I have lived in China since 2010. In the past 15 years, China has transformed from a low-trust society to one of the highest-trust societies, similar to Japan. It is fine to leave your wallet, phone or laptop at a cafe table while you go to the bathroom etc. I leave my $5k bike outside every day with no fear it will be stolen or damaged.
The lost-wallet test doesn’t expose a flaw in Chinese society; it exposes a flaw in the scholars who designed it. They are trying to study a digital civilisation with Stone Age tools. Judging China by a wallet experiment in 2025 is like judging aviation with a pterodactyl. When your methodology belongs to an extinct world, the only dinosaur in the room is the researcher.
> The discrepancy between email response rates and the other two measures arose because many wallets were safeguarded until the owner could come collect them, despite no one emailing.
So in China and China alone, people systematically overlook the possibility that the person who lost the wallet doesn't know where it is? How exactly does someone "safeguard" an object that they've moved without telling the owner? I mean, I get that they didn't immediately empty it of cash, but this is a very strange and useless way of helping people.
The fact that it went up a lot when WeChat was used does open up another possibility that wasn't explored in the article - maybe the Chinese are more helpful when they think the wallet belongs to a Chinese person who will be able to return and look for it, but when it belongs to a foreigner they don't bother to reach out because they assume that person is a tourist who isn't coming back and won't report to the police.
I'm also skeptical of the possibility that the average Chinese neither have email addresses nor know anyone who has one. Sounds unlikely, a bit like claiming that people elsewhere can't be expected to return a wallet unless it has a WhatsApp number in it.
It is important to recognize the strengths of China, particularly in industrial processes and engineering. Their resistance to mass immigration and economic nationalism has indeed paid great dividends already. So have their neo-colonial efforts to secure coltan deposits in the Congo and other locations. Nevertheless, China is still the greatest enemy of the West in this century, and must be recognized as such in any realistic model of the world. One need only read the CCP documents advocating revenge for a century of "economic humiliation" for confirmation of this hypothesis. Therefore, I believe the United States is entirely justified in adopting certain economic strategies used by China in order to regain control of the rare earth mining industry, lithium batteries and other scientific and technical fields. The deindustrialization of the early twenty-first century will be regarded by future generations as quite foolish indeed.
China has made no 'neo-colonial efforts to secure coltan deposits in the Congo and other locations'. You will never see them deal with a foreign country as we are doing with Venezuela and have done with hundreds of other nations.
Nor do any CCP documents exist advocating revenge for a century of "economic humiliation”.
You imagine these things based on your hasty reading of Bad China headlines.
> The usage of the Century of Humiliation in the Chinese Communist Party's historiography and modern Chinese nationalism, with its focus on the "sovereignty and integrity of [Chinese] territory,"[20] has been invoked in incidents such as the US bombing of the Chinese Belgrade embassy, the Hainan Island incident, and protests for Tibetan independence along the 2008 Beijing Olympics torch relay.[21] Some analysts have pointed to its use in deflecting foreign criticism of human rights abuses in China and domestic attention from issues of corruption and bolstering its territorial claims and general economic and political rise
The "West" made the choice to deindustrialize and move factories to China.
The "West" is suffering from the greed of "End State Capitalism".
China did indeed suffer a "century of humiliation". Tom Swift writes about the crimes committed by "The West" as if they are all in the "heads" of the Chinese. Trump is bombing innocent speed boats because he claims they are smuggling Fentanyl to the US. Does Swift not know about the Opium Wars? The British (and Americans) forced China to accept Opium so the colonialists could rob China of its wealth and its health.
China didn't plot some devious, underhanded scheme to gain control of rare earth mining and processing. The American Capitalists encouraged it. They were happy to let China do the dirty work while they profited.
The USA mandated the dollar to be the world's reserve currency instituting the "Superimperialism" that Michael Hudson wrote about decades ago. The USA has continued subterfuge around the world with wars and color revolutions. The USA has nearly 800 military bases around the world from which it perpetrates chaos and murder.
I will agree that the US should adopt Chinese economic strategies that have lifted 800M people out of poverty; grown the Chinese GDP in excess of 5% for decades; and hasn't had a recession since 1979.
China isn't the enemy. The "Anglo-American Oligarchy/Deep State/Jewish Mob", which destroys all it touches, is.
