China is a thriving country that

is taking the world by storm. China is a poor country with serious problems and bubbles are about to burst. China is an agrarian society. China is an urban country. Chinese government is savvy. Chinese government is corrupt. Chinese businesspeople are successful through hard work. Chinese business-people are successful through cheating. These are conflicting stories， yet you’ll find all of these themes widely reported. None of these reports are representative of China， yet none of them are inaccurate either. The key to understanding China is to put everything in the proper context and localize it as a report about a specific area and not the country as a whole. It is essential to remember that one in a million in a population pool of 1.3+ billion happens much more frequently than the phrase would otherwise suggest.

China is a massive country with great geographic and cultural diversity. The country is further segmented by the fact that local politics often trump national agendas and what laws you may see enforced in Beijing won’t necessarily be enforced in other localities and vice versa. This is only natural in trying to govern the world’s largest population. For some context， the Qing and Mongols were considered foreigner invaders just 100 years ago， yet their homelands now constitutes huge tracts of modern China. The following warlord era， where the country was divided into fragments， is recent enough that it remains in living memory. That fragmentation was no accident as it is the natural state of things for such a diverse and vast territory. What may be true in one city in China won’t necessarily be true in a neighboring city， let alone in the rest of the country.

A friend recently asked， “So how often do you eat badger meat?” To my surprise， he’d read on Wikipedia that badgers are commonly eaten in China and readily available in markets. To my shock， the source of this information was from a British shaving brush company that gave out this information as a way to assuage fears of badger cruelty – implying that the badgers that supplied the hair for the brushes were killed regardless of existence of badger shaving brushes. While there was no intention of slander， this information was taken out of context and brought to a much wider audience by a well-meaning person on Wikipedia. I made a simple edit to correct this misinformation but my edit was rejected. As there aren’t any articles available that refute that badger meat is commonly eaten in China， I had nothing other than anecdotal evidence and my edits were rejected. It wasn’t until I got creative and posted links from Chinese online shopping sites that clearly supported my cause that the opposition conceded that is was wrong to argue for something of which they honestly knew nothing about despite that a shaving company said otherwise.

That’s the problem with China， it has such a wild reputation from being so closed off and has such a massive variety of people and culture under one flag that people are more inclined to generalize and simplify. You’ll find exotic things elsewhere in the world but unlike China， it won’t be all united under one banner but rather spread out among different countries. When an Ecuadorian eats guinea pig for lunch， the reputation doesn’t carry over to Brazilians as well. Pele has never had to respond to questions about Ecuadorian culinary habits but Yao Ming is constantly asked about whether or not he eats dog despite that the practice of eating dog is very distant to his native Shanghai. Given enough scrutiny， any randomly selected population of over 1 billion is going to flood the news with coverage of unbelievable reports. While what you may read is most likely true， it’s important to ask yourself if it’s just another Wikipedia badger article.