[Migrated, see pinned post] Casual Conversation

His trusted source is a German man that doesn't speak chinese, has never been to china and uses satellital pictures of buildings in construction as proof, like it is eyeopening how much media buzz someone as unserious as Adrian Zenz has only because he preached the "china bad" narrative.

Lol. Alright I’ll try to be as vague as possible while still trying to respect those involved.

My wife is in an industry where she has a lot of knowledge in what she went to college for. She had a friend living in China at the time (caucasian), who was also in the same field. The company her friend worked for offered to pay for my wife’s travel and expenses to work for them (Research and Development) on a contract job for two weeks. This company was Chinese, with Chinese workers. I believe there was only one other caucasian person in the mix at the gym (aside from her friend)

From the get go, it was a problem. My wife is caucasian and does not speak the language. Cheng Du where she needed to go. She had to do a connecting flight on the way there in China. It was very difficult to navigate and no one would help her. She eventually managed to get where she needed to go.

Once she was there. It was a nightmare. My wife is in the fitness industry. She has a degree in exercise science and kinesiology. This should give you a frame of reference for how healthy she lives her life and how fit she is. While in china, men would get off their bikes, take pictures of her, point and laugh. I believe they called her Fat tan farmer, far farmer or big lady. Again, my wife is lean and not fat in any way, but China’s standards of what the human body should look like seems insane. Everyone was paper thin. The gym she was working for had banned weights in their gym, weights!

It was very difficult to interact with people at all. Going to starbucks for example, they would either ignore her to her face and have people skip her or go into the back to hide from her. She was under the impression she would have a guide with her most of the time, but that was not the case. They took her out to dinner once, and that was it, they left her to fend on her own. She was not used to the fact that over there, red traffic lights are merely a suggestion (though this aspect is many counties)

The conditions of the area were extreme and changed from block to block. Some streets would have slums and stores made out of sheets of metal right across the street from what look like a 4 star hotel. Where she stayed was a more safe area (where her friend lived). It’s overcast there from pollution or whatever, that If the sun came out people dropped what they were doing to take pictures of it. And it wasn’t even that impressive compared to what we see in the US. It happened twice in the two weeks she was there.

The thing that finally broke her situation was that they handed her thousands of dollars in cash with the directive to go back to the US and go to other gyms, so she secretly record, steal their ideas and report back to them. I guess thinking about it now, they basically wanted her to be a spy for them. The whole experience strained the friendship between her and her friend, they argued and never spoke again after this trip.

Finally on her way back, she had her final surprise. My wife is generally a nervous flyer, and this event put her off from flying for a bit. On her plane back (she can’t remember what company) while they were passing over Japan, they hit the most turbulence she had ever been on. The plan started to violently shake and lose control, the oxygen masks deployed and everyone started crying. She honestly thought she was going to die and this was it. Obviously she made it home, but she’s never going back. I’ve always wanted to visit Japan, but the thought of flying that long and even entering Asia is still traumatizing to her.

Well said