this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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Sino
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Wasn't all that stuff made in Hong Kong before the handover?
Yes but I'm not sure if I'd date it to the handover. It must have been many years later things started to decline in this area? The handover was 1997 and China was definitely still "cool" when Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was released in 2000.
EDIT: At a vague guess I think things were still fine in 2002-2003? Something happened then to sharply affect opinion here in the UK which was generally not negative at all, in 2002 UK opinion was 16% negative and 65% favourable. China was legitimately regarded as cool in people's minds.
Propaganda machine go brrrr, Ive never seen any big news network talk about china in good light or even neutral in the last 20 years. The BBC filter with forests all greyed out comes to mind. I guess thats when the US saw that economic liberalization in China would not go the way they wanted and the economic balcanization would not happen.
Idk the only way I have learned about China in some objective way has been with raw economic stats that contradict every "The Economist China will fall" news article while in a 5-20% yearly GDP growth for 20 years. And then I joined this place which has helped me getting rid of liberal brainworms I still had in my mind, the day I actually read the USSR and Chinese constitutions I just read every line thinking "Based" in my mind.
Back to topic, last month I just saw some Chinese anime about Chinese god power scaling but it was about some Victorian era detectives, and the production quality was good, so I guess they are building something up although they dont seem to catch as much atention, I just saw it on my stremio in the most seeded section.
It's the 2008 Summer Olympics. That was around the time when people were finally exposed to what China was actually like instead of thinking Chinese people were still riding bicycles like Chun Li's stage from SF2. You started getting press about how China's air pollution was akin to breathing in car exhaust. Add in the Great Recession where the West is no longer secure about its place in the world and Obama's pivot to Asia, and it's not difficult to see how people perception of China would deteriorate.
A lot of graphs have the same pattern: a bump in unfavorability around 2008 and a bigger bump in unfavorability around 2020.
I do think you're on to something.