CHINESE FACE is GARBAGE?

so what his face other than you know an actual face the best way for me to demonstrate face to you is by using garbage so today guys I'm talking about face now this is something that is probably the most important thing you need to understand if you're dealing with China in any way shape or form I mean okay it is a cornerstone of all business here it's a cornerstone of all relationships here it's basically the cornerstone of life here and so it's quite a difficult concept to explain but I'm actually going to demonstrate this whole concept of face to you using garbage because believe it or not face in China can be very well demonstrated using the garbage bins here and how trash works so let's see how good China is at recycling so you got recyclable and non-recyclable now let's go around keep in mind this one is non recyclable Oh on this side recyclable and non-recyclable no matter where you put your garbage in I guess it all goes to the same place or something now when I first got to China specifically to Schengen which is one of the big sort of impressive cities you find here in China I was actually very impressed this was a long time ago in 2006 I noticed when I got here that all over the place you had garbage bins but not just normal garbage bins he had separated garbageman's you have recyclable and non-recyclable and you know it gave me a very good impression and made me think wow you know China's very forward-thinking it's very green I want you to pay attention to that behind me there that single sort of garbage bin at that old man's sort of carting along we'll get to that in a minute anyway I thought wow very forward-thinking very green fantastic and this is face ok those garbage bins were giving the city if not China in general face in other words a perceived pride a perceived benefit a perceived depth or perceived whatever and the best way to basically describe face is to describe it as pride and honor and to lose that pride and to lose that honor is one of the worst things that can happen to a person here in China and especially if you are to make them lose face or lose honor in front of somebody important or in front of their family or something that's the quickest way to get yourself into hot water here so back to the garbage why did I say that garbage is the best way to demonstrate face in China well it's very simple those recyclable bins you know the recycle non-recycled boo bins the ones that gave me such a good impression when I first got here it's actually all just fake it's all rubbish okay I didn't mean that pun but I kind of liked it anyway but it is it's just rubbish okay so here we can see non recyclable as this is the non recyclable bin but it's absolutely full of plastics cardboards bottles things like that and here we have the recyclable which is full of the same so there's literally no difference between this and this here have again the yellow one is supposed to be the non recyclable one but it's just full of plastics bottles cans all sorts of recyclable stuff and the one with the non recyclable the one that's supposed to be recyclable is also just full of plastics bottles cans corn cobs whatever really doesn't make any difference and once again here we have another okay says other waste but yet we've got plastic got Styrofoam containers plastic straws all that here under recyclable we have plastic we have you know the usual stuff that you would expect to find in fact a very little difference between the two so once again I mean I could do this all day but there's never going to be a set of trash bins anywhere in the city where you actually have the trash separated correctly the if you look inside the recyclable side you'll see it's full of non-recyclables if you look inside of the non recyclable you'll see it's full of recyclables people don't care they just throw anything in either one basically the path of least resistance which ever been is closest that's the one they'll use and to make matters worse when they actually come to collect the garbage it'll be like that old guy that I showed you earlier with a big sort of garbage can he will go and he will just empty the trash out of both of them directly into one bin so it doesn't actually matter that they were separated so if people were even separating them in the first place it would all end up in the same place anyway now at the end of the day this doesn't really matter too much because there is a thriving recycling industry here in China basically people will go through the garbage and they'll dig out plastic and cardboard and things and any side alley you duck down here in China you'll find people actually dismantling things like there's this old he's over here dismantling a fan to get the metal bits out to copper out you know and he will obviously go and take it to a recycling plant and get each and every part of that thing salt and of course the same is with it done with cardboard and plastic bottles and the like and this of course is just happening down a side alley you know there's a Main Street over there and you know anywhere you go in the big cities if you turn down any other side le you will see people busy dismantling things you know for recycling so at the end of the day there's a system in place that overcomes this whole weirdness with the fact that the recyclable and non-recyclable been things are never separated now bunchy you guys might