"In the media, China is repeatedly condemned for its undemocratic government and vilified whenever it takes any action on the world stage that could be construed as assertive. On social media, it’s filtered through memes about collapsing buildings or doctored videos of empty cities. And in online intellectual circles—especially on the dissident right—there’s a recurring impulse to explain Chinese success or failure in moral terms: if China stumbles, it’s proof that the people are corrupt; if it advances, it must be cheating. The underlying message is consistent: the Chinese cannot be trusted."
This is a concerted effort to besmirch anything Chinese. The United States wishes to maintain its world dominance...a unipolar world, hence the extreme propaganda. The same is true of Russia.
The condemnation of China because it doesn't have a democratic government is laughable, coming from the United States. The United States is not a democracy either, nor is it a democratic republic. The electoral process is non-functional here. We live under a plutocratic oligarchy. The United States claims it is a democracy, China doesn't.
Do you remember Covid? In America about half the country got to go through most of it relatively free. When the people of my state got a chance to go to the voting booth we elected a Republican and got masks out of schools overnight.
What happened in non-democratic China? They suffered the most extensive and totalitarian lockdowns in the world. People of entire cities forced to starve to death in their apartments. It only ended when mass demonstrations calling for the overthrow of the regime forced its end.
At the end of the day, you can still throw the bums out when they fuck up big. You can’t do that in China and it matters.
Oh and remember when they spent decades doing forced abortions on people that had more than one kid.
We all saw the videos of the screaming people in tower blocks as state workers in hazmat suits welded the doors closed. We remember them boasting about their Zero Covid policy. Or are you saying all those videos were faked to besmirch China?
What part exactly is nonsense? In 2024 the US Congress passed a bill allocating $1.6 billion to fund anti-China propaganda, and this is only a tiny portion of the funds in reality devoted to funding such media production. Just to cite one, take a look at how many channels on Youtube are dedicated to producing anti-China propaganda and how they are promoted and monetized by Google.
As for the rest of your claims, they are prime examples of exactly what the article talks about. China has plenty of problems (about which we have written extensively) but the points you mention are not among them. Take for example the one-child policy. Who forced this policy on China? It should not be hard to guess. Just do a bit of research on population reduction policies pushed by a certain major government in the 1970s around the world. Or your comments about entire cities starving to death. Entire cities? Many of the measures imposed were arguably illegal under Chinese law and together with the Zero Covid policy in general certainly proved to be bad ideas -- there is no question about that. We documented events extensively at the time and our post mortem on the crescendo in December of 2022 was not very complementary (See https://austrianchina.substack.com/p/estimating-chinas-omicron-death-toll). But if any one person actually starved to death, the case has not been publicized. There is absolutely no doubt that many people suffered during those lockdowns due to the easy-to-anticipate failure of central planning, but that is not the same thing as starving to death. Moreover, you are missing the flip side, for example the fact that China was the only major industrialized country where it was actually illegal to coerce anyone into taking a vaccine. Nor were masks ever publicly mandated in China, unlike in most of the West.
"At the end of the day, you can still throw the bums out when they fuck up big. You can’t do that in China and it matters."
No, it doesn't matter. Throwing out the 'bums' means nothing because the old bum is replaced with a new bum. The Deep State is in control, and any illusion that your vote means something is part of their narrative. On issues of importance, the Deep State rules. Wealth discrepancy has reached levels never seen in the United States, which is thanks to rapacious megalomaniacs, ie, those who control this country.
As I said, we literally got a big change in COVID policy the second we elected a Republican. That made a gigantic difference in my life.
Moreover, there are bigger differences in governance now than ever before. After the eye opener of COVID, we finally decided to move to a red state. We have:
1) No income tax
2) A state budget with a surplus and no runaway pension obligations
3) Low cost of living and affordable housing
4) Universal school vouchers including home schooling and educational freedom
5) Affordable non-woke high quality public universities
I could go on.
The difference between red and blue states has never been wider than it is today. Politics does in fact matter in a big way to my quality of life.
"Money, as we know, has no intrinsic worth, but commands value only as an exercisable “claim” on those physical things for which it can be exchanged."
Precisely! Money is "Not Real". It is a mass fantasy which is useful in a modern economy but it is no more "real" than the imaginary numbers that come from the square root of -1.
