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Comment by sho | Hacker News Reader

Oh come on. Pollution is highly localised. Yeah, there's a few bad cities but it's a big place and 99% of it is fine. And no clean water, really? That will be news to the billion plus inhabitants who haven't realised they're dead yet from lack of clean water, sixth sense style.

Nit picking aside - that surveillance state is maybe 5 years ahead of the west. I'm continually amazed that western governments have allowed strongly encrypted private communications to become a thing, even an expectation - this is totally unprecedented and a radical upset to the balance of power between the state and its citizens. I expect it's only a matter of time before strong end to end encryption is totally banned in the west, too.

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How many native Chinese do you know who drink tap water? Almost all I know either drink bottled water or only hot, boiled tap water.

As for pollution, only 84 out of 338 cities reached the national standard for air quality [1]. That's not exactly "a few bad cities". The government has been working on improving it, but they still have a long way to go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_in_China#Air_polluti...

> Almost all I know either drink bottled water or only hot, boiled tap water

100% of them drink boiled tap water. But isn't this proving my point? Not like it's poisoned with heavy metals?

As for pollution, of course they have a long way to go, but the dystopian picture you paint is hardly fair. It's not perfect but you make it sound like Blade Runner 2049. It's not. I live in Bangkok right now and it is WAY worse than Shenzhen or Shanghai. But I never hear Thailand invoked in one of these "pollution hell" threads.

Look, what you said isn't technically incorrect but your level of hyperbole irked me. I always come across as defending China or something in these threads but I'm not really, I just want it to be fact based. China is not THAT bad. Yes, I know a lot of Chinese people, and they express no pressing desire to leave. It is very far from the worst place on earth to live.

> 100% of them drink boiled tap water. But isn't this proving my point?

No, it's exactly disproving your point, or at least strong evidence against it. To be explicit: if 100% drink boiled tapwater then 100% feel pollution is present which strongly suggests pollution isn't localised.

As for introducting heavy metals, you're trying to fudge the issue: pollution may include, but is not limited to, heavy metals.

> I always come across as defending China or something

I take your point and will accept you're arguing in good faith, but a sloppy post like this simply undermines yourself.

We drink boiled water just because we like it warm. It's part of the culture. It's also one of the reasons why there are few epidemics when natural disaster strikes.

The tap water quality varies from place to place, but it's generally good enough, granted it is not as good as the first world countries such as the US or Japan or much of the Europe, but after all we are still a third world country.

We are a surveillance state and it's worth discussing and condemning in every aspect, but talking about tapped water just dilutes the topic.

Well put. It's true a lot of the negative stuff here isn't technically incorrect, but the hyperbole certainly has a distorting effect on the conversation. Clearly, discovering negative aspects about China serves some kind of convenient narrative. I suspect it's something to do with China's growing power, which is threatening to the hegemony the so-called West has exploited for the last few centuries. Reading between the lines the story is something like, "yeah China is growing but it's not real because pollution, human rights, surveillance, etc - anybody could grow like that if they took shortcuts like them". Which I suppose ultimately is a subconscious projection of the guilt the West feels about the shortcuts it took.

> It's true a lot of the negative stuff here isn't technically incorrect

Then it's correct, yes?

> China serves some kind of convenient narrative

I have to agree. If china were an economically unimportant tiddler or have lotsa oil, the west wouldn't care nearly as much.

> the so-called West has exploited for the last few centuries

And china had a pretty repressive feudal government for a very long time. That is, the pyramid's peak freely and often brutally exploited the pyramid's broad base. For a very long time. And Uighurs - like to comment on them? Perhaps you'd like to list some chinese atrocities here?

Seriously, list some.

I'm aware and not proud of the opium wars. That shit should be taught in school, as well as the way brits treated the irish, the welsh, the scottish... Not as a guilt thing but as a way of saying, let this not happen again.

> 100% of them drink boiled tap water. But isn't this proving my point? Not like it's poisoned with heavy metals?

