TecRah

Understanding leads to greater peace.

There is a grim story in the Old Testament book of Genesis about a time when mankind banded together in hopes of building a tower to heaven called the Tower of Babel. However, God stopped this plan by making it difficult for humans to communicate with each other because they spoke different languages, thus dividing the human race, and the Tower of Babel project failed.

This is a religious story as well as an allegorical one, with a transcendental moral that transcends time and reaches humanity itself.

The interesting part of the story is not only the dream of the unity of all mankind, but also the second half of the story, in which mankind is divided because of its inability to communicate with each other.

The dream of great unity has almost never been realized in human history, the short-lived Comintern is like the ravings of a patient who has returned to his senses, and we are used to convincing each other of the impracticality of this ideal. But what we can’t have is always on the move, and the Wandering Earth series scratches that itch of the unattainable.

Perhaps the only limitation of the Tower of Babel story today is that God could not have imagined that even if human beings do speak the same language, there are 10,000 ways in which they can disagree with each other.

But rather counter-intuitively, it’s amazing that we’ve actually seen the beginnings of a great unity of all mankind, like a dream, in the Little Red Book lately.

We’ve already written a post about the large number of foreigners on Little Red Book a few days ago .

Normally, the follow-up of this matter, in fact, are left to the readers to complete the rest of the exploration, after all, we can not guarantee that everyone’s interest, whether or not always focused on this matter. But what happened next was far beyond our expectations, and what we thought was just a big Internet spectacle for the world’s netizens became more and more a vision of how human beings can truly connect with each other.

We see Americans helping Chinese people with their English homework, as if they have a different kind of thirst.

We see Chinese people helping Americans with their Chinese homework, with S H E’s Chinese words playing on a loop in their heads.

We see a huge crowd of strangers come to the Internet space that already has a fixed atmosphere, and the conflicts and barriers that should have appeared originally are dissolved under the behavior of paying cat tax. When you see the surprise reaction of foreign netizens when they receive the certificate of cat tax payment, you will realize that friendly human communication is far simpler than imagined.

In 2014, Tim Berners Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, conducted a question and answer session on Reddit, in which people asked him what surprised him about the Internet, and what were the reasons for people to go online that he had never envisioned.

Many people pressed on, guessing it had to be Porn, and his answer turned out to be Kittens the cat.

Ten years after that answer, across the pond on the Little Red Book, we are once again witnessing the power of Cat Kittens In a way, I think Cat Kittens deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.

None of us could have imagined that the switch to peaceful communication would be flipped by Cat.

Seeing the cat tax on the Little Red Book reminded me of this photo. I took it on my push-button cell phone over a decade ago of a cat I had in my old yard, and I still remember it biting me when I was pregnant

Similarly, none of us expected that after crossing those entertaining netizen exchanges, the first thing that became the theme of communication between China and foreign countries would be reconciliation .

A long time ago, we thought that the huge flow of information brought by the Internet could help us realize more quickly what the real world is like. But up to now, due to the excessive mixed information, it is hard to say what we realize is the real world.

The recent Los Angeles fire in the United States is an event that has attracted quite a bit of attention, and in an effort to dramatize the tragedy of the fire, there are a lot of marketing numbers reproducing the video of that famous Hollywood sign being engulfed in flames.

However, I noticed that a very ordinary American netizen stood right under the sign and shot a small video, telling everyone that although the fire was tragic, the sign was in fact nothing, and at the same time, using a shrug of the shoulders and a surprised expression to express his speechlessness to the fake news circulating on the marketing channels.

The discrepancy is quite interesting. It clearly points out that in the current age of the Internet, we want to recognize the real world, but has a different difficulty than before. How to cross the barriers of falsehood is always a head-scratcher.

The Great Reconciliation Movement started on Xiaohongshu is, to some extent, an attack on this false barrier.

Until now, we didn’t really know anything about life overseas, and the physical distance actually gave us more access to the real thing, but the mixed messages still created confusing perceptions.

Magazines that ate the dividends of their time, such as Yilin Reader, created the illusion that the foreign moon was full.

The various realities of Rune’s adventures both dispel some of the overly glamorized imagery and build another layer of misery.

The overseas life portrayed by these two extreme channels is in fact equally strange. They both borrow a certain kind of exaggerated narrative to put a veil of curiosity or admiration over the most mundane and ordinary life. The output is the same illusion.

In the case of Little Red Book, the illusion is shattered by a large number of real ordinary people’s lives in a way that breaks down the cleverness with force. Through a very simple and direct way, we exchanged information with many overseas netizens about the most common daily life of clothes, clothing, housing and transportation, and learned about the most common aspects of each other’s lives.

