If you watch videos on Chinese TikTok, there's a lot of...
Is that just... it's like, which is RedNote.
Yeah, it's a... sometimes I feel like you, like you...
Eugene, oh my god, you have such a good accent.
Yeah. No, seriously. Seriously, you could, you could go to Chinese TV and be...
Oh, damn. Damn. Oh, no. Eugene, excuse me. A wise man once said, 'Compliments are best when they are shared with others.' So, please, Ellis, please carry on. Carry on.
This is What Now with Trevor Noah.
Ellis was telling me an interesting story, but...
I didn't... I, no, I didn't want to come and repeat it, but yeah, because also...
There's one thing about compliments: they are better when they are shared.
Just like conspiracy theories, or sometimes charges when they're being pressed against you, like him too. He was there.
I've never heard that one. Compliments are like conspiracy theories.
No, that's what I'm saying. I've never heard that. I like that. I like that. That's a fresh one.
Alice, go ahead. Tell him.
Oh, so I got the email from you guys two weeks ago and I legitimately thought it was a scam. I was thinking, why the heck is Trevor Noah, A, interested in China, and B, why is his team emailing me? And so I sat on it for two days thinking this is just, this is probably another one of those AI scam artists that are just creating random emails out there for people.
You okay? You've made me realize something. I think you're not, you are not the first, second, nor third, nor fourth person who said this. I need to find a different way to reach out to people then, because I, because DM...
Because many people think that when we're reaching out, it's a scam.
Yeah, but DMs are the original authenticator.
Okay. So in the DM, you know it's true, right? Alice, if, if you had gotten a DM from him, would you get the blue tick verified? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. On Instagram. Yeah.
Yeah. I never... Well, I'm glad you didn't think it was a scam, or I'm glad that you were naive enough for the scam.
I did, I did due diligence, so I went and LinkedIn-profiled the guy and then the team working, you know, your team and...
Yeah, this is too much work. This is way too much work and I apologize.
No, not at all. I mean, this is so fun to get to come here. I'm just really a huge fan of both of you.
Oh, I mean, I'm a huge fan of your work because you, you know, as you said, you're an expert in probably one of the most complicated topics that the world has ever dealt with, and that is not relationships, but that is one of them, Eugene. But in many ways, actually, Alice is a relationship expert.
It's just a different type of relationship: geopolitical relationship.
Um, no, but, but, but you, you are considered an expert on China, which is... Am I correct in saying it is one of the most complicated countries to actually be an expert in because of how multi-layered it is?
I completely agree, and we were just talking earlier how my pet peeve is the amount of white people that write about China without having ever gone or lived there.
And they have a framework by which they analyze China. They think it's the next Soviet Union. They think it's the next Imperial Germany. And my real stick is, you've got to, and you probably understand this better than most people, you've got to understand the culture from the ground up to really understand what the country is about. And it's a very complicated, diverse history and culture. It's entirely relevant in this new technological geopolitical age. But I think you're completely right. It's one of the hardest countries to get right, and increasingly so in the last decade, because A, people aren't traveling in the way that they used to. B, Western journalists aren't living there. Some were kicked out. And C, just in general, people have this ideological frameworking and fearmongering about China without really trying to understand it.
Did you see that trip recently where a few US, I don't know if they were senators or just Congress people, went to China? It was their first time, which also shocked me, by the way.
It shocked you that Americans left America.
Don't do that, bro. You both of you, don't do that. Don't do that. Hey, I had a bento box for lunch.
I don't know what that is.
How close I am to another country.
You, you... to the culture. You had a Korean, you had a Korean meal and now you're close to China.
You're part of the problem, buddy.
Um, no. I was shocked that lawmakers could go to China for the first time. And I mean like deep into their tenure, like deep, deep. These people have been serving in Congress forever. This was their first trip to China. And then while they were there, they were just mesmerized by everything. And they came back saying, 'Yeah, well, I mean, China wasn't... I didn't expect it and I couldn't believe what they're doing out there.' And you know, I mean, there's a lot of things. I've got a new perspective on China. I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait. I understand if an idiot like me is living at home and has an opinion on China, right? That's fine. It's not great, but it's fine. If you are making laws and you're deciding policies between yourself and China, and you know nothing about China, like what are we doing? Do you know what I mean?
