These are not the kinds of stories that I typically pay attention to:
The reason is simple: these are what I call “outlier” stories. They make for incredible headlines that get people to click and say, “Hey, you gotta come read this” (or to click “forward”). They are great for selling advertising space–
–but they are meaningless.
When you get over a billion people, you could probably find a 1-in-a-billion-story every day. Given the 400+ million Chinese online now, the odds of that story bubbling to the “top” are fairly good. All it needs is to get decent traction on a Chinese social network, and thence to a Chinese news site, and thence to a global news site, and you’ve got a story.
But it is meaningless because it’s no more than a 1-in-a-billion story. If a meaningful trend impacts at least 1 or 2% of society, then in China it has to affect 10 million people. A drought, a famine, a major political uprising in a large city, a disease–these are the kinds of things that are important.
People doing something stupid that will haunt them for the rest of their life, but which most sane people know instantly not to do–these are not the stories that I focus my attention on. And really, you probably shouldn’t be spending very much time on them either. They shouldn’t shape your opinion about China (or about any other world region) because they are not representative of Chinese people as a whole.
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