[Suits]

(09-03-2017 11:04 PM)Fortis Wrote:  

Classic Chinese obfuscation and misdirection. The real question shouldn't be whether Taiwan is its own country.

The question should be why China is so salty about the entire thing?

Because in East and South East Asia, there is no such thing as guilt and shame is only felt when one loses or when someone's inferiority is demonstrated.

That's why they can't admit to having objectively lost control of Taiwan. Because admitting to losing would force them to experience the emotion that they hate the most.

(09-03-2017 11:04 PM)Fortis Wrote:  

^ I've been saying forever that you cannot play fair with the Chinese. They will use your rules against you and call the police on you, but will then break the law when no one is looking and get butthurt when you call them on it.

Their method of last resort is to try to guilt you into not saying words that they don't like. Which is interesting, because they certainly would never allow themselves to be guilted into anything.

In recently let go of some clients who were more trouble than they were worth. I picked up a few years ago when I needed the work badly enough to give them very reasonable terms. They probably thought they were very clever for negotiating my fee down to a very low level (considering the competitiveness of the service I offer) and assumed that if they invited me to enough family dinners, that the arrangement would continue forever.

I've lived in China long enough not to fall for that, but it didn't stop these ex-clients from doing everything in their power to try to guilt me into sticking with them. They never offered me more money, which would have been the right move. They never offered me anything. Their only strategy was to try to use shaming language to motivate me.

The never would have offered to renegotiating because renegotiating would have meant losing, so they didn't offer that. I almost had to change my phone number because I was being called and texted multiple times a day for two weeks in efforts to manipulating me into continuing the arrangement, but eventually it let up.

It's ironic, because the Chinese are themselves huge fans of ignoring signed contracts whenever renegotiated is in their favour. They just don't like the tactic being used on them. For the record, I don't have contracts with any of my clients and both parties are free to end the relationship at any time.

A lot of people who are new to business in Asia don't understand this and fall for acts of friendship that convince them that their relationship with the other party is special and they would honestly feel bad to not keep up their end.

It's a rude awakening when the Chinese party demonstrates that they never felt the same way and that the friendly behavior was just a ruse.

(09-03-2017 11:04 PM)Fortis Wrote:  

Ah well, The west has created this problem in many ways. They cater to the Chinese students and the Chinese students demand that they get preferential treatment.

Right. It's their own damn fault. Having an impressive campus with pretty buildings is much more important to them than the honourable goal of offering a dignified education.

Even the ranking system for American university weights factors like total endowments and feelings heavily.

(09-03-2017 11:04 PM)Fortis Wrote:  

What'll eventually happen is that so much Chinese money flows into the West that they degrade our educational standards further, then they realize they've fucked up and have nowhere they can send their kids abroad to get a real education.

They aren't strategizing that far into the future. It's not because they can't. You have to give credit to the Chinese for the fact that they really can play the long game, but when it comes to leveraging Western education for the purposes, this doesn't apply.

It's a low trust culture and everyone is safe assuming that if they don't send their child to cheat their way through school in the west, someone else will. If educational qualifications are an important part of their plan to keep their family in the game for another generation, they'll do what they have to now regardless of the future cost.

Even if there is a future cost, refusing to play the game now guarantees that they won't even be in the running later, so it's safe to say that degrading Western education systems is something they are more than willing to do.

Their own education system is a joke and it still function just fine, because a degree from a school that only the best can get into is still valuable, even if the education itself is useless. And to be fair, Africans love coming to China to do university, because for better or worse, the education is still superior than what their own countries can offer them.

In conclusion, they definitely don't give a fuck about quality of education, because they figure that if they have enough wealth, their descendants will simply be able to buy a big name degree. The education itself is fairly pointless when you are rich.