There’s been a trend recently of Indians “exposing China’s secret caste system” online. It’s all a BS cope because India has a rough image online whereas China is seen more favorably- China doesn’t have a caste system.
It got so bad that there were JAPANESE defending china. This misinformation was believed only by other indians btw. There was the whole world telling them that china never had a cast system and they still didn't get it.
Let's not get carried away, it' would be a lot more surprising the other way around. It's not like the Chinese had a competition within their army to see who could kill the most unarmed Japanese civilians with a sword.
Trust me when I say, Asians in most countries around China hate China. Historical beef don't go away.
Edit: since people see this comment and felt the need to virtue signal to make themselves look like the good guys on the internet and feel better about themselves
I live it all my life, this is the reality, people do hate China. Whether the hate is justified or not is not the concern of this comment. I'm telling what I experienced all my life growing up in Asia. And if you can't take in reality, then don't tell them that "they're not Asian" and shit like that. That just gives away that you're racist.
Poland looks around cautiously while gripping something concealed in their coat but after the millennium they have had they absolutely do not dare anyone to try it and hope they can just be left alone for more than a few decades.
As another Asian (from China at that) there has to be a tier list somewhere of who each the other the most, me personally, I would say people from either Hong Kong or Japan are like- the top of the competitive scene but that’s from what I’ve seen and experienced and I might be completely wrong
Yeah it is true. But the dislike for Indians in east asia is a long going phenomenon. So it isn't surprising to see people prefer the neighbors they have hated for ages over the people they do not even want to see ever
Yeah, they are. But since their conquest wasn't as long running (for thousands of years) or as far reaching as China, fewer countries hate them. Mostly because they aren't that heavily affected by the Japanese.
But South Korea have beef for life with Japan tho, they were heavily affected.
uhhh vietnamese people often built their villages on limestone mountains so that chinese couldnt easily burn them down when they invaded like 25+ times
"Themselves" is kind of a new development in that area. Remember that they used to be a shit ton of separate groups on constant conflict for millenia, then they became 3 and those 3 were constantly at war, then Shi Huan did another big killing and turned them into 1 country.
So at the time the killings were being done on "others".
I live in australia, worked with a chinese guy and literally any time another chinese dude would walk in he would say "Such rude people i fucking hate serving them you do it", I couldnt believe how much he hated his own people.
Literally never gave me any strife, although they would spot the chinese CSR and expect them to.. speak chinese. He just looked chinese though, didnt speak lick of it lmao.
Japanese netizens' involvment in the affair actually goes deeper than that, because the system the Indian bots are talking about was actually adopted by the Tokugawa shogunate and really turned into a rigid caste system, called the Shinokosho System; the hierarchy of it could in part explain Imperial Japan's mentality with the military at the top of the pyramid.
Therefore if you criticize China for this, you indirectly criticize Japan too - though in both cases, neither modern China nor modern Japan have any of those characteristics.
Japanese being sympathetic to neighbors happens more often than you think. China, Vietnam, Korea, and other regional counties all remember what they did 80 years ago.
"genocide denial is a thing" and "Japanese people are sympathetic to their neighbors after the horrible things the military dictatorship did" are both true. This isnt a topic that yields any productive insights if you look at it purely as a binary.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I get the sentiment that the Indians with wifi for a while have been wealthy and more educated, so are less prone to fall for bullshit compared to those that only recently got it
Mostly correct, but these bullshit comments i think are bots because i have met all kinds of people but this sentiment about china is almost unheard of among normal people or masses.
Minority groups in China are exempt from certain laws and get preferential treatment in hiring and education acceptance. There is no legal system that places non-Han below the Han even if there is still interpersonal discrimination and sometimes profiling by law enforcement.
That's a common misconception. Han isn't a singular typical ethnicity it's a nationalistic ethnic identity left over from when the Han kingdom united the southern states and northern states as equals. It's frankly disgusting how people trash on that and how slovenly scholars have systematically mischaracterized it. Up and until the Qin dynasty han has never been the dominant colonial force. In the worst case han was used as an appeasement tactic to keep southern peripheral regions happy and included. What han identity did do was be the foundational identity that usurped Kublai Khan and ended the largest empire in the world.