be saying well that's probably just in your city or you know well that's maybe just in the south of China or something but no I specifically was anticipating that because I get a lot of people saying you don't understand China you only live down there in the south so I got a friend of mine who lives up in Shanghai which everybody sees as sort of the jewel of China the sort of classier most sophisticated city in China so I got him to go out and take a look at some bins and what he found is actually quite amusing so we're going to switch over to a video that he's made for me a wonderful video which really demonstrates my point to a tee now let me show you something here in Shanghai in my own compound so this is the garbage management or disposal system in my compound so you have four bins one is recyclable the other one is regular domestic garbage this one is compost bin so you know basically everything that's biodegradable everything that can go back to the ground and the last one is like toxic waste like batteries acid anything they can't put away in the regular dump now let's see what's inside the bins yeah it doesn't look too recycling to me let's see what's domestic looks about the same now the compost which is supposed to be only like biodegradable and food leftovers kind of thing yeah you got plastic trays and bags and paper and containers and now let's look at the toxic waste bin you pretty much have the same thing again some domestic garbage now for some reason I feel like it wasn't really recyclable stuff but just regular garbage and she threw it in the first available bin so you see the same thing just happened just now and I can guarantee you this was not recyclable stuff I could see through his little plastic bag and those were not like just limited to plastic paper and cardboard and whatever and for some reason they feel like this lady behind me is gonna do exactly the same thing anyways let's see what happens there yep first bin seems like if you're coming from this way you're more likely to just dump it in the first bin no matter what's in your bag this is really funny because that lady now just came from the opposite direction and just threw it in the first bin coming from her direction closer right in the recycling bin and you saw what was in the bag right so again it seems like China has really great intentions when it comes to garbage management and disposal but the application and the education of the public is not quite there yet that being said not everything is lost because where there's money to make you will find people willing to go in those bins and dig out the plastic bottles the plastic containers the cardboard boxes anything that a company is willing to pay for to eventually recycle or reuse they'll be willing to they get out and kind of run their own like kind of low their own little business right it's just unfortunate it's not part of the system all right so I hope by now you guys have figured this whole face thing out basically in China perception is more important than reality in other words it's more important for people to perceive you as being smart or rich or maybe powerful something like that or progressive or whatever the case the perception is more important than reality so you could be a poor person struggling to just make it by but as long as you can afford the clothing or the bit store the car or whatever it is in order to make people think that you're rich you know that's more important than you actually being rich and it goes with everything it's like if your colleagues at work perceive you as being incredibly smart because you've got a lot of degrees and so on and so forth that's more important than you actually being smart anyway that's just a cultural thing and if you can understand face and the concept of face you'll do incredibly well in China you'll also do incredibly well if you're doing business deals and things like that with newspeople so I hope this has given you some sort of understanding and this will also give you a little bit of understanding as to why I get so much hate for almost no reason on my channel from Chinese medicines and that's simply because you know a lot of people believe that these these medicines believe that they're that I'm causing China to lose face by pointing out simple truths in daily life which are kind of inconvenient truths things like Chinese just not a utopian society that's 100% perfect in every single way anyway guys I hope you found this informative I hope this helps you understand China better so that when you deal with China when you come to China and you visit China you will make a better sort of experience out of it all so thank you very much for watching until next time you know the drill as always stay awesome [Music]

Channel: serpentza

Views: 260,901

Rating: 4.7704511 out of 5

Keywords: China, Face, Society, Garbage, Trash, Recycling, Green Energy, news, chinese, beijing, recycle, bottles, waste, gutter oil, breaking, serpentza, living in china, china how it is, winston sterzel, shenzhen, china (country), asia, cultural differences, culture, traveling, life in china, expats, foreigner, shanghai, Garbage disposal, land fill, Chinese land fill, Chinese waste disposal, economics, toxic, travel, asian, wanderlust, china garbage, rubbish, losing face, loss of face, gaining face, giving face

Id: 6mV1EY6wZHo

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2017