Yeah. Yeah. 100%. And I love that imagery of Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, marveling at the ceiling as he goes into Beijing during the Trump-Xi summit. But that really sums it up. I think since COVID, people haven't really been traveling to China in the same way. Now that's changed in the last year or two because there's now visa-free travel policies and now it's trending 'China maxing' to go to China.
Did that really happen because of iShowSpeed?
I think, yeah, I think he's a huge star, by the way, in China, and I love that.
That's insane that that happened.
But he's not the only one. There's a ton of American vloggers, you can see this across YouTube, who in the last 18 months have been going to China, getting huge views just showing... because China compared to Japan is way cheaper and it's one of those underdog tourism destinations. It's been so developed since COVID, the internal domestic tourism industry, the logistics, the transport. So when people go there, they're so shocked that China's not the China of the 2010s. You know, remember the Beijing Olympics and people were talking about pollution and it was still...
There was so much smog that people were saying they were afraid that the athletes wouldn't be able to run, they wouldn't... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So it's changed a huge amount, even in the last 10 years. But to add to your point, Trevor, my problem is that they A, don't go there, and B, they don't really do the hard work of trying to understand both the intentions and capabilities of the Chinese government and the people. We'll give you a really good example. So the semiconductor policy that the Trump administration and the Biden administration put in, they thought it would be very, very easy to just cut off the hardware side of AI development, mainly the chips, and that China would be behind. China would have no hope of ever catching up. Fast forward a decade, and you know, China's only a couple months lagging behind the frontier models in America. Huawei just announced that in the next couple years it will do under 2nm chip production, which is as competitive as TSMC. That I think is so different from what people would have expected because they're not going to China. They're not understanding what's actually happening at the government level, but also in the companies. The companies like Huawei, like SMIC, which is another chip company, Alibaba, ByteDance, they're hugely innovative companies, not just the kind of imitative China that we're so used to.
Well, I think it's because people keep an idea of a place or a people as they first learned of them.
Mhm. And I think we're all guilty of this in some way, shape, or form. Like in South Africa, one of the main things people would think about when they think about China is fake goods.
You know what I mean? Hong Kong.
No, no, no. I would have thought...
What would you have thought?
I mean, fine. Carry on. But no, but I'm serious. You're not wrong. It was Kung Fu movies.
It was Kung Fu movies. Drunken Master.
Yeah. Drunken Master. Jackie Chan, of course. Chan came later, though. But yeah, but I mean for us it was...
Bruce Lee and then Jackie Chan and then... Yeah. All of... I mean, this was like our world.
Yeah. Then it became fake goods.
And not even like a negative way. It was just like they're just the best at making fake goods.
But I think a lot of the world sort of stopped there.
And they were like, 'Oh, China, the place that makes things, cheap things, toys, and fake goods.' And that's where China's identity stopped.
Yeah. And to your point, it feels like either just in silence or when nobody was paying attention, China just leapfrogged. I was watching a video. I was showing you, I was telling you about this. I was watching a video about some guy who lives in Shenzhen. And this is a white American guy who grew up in Colorado and he lived in like a small town. And he's just, he's not even like showing off the place. He's just like, 'Hey, I just want to show you guys like how I live and my vibe out here and the technology that he's showing, the lifestyle, the style, the cost of living, the style of living, like how people are.' And he doesn't, he doesn't like flower over things. He's like, 'Oh, certain things are really strict.' And then he's like other things, people are riding scooters, like mopeds wherever they want. And so he's being, from what I could see, relatively honest about his experience. But I won't lie, even watching that, I was like, 'Oh man, I didn't know that about China, and I didn't know that about China, and I didn't know that about China. I didn't know that about China.' And I was just like, 'Have we been living in like a dark ages of China information?'