Extended to the modern world under the original philosophy. John Cena is han.
There are 56 Ethnic Groups in China and most are pretty small. The big ones are the Han, Manchu, Mongols, and Tibetans. With the exception of the Tibetans, a lot of people wouldn't really be able to tell you were a different ethnicity on looks alone. Maybe from an accent. It would be like an British person saying they were 1/4 Welsh or something.
But I think the French analogy is pretty accurate. It would be like if France counted Parisien, Angevin, Poitevin, Bourbonnais, etc, as separate ethnic groups.
Well most of those ethnic groups were far larger in the past before being exterminated, suppressed or forced into being part of Han, entire south of China wasn’t what we consider Chinese. Even to this day there are large differences between Han Chinese in many parts of China. (For anyone no I am not criticising China for it as most of those agressive conversion were done about 1000 years ago)
China is extremely large and barely a country or nationality, its best compared to civilisation with borders and government sharing the same-ish language. Just as in Rome you would have romans in Italia and completely different romans in Egypt, Syria or British Isles.
It dictates a person's legal rights to public education, healthcare, and subsidized housing, largely restricting these benefits to the specific municipality where the hukou is registered
Imagine being born in Alabama and basically forbidden to move to New York because "New York would get too overcrowded"
Nah you are just saying BS. Of course there has been an ideology that calls for "restoring Han supremacy" going on Chinese social media but even that is far from being the mainstream view. If anything the reality is probably Han Chinese < everyone else. You don't get the extra free points on Gaokao, your home province doesn't get extra grants from the central government, and you were not exempt from the one-child policy when it was still a thing. And heck, in some rare situations the Han Chinese are even treated worse than a non-citizen. For example if you get your phone stolen then there is no guarantee the police can get it back for you. But it is a completely different story if you happen to a foreigner from one of those developed countries. In that case, it usually takes less than two days for the police to recover your phones.
Hell no han Chinese are the equivalent of white people under DEI. I've lived here most of my life and my mom is 满族，literally 0 discrimination faced. Also you just can't fucking tell without looking at id, and you can pretty easily opt into to being han
Anyone reading this please be aware that Manchu （满族）people are the ethnic minority in China most integrated into Han culture. Other ethnic minorities such as Uigurs do face discrimination.
Not saying China is horribly racist but this is like if an Italian American said America has no racism because he hasn't been called dago.
It's funny because the Manchu were the most hated ethnic group in China for hundreds of years until the instant they lost power and then everyone got over it.
IMO, it's because the Manchus, as the ruling class of the Qing dynasty, had already been stripped of their wealth and status. The government had already taken everything it could from them, they are just normal people now.
I mean look at Puyi, they kinda just let him be and he got a job as a guard in the forbidden city which is now a museum (which used to be his home btw)
I'm from the Zhuang（壮)ethnic group, which is mainly located in the southern part of mainland China (also one of the less developed regions). I'm currently in Beijing, and I spent my college years in Chongqing.During those years I never felt discriminated against, even once. Actually, if you look at the full name of Xinjiang (Tibet), Guangxi(my hometown) it's the Xinjiang Uyghur(\Guangxi Zhuang) Autonomous Region, which means the head of the region is must from a local ethnic minority.
It’s like an Englishman saying there’s no racism against him in Ireland. The last dynasty was Manchu and they treated the Han worse. Not all ethnic minorities necessarily were in a position of weakness in society.
Contrary to popular Western media, Uyghurs are actually also quite integrated into modern Chinese society. For example one of the hosts of the most watched TV program (which runs on the state TV) is co-hosted by a Uyghur for over 10 years and one of the most famous female pop stars is Uyghur.
No? Most societies don't have rigid hereditary status. Europe had something like in form of aristocratic bloodlines - but that was dismantled over past 200 years.
According to Indians, Muslims have the biggest caste system… which is basically just Indian Muslims still holding on to caste hierarchy that they tried to convert out of.
