On Social Reality in China

[Epistemic status: intuitions and anecdotes.] Recently, several posts and projects (Thoughts Memo, Babel Translation, Please Give Them a Chance) have taken important steps towards raising AI safety awareness and sharing rationalist philosophy in China. It’s great that we’re recognizing the importance of solving the messaging problem for China, and thus laying the groundwork for an international AI pause. Below I record my perspective on cultural differences which are relatively underdiscussed, which may become roadblocks to this communication program. Background: I’m a “first-generation” Chinese-American who moved to the States at the age of four. The beliefs in this essay are primarily drawn from interactions with my parents and their generation of immigrants, and from consumption of Chinese media (dramas, webnovels, games, and manhua) which are not necessarily representative of the realities on the ground. I am likely over-indexed on the older generation and internet culture, and would appreciate corrections from folks who have direct lived experience. The picture I aim to paint is also complicated by a massive generational gap, and my understanding is that some of the below sentiments (e.g. the cynicism and nationalism) are partly inherited by the younger generation, and partly rejected through a variety of countercultures. Briefly, I point to four axes along which China is strikingly different. These differences are not black-and-white, but I think if you take the liberal middle-class western bubble I live in and shift the mode ~1 standard deviation in these directions you would get a substantively more accurate model of China: 1. Chinese social media is like American junk food. Chinese people find American food disgusting: inauthentic slop inundated with additives and high fructose corn syrup. Westerners will find Chinese social media similarly disgusting: uncanny-valley filters are everywhere, and social media is omnipresent in every corner of life. 2. P