[quote=“Jive Turkey”]I think your whole strategy is wrong. To most Chinese who aren’t complete nitpickers, differences like traditional and simplified characters are not going to seem all that meaningful. I think that if your Chinese is up to it and you aren’t afraid of embarrassing them, then give them a hard, figurative kick in the balls. To do this, I suggest pointing out differences like the following:
-Chen Shuibian is in the clink for 20 years (reduced from life) after being convicted at the end of a public trial for embezzlement, money laundering and bribery. How many of the PRC’s highest leaders have been publicly tried for corruption? How long has Li Peng spent in jail?
-Short of shouting “fire” in a movie theatre or committing libel/slander, people in Taiwan can say pretty much anything they want about anybody or anything, and the government can do sweet fuck about it. Don’t like an elected leader or high profile civil servant? Blog about it, or get one of the rabid media organizations interested in it. Got a police officer or gangster on digital video doing something illegal? Put it up on Youtube if you are sure the object of the video does not know who shot it. The government and that gangster can do nothing to you, and they can’t take that video down or block it. Can you do that on the mainland with the confidence that the PSB internet goons won’t identify you?
-Continuing on the subject of the internet, Taiwanese can directly access any website in the world. No need for a VPN or proxy server to read information that The Man does not want you to read. Can you do that on the mainland?
-Mainland women frequently wear stockings or hosiery that make their legs look horrible, their underwear is more like a pair of shorts, and their bras look like they are made of some kind of cheap, improperly manufactured polyester that would cause a skin rash. Taiwanese women look damn hot when they wear short skirts or shorts, they don’t wear ugly bras, and their underwear covers just the right amount.
-Taiwan has run its 300 km/h+ class high speed rail for over four years, and there have been no fatal accidents. The PRC’s HSR, if you believe the state media, as killed 40 and injured 192 in its first year of operation. While the Taiwan HSR project was riddled with corruption, the level of it pales in comparison to the mainland’s HSR development.
-When a major food safety issue is uncovered on the mainland, the media is silenced and anybody who is not satisfied with the compensation and “justice” that comes afterward is disappeared until they see the error in their thinking, or just put in a mental institute. One or two people will take the fall, while the asshole party members who took bribes and looked the other way go about their business as usual. When a major food safety issue is uncovered in Taiwan, the media runs wild with it, there are public legal proceedings and there is at least a decent chance that the guilty will spend time in jail. Mental Health Institutes are for the mentally ill in Taiwan.
-The PRC classifies the number of people executed every year as a state secret; outside organizations have estimated that the number is anywhere from 2,000 to 7,000 per year. The ROC government stopped capital punishment for four years, and over the past ten years has killed no more than an average of 1 person a year. Information regarding the number of and method used in executions is publicly available to anybody.
-Taiwanese spit, fart, burp and smoke less in public than mainlanders.
-When you ask a Taiwanese on the street for directions, he/she typically either gives you clear directions or tells you he isn’t sure. Ask a mainlander, and you frequently have half a dozen people mobbing you, trying to work their own angle, e.g., “I can take you there for RMB 200!” or “you don’t want to go there, you should go here instead!”
-In most relatively well developed cities on the mainland, there are a lot more brothels than there are in any city in Taiwan.
-Taiwanese people don’t let their government heard them like cattle through bullshit “security” procedures like when people entering Tiananmen Square, the underground or any major public venue in Beijing are required to have their bags X-rayed. Nobody in a position of authority in Taiwan has done anything to piss off any ethnic group or dissidents to the degree where such procedures would even seem half-sensible to any right thinking person.
-Mainlanders talk louder than Taiwanese.
-The ROC government does not see a need to interfere with how many kids every family has and has not sterilized anybody or taken away anybody’s baby.
-An organ transplant team in Taipei fucked up royally by giving HIV to five people who would have reasonably expected that they would not get such a disease from a transplant operation. The hospital and the doctors accepted full responsibility. Tens of thousands of poor bastards in Hunan and other provinces were given HIV when donating blood. Has anybody said sorry? Has anybody really taken full responsibility?
-In Taiwan, in a broad sense, “5,000 years of Chinese civilization” continues. In the PRC, civilization and civilized behavior seem to have ended around 1949.
Please feel free to add any other comparisons that you feel illustrate the differences between Taiwan and the mainland.[/quote]
While I definitley do agree with your post, my problem when communicating to the mainlanders is explaining that cultures are indeed very different in many general things. I don’t try to explain to them why Taiwan is better or etc, but I try to point there are a lot of cultural differences between the two places.
For example, I often say these are the huge differences between the two places:
-Night markets vs. lack of
-Night life vs. very early closing times.
-A few Taiwanese minority groups vs. China’s 56
-Taiwanese expats vs. Shanghai ones
-Traiditional characters vs. simplified (for me this is huge, but perhaps I’m the only one that sees it the way)
-Right to left reading vs. only left to right reading
-Hot Springs vs. only a few places in China having them
-Very island culture vs. a big place with a huge variety of cities and such
-Mandarin or Southern Min mostly vs. Xinjiang hua, Shanghai hua, Guangdong hua, Tibetan, etc etc
-A plethora of book stores vs. a lack of them
-Fashion style
-MANGA vs. no manga
-Wangka’s vs. horrible and smelly Wangba’s
-Easy ability to commute to other cities vs. bigger place and more distance to other cities
-Easy escape to the mountains from wherever you are vs. depends on where you live
-Scooters vs. lack of them
-Higher education levels in Taiwan
-Many temples vs. a lack of them
Honestly the list can go on and on. When I tell people in Mainland China what differences I see between Taiwan and the Mainland however, very few agree and say the two places are very different. Instead they adamantly claim that both places are extremely similar, as if saying they have cultural differences was an insult to them.
