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:
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.
Primacy of social reality, and of shame and “face.” Shame is seen as something that just works in China, and is the dominant lever by which virtue is enforced.
Truth or Dare – a deep cynicism about human nature. People are by default out to get you. Emphasis on strength/competence and de-emphasis on kindness/virtue. Closely related to, but distinct from, scarcity mindset.
Chinese nationalism as collective insecurity. The narrative is that China experienced a “century of humiliation” being brought to its knees by western colonizers, the Opium War, and Japanese atrocities in WW2, and the world still sees Chinese as “East Asian weaklings.” Through this lens, the primary drive of Chinese people is to prove themselves equal or superior to westerners and usher in the Chinese century.
Chinese Social Media is like American Junk Food
One thing I was shocked by when visiting China is that my grandparents went down to the supermarket every afternoon to buy fresh veggies to cook dinner. Chinese people, at least the older generation, are extremely careful about what they ingest, and have extremely high standards about freshness and culinary discernment. The idea of Americans storing fruit, veggies, and preserved food from the grocery store for weeks in the fridge is repulsive to them.
I think the exact reverse of this dynamic exists for social reality. Chinese beauty filters are out of control. Similarly, here’s what much of pre-AI manhuas look like:
Westerners sometimes tell a story that China embraces AI because of some philosophical positivity towards technological progress. I don’t entirely discount this story, but my impression is that Chinese consumers already had a high tolerance for slop and AI content fit naturally into this ecosystem without ever triggering an uncanny-valley reflex. If anything, AI slop is of higher quality than some of the existing mass-produced content. According to this article, one new AI mini-drama (several hours in length) launches every 36 seconds on Douyin.
Another striking feature of Chinese media is the ever-presence of audience reactions and the surrounding cultural conversation. Here is what I see if I pull up the first episode of idol drama “Pursuit of Jade” with 弹幕 (bullet comments) on by default:
Here’s the first chapter of a randomly-selected popular novel on Qidian (the largest site for Chinese webnovels):
Every sentence is annotated with reader comments – so interacting with the reactions of other netizens is now part of the reading experience. Often these comments are filled with memes and in-jokes (梗) which take years of internet immersion to understand. And thus reading a novel, something I classify as one of the most private experiences, is embedded into the cultural conversation.
There is a lot more I could say: writing is filled with “clickbait” attention-grabbers; astroturfing and doxxing are entrenched industries; and it is typical for important events in slop novels to be padded by pages of fictional “social media reactions” showcasing in-universe virality. The basic message is: how others react to something is as important as the thing itself.
The Primacy of Social Reality
Here is the first verse of a popular children’s song:
I'm a small student. I carry my backpack to school I’m not afraid of the sun. I’m also not afraid of the wind or the rain. I'm only afraid that my teacher would scold me for being lazy I'd lose face before my parents without the knowledge of school Lan lee eh lan lan lee eh lan lan lee eh lan I'd lose face before my parents without the knowledge of school.
This basic message is inculcated throughout Chinese upbringing: push through and ignore physical discomfort, but attend to and be subject to social censure. It’s okay to be buffeted by the elements, but if your grades are bad, you’ll be too ashamed to face your parents.
China lives inside an intricate and cynical theory of social reality. I wish I had some good writeups of this to point to; something that comes close is 48 Laws of Power, which cries out “this writer is sourcing from Chinese philosophy” but goes too far in the nuance-less sociopath manifesto direction.
To give some examples, the phrase 社死, “social death,” which means being so embarrassed that one might as well be dead socially, has gained a lot of popularity. I think there is a genuine sense in which people (everywhere, but more so in China) are more viscerally afraid of humiliation than death. (Again, there exists a nuanced dialectic about this phrase, and it is now used mostly ironically to joke about minor embarrassment. Further, many fictional protagonists are written as bold iconoclasts who do what is right despite social censure. I think this example still points to a culture preoccupied with social grace.)
Another example, as depicted in media, is a complex of subtle and entrenched rules “潜规则” (lit. “unspoken rules” or “underwater rules”) about social/corporate power that serve to enforce dominance hierarchies. The most salient such rule is “sleep with your boss to get ahead,” but more broadly, it points to dynamics like bribery and nepotism. Depending on status dynamics, being late is either a faux pas or a power move. Similarly with refusing to get drunk at a work dinner.
