Many places in the US have laws that prevent you from feeding the homeless. Most, if not every state has laws to prevent you from dumpster diving, but also laws to prevent you from giving away food that you're going to throw away. Kids can rack up lunch debt.

I saw this when I was a grocery cashier too and it's crazy how easy it was to make someone's day by just giving them a dollar discount or something stupid like that. They treat you like a saint afterwards. I'd do it all the time and nobody ever said anything to me about it because the customers loved me.

They made a whole app for that

In America, having a car is more essential to survival than shelter

You'd be surprised, some people are actually completely unaware of how a bunch of basic things work in the west. My younger cousin, who had never left China and is also extremely offline (for a zoomer), once asked me what's the deal with lawns. Like "Who maintains them? Is it like plants in parks? Why are they there?". The more I explained it, the more confused she got.

So you can't not have grass, everyone has grass. But it also can't be too long. And you have to spend extra money keep it alive in a drought (which Australia experiences fairly frequently). And you have to spend money on equipment to cut it, or spend more money hiring someone else to cut it. If you're renting, not maintaining the landlord's grass will get you in trouble and possibly evicted. And you have to keep weeds out.

Now, she was 19 at that point in time, so fairly naive. But still.

I don’t think that’s what this post is saying. A very real phenomenon on Xiaohongshu is Chinese citizens just straight up not knowing how bad it is in America. Of course there are assholes, but this post isn’t about how all Chinese ppl are saints (plenty of anti black and anti Indian racism), it’s about how by and large America isn’t understood as the predatory capitalist hell that it is. When I joined the app, it was a common misconception that every American owned and lived in a McMansion style home, and some Chinese users straight up called people liars for describing experiences with poverty, homelessness, medical bills etc

China doesn't have to be BASED, and likely isn't. It just has to be better enough than the US, which in the 2020s is an embarrassingly low bar to pass.

Instead of having this feeling of skepticism and judging China through unserious posts like these, watch some videos of people travelling and/or living in China, watch a documentary and/or read about how their governance works, listen to the Deprogram podcast episode on China they did a few months back. Then you can have a real, nuanced personal opinion formed through your own marxist judgement and factual analysis.

I think it makes sense when you remember that alot of the bad is being controlled out of it through people being tourists and likely not speaking high level or in many cases any Chinese.

Tourists are not really going to interact with many/if any of the systems with real issues like the hukou system but will have daily interaction with systems that work incredibly well like the metros.

And then through not speaking the language spotting assholes becomes exponentially less likely.