In his highly idealized poem “Facing the Sea, Blossoming Flowers in Spring”, after the first line “From tomorrow onwards, be a happy man”, Hai Zi starts with “From tomorrow onwards” for the second time and talks about caring for food and vegetables. He has many simple descriptions of the ideal life, and this line about food and vegetables is the most basic knowledge about food. What starts from eating is the most basic life for everyone.

The same is true for the reconciliation of the Little Red Book.

The first question that everyone is most concerned about is the income and expenditure that sustains daily life. Subsequently, what we get from it is a truth that the gap between the rich and the poor is far beyond imagination.

The official microblog of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing posted an article on January 13th, stating that by the end of 2023, the average U.S. household will have a net worth of nearly $1.2 million, which is the total value of savings, real estate, automobiles, and other assets owned by the household. However, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve in 2022, the median net worth of U.S. households is actually only $192,000, meaning that half of all households have a net worth below that number.

The gap between the median and the average is more than $1 million, and the naked and exaggerated gap between the rich and the poor is thus revealed.

The personal narratives of everyone in this great reconciliation between China and the United States are footnotes to this data.

We see that many ordinary people still earn less than $40,000 a year, and a large number of people earn less than $4,000 a month before taxes, and even couples earn less than $5,000 a month together, which is grossly inconsistent with our imagination of what people in rich countries earn.

While even a monthly income of $3,000 is still a high income earner in the country of over $20,000 according to the exchange rate, we need to reciprocate by considering that their expenditures are similarly at an extremely high level.

For comparison, I checked my personal income tax app, and the times I paid the highest taxes last year, the taxes were around 3 of my pre-tax income, and in most cases 1 or even less. Based on my observation of the Chinese Internet, my income is around the average, so this number should be representative.

But what we see of the American people’s tax situation is much more than that. According to a netizen on NGA who has worked in US tax-related jobs, the situation of American people’s taxes accounting for 20 to 30 percent of their income abounds.

Image courtesy of NGA

Layers and layers of taxes have become the first difficult hurdle in front of every American. The domestic Internet often jokes that the U.S. Revenue Service is scarier than the FBI, and with such a high percentage of taxpayers, that joke takes on a bit more bitterness.

Little red book on the American Internet is not no high-income people, we can observe some cases of more than $ 10,000 a month, but their income in the deduction of taxes and some monthly insurance bills, often need to cut in half.

With high taxes, domestic netizens have invariably discovered that income is actually a common predicament faced by all. American netizens who were crying about not only being underpaid for a full-time job, but also not having had a raise in pay for years, were embraced by Chinese netizens who were in the same predicament, in the comments section.

However, after everyone further compared to the cost of living, domestic netizens found that for Americans, in fact, more difficult always in the next level The American people face monthly mandatory expenditure items, many of which are so expensive that domestic netizens are surprised.

In China, if your rent is more than 30% of your income, you are basically in a tight spot. However, in our observation, rent accounted for more than 50 percent of the income of the American people, can be said to abound.

In many extreme cases, it’s even 70 to 80 percent.

The word insane was used when we saw domestic netizens with incomes of more than $2,000 paying only a couple hundred dollars in rent.

Domestic netizens can’t help but wonder what kind of house Americans are living in that they need to pay such high rents, and as a result of some exchanges, only to find out that they are not living in any kind of gold or silver nests, but just a little better shared apartments. In this case alone, they need to carry a rent several times higher than the domestic one.

With such a burden, they also need to face high insurance costs, such as health insurance, pension insurance, vehicle insurance, as well as all kinds of utility bills, Internet bills, vehicle maintenance fees, etc. It should be noted that due to the large size of the place and the poor public transportation, vehicle-related expenses for Americans is a necessity, rather than the same as in the country, which is used to enhance the sense of well-being of the expenditure.

The triviality of miscellaneous expenses is a fact of life that must be faced, but after crossing over to expenses such as rent and taxes and insurance, we haven’t really touched on the key expenses needed for survival Food. After seeing the high cost of living of the American people, domestic netizens are incredibly concerned about their food and vegetables.

In the past perception of many domestic netizens, the Engel’s Coefficient of the United States of America has always been in a relatively low state, for example, in 2020, the Economist announced that the Engel’s Coefficient of the United States of America is about seven.

Legends about the cheapness of American food have always been passed down in our folklore, such as the many stories about the $1 burger. But in this Great Reconciliation, that part of the story was quickly done away with. While there are variations from region to region, prices are not as low as that level.

Just looking at the fast food part of McDonald’s and other fast food, in some areas with lower prices, McDonald’s special burgers can go as low as $3 without tax, the small amount of poor man’s package can go as low as $5, and the regular package is around $15.

In cities like Seattle, where a regular cheeseburger can cost around $9 per unit is the norm, the regional differences are significant and consistent with the country.