The Dark World Frame
A lot of anti-social behavior I used to intuitively attribute to "Dark Triad" pathologies – narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy – I now attribute to a cluster of cynical/self-defensive beliefs that Duncan Sabien identifies in Truth or Dare as “The Dark World frame.”
Dark World thinking is typified by Peter Thiel’s recent viral quote: “If you’re evil, at least you’re not bad.” Dark World thinking is everywhere, but in my experience there’s a particularly brazen strain in China. Key tenets of the Dark World:
No good deed goes unpunished.
It is better to be strong than good.
It is better to be evil than weak.
It is better to be honest than kind.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
That which can be destroyed should be.
Kindness to others is cruelty to oneself.
A common trope in Chinese stories is what I call parenting-by-cauterization. A cruel master forces a young boy to kill his best friend: “He was your greatest weakness, kill him and you have one fewer.” Forming attachments is weakness. Breaking attachments makes you strong. (To be fair, this pattern is usually attributed to antagonists, and generally rejected as needlessly cruel by the overarching plot. My reading is that this is a real dialectic-in-progress to reject a pattern of generational trauma.)
Dark World thinking sees all virtue and kindness as pretense. Among many such tropes, a common derogatory trope is of women who act nice and innocent 白莲花 (white lotus) while being deceitful and manipulative on the inside. Chinese media creates trapped priors that people acting kind, altruistic, and pure are more likely to be evil. Similarly, the phrase 圣母 (Virgin Mary) is derogatory slang for someone who displays excessive (read: normal-to-westerners) levels of empathy. If all kindness is pretense and deceit, the only way to signal trustworthiness is cruelty. My father used to say, “Everyone will be nice to you, but only your family will be honest.”
One time I was having lunch with my wife and a Chinese friend, and the conversation meandered to why my wife entered college as a premed in her distant past life. Among the many reasons – money, respectability, parental approval – my wife brought up the motivation of “saving lives and helping people.” My friend laughed open-mouthed at that suggestion, taking it as an obvious joke. (Again, I don’t mean to say this person is representative of China. I suspect that their reaction is two-standard-deviations more Dark-World than the mode in China, and three-standard-deviations more Dark-World than the mode in the West.)
Zvi Mowshowitz once wrote a book review of The Three-Body Problem, where his thesis was “The real aliens are the Chinese people”:
Instead, the humans are written a lot stranger, to my American eyes, than the Trisolarians. Most characters are Chinese, but even those who are not continue to mostly think and act in this similarly alien style. I appreciated the opportunity to see the view of humanity from someone in a completely different culture. But it points out how ordinary the Trisolarians are that they are, at least, not obviously less like the humans I know, than are the humans in the book. How much of this is how the Chinese or some Chinese group view humans and think about the world, versus how the author does? I cannot say.
The viewpoint expressed is deeply, deeply conservative and cynical.
People, all but a handful of them, are absurdly fickle, petty, short-sighted, self-interested and self-defeating. They are obsessed with status and how they are relative to others, and on the margin wish others harm rather than well. If anyone tries to escape disaster or otherwise rise on their own, universally mankind's response is to band together to kill them.
The Three-Body Problem is a particularly extreme example of the Dark World frame, and it’s an outlier because science fiction is grim-dark by default. My guess is that half of the Dark-Worldness of The Three-Body Problem derives from the nature of science fiction, and half from Chinese culture. There’s a reason the second book is called The Dark Forest.
Chinese nationalism as collective insecurity
At some point I was watching American Ninja Warrior, and one season hosted national teams from various countries. When the interviewer came around to hear people’s stories, all the western teams were like “I’m doing this to set a good example for my wife and kids at home.” The Chinese team was like “I’m doing this to prove to the world that Chinese people can be great athletes.”
In 2025 we saw the launch of an absolutely peak FMV game “Road to Empress” about instrumental convergence a fictionalized account of China’s only official female ruler Wu Zetian. Ludwig went viral in China for streaming it on Twitch, to the extent that the creators flew him out to China to film a cameo in the sequel:
Ludwig’s cameo.
The top comment on the Bilibili playthrough, which Ludwig reacted to in this clip, went, “This game is really good-looking. It can let foreigners know that Asians are not all squinty-eyed as in the stereotype [grin] There are also many handsome men and beautiful women.” Ludwig’s response was “I'm laughing that their idea of America is that before playing this game, I thought all people in Asia were the stereotype with the squinty eyes.”