I like the way you said that. I think so. But it's starting to change. Haven't you noticed on your TikTok, Instagram feed, there's a lot of discussion about 'I'm living in a very Chinese time of my life,' China maxing. People are drinking warm beverages and China is living in 2030, living in the future, you know, that it's safe and clean. It's starting to pivot. And what's interesting in some of the polling data that came out from Pew is that in particular on both sides of the aisle, Dems and Republicans, Gen Z are way more favorable than the boomers. That makes sense. But that's starting to change in the sense that they are getting over time more favorable towards China. That's pretty interesting to me. I don't know how much of that is social media, you know, content driven by the stuff you see on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, but certainly I feel like in particular in the last year or two, we've had a change in opinion at just the popular level about China and that's across the board in Europe too. China's unfavorable readings were really high during COVID because obviously a lot of people blame China for it. China seemed to be screwing up the process, the response to COVID. But since then it's rebounded remarkably in terms of favorability.
Yeah. You know, that is probably the strangest thing about China. Like when I try and read about it and try and understand it, on the one hand it seems like China runs, you know, the way the Chinese government runs the country is really structured and rigid. That's how it feels for me when I see it. I'm like, okay, they have an idea of where they're trying to go. It's multigenerational. It isn't constrained by the next election or democracy or like a thing that's going to throw it...
Campaigning or elections.
Yeah. They're like, 'No, no, no. This is our long-term plan. It's going to last longer than we're even alive and this is where we're trying to get to.' But it seems very rigid. It's like strict parents. That's how I feel like. I feel like China's government is like strict parents. But then at the same time, I'll see things that China's doing where I'm like, that seems fun and rock and roll and it doesn't match up with the idea that I have of a homogeneous like strict parent, if that makes sense. And I don't know, how should we be thinking of China? Like which China is the real one? Is it the place where everyone's building everything and they're moving forward and you know there's just like a boom happening in terms of manufacturing, etc., etc., or is it the China that has like the strict government that defines how people live their lives every day?
Yeah, it's honestly a cop-out answer, but both. This is going to sound very wonky. There was a great paper by a Chinese economist over a decade ago in which he has a framework that China is a regionally distributed authoritarian regime. And what he means by that is that yes, you have the central government which historically in China has been...
There's a phrase in Chinese which is that the mountains are high but the emperor is far away. And that suggests...
Say that again. The mountains are high...
The mountains are high but the emperor is far away.
I would love that on my bio.
The mountains are high and the emperor is far. And what it means by that is yes you have central command and the emperor or in this case the central government says you should do this. These are the targets for semiconductor output. This is what growth we want. But local governments have a degree of latitude to interpret what that means and at the same time they're also experimenting. So China from the 80s onwards had, as you probably know, these special economic zones in particular the eastern provinces like Shanghai, Shenzhen. They are experimenting with innovating, being pro-business, bringing more private market entrants into the economy and that really drove, that was really the responsible driver for growth in China that cannot exist without a central government that is willing to give a degree of latitude to the local government. So yes, China is like a strict Asian parent and I know this from my own personal experience, but there's a degree...
You see, my friend Eugene doesn't, Eugene doesn't see color. That's what I love about Eugene. Eugene doesn't say... Yes. Ellis is Asian. Eugene... So because also I was raised by my TV and it was a Sony. So we have a lot in common. Japanese parents, Asian poems, Asian poems. Yeah.
But yeah, so it's, and this is my thing with a lot of Western analysis. It has a very formulaic and sometimes ideological approach to China, which is, oh, it's communist. It's Marxist-Leninist. You see this in their language. This is what they say. But really, you know, there's so much, to your point, innovation and chaos and diversity. Even, you know, the number of ethnic groups in China, the different cuisines, the different dress codes. People in Shanghai behave very differently from people in Yunnan, which tends to be a more hippie kind of area where people are wearing, you know, a lot of linen and drinking tea and eating mushrooms.
And not drug mushrooms, but actual mushrooms. It's the most biodiverse place in the world for mushrooms.
Yunnan means 'south of the clouds' and it borders Vietnam, Cambodia. It has a lot... and it's a totally different vibe. Totally different. Densest amount of minority groups in China, including Muslims. So I think people have this kind of idea that China is very homogeneous. And yes, most people look like me and they have the dark hair and this kind of skin. Right. But people come from different religious backgrounds. They practice different traditions. They, you know, eat different foods.
