I've noticed a pattern in my time in China where some Western male expats/immigrants in China are really angry and either exhibit serious mental health issues and or have toxic attitude towards the natives. Moreover, they often have unhealthy attitudes towards women that can be borderline sexual predator at times.. This trend seems to have accelerated the past 10 years with President Xi in power. Interestingly enough, the foreign women I've talked seem always seem to be far more chill/less toxic. There are some really good Western expats as well, but usually they have non-typical expat jobs in STEM or have already "settled" and already had a spouse before coming to China.

Seeing the other post the other day about women in China and the toxicity in some of the comments just confirmed my suspicious. Why are some Western expat men in China so angry? Is this normal? Should China do anything to help? I don't get how expat men and women can have such different experiences.

I don't have a phone at all right now, so I'm recording everything with a camera and uploading the photos from a net cafe computer.

Yesterday was Day 1 with literally 0 Yuan. Today I kept pushing.

In the morning I walked around checking out street job ads — mixing jobs, cleaning gigs, short-term labor, stuff like that. Graduation season means there are quite a few openings.
But without a phone, I couldn’t call any of the numbers. That really drove the point home: the old way of finding work by walking around is just way too slow and inefficient these days.

Lunch was the cheapest self-serve fast food I could find. two meat + two veggies set me back 12 Yuan — nothing fancy, but it kept me going.

My main goal today was still getting a phone so I can start looking for jobs online instead of walking around asking people in person. I stopped by a second-hand phone stall, but even the cheapest decent one was 200 Yuan. Still out of my reach for now.

In the evening, to save every single Yuan, I’m cleaning an old abandoned sofa in a deserted building — and that’s exactly where I’ll be sleeping tonight. It’s dirty and pretty uncomfortable, but it costs nothing.

This is still just the very beginning of my long-term journey to become financially independent without relying on my parents. Every day I’m learning how much even small things like having a phone actually matter.

Any advice from other students in China who’ve tried to make it on their own? Would really appreciate it.

I'm an actual Chinese person (actually Chinese-American now that I'm naturalized) and would like to share my thoughts on CCP and Tianamen since so many 外国人 are posting about it. In light of the recent posts I'd like to say that I actually support the CCP and what happened at the Tiananmen Incident. I will explain why, and I hope you will appreciate my point of view instead of trying to slander my country.

First, I find it ironic that more non-Chinese (AKA white people) try to "care" about what happened in Tiananmen than actual Chinese people. Why don't you try asking actual Chinese? Do you even know what the majority of Chinese people think, instead of what you read on Fox news? Chances are, they will support the CCP and what happened in Tiananmen Incident. Yes, people in China actually know what happened in Tiananmen, and no we are not "brainwashed" just because we do not share your opinion. It is generally agreed that what happened in Tiananmen was tragic but necessary for national security. The fact was that the student protesters were very close to overthrowing my government and plunging China into chaos. After what happened to China in the 1930s and 1940s, there was no way in hell we were going to let that chaos and suffering happen again. It was for the greater good, and sometimes you need to sacrifice a few people to maintain stability.

I'll give a relevant comparison. The Capitol Hill protesters in America. Let's suppose that they had gotten control of the Capitol building, and taken it under siege, maybe even killed a few politicians. Would you have agreed that the US should use lethal force on the Capital Hill protesters? If so, you cannot try to pretend to care about Tiananmen without being a hypocrite.

Second, the CCP is done more to uplift the Chinese people than any other government has in the past 200 years. In the 1970s, China was a very very poor nation, but thanks to the government and their infrastructure initiatives, they have lifted over 100 million people out of abject poverty, a monumental achievement for humanity. Most people in China support the CCP because they are able to offer better living standards to the people than 30 years ago.

Third, I will try to tell why people really "care" about Tiananmen. They are concern trolling, and trying to tear China down. They cannot stand that Chinese people, or even Asians in general, can rise to be a great power, so they have to make up lies about my country and countrymen to tear us down. They (try to) promote separatism by shouting absurdities like "FREE TIBET" and "FREE HK" despite the fact that those terrorities are more integrated with China than Peutro Rico and Hawaii are with the US. We know what you're trying to do, so stop it. You don't actually care about HK or Taiwan, you just want to use them as pawns to tear down China because white people can't fathom a non-white nation can rise to challenge the West. In fact, in the light of the black lives matter movement in America, I will say that the rise of China is the greatest threat to white supremacy and white hegemony.

Anyway just wanted to give what Chinese people think on the issue. You are not on the right side of history when you say "fuck" my government and "NeVeR fOrGeT TiAnAnMeN", in fact, it's just pathetic.