Even among strains of nationalism, Chinese nationalism seems to be particularly chip-on-your-shoulder. My impression is that this kind of insecurity is less in your face, but still present, in younger Chinese today. It is concerning how much Chinese AI models catching up in the AI race is entangled with this national insecurity.
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The point of this post is to open for the reader my fairly narrow window into Chinese culture, and to draw attention to certain features I find alien as an American.
I suspect that if the rationalist project wants to take root in China, it has to solve problems like not being immediately branded as holier-than-thou “圣母”, and adjusting to the cutthroat attention economy of Chinese social media. HPMOR is an example of something (grimdark power-scaling quasi-isekai fantasy) that likely appeals to Chinese netizens; Peter Singer is not.
I like to say that if LessWrong is “on the spectrum” and “more autistic than normal,” where normal is set to the ambient western culture, then China lives past the right endpoint of the spectrum, at “even more allistic than normal.” My current hypothesis is that the locally optimal message to China is in the vein of “give us your autists who feel alienated by the monoculture,” but others may prefer a more conciliatory approach that directly appeals to the dominant culture.
Thanks very much for your post.
I'm a second-generation Chinese American, and among these I suspect that I and my parents are more Americanized than the median, but not by a lot. I've been to China maybe seven times in my life but didn't pay much attention for the first five, and have worked with Chinese professionals and interfaced with moderately successful Chinese people.
I have the impression that in an era where the (developed) world is becoming more and more culturally homogeneous, China remains (to Americans) substantially alien, and e.g., attempts to model China, Chinese people, and the Chinese government for the purposes of affecting AI-related outcomes have been utterly inadequate/misguided. However, by and large I don't have the identity-based authority or cultural immersion to make a post like this myself with good concrete examples.
Some remarks I would add to the main body of your post:
As a result of a combination of Dark World thought and an extreme emphasis on social cues, I'd say the median Chinese person is 2SD more cynical/suspicious/prepared to deal with bad actors than the median American. A type of naivety and good will which is common, maybe even modal, in EA circles, probably literally doesn't exist in China.
More generally, there is an extremely pragmatic, realpolitik like cynicism about the function of rules and institutions. This includes the fact that plenty of rules exist to usually be broken but selectively enforced, and this is the reason that e.g. academics that come from China are often caught brazenly plagiarizing (they didn't think people could possibly be serious about the rules against it).
As you say, It's totally devastating to be an autist in China.
Accordingly, credentialism is outlandish; conversations often transparently consist of injecting as many big-name affiliations you can pseudo-credibly associate with yourself as possible, and your ability to do this will actually determine whether people deem you worth listening to.
Any notion that governments derive their right to rule from the will of the people, an idea which Westerners take for granted, is not at all a given and for many may be too absurd of a notion to consider. From this it follows that the actions of the government are a given, and individuals lack agency in trying to go against whatever is currently being done to them.
Propaganda works pretty well. To the extent that propaganda isn't working, people by default feel helpless to assert or build on the existence of reality contrary to propaganda.
, and easily used to justify doing antisocial or malicious things to get ahead; the idea of working towards positive-sum equilibria is reflexively rejected as 圣母. A version of this is often applied to assert that the behavior of the government is justified by the economic growth that China has experienced.
It is often assumed that life involves a lot of suffering by default, that striving for more than this involves more suffering, the purpose of life is to avoid suffering, and that thinking that things should be otherwise is 圣母.
Of course, any compression of a whole country into a single post is a trade off between accuracy and usefulness - and I think it is true that even today, many Chinese youth/adults still feels that the humiliation from the... century of humiliation has yet gone away.
But I feel that this post is over-indexing on a particularly degen part of chinese culture/noosphere ("imagine thinking that all Americans are like 4chan/b/") through the lens of web-novels or the commentary of a particular person's commentary on a TV show on bilibili. And I don't quite understand what "give us your autists" mean on an action level.
bilibili is not as degen as 4chan! (Bilibili nominally started as an anime site - i think it is sufficiently mainstream to not be degen. It was not my intention to claim that bilibili is as degen as 4chan (though I see how my follow up is under-specified and seems to be a direct comparison between the two - will make correction)).