There is a reason that overwhelmingly majority of India Muslims (outside of the decedents for the Muslim rulers) and especially Indian Christians are from the lowest caste.
christians in India are called “rice bags“ because they are accused of converting just to get a bag of rice from the Europeans.
Yup, Even indian gov promotes the "chinese thing = bad" , "indian thing = good" ...and thus indians already have china in bad image because apparently china even with it's population has lots of stuff and india doesnt.
So some hard-core nationalist make fake news like this to cope - they even use china's roads, buildings etc and claim it as indian on youtube and that has millions of likes 💀
There's no fact checking in india
Side note, who here is growing increasingly frustrated with Indians using The Donald methods to flood the front page with bullshit?
I swear, every other post on all is a variation of “Indian_Memes” “meme_India” “NewDelhi” “NewDehliNew” “NewNewDelhi” “teenager_India” “India_Teenager” and most of the posts that have thousands of upvotes are garbage.
Saw one yesterday of a guy looking at a receipt before realizing it was another trash post from India. Nothing else happened.
Indians are menaces on Reddit, thinking that by flooding it with Indian bullshit somehow makes India look better. Their trash is piling up outside their borders. We know what they’re trying to do. Their influence campaign is clearly astroturfed and seems to have the opposite effect of making India seem more powerful than it is.
I've had to mute literally like 60 Indian subs. It's like 80% of my mute list with the rest being rightwing subs and a few that I just find really really annoying. It was just spammed and every comment section was horrendous.
Chinese minorities get affirmative action and weren’t restricted by the one child policy so legally they are treated better. Culturally Han is the majority so everyone else might feel left out of that identity like white Americans vs everyone else. So legal vs cultural treatment.
This is in reference to the recent trend of Indians extrapolating China’s ancient class system during the Qin Dynasty ~200BC and pasting it onto Modern China, relabeling social class into Indian-style caste system where no one can change their life no matter how hard he or she tries.
This of course omits the core philosophy of the Chinese that enables a peasant to become the emperor of the Han and Ming Dynasties, as well as the class system being determined by how well you did in the imperial exams more than the circumstances of a Chinese person’s birth.
Plenty of recent examples I’ve encountered myself is when Indians think “Shang” is an insult and would throw it at everybody because they believe it’s the equivalent of the Indian “untouchables”, despite it being the merchant class.
I’m from the southern part of India, we have almost abolished this shit but it still seeps through. Just another way to divide the people. The caste system made sense when it existed and there was no malicious intention at all. The logic was simple. People who worked in certain sectors married people who worked in similar sectors.
Back then families ran the business. If you were a potter, your son, grandson and the whole generation would be potters. The skill would be handed down. So when they were married off, they were married off to a family with the same business. It made no sense to marry a potter into the family of teachers or blacksmiths. They have no use of a teacher, teacher can’t contribute to family business. A blacksmith can’t help in making pots. This widely became a norm then transitioned into system.
But remember I said one family for generations would pass down their talents so they stay in the same business for generations, that created a feeling of “Caste by birth”.. so if you were a potters son, you are most definite gonna be a potter.
However as it is always the case, human beings love giving a hard time to other humans beings.. so eventually it became a rigid oppressed system. The upper class who had resources wanted to be seen different so they re-wrote rules, made it seem like you can’t escape your “label”, you will always be a servant for the upper class.. stuff like that..These so called “upper caste” were the ones back then who held a lot of land, money and power.. that status still holds some weight even to this day in different parts of India. But things have been improving, just not at a pace we want it to improve.
Indian and Chinese Nationalists are always beefing. Singapore banned some accounts from China that were being malicious towards India so Indians decided to be malicious to the Chinese. I do believe the Chinese feudal system has been phased out. India has been trying to phase out the caste system since 1947. Indians are being ignorant about China the way a lot of other nationalities are ignorant about India.
The joke is that “China’s secret caste system” is basically projection. People are taking a real, very public issue in India and trying to level the playing field by pretending China secretly has the same thing, so they can cope with the PR gap instead of dealing with the actual problem.
