ooo, pick me, pick me, I lived in mainland china as late as 2018. in addition to the wechat/alipay thing, here are a collection of details about life in modern china https://twitter.com/yearninglwj/status/1292128141935349761

wechat is ubiquitous. messenger app? wechat. facebook-like social media? wechat moments. paying money? wechat or alipay? splitting bills? wechat. randomly giving out small amounts of money to your friends? wechat. talking to your employer? wechag. talking to clients? wechat

public transportation actually exists and is good. I lived in Shanghai, and like why the fuck would I own a car in Shanghai unless I wanted to show off how rich I was

those bikeshare bikes are everywhere, and sometimes in huge piles!

oh and qr codes are everywhere. many times, payment is done by scanning them. like your random street foot vendor selling doujiang and miantiao or jianbing for like, 5rmb or whatever has a qr code

the bike share thing is probably only true of some cities. like I said, I lived in Shanghai so that's where my experience is most accurate to

the streetfood scene is awesome! or idk, it was awesome, now I have no idea because they started cracking down on them but then li keqiang (premier, 2nd guy after Xi jinping) came out as pro Street food. idk I'm not 100% sure what's happening now

law enforcement can feel kind of random. sometimes they've let something go for a while but then somebody decides it's Time To Get Serious about the thing and all of a sudden people start getting in trouble for it. at least, that was my impression

anyway, back to streetfood. for breakfast, a lot of people buy breakfast food from small vendors. it's cheap and delicious. common breakfast foods include: mantou, baozi, zhou (congee), various kinds of flatbreads/pancakes (jianbing is my favorite), doujiang (soy milk)

stuff that is common to do for fun: hotpot. hotpot is delicious. the most frequent place people go is haidilao, but the wait is atrocious. they literally give you snacks and will like, paint your nails while you wait for a table to open up. so get reservations

also ktv, which is what we called private karaoke rooms in China

obviously this was pre pandemic

delivery is ubiquitous and cheap. sometimes stuff from taobao got to me in less than a day. Amazon sucks by comparison

food delivery is also super cheap and common. if things haven't changed the main apps for this would be eleme and meituan

ok, some less frivolous stuff. it's normal for people to live with their parents until they get married. obviously it depends a lot on personal circumstances bc people move for jobs, but anything real estate related in a major city is hella expensive

there is no social norm to move out once you reach adulthood. also, china is super economically unequal. so shit can suck if you're trying to move up. so if you're trying to write modern au jgy, there's definitely plenty of stuff to draw on

starting to realize there's so much stuff that I can never be done vomiting it onto this twitter thread

the one child policy means most youngish people do not have siblings (tho exceptions to the policy were given to rural household/recognized ethnic minorities)

the one child policy has been the two child policy since 2015

feminism and LGBT rights have been on the rise over at least the past decade or so, but the ~discourse~ isn't necessarily the same as in the west. metoo was huge in China

social activism is a bit complicated

because the government is basically run by a bunch of overwhelmingly male boomers. however, unlike many boomers in America, who have lived some of the most privileged lives in human existence, being a boomer in china means you likely went through a lot of trauma

anyway, the govt is run by a bunch of male boomers and have social attitudes you would associate with that group of people. however, attitudes are far more liberal among young urbanites, and feminist and LGBT activists have been able to get both the govt and social attitudes to

gradually improve, at least on these types of issues.

okay I'm tired so I'm going to stop vomiting info now but I might continue this thread later

wow this thread is really popular. other stuff

high speed rail exists and is awesome.

twitter->weibo (other popular social media sites: zhihu, baidu tieba)

uber->didi

youtube->bilibili + others

tinder->tantan lol

yelp+Google reviews+groupon+other stuff->dianping

the streets are safe at night, but on the other hand many people will still think they're very scary and you should never walk around at night

I don't really get this one but apparently westerners find this weird and comment on it a lot: people drink a lot of hot water

this one is less fun but there's a lot of low level corruption (I won't speak about high level corruption lol). like I know someone who basically bribed the police to get someone out of jail.

connections matter a lot. this is true of any culture but it's a bit more true of Chinese culture. the flip side of this is that, people you meet through people you know are often super hospital and nice

here's another thread with good info about how wechat works and domestic stuff https://twitter.com/boldsurvive/status/1292436184795435010?s=20

can confirm ovens aren't really a thing. also if you rent an apartment it usually comes fully furnished (or at least it did where I lived)