Michigan” doesn’t happen its gonna be fine), my parents still have the habit of boiling water… I feel like they’re just wasting electricity lol…
The only thing I liked was the subways in Guangzhou had the platform safety doors… I remember when I first arrived in NYC, I often have fears about just falling into the tracks, cuz the lack of doors… but yea that’s like the safety doors only thing I really missed
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
This comment is so frustrating 😅 one of the only concrete statements you make about Chinese policy is “i cant imagine them handing out free food to anybody”. Literally political criticism based on vibes.
By all means there’s lots to criticize about the Chinese government but at least actually make criticisms, not just “I know China to be evil and therefore they must not do good things” 😅 also that last paragraph is such an insane over generalization. As though the entire world experiences a uniformly lower standard of living than the US. There are people in the US who live in absolute near starvation squalor with literally no rights whatsoever. Not to their health, their freedoms, nor their labor.
China is also not a uniform state. There are parts of China with higher overall quality of life and lower overall quality of life. China as a nation has improved their overall quality of life at one of the fastest rates over the past 5 decades by pretty much every metric. They have cheap electric vehicles, they have much better housing options than they used to, they have some of the largest and most technically modern public transportation systems in the world.
They aren’t doing every single thing wrong. They have done a lot of things right. Again, not that I support or endorse a lot of their politics, but dismissing it all as backwards starving impoverished who cannot fathom American opulence is both very stupidly elevating the miserable reality of being poor in America, and erasing any progress the country has made. The end goal should be a better world for all workers. This includes those in China and those in America. Dismissing progress is completely counter to that goal.
Prove_your_argument@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
You’re welcome to provide any information, instead of complaining and providing absolutely nothing.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
I don’t understand why it’s on everyone else to research baseless claims you are making, but sure, whatever lmao.
So to even answer the question you have to specify what exactly you mean by food bank. Providing food for people who are impoverished takes many different forms. From individual meal based facilities like soup kitchens, to dry and preserved goods providers, to international warehousing of emergency food relief supplies.
So assuming the question at hand is, does the government of China provide its citizens with any kind of nutritional assistance? Yes, they do. The available facilities vary by region, city, and even district levels. Most of the development of large organized food relief organizations has been relatively recent, with the first to adopt a “food bank” label starting in Shanghai in 2015. Between 2015 and 2023 the Oasis public food bank setup facilities across China formalized as a national network of food relief facilities.
At the same time the government of China has worked with public enterprises in China including restaurant chains and grocery stores to implement “Surplus food programs” to reduce food waste and redistribute food to relief programs and facilities.
This was all information I found on my own with pretty basic cursory searches in about 20 minutes. There is far more public information out there and I would encourage you to use free resources to research subjects yourself before making foundationless statements like that.
Prove_your_argument@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
You’re a tool and you’re holding up a strawman argument, and you’ve even changed your own story now.
You started out with:
Which I am sure it is for you. It doesn’t really say anything negative or concrete about china, AT ALL. It makes no claims about china. And you even acknowledge it… but try to stir up some shit without actually finding anything to stir up. It’s like you’re just a propagandist trying to say america bad, which they are for a myriad of reasons, but it’s not because people can’t be admitted to hospitals or they are dying from overwork - which is what I replied to originally.
I didn’t make a “concrete statement” about anything. And you conveniently omitted the first part of the sentence that literally said "I don’t know the food situation in china" didn’t you? Because you’re holding up the imaginary argument of “china doesn’t have even a single food bank” as your strawman argument, and you had no clue either way, because you had to google it, idiot.
China’s median wage is close to 6k/year. Chile and Uruguay is close to 12k/year. The dominican republic is ~7400/year, and they absolutely do not have any kind of real food assistance program outside of the smallest scope. Chile does have something a lot more substantial, but they make wayyyy more. Given that china is poorer in terms of median wage than any of these, that’s going to be the case for a lot of workers away from wealthy median areas.
The fact that China is even on the Global Hunger Index site shows that hunger is still a challenge. They are near the top of the chart with many of the latin american countries i’ve listed. Globally hunger has been much less of a problem in the past 10 years than ever before, only in truly troubled countries do you find horrific levels, like in Haiti or Somalia - and nobody is saying china is anything like those in the overwhelming majority of the country. Not having food banks is way less than mass food insecurity… it’s the missing gap between healthy income levels and
China does have a dibao system for an extremely area by area “basic income” where they give people a pittance per month that can partially subsidize what they have, but there’s no real federal style food assistance beyond that. China spends more money on food than any other category in rural areas by a huge margin, and you don’t need to take my word for it. You can check the PRC’s own statistics instead of “googling it” like an ignorant moron.
Overall Median income is ~41k yuan or ~5,900. About 1.4 billion people in total.
Urban Median income is ~54k yuan or ~$7,800. This is about 952 million people.
Rural Median Income is only ~23k yuan or ~$3,300 or so. This is about 452 million people.
That rural amount is despairingly low and since it’s median half of the people in rural areas make less…this is unbelievably below poverty level in so many countries around the world. Food insecurity must be a major challenge in rural areas since with that kind of income food costs become tantamount to all others.
The statistics I linked from the CCCP also call out rural spending on “food, tobacco and liquor” because clearly food is in the same category as getting lung cancer sticks and fucking your body up with booze (priorities right) and that comes out to 6226 yuan, or just shy of $900 a year. When ~32% of your income is going to just food, smokes and booze, losing a job puts you in dire straits. In poorer rural areas the “basic income” from dibao is only 200($28) to 300($43) yuan a month, and you still need to have clothes, a place to live, etc. 3600 yuan ($519/year) - I think everyone knows this isn’t going to be nearly enough.
There’s no way food banks originating from extremely wealthy urban areas ten years ago are suddenly reaching the majority of Chinese. It’s not even a state sponsored thing (yay communism, helping the people!) I still have substantial doubt as to how much food assistance there is even in many urban areas, because I know how tough food tends to be when money is tight in countries that are generally poor (but not troubled like Haiti.) Food assistance programs can only subsidize a small portion, as we see with SNAP in the US. Wait.. snap is the american government food assistance program? Who are the communists again?