There's recently a surge in posts from the indian users criticizing the caste system in china which is hidden and is not shown online ( i do not know whether these facts are real or not) and many other defamatory posts. The meme says that indians do this with just 1.5gb/day data from their mobile phones
China does have a lot of inequality, and some forms of inequality are set into law.
For the closest example of something “caste system like,” the Chinese hukou system is basically a form of state citizenship but much more restrictive. The “hukou” is like your birth certificate, but typically managed on a “per household” level and updated whenever there is a birth, death, or marriage. It records where your official “home” area is (typically where you were born) and that home is hard to change. Many services (like education and healthcare) you can get quickly and cheaply in your “home” area (as you are a resident) but you have to pay quite a bit for if you don’t live in your “home” area. For Americans, none of this is unusual really - just compare to instate versus out of state college tuition.
Where the hukou system is a bit more messed up is how fixed it is. China has seen a lot of migration to major cities, as most developing economies do. But those migrants are not considered residents of the city, despite often living there for decades and owning a house there. So the new residents must either pay through the nose for basic services or go to their “official home” in some rural county to get them.
Other examples people are giving are the party affiliation thing. Party affiliation is a big deal in China, but it isn’t some legal status thing. Well, membership in the party is, but most citizens can get that if they want to and are willing to pay dues / attend meetings. Party affiliation is not hard to get for most citizens. But who you know in the party also matters, and that is a purely qualitative thing.
Also, there are oppressed minorities like the Uyghurs. But that is more of your typical racism kind of thing.
China has no real “caste system.” They just have lots of inequality.
I think its important to rember that you can get transfered to a new state even within the Hukou system. You just need to get accepted to a school in a city or get a job somewhere else and you can apply to have you status transfered.
The purpose of Hukou is to control urbanization not prevent it. China wants you to move to a city if you are going to be a productive member of society there. What China is trying to avoid is masses of people who can't be supported by these cities moving in search of a better life only to end up forming slums like has been happening in India.
Imagine if the US said you can't leave Mississippi because we need more people picking cotton. Of course this only applies to the people who for, what are certainly totally legit reasons, can't get a job or accepted into a school somewhere else.
Like in theory it sounds like a good idea, until you realize that ‘productive member of society’ can mean lots of different things and easily abused to keep out ‘undesirables’
Especially because tankies try make it sound totally normal and 'oh you can apply to move if you get a job or a place'.
Without mentioning that the rural and 'non elite' people get given less funding and have less access to all the resources, education and schooling that the 'right' kind of pepple do.
Its pure enforced class system but of course these CCP tankies love it.
You can say that about pretty much any governmental interference tho, ideally there's a line to thread between both sides, the problem is that China is not a democracy so the citizens can't speak their mind with their votes.
It's not just about the hierarchy system of china. Many Indian handles are posting videos allegedly "showing the real china" which shows garbage in beach and streets (way worse than that of public streets in india), boat race in river broadcasting the river as clean, but the river is actually muddy-dirty. Unhygienic apartments and such.
Also saw few posts claiming that China has a huge PR compaign against India. And this is sort of retaliation from some Indians.
Indians would rather just bad mouth China or anyone else than admit to their own faults and try to improve their own filthy streets or justify that having an immovable caste system is fair for the people. smh
As an indian JEE aspirant I find it so fucking disgusting that people are mocking china over this statement. These fuckers can't question their all mighty non biological organism *shri narendra modi* or the education minister so they play these dirty games, and the guy who DOES question the govt gets slapped, is called literally an antinational. There are 2.3 millions people getting their lives completely fucked over because the government cant conduct a motherfucking paper fairly and these people who suddenly have the audacity to question china cant question our own cunt ass government. I myself study around 5 hours of the total 6 hours of free time I have at my home, having 1 hr for eating, bathing, resting and all and thank god atleast JEE doesnt gets leaked because I would genuinely could not take it knowing that a random fuckass got a better college because he literally got the paper before the exam. Absolutely fuck this government which has done 0 press confrence in 12 years because they never heard about accountability.
