Any Tildeans who have lived in China or Russia and the West? What were the differences in the daily lives of average people?

umlautsuser123
Sat, 04 Jan 2025 21:18:01 +0000

edit: It's been a surprisingly active thread in a way I hadn't expected. Thank you everyone for the light debate, and I'm sorry if any of this was a source of discomfort. The internet has historically been a safe place to find out things that would be difficult to ask in person even if you know who to ask, and I appreciate the fact-checking, reality-checking, what-have-you that comes with that.

Things like:

What things felt free to do and not free to do? Was that a quality of law or society? (e.g., freedom of speech, gay relationships, zoning, running a business, jaywalking, etc.)

Trust or reliability in government

Educational quality

Relationship to the media

What luxuries people tended to have (e.g. modern imported gaming consoles, domestically produced products, number of cars, etc.)

Posting from America here. As the great power politics seems to have heated up these past 3-10 years, it feels like the environment has become more polarized as well. Eventually I started to ask myself what exactly I was supporting or opposing philosophically, in wanting my country to have the largest influence. The measures I came up with were not things that my own country did well on, and often felt like things I couldn't get the most accurate picture on without Russian or Chinese language acquisition. I happened upon a BBC article about new Chinese graduates I guess going through what millennials did in 2008, and found the general similarity of it interesting.

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