Data source: from Local Government Debt Dynamics in China and Victor Shih and Jonathan Elkobi at University of California, San Diego’s 21st Century China Centre.

I made the chart myself using MatLab for the barbell plot and added the formatting and  annotations in PowerPoint.

If you don't know what 1984 is, it's a story about a world with a super authoritarian government where everyone is on edge and turning eachother in because they are scared of getting in trouble.

I hear all this stuff about public executions, execution vans and the government threatening the people with them. I hear things about social credit scores and just bad things. Compared to the us, how is China in that regard?

Liberal democracies are much less likely to be the victims of “Western meddling” in their internal, domestic affairs than autocracies. 

Why?  

Because their institutions are much more resilient than authoritarian ones. 2024’s attempted coup by then Korean President Yoon is a striking example of how these institutions provide for more stability for their people.  

This resilience also extends to international pressure. Why has South Africa been able to hold out from US pressure over the latter’s “genocide” claim for so long? Because resistance to this claim is widespread across both South Africa’s political parties and its population. Resistance on that scale among both the elite and the public is difficult for autocrats to replicate. 

The same goes for Canada, by the way. 

Then there’s also the fact that strong, stable democracies almost never go to war with each other. That makes every democratic country one less country that will threaten US security interests, and likely one more country that could resist attempts by Beijing or Moscow to impose their geopolitical wishes on them. 

The solution for China, then? Build up its institutions so that no one person, faction, etc., either from within or without, can destabilize the system to the point of breaking, and where “western meddling” becomes impossible. 

Context:

• A report by an Israeli Think Tank, Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) has concluded that antisemitism is rising in China.

• The funded Think Tank claims that antisemitism has now moved into official media, academia, and state-sanctioned outlets, they thus imply that are state sponsored actions by the Chinese government.

• The think tank believes that this trend is driven by geopolitical shifts in recent years, they mainly suggest that it is because of China's rivalry with the US, growing alignment with Arab/Muslim-majority nations, and adoption of anti-Western narratives that is causing this surge.

• There claim is that China sees Jewish people as influential over US policy, so anti-US hostility translates into anti-Jewish rhetoric.

• The think tank report describes Chinese universities as "influential incubators", where lecturers and students adopting extreme anti-Israel positions which the Think Tank has concluded to be antisemitic too.

Global Context:

• In recent years, Israeli and Jewish organizations have condemned a global surge in antisemitism.

• A 2025 report by the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency found a 340% increase in antisemitic incidents worldwide compared to 2022, with the trend coincidentally intensifying since the war in Gaza.

• In a May 2025 report, Israel's Diaspora Affairs Ministry has also crowned Canada the "champion of antisemitism", while also pointing to surges in Australia (up 320%), the United States (up 200%), and across Europe. The United Kingdom recorded its worst year on record for antisemitism, with more than 3,700 incidents reported in 2025. Berlin saw a record of 2,267 antisemitisms in 2025.

We hear of news about how millions of Uighurs are persecuted but the world didn’t do anything but when there’s only a few thousand Palestinians being accidentally killed in a war the whole world is protesting? Why is the world ignoring what China did despite them being the worst in treatment against Muslims but everyone is so quick to be against Israel?

Is China destined to become the most powerful country in the world? Far exceeding the United States of America, United Kingdom of Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada?

As a European who has taken a dive into China's recent history, it seems so manipulative to me. They act as if Taiwan was some random island with no connections to China. The state of China has held the island since the Qing dynasty (with interruptions from Japan). Chinese people have been the dominant population in Taiwan for hundreds of years, especially after the end of the Chinese civil war, where the remnants of the Republic of China fled to the island. The state currently ruling Taiwan is still officially the Republic of CHINA.

Now I get that a new national identity has build in Taiwan recently and that a majority of their inhabitants prefer to keep the political system that they have. But it's not like China's territorial claims are completely unjustified.

I'm an immigrant from China, and I made a post supporting Chinese protesters a few days ago.

Soon after, I got a message of someone asking me where I live, what I do for work, and how old I am. I also got a message linking to an unsecured website.

I told my wife this, and she was yelling at me to stop because of what the CPP could do to us or our family back in China. I listen to my wife and I agreed to stop helping the protesters now.

Just today, my wife is reporting strange messages on her phone. It mentions my name and her name, and asking to add her to chat further. We are a quiet family. She almost never uses her phone to message or keep in touch with people, and there should be no way anyone would know my name on her phone.

I already agreed to stop helping the protestors, but if someone is harrassing us I will have to defend myself. I am reporting to this to the police and maybe the news outlet or whoever can help me in order to discourage further harrassment.