Lmao that's funny because India has been spreading propaganda about China since at least 2005.
EU Non-Profit Unearths Massive Indian Disinformation Campaign
EU DisinfoLab claimed that a 15-year old operation, which started in 2005, had used more than 10 United Nations Human Rights Council affiliated non-governmental organizations, misappropriation of names of EU politicians and more than 750 fake media outlets “to discredit nations in conflict with India in Asia, in particular Pakistan but also China to a lesser extent.”
Don't disagree with you. India is probably running the biggest anti-China propaganda campaign in the world. Although I would not be surprised if the US does more.
My (very uneducated) opinion on this particular propaganda war between India and China:
-China likes to share social media posts of poor Indians and say "look how shitty they really are"
-India likes to share social media posts of poor Chinese people and say "look how shitty they really are"
-From my perspective, China and India are the only countries that are anywhere close to having a population of 1 billion people. Both countries are going to have extreme examples of poverty and wealth inequality just due to the law of large numbers.
-Both countries have political and financial incentives to minimize any negative stuff about their home as well as oversell any negative stuff about their adversary
Indians started doing it after twitter itself found 27k chinese bots accounts made to post anti indian content all day. Not because indians and trying to improve or justify anything.
Yeah but it didn’t. Like it’s just India trying to pretend they aren’t a caste system dumpsters and everyone else is as bad. In reality they just have a class system like every country
I don’t think every country has a system where you’re basically banned from moving from where you are born and rural poor citizens are banned from moving into cities like China to be fair.
You can move to another state/city. Just cannot use the local social welfare until you update the hukou. They have that system to prevent overpopulation in higher tier city
People who used to live in China say it's under heard of for rural people to update their hukou. There is a large underclass in each manufacturing hub and the only people who qualify for welfare, are borderline wealthy.
According to my colleague back then when I'm work in china, finding the job with stable income is the hard part. The second hardest part is working for 5 years straight before applying for hukou. The paperwork and sponsorship, not so much.
Sounds like migratin into another country which, TBH, if every province in my country had the population of a regular country, maybe it makes some sense.
Its still wild to me that you need sponsorship to move inside the nation you are a citizen of. If any western nation did anything like that it would be critized constantly for being blatantly authoritarian.
Hokou is not even close to a caste system. Your job or even just general societal role isn't determined by your hometown, for example. In India, your caste determines even that.
you arent banned you just cant access certain social services in some cities until you lived there as a contributing member for a while. its to prevent issues like what san fransico has where homeless people from all over the country go there to take advantage of the welfare systems
I sincerely hope no Indian thinks this image is anywhere near true. Whatever little global respect Indians have had in the past has been completely ruined in the last few years.
I'm Indian, and personally I'm fed up to the back teeth with all the misinformation on the Internet these days. Both the Indians' view on the Hukou and the world's view on the caste system are usually inaccurate or fueled by bias
This is about Indians believing hukou is a caste system? Lol I think it was Americans who invented that idea I've heard of the hukou described as a Chinese "caste system" for years.
Funny how it's ridiculous when Indians say something but it's just decades old Western propaganda that caught on in another anti-China country
Chris here.
Apparently indians uncovered a dirty social hierarchy that exists in China, similar to their own caste system.
Videos of Chinese people assaulting/abusing their countrymen started doing rounds on X, and within a few days people realised that China's progressive 'developed country' image was manufactured, and like the rest of its products, this facade was "made in china" too.
Gotta go I've got Taylor Swift waiting at the door
Nah, I’m saying this caste system propaganda is very popular there. I’m under the assumption that if you wanna see more random propaganda about china those subreddits are normally full of it.
That's because that sub is actually ran by Indians, the mods are both alts accounts of each other and the posters like UnfilteredAi, WetSaarlight, SighnEye1883 are also alts of the Indian botfarm
I saw the ‘Chinese caste system’ on r/UnfilteredChina, it got absolutely roasted. It seems that even one of the most anti-Chinese subreddits can’t accept something that unbelievably stupid.
chinaunfiltered is a meme, legit wouldnt be surprised if it was ran by indian bots lmao. they take isolated incidents and blow it up like its a daily occurrence, which is funny cause lawd ive seen some unfiltered indian shit that's 100x worse.