It's interesting because when you talk about China or when I read about China, because I'm consuming Western media, the criticisms of China will always be, yeah, China seems to be doing well and yes they've built a lot of cities and yes they've built a lot of infrastructure and yes they're doing really well in technology and yes they basically run the world's manufacturing. Yes, yes, yes, but remember there are still parts of China that are experiencing a lot of poverty and people are not moving out of the middle class and there's no boom, etc. Then what I find myself struggling with is I go, it's just interesting to me that that framing is used to label China's entire system as a failure.
But the same thing is not levied in Western countries, especially in America. So they'll go, the US, you'll be like, yeah, but people live here paycheck to paycheck. Most people are one paycheck away from poverty. Like it's, the percentage of people in the US one paycheck away from poverty, people who cannot afford their standard of living even with a full-time job is like one of the highest. But then people here will make it seem like, when the media writes about it, they'll make it seem like people have failed. They don't make it seem like the system has failed. Yeah. Yeah. So they go like, 'Yeah, well I guess, you know, some people I guess have chosen the wrong jobs or I guess they've got the wrong degree or they've got the...' So I want to know how China views its problems and like where does it diverge from the way the West portrays China's issues or problems?
Well, the West, insofar as I understand, portrays it a lot as, you know, this is the problem of authoritarianism. It's a massive struggle between democracy and authoritarian regimes.
They still see that little red book.
Yeah. Exactly. They have this kind of Maoist, Marxist-Leninist framework. Whereas in China, they're thinking about structural issues. So what I have called the four Ds are the real problems in China that policymakers understand.
And those four Ds are number one, debt. You've got debt north of 300% of GDP. That's just a little bit lower than Japan, but that's a huge amount of debt, more than the US.
Why does that matter? It matters because it crowds out investment in more efficient areas of the economy and it crowds out domestic demand, which is the second D. You know, consumption has really underwhelmed and actually is underwhelming relative to pre-COVID trend because household savings rates have gone up. Households are less, you know, less keen to spend like Americans, for instance. They don't use their credit. There's no sort of tradition of using credit cards. People are more conservative when it comes to, you know, spending of durable goods, for instance. And that has obviously got knock-on effects for the rest of the world because it means that if China wants to keep growing at 5% of GDP, then it needs to export even more to the rest of the world to maintain that growth. So it's the other side of this demand and debt problem.
So if China's population is not bearing the brunt because it's not spending as much, it's not creating as much for China's economy, then China has to get that spending outside of China.
Exactly. And the strength of the American economy is that it is consumption and services based. You guys spend so much, don't you guys?
But so the policymakers, they want to get to some version of America where they want to be more consumer services-led, but they're not willing to see, you know, a massive slowdown in growth, meaning, you know, winding down exports in order to achieve that rebalancing in the economy to be more like the American model. So it's a very difficult balancing act for the policymakers. And then the third one is one of the, I think, most challenging issues: aging population, demography. The third D is demography. The fact that, you know, now we have the lowest birth rate since 1949, on record since the communists came to power.
That's why I think you moving back home will be good to have fertility increase.
Nice young man, settle down. Leave the 40s alone.
I didn't know this was going to be this kind of podcast. There's too many tech bros that are talking about pro-natalist policies.
Speaking of, there is this one guy in China who's fascinating.
Just a side note and talk about...
Yes, feel free. Go ahead.
So there's a demography professor who is also the chairman and founder of Ctrip, which is China's big trip booking platform. Okay. And he is now paying his employees $50,000 per baby because he's so worried about the demographic issue in China. You know, China's replacement rate is now about one, meaning that the population is shrinking. By 2040, one in three people will be above 60. Just think about that.
Because Germany's is currently like 1.4.
Slightly higher than China.
Yeah. And then like Japan is lower, below one.
Yeah. So Japan is not replacing, not replacing.
Exactly. And that's a huge implication for growth because if you have an increasing number of the economy above 60, one in three by 2040, then who's going to pay for social services...
Exactly. And who's going to drive productivity when you have, you know, ever-shrinking labor force and ever-shrinking youth population. So that's the demographic challenge and they're trying to subsidize it by giving people more money to have babies. But women, this is the thing that's understated, I think, in Western media and this is why it's actually, if you watch videos on Chinese TikTok, there's a lot of...
