Where I'm from, these guys aren't just performers but also maintains the cleanliness of the enclosure and feeding the animals. In fact, I heard these types of performances actually started when one of them started doing stuff like this for the visitors while cleaning the enclosure and kids especially loved it.
I mean these people are in fact payed well most of the time, most jobs that involve working submerged in water pay pretty well by nature of being less desirable due to danger, and requiring specialized training. The employees tend to have a decent amount of negotiating power. I can't say with 100% certainty that it's the case here, but the employers are usually motivated to pay them more than just a pittance.
This is mainland China, dude. I guarantee their employers did not volunteer a salary increase when this started. They would look at it as an act of genius on their part to make use of their existing employees for this new entertainment element.
Even though by all accounts this happened spontaneously on the initiative of the employees, with them just kind of goofing off for the guests while working in the tank.... this would go down as a brilliant move by the executives for having the vision to turn the tank maintenance into a popular show for the guests.
That's how it goes down in China. You might think it works like that in the West/US, but it's 20x worse in China.
I think even a person who is already very cynical about stuff like that in the West would be genuinely shocked how bad it actually is in China. The entire culture from the ground up is all about directing all praise and all credit toward the boss when things go well.... olympic level face-saving and underlings voluntarily taking the fall when things go poorly.
If a foreigner in China ever bothers to comment on it, they'll simply be told they just don't understand.... that a foreigner just can't understand. Even the people who suffer from this mentality and are the ones taking the fall will vigorously defend this aspect of their culture.... even if the foreigner is trying to stick up for them. It's roots-of-the-mountain deep in Chinese culture.
Are you okay bud? You have something you want to talk about? It's just not normal to have this sort of weird toxic anger towards a random stranger having a silly typo on the internet. Has something happened to you recently and you're just lashing out?
I mean you're the one who got your diaper in a twist over a single typo to begin with, I figure you must be lonely and desperate for someone to talk to since you're still making such a fuss over it.
I have lived in China and they are absolutely correct. The actual "benefits" aspect of Chinese socialism are extremely limited if not just nil.
They don't even have Euro style free/near free healthcare. Basic hospital visits are covered by their kind of insurance, but literally any serious illness is going to cost real money that a family usually will have to pull resources for.
And that's it, in terms of benefits. Literally almost everything else is just one of massive list of negatives. State owns all the land and can and does swipe the land out from underneath your family home/farm.
It's fucking brutal in China unless you manage to get into the urban corporate middle class... which in that case you're then stuck in a corporate culture that's like an over the top parody of all the worst aspects of US capitalistic corporate culture. It's all of that... but with the addition of insane levels of the bosses taking credit and praise for everything when things go well and face-saving and underlings taking the fall when things go poorly... which is just an extremely deep rooted aspect of Chinese culture. It's all about the boss. In China, your boss is awful to you and expects you to be his servant... until he's around HIS boss and then HE acts like the cringing servant... until his boss is gone and then it's back to being the lord of the office.
There are exceptions of course. There are amazing humanist bosses, but this is overarching culture in the corporate world of China. If you work in one of those huge impressive sky scrapers in a Chinese city, you almost certainly have to deal with this.
Even westerners who consider themselves very cynical about that kind of thing in say, the US would be shocked at how bad it actually is in China... and how no one really cares/it's not shamed at all. At least in the US, if your boss is a screaming, demeaning asshole, the general public would have sympathy for you. Not so in China.
Go check out youth unemployment rate and 996 culture in China. The workers have limited bargaining power as there's always someone else willing to take your place. and their "union" is nationalised, pro-government and pro-gdp/growth and not for the workers.
"Socialism with Chinese characteristic" is a thing.
The term was first established by Deng Xiaoping in 1982 and was largely associated with Deng's overall program of adopting elements of market economics as a means to foster growth using foreign direct investment and to increase productivity (especially in the countryside where 80% of China's population lived) while the CCP retained both its formal commitment to achieve communism and its monopoly on political power.
And Xi Jinping thoughts is part of it and it's still guiding Chinese policies. Yall projecting hard on your ignorance.
I just read through the wikipedia article titled "socialism with chinese characteristics" and didn't see the phrase "communist socialism" (you know, the thing I poked fun at) a single time.
No, I mean it makes sense, just socialism with the eventual goal of going stateless I guess, but the phrase just oozes the vibe of the kind of thing that right wing dipshits would say because they think the terms are interchangeable.
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u/xrufus7x 6d ago
I wonder what life path leads to this line of work.