Hello World!
I am Alessio, an Italian Expat currently living in Shanghai, and I work as an Industrial Engineer here.
I have a strong passion for different Cultures. Many events brought me to visit China several times, and eventually to live here, at least for a part of my life.
Here you can find out more about this blog idea and about its title, The Eurasian Efficient Frontier.
Hope you will like it! Share your feedback with us!
Alessio
Who is the Page “Life in China” for?
This Page is for open minded people who would like to understand China from a European / Western perspective. This Page is also for Chinese people who would like to understand what foreigners think and feel about living in their country.
Disclaimer: I am by no means an expert about China or a Sinologist. Even my language knowledge is not that advanced.
Such a large country, with such a huge population cannot be easily understood. Its deep and ancient history and culture are so far from Western ones, and it can feel (and feels) overwhelming. The end result is often surprise, misunderstanding, simplification, and in the end stereotype creation.
Actually, the more I live here and the more I study, the less I feel I know. I constantly feel that I just scratched the surface.
See how to compare countries real size here: https://www.thetruesize.com
China is a very, very important country in the global scenario and it will be more and more in the future. We as Europeans (and Western people in general) should try our best to understand this country, but in general I feel we don’t put much effort in it.
China, like every country in this world, is not perfect. On the opposite, it has many problems. However, common people in the West have a very distorted idea about tit.
During my first trip in China, in 2016, I felt shocked by how different China was compared to how I imagined it, based on my Western knowledge (and bias). I felt tricked by my own Culture and Media system, which led me to have a very incorrect idea of this large part of the world (around 18.5% world population lives here, as of April 2023).
This first trip literally changed the way I see the world. I felt so much more awareness, and I clearly feel as my life divided in two sections by this trip, a “before” and a “after”. I will definitely write about this in a dedicated post.
I think that the only way to experience such a different country and to try to understand it is to try be like an Empty Cup. A cup empty from prejudice can easily welcome and be filled by new different habits, flavours, tastes, sounds, noises.
We should try not to have any prejudice. Our glasses must not be coloured with a “Western-Filter”, they must be transparent.
In the end, we must be children again. Children have not built a strong Cultural Superstructure yet, and don’t know racism. They naturally accept the world as it is, without many prejudices (they did not have much time to develop them!). And this approach is the key to learning – which is what I am trying to do everyday, and that I would like to share with this blog.
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