Is that way or is it just...
It's doing like, which is RedNote.
Sometimes I feel like you, like you are...
I can, I can roll like that.
Oh my god. You have a good accent.
Yeah. No, seriously. Seriously, you could, you could go on to Chinese TV.
Okay. Oh, damn. Damn. Oh, no. Eugene, excuse me. A wise man once said, 'Compliments are best when they are shared with others.' So, please, Ellis, please carry on. Carry on.
What was I saying? It was demography.
Yeah, you're talking about demography and you're talking about on Chinese TikTok.
Oh, so girlbossing is a huge trend on Chinese TikTok.
So women telling other women, don't go and get married and have kids. Find a younger man and just enjoy your life and be focused in your career.
Really? This, you know, you know this is the funny thing about like the world... you got excited.
No, it is. You know why? Second system effects. You know, I love them, right? The concept that we never know what the effect of something will be, the second effect of something will be. Okay? So, we know that we're going to make a computer. We don't know that the computer will lead to the internet. We know that we'll have the internet. We don't know that the internet will lead to e-commerce. We don't know that e-commerce will lead to... We don't know. We don't know. We don't know.
You can do anything in life, but you don't know what the second system effect will be. You can't always predict it. One of the things I think we've taken for granted with choice in general for men and women, contraception, all of these things that we've come up in society, is people now can choose whether or not they want to have kids. And we're basically living in like the first sort of generation where that's a possibility. If you think about like the last maybe 100 years, maybe even less, it's the first time where people can like choose how they want to live their lives. Before, life just happened to you. And now if people choose how they live their lives, it might not go well, is what we are learning, but we don't know how it's going to end. Do you know what I mean?
Thank you. How do you say, how do you say like, I get it?
So, but you are part of the... Or you could say that men may be a part of... take some ownership. You're at your prime. You're doing this incredible work. Eugene was sent here by your parents, by the way. But the thought of settling down here now. Where are we at with it? Because I'm sure if they see someone who's in your position doing what you're doing, doing it, you can influence some people into having kids for $50,000.
You be an Asian tradwife.
Well, the Asian version of Secret Life of Mormon Wives.
But why is it not fashionable anymore for young women who are successful and professional in China to aspire to having a partner and having children?
There's a couple of reasons. You see this as a global phenomenon once you get to a certain degree of, you know, per capita GDP or economic outcomes in a country and that translates to education outcomes for women. They decide that the trade-off of having babies versus incremental growth in their career becomes, you know, not an attractive prospect. So they focus on their career as opposed to having more babies. But in the China context, I have a hypothesis, which is that the one-child policy, back to your point about unintended consequences, meant that you had for the first time in Chinese history, because China is a country, I'm sure you guys are familiar with this concept of having many children is a fortuitous thing, especially boys. 'Du zi duo fu,' which is a Chinese expression: the more boys you have, the more lucky the family is.
They changed that with the one-child policy, which is government intervention. And then I think, I don't think of any other country in history where you have mass concentration of parental time, energy, and resources on one kid. And if that's a girl...
Then you were expecting that girl to go out and conquer and, you know, get a PhD, run companies, do incredible things.
She's incentivized. Yeah. She's incentivized to be successful financially.
The one child, all resources are pulled towards her.
Towards her as opposed to a brother. You know, that's something we take for granted as well, is when we live in a world where everything has become hyper-competitive, getting into a school, getting a job, etc., etc., etc. It means that it's safer for you to put all your resources into one child than to disperse your resources amongst many. Because if you have one child, you can afford their tutor. You can afford their extracurricular activities. You can afford their piano lessons. You can... But if you have many children, you now risk having a wonderful Brady Bunch who just like plays with toys and has fun, but they may not be elite. You can't afford to make them all elite.
Yeah. You know what I mean?
I see it happening in South Africa. And if you look at mostly female users of TikTok and Instagram, and not Twitter that much, in South Africa, it's usually professional women in their late 20s or early 30s who do not have children.