Lincoln won the Civil War and built the transcontinental railroad with his phony money called "Greenbacks". China is doing the same thing through the BRI.
What does the US do? It has turned the dollar over to banksters who periodically inflate the economy so they can set it up for a recession in order to steal the wealth created by labor. This cannot continue. American fascism is growing and Americans are being relegated to neo-serfdom.
The bit about Japan is true. I lived there for 20 years and found four wallets in the street in that time. I took each of them to the nearest police kiosk rather than trying to track down the owner. In Britain, on the other hand, it is far easier to go to a person's house, regardless of where they live, than to find a police station. I now live in the English town where I was born and I have no idea where any police station is, let alone the nearest. Just saying, that that wasn't sleight of hand on the part of the researchers. Police kiosks are everywhere in Japan. And yes, the Japanese and Chinese are indeed ethnic cousins but in behaviour there is very little similarity.
1. Academic fraud is correlated with civic dishonesty obviously but they’re not identical and the former is also heavily influenced by bad incentive structures which China has a lot of (e.g., promotions for people who meet a certain quota of production).
2. The wallet study’s relevance is with regard to you using it in a paper you had published on race and honesty, but that one was focused on blacks, Hispanics, and whites. We still don’t know how Asians compare to whites on all the other metrics.
3. I’m not saying the wallet study itself is useless, but considering China is the only NE Asian country included on there (unless you want to count the SE Asian countries which themselves have much lower NIQs to begin with but somehow outperformed China. That does not seem very plausible intuitively speaking) and then the authors themselves admitted to excluding Japan, it does raise questions about if it would work WRT to China (and East Asia more broadly) specifically.
Based on the results of academic fraud from other East Asian countries, it’s certainly *possible* East Asians are modestly below whites on honesty, I’m not throwing that out entirely, but surely even you have to agree that China ranking dead last here with a 7% reporting rate is way off.
As for your post on scientific misconduct, I can try updating it yes. I’m currently cramming for my exams.
I know there is a lot of prejudice in the West towards the Chinese government (probably just for being communist), but I didn’t realise the prejudice also applied to Chinese people generally. I personally haven’t come across such prejudice and curious to know whether it holds across the the entire West (as well as Russia), or whether there is a lot of variation within the West (and Russia).
Probably as Chinese people become wealthier, the prejudice will diminish. Unfortunately we tend to look down on the poor and look up to the wealthy.
My first job was with a large multinational that had employees in many countries. All the internal IT infrastructure was international and borderless, except for China. For Chinese employees everything was special cased. They had different network rules, different access levels, and people who travelled to China - even on official business - were automatically locked out of most systems if they logged in from a Chinese IP address. You weren't allowed to take the companies IP assets into China. And no other country was treated this way.
I thought at first it was kinda paranoid, up until I talked to people with experience of dealing with China and its employees there. Datacenters there would drop offline, we'd ask what happened and be told there was a "power outage" but then when connectivity came back the routers would have had settings changed via local override. In other words, the datacenter's contents had been stolen and then employees lied to us about what happened. And that's when I understood why the company treated China specially.
This company also got hacked by the Chinese government, who got in by exploiting lax security standards in one of the China offices, and one of its products turned out to have stolen code in it (put there by Chinese employees).
This was around 2010 or so I guess. Dealing with China was just constant madness. The amount of time and energy it took up was huge.
At the time I thought this was a problem of the government and not the people, but later on I ended up being caught up in some event I won't outline here, and discovered via direct interactions with a bunch of Chinese businessmen that no, they were in fact genuinely hyper-collectivist to a level I hadn't imagined possible. The idea of a strong separation between people and their government dissovled in those months.
Now, maybe things have changed a lot since then. I think they probably have. But it was only 15 years ago and first impressions last. I was young then, I'm middle aged now but I'll probably retain some lingering paranoia about (mainland) Chinese for the rest of my life.
A large portion of the people in the US military that are stealing confidential info and selling it to foreign governments seem to be people of Chinese heritage selling it to China. Maybe there's bias in the reporting or what stories get traction, idk. The pattern is hard to ignore.
As for 'China still lags far behind the West in living standards,' having lived in the West, Japan and China, I would choose China for its QOL: social, intellectual and material.