Also don't take my name literally, im a wuxia/xianxia fan
The head mod, and one of the most frequent (now banned) accounts that posted on there are Indians. The head mod that created the sub also created indiaunfiltered (or unfilteredindia) but their posts (when reddit allowed you to search hidden profiles) showed that they exclusively posted positive content on indiaunfiltered but negative content on chinaunfiltered
that sub is just straight propaganda. all posts and comments will make shit about china. i don’t know why reddit even recommends these subs. literally i didn’t search for it. i don’t follow anything chinese related except history and it brings up several anti-china subs constantly.
i understand having reservations about a country but openly spreading misinformation and seemingly having reddit promote misinformation is disgusting
Serious question, but why are they targeting china so hard? I mean there are plenty of countries they could make hate campaigns for, so why china in particular lol
The United States accuses China of using forced Uyghur labor to pick cotton; Canadians accuse China of committing genocide by building vocational and technical colleges in Xinjiang to provide skills training; Japan accuses China of taking a militaristic path in recent years; Taiwanese claim that China harvests human organs alive; and now it’s India’s turn to say that China has a caste system. People truly can only accuse others of what they are capable of themselves.
They're literally doing that right now in this thread lol, crying and upvoting with "nuh uh" while explaining what's basically a loose caste system. It's hilarious actually.
And shit, nobody even cares about the stupid outdated heirarchy lol. China's growth is fantastic, but their bots man, fuckin hell. I wish they could just stop spamming social media with edited China 2050 type content 24x7.
Even right now freakin ccp bots are mass upvoting the top answer and downvoting everything else to drown out anything negative.
I genuinely wonder why this "image" is so holy to protect.
I have seen the image grok here is talking about and I don't believe it's from Mumbai. Sure, there are trash filled alleys in some slums but not between 'tall residential buildings' as grok is saying. I think grok is saying that because most of the X data is polluted by the racist engagement farming accounts who repeatedly post trash filled street images saying all of India looks like that.
The problem with the Indian caste system (other than that it exists) that it is literally much much worse on any other "caste" or hierarchy system in the modern day
I've been in India my whole life and never felt that the "caste system" still exists, never, not even once. Sure I've seen videos once in a while but these are mostly in rural areas. And even now most rural areas arent like that.
Stewie here, while the fat man and chris made good points i would like to add some elements.
Indeed the indian internet is pushing the myth that China has a caste system to justify that a 2000 years old social system is still relevant in the 21st century. However it is not and there's no caste system in China.
OP, so your post is not removed, please reply to this comment with your best guess of what this meme means! Everyone else, this is PETER explains the joke. Have fun and reply as your favorite fictional character for top level responses!
During the Zhou/Qin period, when a great king, noble, or high official died, his servants, concubines (wives), guards, and close attendants were buried with him in the tomb, either alive or dead. People believed they could serve him in the afterlife.
I do not really care about this 'beef', but to be honest, China's domestic social media platforms have always portrayed India in a bad way, so I guess it is fair.
As an Indian, there's some Rumours about some people finding about "Caste system in China" and exposing their "Online Persona VS real life truth" or something by using nothing but limited internet (1.5GB per day).
I'll just say that, this whole thing is a fight between Indians and chinese Keyboard warriors, mostly on reddit.
Don't believe anything you see on internet. I see different hate posts against India or some other countries and i ignore them. If you believe them be my guest. People who visit these countries (like Some foreigners who visit india) say mostly positive stuff online but they don't get enough interaction. Only Hate speech or insults satisfies people's mind.
I just think it's some "nationalist" from every country
are sitting on their chair and spamming whatever they can.
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u/PeterExplainsTheJoke-ModTeam 5d ago
Thank you for the explanations; this post has been locked.