Tiktok is probably 1OOM more popular than bilibili and more degen overall. (though still far from 4chan by my degen metric).
Now having more time to mull over, the intention of my. comment was more tribalistic than ideal. My current stance is something more like:
The Chinese are hella degen (in the view of Americans) in many ways:
Uses their phones way too much even at a dinner party
Have a somewhat homogenized standard for beauty
Even more addicted to short form content than the avg zoomer as a whole
The Americans are hella degen (in the view of the Chinese) in many ways:
mass bankruptcy from sports gambling
gun related violence and homicide rate 10x china
would allow a few hundreds fishes' safety to block important construction projects (despite eating a few OOM more each day)
All these are important things to know about China and the US
But to understand the Chinese social reality, it is better to approach it from a structural view ("These are the reasons why their environment encouraged these traits") than a behaviour view ("Chinese are cynics and they are aliens to us").
Thats why I felt bad - not because the claims are wrong, but to view the Chinese through a pure behavioural lens, it makes it easier to alienate them and think of them incomprehensible.
(Context: am Chinese, 1st gen, lived and worked in the East and West)
My disagreement now comes from the fact that I was specifically speaking about the difference between China and my social bubble (represented by say academic mathematicians and rationalists in the west). The people in my bubble are not degen in most of the ways you listed above (except possibly the fish one?).
There's probably an important and separate equivalent post that might be written about "the social reality of Real America" that might be helpful for our messaging campaign in the States, and it would include some of the things you're pointing to, but that's not the one I wrote.
If I ctrl-f for rationalist/academic, i get 2 hits in the post. And American 8 times. Most of the comparison seems to be made between the Chinese and Americans, instead of Rationalist <> Chinese or Academic <> Chinese?
I am a first-generation Chinese immigrant who came to the US when I was 15. I also took US history/government (AP) classes and world history/government classes in both high school and college (I majored in statistics with a concentration in political science). But I have now lived in the US for more years than in China, and I do observe many differences among my Chinese friends (and even more on Chinese social media), so take my words with this context as well. I do think it is a good idea to share things like OP did to build cross-cultural understanding.
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.
It really depends on which social media platform. Xiaohongshu (Rednote) has been pretty reasonable to me so far, maybe partly because it is not based on short videos (it's mostly pictures), and it is probably the only one I use. To me, X/Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are pretty bad and going downhill, and worse than Xiaohongshu. One thing I notice is that Rednote still has many fake science posts, though, more than I expected. (And sadly, I found that I sometimes believed them. I need to adjust and fact-check more.) I've also noticed that people from older generations really like to share fake science posts that they believe are true. I think there have been some recent regulations around this: you need a degree in certain science/psychology subjects to post about them on social media. I'm not sure how well it is enforced.
Chinese nationalism as collective insecurity. The narrative is that China experienced a "century of humiliation" being brought to its knees by western colonizers, the Opium War, and Japanese atrocities in WW2, and the world still sees Chinese as "East Asian weaklings." Through this lens, the primary drive of Chinese people is to prove themselves equal or superior to westerners and usher in the Chinese century.
The "century of humiliation" sentiment is real and widely shared (and the history is true), but "proving themselves equal" as the result is not very accurate. In my world model, it is more about people being angry at the injustice and wanting to make sure the country is at least strong enough to defend itself. Colonization is not something people find glorious, but rather evil.
People are by default out to get you. Emphasis on strength/competence and de-emphasis on kindness/virtue. Closely related to, but distinct from, scarcity mindset.
To me, the issue is resource scarcity and allocation. Not very long ago (maybe the 1970s), poverty was still quite common. (And somehow, my impression is that kindness/virtue mattered much more back then.) As the economy has improved and time has gone on, I've somehow seen more emphasis on strength/competence. And maybe a lot of EA/LW folks don't know this: in my view, some form of consequentialism and long-term utilitarianism is almost built into daily life: "Is this thing useful?" Sometimes when I discuss with Western friends how I think having more virtue is net positive, I realize my baseline is very different.
However, at the same time, virtues are still highly valued in some contexts, especially when judging the behavior of others, the more privileged, or celebrities. I think this is carried over from traditional values. It's something similar to "德不配位," basically a belief that the higher up you are on the social ladder, the more morally competent or constrained you should be. (I generally like this idea, but it should not be used as an excuse by people who feel like they are the least powerful in society.)