It sometimes feels as if China simply does not understand how the West communicates. In the United States, like in every historical empire, the political system almost requires an external rival. An enemy — real or symbolic — becomes a tool for holding a fragmented society together. This does not necessarily mean hatred.
In Europe and other Western countries, the dynamic is completely different. Our journalism is built on criticism — of the government, of corporations, of ourselves, of allies. Western media criticize everyone and everything, and this is not an act of hostility but a cultural practice. Most people do not take it personally. If anything, public criticism helps highlight problems and sometimes even solves them, because acknowledging a flaw is the first step toward addressing it.
In China, journalism operates with almost the opposite purpose. There, the goal is not critique but the maintenance of social harmony. This is why Chinese public discourse often feels infused with what Westerners perceive as “toxic positivity.” Criticism is not just discouraged; it is seen as destabilizing, something that disrupts unity. The intention is not malicious — it is simply a different cultural logic.
This is why misunderstandings arise. Many Western journalists — and ordinary citizens as well — do not hate China. They criticize everything, including their own governments, and often far more harshly than they criticize Beijing. But what is meant as normal critique in the West is interpreted in China as hostility, disrespect, or even an attack on national dignity.
The West often fails to understand that in China, any form of critique — even well-intentioned, constructive critique — is often taken personally, as if it questions the legitimacy or moral standing of the entire society.
Substack needs more articles like this from writers who are not specifically China-focused. "China Derangement Syndrome" is a great name for it, too, because it's a debilitating condition widespread throughout the West, and a dangerous one at that because it aims to alienate the inhabitants of the West from the world's leading economic power and their primary source of goods. Over the years we have also written about various aspects of this propaganda campaign, what we called the "China Dystopia Psyop" (https://austrianchina.substack.com/p/china-dystopia-psyop) or our top 10 myths about China (https://austrianchina.substack.com/p/top-10-myths-about-china-part-2) but Mt. Whitfeld's term is better. There are plenty of things eminently worthy of criticism in today's China, such as our current government's disastrous dabbling in central planning and often ridiculous censorship policies, but tellingly these topics are almost never picked up in the West -- perhaps because the West itself hardly has much to brag about in these areas.
I would like all the China Haters to look into videos and articles from Brian Berletic, Aaron Good, Michael Hudson, and Richard Wolff.
You may still hate China, but at least you'll be exposed to the true source of the hatred against China, Russia, and Iran. The neocon push for American Empire.
Even billionaires have acknowledged that the Empire is in decline. You can find youTube videos of them showing this. The decline was not China's fault. America did it to itself by allowing end-state Capitalistic greed to be rewarded.
Anyone who still believes that votes counted on proprietary machines manufactured by specious companies owned and controlled by billionaires is an idiot.
What this piece highlights isn’t a China story so much as a measurement story.
Most cross-civilizational ‘honesty’ and ‘trust’ instruments were built inside a Western individualist schema, then applied globally as if the underlying cognitive architecture were universal.
But collectivist systems route responsibility differently; they encode honesty at the level of the group rather than the lone actor.
If you apply individualist instruments to collectivist coordination, the measurement collapses and gets misread as moral failure.
This is one of the biggest epistemic problems of our time: we mistake instrument bias for civilizational diagnosis.
I have lived in China since 2010. In the past 15 years, China has transformed from a low-trust society to one of the highest-trust societies, similar to Japan. It is fine to leave your wallet, phone or laptop at a cafe table while you go to the bathroom etc. I leave my $5k bike outside every day with no fear it will be stolen or damaged.
My bike was stolent in China so good luck.
The lost-wallet test doesn’t expose a flaw in Chinese society; it exposes a flaw in the scholars who designed it. They are trying to study a digital civilisation with Stone Age tools. Judging China by a wallet experiment in 2025 is like judging aviation with a pterodactyl. When your methodology belongs to an extinct world, the only dinosaur in the room is the researcher.
👎
I'm not sure it does. This bit is very strange:
> The discrepancy between email response rates and the other two measures arose because many wallets were safeguarded until the owner could come collect them, despite no one emailing.
So in China and China alone, people systematically overlook the possibility that the person who lost the wallet doesn't know where it is? How exactly does someone "safeguard" an object that they've moved without telling the owner? I mean, I get that they didn't immediately empty it of cash, but this is a very strange and useless way of helping people.