Clearly not 100%. Not a huge fan of these random percentages haha. And we don't know if the tap water isn't poisoned with heavy metals. The effects aren't immediate so it's not like locals would necessarily notice. There's at least one source that claims they are indeed poisoned with heavy metals [0]

> As for pollution, of course they have a long way to go, but the dystopian picture you paint is hardly fair. It's not perfect but you make it sound like Blade Runner 2049. It's not. I live in Bangkok right now and it is WAY worse than Shenzhen or Shanghai. But I never hear Thailand invoked in one of these "pollution hell" threads.

I dunno man, Shanghai on a bad day is pretty comparable to Blade Runner. When I go to China, I get a headache, my mouth tastes metallic and I definitely have a reduced lung capacity. Also, I was actually impressed by Bangkok's lack of pollution. Maybe I caught it at a lucky time, but the air was very refreshing compared to Wenzhou. Even right now, the air forecast is decent [1] compared to Wenzhou [2] or Shanghai [3].

China is definitely not the worst place to live, but it's dramatically different from most western countries. In most western countries, you can talk about Winnie the Pooh without getting banned, while enjoying a nice refreshing glass of tap water :D.

[0] https://www.purelivingchina.com/blog/what-pollutants-are-chi... [1] https://aqicn.org/city/bangkok/ [2] https://aqicn.org/city/wenzhou/ [3] https://aqicn.org/city/shanghai/

> Clearly not 100%. Not a huge fan of these random percentages haha

Well, frankly, most Chinese I know will boil their water regardless of where they live. They do it in Australia and Singapore as well. Cultural norm?

I guess I'm not invested enough in the argument to dig up actual water pollution statistics but I'd be pretty surprised if Shanghai water was actually toxic.

> Shanghai on a bad day is pretty comparable to Blade Runner

I guess I've missed those days. I know Beijing can be hellish but most of my China experience is down south. I've never been to Wenzhou but I know Shenzhen very well and I can categorically tell you that air pollution in Bangkok is worse.

But look. The whole point of my comments has been to not generalise local data points to a whole country. As other commenters have mentioned, you can't drink the tap water in Flint, Michigan either - and that's in the so-called richest country on earth. LA smog is awful too. But that's just those places. The USA is huge. So is China.

As for Winne the Pooh - that's ridiculous. I read a good quote the other day: "the nation that is afraid of humiliation will soon humiliate itself" and I agree 100%. I'm not trying to defend China. I'm just trying to defend fact.

Your “few bad cities” also contain 24.5/40.0 million (Shanghai), 22.5 million (Beijing), 19.8/44.3 million (Guangzhou), 15.5/16 million (Tianjin), 15.4/25.2 million (Chongqing), 14.7 and 18 million (Chengdu), 12.4 million (Shenzhen), 10.7/19.8 million (Wuhan) and 10.0/21.1 million (Hangzhou).¹ China is 58% urbanised.² Most of the land area of China is not as polluted as Shanghai, that is true; but disproportionately many people live in those areas—which is unsurprising, because pollution is often due to high population density. (Pollution per capita is of coursed generally reduced by density, but that is another matter.)

1. see the Wikipedia page for largest cities in China

2. Yiping XIAO, Yan SONG and Xiaodong WU, “How Far Has China’s Urbanization Gone?”, in: Sustainability 10.8 (Aug. 2018), p. 2593, DOI: 10.3390/su10082953

> there's a few bad cities but it's a big place and 99% of it is fine

http://maps.who.int/airpollution/

>That will be news to the billion plus inhabitants who haven't realised they're dead yet from lack of clean water, sixth sense style

People in places like Flint aren't dead either.

They've organised alternate supplies - as have any Chinese who don't trust the local water. As you would expect.

I'm glad you mentioned Flint though. I assume most Americans here know about Flint's issues - but they realise the USA is a big place and that's only one town. Well, China's a big place too. Yeah, it can improve, a lot. But this godforsaken hellscape that people seem to imagine all the time is just not real.

Strongly encrypted private communications are already effectively banned in Australia.

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