Yeah. Who are maybe on weekends running, doing some cooking content and decorating. And you think to yourself, this was a generation that was raised by two parents working government jobs or maybe sometimes even in retail in the township. And they mostly are the first generation to leave the township, be in the suburbs, become an accountant, a doctor. But it's so rare that they use five times of what their parents used to earn combined to just facilitate their lifestyle of hobbies.
Oh, interesting. So I usually do this experiment. When my daughter was younger, I would look at race. I would go, Afrikaners people versus black people. So black people in a private school, you'd see them driving one child in a fancy car. Afrikaners people, Afrikaners women would drive four kids in a crappier car. So they would spend most of their money educating the kids that they have. And then the black people on the other end, you would see spending most of their money in a lifestyle for one child. So we're seeing that happening over and over again. There's more single affluent black women than there are the other way around. And it's becoming more and more trendy for people to climb the corporate ladder instead of prioritizing families. And I find it weird in our country because I'm like, us in our early 40s, we are products of those women.
Who were earning very little but managed to have more than one child.
That went to a public school and managed to find their way in the world. And I'm thinking to myself, where did it all go wrong? Actually, what is the breakdown while we're still talking about demographics in China? We're seeing this trend around the world. Is it the same in China where the men are now becoming less favored in the workplace or are finding themselves in a hyper-competitive world where they're actually like losing a bit of the race? Is that also seen in China or is it different?
Not to the same degree and it's not talked about as much as it is in the West.
But there, and certainly not as much as Korea, where I know there is a right-wing incel movement that is anti-women because, to your point, they feel as though the deck is increasingly stacked against them. That hasn't quite happened as of yet. But I think more importantly is this kind of consternation, especially amongst men, that they can't find women because one of the other unintended consequences, although you could have easily predicted this based on human nature, is we've got a massive skew towards the male population as opposed to females. So there are way more men in my generation in China than there are women.
Because of the one-child policy.
Because the one-child policy and people favored, they would rather have one son rather than a daughter.
And as a result, dating is just really tough. The barrier to entry to date as a Chinese man, historically and still is present today, is you've got to have your own apartment, your own car, a really stable job. And it's really, really tough. And that's why we were talking about this earlier. There's been a trend on social media in terms of vloggers, but it's been happening really since Russia-Ukraine of Chinese men going out and finding Ukrainian women and bringing them back to China. And the Ukrainian women have really popular vlogs saying how great China is compared to Russia or Ukraine and how great Chinese men are compared to Russian men because they're responsible financially, they take care of the kids, they take care of their women. It's...
Fascinating thing. One last data point. I was in Shanghai a couple weeks ago, and in Tomorrow Square, which is right in the center of Shanghai, there are now these matchmakers that just sit out there, and I literally saw hundreds of them in the square.
In the park. I've seen this. Yes, of 70 men. I like this. You know, this I've seen this.
Yeah, but not even a picture of them. It's just their little data.
The data. Wait, so they said I saw this and I thought they're bearing that people are like comes in and goes, I've got a... Yeah, I've got this guy. It's sort of like an auction as well, right? Like people are like, I'll pay you this for this. No, I'll give you this much. I'll give you this much. And it's like a whole I didn't know there was a real thing, but now you made me realize maybe maybe the the solution to the world's problems is we just need to figure out yes that. But also we just need to figure out where everybody's um polar opposite answer lies in arranged marriages maybe.
But what I mean is this. Who would have thought the perfect companion for Ukrainian women was Chinese men?
Yeah, that's what I'm saying all along. So I'm saying wherever you are out there, you are a Chinese man or whatever you are, you are a Ukrainian woman or whatever you are, and you might be struggling in your market as you say. Little do you know there's a market out there that is pining for you and is more perfect for you. What a business opportunity. Do you get what I'm saying? Yeah, 100%. We could stop this. The three of us. What? Where would South Africans go? What would you pair with? I leave those ones. They've done enough. What we need to FOCUS ON IS THE AUNTIE IN THE PARK AUCTION.