The fact that it went up a lot when WeChat was used does open up another possibility that wasn't explored in the article - maybe the Chinese are more helpful when they think the wallet belongs to a Chinese person who will be able to return and look for it, but when it belongs to a foreigner they don't bother to reach out because they assume that person is a tourist who isn't coming back and won't report to the police.
I'm also skeptical of the possibility that the average Chinese neither have email addresses nor know anyone who has one. Sounds unlikely, a bit like claiming that people elsewhere can't be expected to return a wallet unless it has a WhatsApp number in it.
It is important to recognize the strengths of China, particularly in industrial processes and engineering. Their resistance to mass immigration and economic nationalism has indeed paid great dividends already. So have their neo-colonial efforts to secure coltan deposits in the Congo and other locations. Nevertheless, China is still the greatest enemy of the West in this century, and must be recognized as such in any realistic model of the world. One need only read the CCP documents advocating revenge for a century of "economic humiliation" for confirmation of this hypothesis. Therefore, I believe the United States is entirely justified in adopting certain economic strategies used by China in order to regain control of the rare earth mining industry, lithium batteries and other scientific and technical fields. The deindustrialization of the early twenty-first century will be regarded by future generations as quite foolish indeed.
China has made no 'neo-colonial efforts to secure coltan deposits in the Congo and other locations'. You will never see them deal with a foreign country as we are doing with Venezuela and have done with hundreds of other nations.
Nor do any CCP documents exist advocating revenge for a century of "economic humiliation”.
You imagine these things based on your hasty reading of Bad China headlines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation
> The usage of the Century of Humiliation in the Chinese Communist Party's historiography and modern Chinese nationalism, with its focus on the "sovereignty and integrity of [Chinese] territory,"[20] has been invoked in incidents such as the US bombing of the Chinese Belgrade embassy, the Hainan Island incident, and protests for Tibetan independence along the 2008 Beijing Olympics torch relay.[21] Some analysts have pointed to its use in deflecting foreign criticism of human rights abuses in China and domestic attention from issues of corruption and bolstering its territorial claims and general economic and political rise
Of the 30 human rights described in the UN Declaration, China leads the USA in 29.
China is not an enemy of the West.
The "West" made the choice to deindustrialize and move factories to China.
The "West" is suffering from the greed of "End State Capitalism".
China did indeed suffer a "century of humiliation". Tom Swift writes about the crimes committed by "The West" as if they are all in the "heads" of the Chinese. Trump is bombing innocent speed boats because he claims they are smuggling Fentanyl to the US. Does Swift not know about the Opium Wars? The British (and Americans) forced China to accept Opium so the colonialists could rob China of its wealth and its health.
China didn't plot some devious, underhanded scheme to gain control of rare earth mining and processing. The American Capitalists encouraged it. They were happy to let China do the dirty work while they profited.
The USA mandated the dollar to be the world's reserve currency instituting the "Superimperialism" that Michael Hudson wrote about decades ago. The USA has continued subterfuge around the world with wars and color revolutions. The USA has nearly 800 military bases around the world from which it perpetrates chaos and murder.
I will agree that the US should adopt Chinese economic strategies that have lifted 800M people out of poverty; grown the Chinese GDP in excess of 5% for decades; and hasn't had a recession since 1979.
China isn't the enemy. The "Anglo-American Oligarchy/Deep State/Jewish Mob", which destroys all it touches, is.
"The "West" is suffering from the greed of "End State Capitalism"."
Perfect description of the current situation.
"China isn't the enemy. The "Anglo-American Oligarchy/Deep State/Jewish Mob", which destroys all it touches, is."
Another accurate statement.
The West tends to use the ally-enemy distinction from Schmitt whereas Asian countries do not. Life is far more ambiguous.
"In the media, China is repeatedly condemned for its undemocratic government and vilified whenever it takes any action on the world stage that could be construed as assertive. On social media, it’s filtered through memes about collapsing buildings or doctored videos of empty cities. And in online intellectual circles—especially on the dissident right—there’s a recurring impulse to explain Chinese success or failure in moral terms: if China stumbles, it’s proof that the people are corrupt; if it advances, it must be cheating. The underlying message is consistent: the Chinese cannot be trusted."