In recent years, there has been a wave of attention on mental health, which adds another turn to the story.
my wife brought up the motivation of "saving lives and helping people." My friend laughed open-mouthed at that suggestion, taking it as an obvious joke.
The social changes caused by rapid economic development tend to be hard on people. A person needs to be integrated into society, and rapid social change makes it harder for a person to achieve that, resulting in high rates of addiction. Some addiction psychologist believe that England's Gin Craze of the first half of the eighteenth century was caused mainly by rapid social change. Another source of social change in China was Mao's uprooting of most of the country's traditional moral frameworks.
My point is that some of what the OP describes is probably a reaction to drastic social change and to the trauma of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution rather than permanent or even persistent manifestations of the Chinese character.
This is fascinating. Contrary to what the author might expect, I feel like the Chinese internet he describes is a lot more similar to the internet I remember growing up (as an ∞-generation White American with little to no surviving history anywhere else) than the English-speaking internet is today.
The feeling of being fundamentally on the same page as everyone else, sharing notes on the things they're reading, and so on definitely reminds me of certain imageboard threads when I was younger, and of things like Twitch Plays Pokemon, where everyone sort of merged into a single collective impulse, sharing their true feelings with each other under the cover of anonymity. As the English internet became global, it's become a lot less intimate, and the assumption that someone is 'like me' faded, meaning that the internet no longer really has a strong sense of community. But what little I know about the Chinese internet is very familiar, sort of like our internet circa 2012 if the memes and customs evolved separately but into similar niches.
I think the Chinese use of AI for all of these infinite drama series fits that presentation, too. Americans made similar things when the tech came out, but only as proof of concept demos. The death of organic algorithms mean that creators are a lot less prolific now, so nobody really had the incentive to scale it out and get it running as anything more than a brief demonstration of technical skill. I'm reminded of the 24/7 lofi hip hop girl streams that were really popular in 2016; we'd definitely see the AI version of that if modern AI had come about 10 years earlier, in the more organic ecosystem.
The big difference is the concept of 'face', though. Anonymity and the absence of any sort of chilling effect imposed by the real world was the source of a lot of the magic I describe.
I think the embedded comments are sometimes great, there are truly peak memes and it is a very cozy feeling to be part of the chatter and in the know. The way I relate to it is in the same way that I relate to American fast food - I like Panda Express! But cooking for someone who likes Panda Express is a different task from cooking for someone who likes traditional Sichuan cuisine.
The general idea the post is trying to hammer in is true (especially for US EAs/rats to understand).
However:
I'm unsure how much specific parts of the author's frame of reference is going to be still be fully true as time goes on. from what I can tell, younger generations (born in middle class urban environments) are on average a 0.3-0.5 standard deviations less dark-triad-y than their parents. And afaik this reflects in the government from my businessman father's anecdotes about younger <30yo bureaucrats being more meritocratic on average than older counterparts. This shows signs of a slow but steady multi-generational cultural evolution process.
It is highly possible that a huge predictor of kindness, meritocracy, and selflessness are on average often economic status at birth, as well as parental attitudes (speaking as someone that went to a tier 1 private school in Shanghai filled with hedge fund kids). Which is not that surprising! I don't fully buy the notion that Chinese people are uniquely selfish and alien in a cultural way that's completely separate from what eventual economic progress can influence. One could look at Taiwan and see how even though many face-saving and collectivist cultural values are present, the worst rough edges of those values are substantially softened, even just with a few generations of gradually more liberal norms and economic progress.
I distinguished "Dark World" from dark triad, they are very different in my mind. Dark World is more about being paranoid and vicemaxxing than being "evil" per se.
I think the cultural gap is probably even larger to other non-western countries, China is not unique. Thankfully they are not close in the AI race.
I agree that (as mentioned in intro) things are rapidly changing, but timelines may be very short.
I distinctly recall a conversation with a neuro-atypical relative where we were trying to convince him to read the room instead of just talking on and on about whatever suited his fancy. His response was - "That's ridiculous, what am I supposed to do? Model everyone else's mood at all times? That sounds exhausting!!"
And the rest of us just looked around and were like (subverbally) - but that's just how we live...