From these shares, we can see that fast food, which is the cheapest in the social dietary structure, is not actually cheap enough for everyone to casually afford it. For people earning $3,000 to $4,000 a month, a meal that removes more than a dozen dollars is not so easily affordable.

A menu of American-style Chinese food

And if we don’t opt for fast food and return to a normal diet, crossing over the prices of the more trivial ingredients, we are able to see that most Americans describe food as basically too expensive. Our perception that meat is cheap but vegetables are expensive is that meat is expensive, but vegetables are more expensive.

When reconciled to the food, clothing, housing, transportation and other specific needs of life, many domestic netizens have been surprised at how Americans actually survive. It is as if, very often, the average income of the American people, when paying for the cost of living, is already in a state of extreme reluctance.

This surprise is amplified to the limit when we learn about their other two mountains of life.

The burden of tuition and medical bills that they have to face in their lives is often unimaginable to netizens living in China. When asked if they can still save money in this state of life, they will tell you that the situation could be worse, and some of them even need to choose between health insurance and tuition loans.

Due to the popularity of compulsory education and the many years the country has spent building up the education system, tuition isn’t such a hefty burden for the average family in the country. But for the average American citizen, the high cost of tuition is almost a nightmare.

Many students must resort to tuition loans to attend school, and it is the norm to carry more than a hundred thousand dollars in debt while attending college.

Moreover, these loans are not interest-free like those in the United States. On the contrary, tuition loans in the United States usually carry extremely high interest rates. The calculation of interest is extremely complicated, and due to my weak knowledge of finance, I must admit that I don’t understand it very well. But there are some facts that can be visualized to support our imagination of their difficulties in repaying tuition loans.

For example, the widely publicized story of Obama paying off his tuition loans into his forties.

There are many overseas users on the Little Red Book who are also quite direct in saying that many of their fathers and mothers paid back their tuition loans into their twenties and thirties.

Because of the difficulty in affording tuition in the United States, after reconciling their accounts, some American netizens have tried to seek the help of Chinese netizens in order to complete their desired degrees in China.

Similarly, the healthcare system in China is actually running far more smoothly and well than in the United States, thanks to the healthcare system, although we often complain about healthcare convenience-related topics. The cost of healthcare in the US is so expensive that it borders on a straw man for us here at home.

Medical bills in the US are so exaggerated that they have basically reached some sort of witch hunt. On the Little Red Book, you can see birth bills as high as $600,000 and ambulance bills that cost two to three thousand dollars for a single trip out of the car.

American netizens are crying out in extremely general terms about how the high cost of healthcare is too much for them to afford, and the difficulty they have when trying to get their health insurance to match up to the vast array of medical billing programs.

Last month, I wrote about Luigi Mangione, the criminal who assassinated the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. In the wake of the Great Reconciliation Campaign, we all have a clearer sense of why the American public so commonly refers to him as the Robin Hood of our time.

Reconciliation, in all its aspects, is constantly breaking down the information gap between us and each other in our daily lives.

Never before in history has there been such an exchange of views among the public that can so visually show us that no matter what land and culture they live in, the lives of the majority of ordinary people are in fact equally difficult, and this is the true picture of modern civilization.

It’s true that the American people have a relatively easy school life, at least they do get out of school at 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon. But in contrast, the extremely high cost of tuition actually makes it so that most of the general public, they probably can’t afford to go to school at all.

Some of the American people do enjoy more favorable working conditions. But accordingly, when it’s time to work overtime, they, like their domestic counterparts, face a stressful overtime life that has no bounds.

Those so-called jobs that require only a few hours of work a day are often just part-time jobs. The reason for such short working hours is that employers are reluctant to hire full-time staff. Such jobs often make it impossible for them to afford the cost of living, so it is quite common for Americans to work several jobs at the same time.

Twenty years ago, Mr WONG Tze-wah, in his Dondo joke No use for charcoal No use for carbon, once made a remark that in the early years of Hong Kong, if you had four needs, namely, food, clothing, housing and transportation, you would need at least four jobs. If you only had one job, then you were very Yin Kung Cantonese colloquialisms to describe misery.

I have always thought that this is just an exaggerated segment that exists in talk shows, but after seeing the descriptions of the lives of the American people on Little Red Book, I realized that this is actually the most everyday description of life Without two jobs, many Americans would indeed be unable to live.

I work overtime a lot at my full-time job, but never at my part-time job, and I couldn’t live without two jobs!

Sometimes the disconnect between two groups often stems from a lack of understanding of each other and a difficulty in empathizing with the plight of both sides. With the differences, both sides often pick the wrong stance in the conversation or walk into the blind spot of arrogance.

But in this reconciliation, all barriers are dissolved by the sharing of life. The descriptions of life’s dilemmas down to the most detailed level drew us closer to the most peaceful of contexts about sharing each other’s lives. We have our hard lives, and they have the difficulties they face.