This is a concerted effort to besmirch anything Chinese. The United States wishes to maintain its world dominance...a unipolar world, hence the extreme propaganda. The same is true of Russia.
Here is a recent article pertinent to this issue.
https://www.rt.com/news/628590-gdp-economic-metric-illusion/
The condemnation of China because it doesn't have a democratic government is laughable, coming from the United States. The United States is not a democracy either, nor is it a democratic republic. The electoral process is non-functional here. We live under a plutocratic oligarchy. The United States claims it is a democracy, China doesn't.
This is nonsense.
Do you remember Covid? In America about half the country got to go through most of it relatively free. When the people of my state got a chance to go to the voting booth we elected a Republican and got masks out of schools overnight.
What happened in non-democratic China? They suffered the most extensive and totalitarian lockdowns in the world. People of entire cities forced to starve to death in their apartments. It only ended when mass demonstrations calling for the overthrow of the regime forced its end.
At the end of the day, you can still throw the bums out when they fuck up big. You can’t do that in China and it matters.
Oh and remember when they spent decades doing forced abortions on people that had more than one kid.
No, your reply is utter bullshit.
We all saw the videos of the screaming people in tower blocks as state workers in hazmat suits welded the doors closed. We remember them boasting about their Zero Covid policy. Or are you saying all those videos were faked to besmirch China?
What a retort.
But the only retort possible to your nonsense.
What part exactly is nonsense? In 2024 the US Congress passed a bill allocating $1.6 billion to fund anti-China propaganda, and this is only a tiny portion of the funds in reality devoted to funding such media production. Just to cite one, take a look at how many channels on Youtube are dedicated to producing anti-China propaganda and how they are promoted and monetized by Google.
As for the rest of your claims, they are prime examples of exactly what the article talks about. China has plenty of problems (about which we have written extensively) but the points you mention are not among them. Take for example the one-child policy. Who forced this policy on China? It should not be hard to guess. Just do a bit of research on population reduction policies pushed by a certain major government in the 1970s around the world. Or your comments about entire cities starving to death. Entire cities? Many of the measures imposed were arguably illegal under Chinese law and together with the Zero Covid policy in general certainly proved to be bad ideas -- there is no question about that. We documented events extensively at the time and our post mortem on the crescendo in December of 2022 was not very complementary (See https://austrianchina.substack.com/p/estimating-chinas-omicron-death-toll). But if any one person actually starved to death, the case has not been publicized. There is absolutely no doubt that many people suffered during those lockdowns due to the easy-to-anticipate failure of central planning, but that is not the same thing as starving to death. Moreover, you are missing the flip side, for example the fact that China was the only major industrialized country where it was actually illegal to coerce anyone into taking a vaccine. Nor were masks ever publicly mandated in China, unlike in most of the West.
"At the end of the day, you can still throw the bums out when they fuck up big. You can’t do that in China and it matters."
No, it doesn't matter. Throwing out the 'bums' means nothing because the old bum is replaced with a new bum. The Deep State is in control, and any illusion that your vote means something is part of their narrative. On issues of importance, the Deep State rules. Wealth discrepancy has reached levels never seen in the United States, which is thanks to rapacious megalomaniacs, ie, those who control this country.
As I said, we literally got a big change in COVID policy the second we elected a Republican. That made a gigantic difference in my life.
Moreover, there are bigger differences in governance now than ever before. After the eye opener of COVID, we finally decided to move to a red state. We have:
1) No income tax
2) A state budget with a surplus and no runaway pension obligations
3) Low cost of living and affordable housing
4) Universal school vouchers including home schooling and educational freedom
5) Affordable non-woke high quality public universities
I could go on.
The difference between red and blue states has never been wider than it is today. Politics does in fact matter in a big way to my quality of life.
Enjoy that Kool-Aid!
Enjoy supporting tyranny because you think it means freedom.
"Enjoy supporting tyranny because you think it means freedom."
But I do not support tyranny. You are the one supporting tyranny because you think you are free in the United States. The propaganda blinds you.
Thanks for the link to the RT article.
Following that to Morgan's web site I find:
"Money, as we know, has no intrinsic worth, but commands value only as an exercisable “claim” on those physical things for which it can be exchanged."