NO, but you know, you know, well, you know what's actually funny is I actually think South Africans are lucky in this regard because we have such a melting pot. So, if you look at South Africans now, I would argue our generation more than our parents' generation has intermingled. So like our parents' generation was more likely to be your mother what ksa your father whatso your mother and there were a few outliers here and there but I think over the years it's become more common for people to cross-pollinate and say oh I like those men from that culture because they're actually more like this and I like those women from that culture because they're more like that and so people will find themselves you know zulu tonga wherever they just find themselves mixing in a different way.
Phenomena that happened when apartheid ended and the world opened up a little is when South African white men started traveling to Eastern Europe like Bosnia and after the war and then they would be in hotels and then this hot blonde would just come in and they were like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You work here?" And the person would be like, "Yeah, that's what I do." They didn't they didn't know that was you coming home with me. Yeah. They didn't know that was a thing. And then they would be now most of them are the owners of these BNBs and these fancy neighborhoods that obviously got gentrified and acquired so much value. Yeah. And when you ask most of them where they came from, they're like, I met my husband on a business trip when South Africa opened up and they came to South Africa. They were like, I appreciate all of what you're doing. You work hard, but women from here would have never seen your value. But I think that's what's happening now in China, right? When Chinese men go out there, they're like, yo, you don't know how hot I am in in Ukraine.
I'm Shong. Good for them. I love that. We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.
How easy is it to um to move to China? Cuz from what I've read, China is not necessarily like an like an immigration country.
No. No. But I think Japan is less of Well, Japan's starting to change now.
When I was in Japan, sorry to cut you off. When I was in Japan, there were newspaper articles. It was interesting cuz the the our tour guide was translating it for us. But there were whole You made your tour guide translate newspaper article. Make please I didn't make anyone do anything. Eugene he as the tour guide was I was just saying what's in the news today and then he was telling me some of the stories and he said not much. He said no really what's in the news today. Yeah. I was just asking cuz I I'm curious. I wanted to know what's happening in Tokyo while we're there.
Right. And one of the big stories in the newspaper was a continuing discussion where they would essentially the headline was should Japanese people be less um xenophobic because they're fully they're fully like we don't want anyone who's not Japanese here. Don't bring them into our country. We're not mixing cultures. We're not. But then the article is like, it was weird because the article was basically like, we agree we shouldn't let anyone in, but it's not working. But we agree we shouldn't let anyone in, but what are we going to do about this? Should we maybe bring maybe we should start bringing people in who want to learn Japanese and want to learn Japanese culture and they want to become Japanese. Maybe we start with them. And then we we were we were out having sushi at a you know those tiny tiny tiny little place like like beautiful sushi places can only see six and I was there with a Japanese man and his wife who had offered to take me with them. Wait and while we were there wait wait what? You you were there in a six-seater Japanese restaurant in Japan cuz just a restaurant. It's not a Japanese restaurant cuz you were in Japan. You're right. Yes. And you this couple wanted to take you out for dinner. Yes. Yes. And where did you meet this couple? I'd met the husband in San Francisco. And so he said, "If you ever come to Japan, look me up." You did? I don't think he meant it, but I looked him up. And then he was like, "Wow, you're here." And I was like, "Yes, I would love to go and have sushi." So he took me. We went to this place. The chef is making the food. It's amazing. Some of the best sushi I've ever had. And then um I think they were Americans. Yeah. But the an American couple walked in and then the chef was like, "No, we're closed." And then they were like, "Oh." And they looked at us and we're guilty with our chopsticks. You know, you're like mid and they're like, "We're closed." And they looked at us like, "You can't be closed." And we I was like, "Yo, I'm not trying to not get the sushi, so I'm not going to I was like, yeah, I mean, whatever's happening here." They left. And then the the chef said to them, "Uh, yeah, I I don't allow nonJapanese people into the restaurant." But it was interesting why. He said, "Because I do not believe that I can provide the best level of service to people who do not understand me and I don't understand them." Yeah. And so if I don't speak their language, this is not going to be the the the experience it needs to be. And so they I don't allow them in here. And there were many places like that in Japan. But then I asked I was like, "Yeah, but how does that do for business?" And he said, "Well, we're actually struggling because of that because there are many sushi spots that are allowing foreigners in and I can only rely on the locals and and we're struggling." And so it's interesting to see how this thing is like all over the world like how how much immigration do you allow because without it you can't replace your population.