And in the process, we see Americans’ most honest accounts of their lives, and see that they, like us, seek the comfort of the most common nipple joys in the face of irresistible pressures of life.

Translation Some people will say it’s your fault you’re having a bad life . So they don’t want to help. That’s why we love apps like TikTok that make us laugh for a while

Resonance in the dimension of the human condition that allows one to let go of the ideological spectrum The choice of political positions The viewpoints on social events. Add-ons beyond survival, and return to caring about people into a genuine exchange.

This sincerity creates a peaceful atmosphere for this exchange between China and foreign countries.

In all fairness, in these two days on the Little Red Book, you will be surprised to find that everyone has always maintained the most basic friendliness and understanding of each other during the exchange.

What’s more interesting is that this kind of peace exists not only in the communication with foreigners, but also in our communication with each other.

Discussions about income, house, standard of living, and other factors can often lead to bitter arguments in the domestic public opinion environment.

But in the little red book these days, everyone is calmly communicating, friendly and embracing their own lives. You can see that underneath the topics of what kind of house you live in and what kind of food you eat, there are actually more portraits of people’s lives in China, and people leave behind more realistic and everyday exchanges.

This is not only a harmonious communication between Chinese and foreigners, but also a reconciliation that exists within us.

In an environment where there are no opinion leaders and no traffic anxiety, everyone is sharing very easily, as if patting each other on the shoulder and praising each other’s efforts in life in general.

In the Internet quagmire of recent years, this kind of peaceful exchange has become almost impossible, and it existed in the distant past, in an earlier and friendlier era of the Internet. In some people’s perception, this kind of peace is even just an illusion, and where there are people, there will always be meaningless and endless quarrels.

But in the past few days, a tower of Babel, jointly constructed by Chinese and foreign netizens, has really been built up little by little on Xiaohongshu.

The pain of life will not be blamed, niche hobbies can be tolerated, and even find a lot of fellow enthusiasts.

Many people in my circle of friends have seen more overseas communities about games, Star Wars, Warhammer 40K and other cultures on the Little Red Book these days. One friend is even directionally training his Little Red Book to be a core delivery area for Star Wars content.

In the midst of this, I’ve seen a lot of meaningful responses.

One foreign netizen asked domestic netizens in a very American style whether there were also DND culture communities in China, and whether this would appear to be very Nerd-like nerds in China, a very special image in the American community culture, which is basically unrecognized in China. As a result, there was a wonderful comment from a domestic netizen below, who said

Dude, we’re Asian, we’re born Nerd.

There is also a foreign netizen, asked the domestic is not also love to drink whiskey, the results of their blended whiskey and a single whiskey taste difference and disagreement, I saw a domestic netizen very nonchalant said the subject like Jack Daniels a whiskey brand like shit, only a single whiskey is good taste.

Identity, culture, cognition, language, none of these are barriers to our communication with each other, and our discussions with each other are only about preferences, fun, and the most everyday communication!

In normal times, we call this communication between friends.

All of this is as beautiful as an illusion, and the unity of the world’s people, which we regard as an unattainable ideal, is staged in the Little Red Book in such an uneventful manner.

Many people think that this is just a sweet period between two netizens, and then sooner or later this foreigner craze will recede under the obstacles of unfamiliar environment, unfamiliar rules and unfamiliar culture.

Moreover, although TikTok, which caused all this to happen, has now officially announced its shutdown in the United States. In the future, it is still unknown whether TikTok will resume its services in the United States. If TikTok resumes service in the U.S. in the future, it is also true that everything that has been played out on Xiaohongshu so far could easily be like a bubble that bursts as soon as it is poked.

And, there are many people who believe that in this big environment, there are still many real foreign trolls who have not discovered this place, and if they are captured by them, Little Red Book will sooner or later become the next global Internet puddle.

But that’s not really too much of a problem Every time in the history of mankind that this kind of phantom dream has happened, brief or not, it’s been immensely valuable.

In this wave, we’re actually caring about the people of the world, who are just like us, and the actual difficulties of life.

We can also see the gentle sentiments of so many American people, in this sincere communication.

This experience of crossing barriers and truly connecting with each other is one of the few times that we have seen reality on the Internet in a way that we have never seen it before.

Even though it may be fleeting, it is still real in this moment.

As Mr. Dirtbike said.

In this great exchange between Chinese and foreign netizens, there is a conversation that is extremely impressive. A forty-year-old Chinese netizen recalled how, when he was twelve years old, he once wrote a letter to Jim or Lucy, a junior high school student far away in the United States, in response to a school project.

After more than twenty years, an American netizen with Jim as his middle name said to him under his message

Your letters were great!