Precisely! Money is "Not Real". It is a mass fantasy which is useful in a modern economy but it is no more "real" than the imaginary numbers that come from the square root of -1.
Lincoln won the Civil War and built the transcontinental railroad with his phony money called "Greenbacks". China is doing the same thing through the BRI.
What does the US do? It has turned the dollar over to banksters who periodically inflate the economy so they can set it up for a recession in order to steal the wealth created by labor. This cannot continue. American fascism is growing and Americans are being relegated to neo-serfdom.
The bit about Japan is true. I lived there for 20 years and found four wallets in the street in that time. I took each of them to the nearest police kiosk rather than trying to track down the owner. In Britain, on the other hand, it is far easier to go to a person's house, regardless of where they live, than to find a police station. I now live in the English town where I was born and I have no idea where any police station is, let alone the nearest. Just saying, that that wasn't sleight of hand on the part of the researchers. Police kiosks are everywhere in Japan. And yes, the Japanese and Chinese are indeed ethnic cousins but in behaviour there is very little similarity.
The problem with attacking the wallet study is that other studies of scientific dishonesty show the same pattern. I told you this last time too.
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/scientific-misconduct-by-ancestry-country
You could update my review, it is old now, 2019.
1. Academic fraud is correlated with civic dishonesty obviously but they’re not identical and the former is also heavily influenced by bad incentive structures which China has a lot of (e.g., promotions for people who meet a certain quota of production).
2. The wallet study’s relevance is with regard to you using it in a paper you had published on race and honesty, but that one was focused on blacks, Hispanics, and whites. We still don’t know how Asians compare to whites on all the other metrics.
3. I’m not saying the wallet study itself is useless, but considering China is the only NE Asian country included on there (unless you want to count the SE Asian countries which themselves have much lower NIQs to begin with but somehow outperformed China. That does not seem very plausible intuitively speaking) and then the authors themselves admitted to excluding Japan, it does raise questions about if it would work WRT to China (and East Asia more broadly) specifically.
Based on the results of academic fraud from other East Asian countries, it’s certainly *possible* East Asians are modestly below whites on honesty, I’m not throwing that out entirely, but surely even you have to agree that China ranking dead last here with a 7% reporting rate is way off.
As for your post on scientific misconduct, I can try updating it yes. I’m currently cramming for my exams.
I know there is a lot of prejudice in the West towards the Chinese government (probably just for being communist), but I didn’t realise the prejudice also applied to Chinese people generally. I personally haven’t come across such prejudice and curious to know whether it holds across the the entire West (as well as Russia), or whether there is a lot of variation within the West (and Russia).
Probably as Chinese people become wealthier, the prejudice will diminish. Unfortunately we tend to look down on the poor and look up to the wealthy.
I think there's some.
My first job was with a large multinational that had employees in many countries. All the internal IT infrastructure was international and borderless, except for China. For Chinese employees everything was special cased. They had different network rules, different access levels, and people who travelled to China - even on official business - were automatically locked out of most systems if they logged in from a Chinese IP address. You weren't allowed to take the companies IP assets into China. And no other country was treated this way.
I thought at first it was kinda paranoid, up until I talked to people with experience of dealing with China and its employees there. Datacenters there would drop offline, we'd ask what happened and be told there was a "power outage" but then when connectivity came back the routers would have had settings changed via local override. In other words, the datacenter's contents had been stolen and then employees lied to us about what happened. And that's when I understood why the company treated China specially.
This company also got hacked by the Chinese government, who got in by exploiting lax security standards in one of the China offices, and one of its products turned out to have stolen code in it (put there by Chinese employees).
This was around 2010 or so I guess. Dealing with China was just constant madness. The amount of time and energy it took up was huge.
At the time I thought this was a problem of the government and not the people, but later on I ended up being caught up in some event I won't outline here, and discovered via direct interactions with a bunch of Chinese businessmen that no, they were in fact genuinely hyper-collectivist to a level I hadn't imagined possible. The idea of a strong separation between people and their government dissovled in those months.
Now, maybe things have changed a lot since then. I think they probably have. But it was only 15 years ago and first impressions last. I was young then, I'm middle aged now but I'll probably retain some lingering paranoia about (mainland) Chinese for the rest of my life.
Thanks for sharing your experience. It sounds quite shocking.
A large portion of the people in the US military that are stealing confidential info and selling it to foreign governments seem to be people of Chinese heritage selling it to China. Maybe there's bias in the reporting or what stories get traction, idk. The pattern is hard to ignore.
Great post. Many thanks>
As for 'China still lags far behind the West in living standards,' having lived in the West, Japan and China, I would choose China for its QOL: social, intellectual and material.
Please take a look at my reference to an article about GDP in my comment.
Ehh, I live in China. I certainly do not think it is the most dishonest society, but I also think 'high trust' is an unfair characterization.
The most interesting part of this isn't China.
It's how quickly a civilization can build an entire worldview on top of a measurement error.
When your epistemic systems misread reality, strategy becomes mythology.
Coordination architectures rot long before power does.
It sometimes feels as if China simply does not understand how the West communicates. In the United States, like in every historical empire, the political system almost requires an external rival. An enemy — real or symbolic — becomes a tool for holding a fragmented society together. This does not necessarily mean hatred.
In Europe and other Western countries, the dynamic is completely different. Our journalism is built on criticism — of the government, of corporations, of ourselves, of allies. Western media criticize everyone and everything, and this is not an act of hostility but a cultural practice. Most people do not take it personally. If anything, public criticism helps highlight problems and sometimes even solves them, because acknowledging a flaw is the first step toward addressing it.
In China, journalism operates with almost the opposite purpose. There, the goal is not critique but the maintenance of social harmony. This is why Chinese public discourse often feels infused with what Westerners perceive as “toxic positivity.” Criticism is not just discouraged; it is seen as destabilizing, something that disrupts unity. The intention is not malicious — it is simply a different cultural logic.
This is why misunderstandings arise. Many Western journalists — and ordinary citizens as well — do not hate China. They criticize everything, including their own governments, and often far more harshly than they criticize Beijing. But what is meant as normal critique in the West is interpreted in China as hostility, disrespect, or even an attack on national dignity.
The West often fails to understand that in China, any form of critique — even well-intentioned, constructive critique — is often taken personally, as if it questions the legitimacy or moral standing of the entire society.
Here is an excellent video on the US attitude toward China as well as Russia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4J4lF1E-eI
Substack needs more articles like this from writers who are not specifically China-focused. "China Derangement Syndrome" is a great name for it, too, because it's a debilitating condition widespread throughout the West, and a dangerous one at that because it aims to alienate the inhabitants of the West from the world's leading economic power and their primary source of goods. Over the years we have also written about various aspects of this propaganda campaign, what we called the "China Dystopia Psyop" (https://austrianchina.substack.com/p/china-dystopia-psyop) or our top 10 myths about China (https://austrianchina.substack.com/p/top-10-myths-about-china-part-2) but Mt. Whitfeld's term is better. There are plenty of things eminently worthy of criticism in today's China, such as our current government's disastrous dabbling in central planning and often ridiculous censorship policies, but tellingly these topics are almost never picked up in the West -- perhaps because the West itself hardly has much to brag about in these areas.
I would like all the China Haters to look into videos and articles from Brian Berletic, Aaron Good, Michael Hudson, and Richard Wolff.
You may still hate China, but at least you'll be exposed to the true source of the hatred against China, Russia, and Iran. The neocon push for American Empire.
Even billionaires have acknowledged that the Empire is in decline. You can find youTube videos of them showing this. The decline was not China's fault. America did it to itself by allowing end-state Capitalistic greed to be rewarded.
Anyone who still believes that votes counted on proprietary machines manufactured by specious companies owned and controlled by billionaires is an idiot.
What this piece highlights isn’t a China story so much as a measurement story.
Most cross-civilizational ‘honesty’ and ‘trust’ instruments were built inside a Western individualist schema, then applied globally as if the underlying cognitive architecture were universal.
But collectivist systems route responsibility differently; they encode honesty at the level of the group rather than the lone actor.
If you apply individualist instruments to collectivist coordination, the measurement collapses and gets misread as moral failure.
This is one of the biggest epistemic problems of our time: we mistake instrument bias for civilizational diagnosis.
Fear of the Chinese government as military rival is overblown because we have nukes.
Still, I dislike East Asian societies. They are stagnant, aging, and depressing.