The idea of Chinese people (and Asians in general) being obedient to authority is something that I’ve heard frequently from people and in the news, but I didn’t mean to imply that sandworm101 made that particular argument.
You can also look at the initial blaming of COVID on China in the media...The COVID pandemic was the result of either 3rd world-like food markets where poor/dirty people sell exotic meats to each other or that COVID got out of some underground lab where they do experiments and can't contain anything.
No one explicitly said that but it was implied pretty heavily especially when you look at how people received the news and interpreted it in memes and whatnot. I sent pictures of Wuhan to some family/friends and they were amazed at how big and impressive of a city it is. They thought it was like a small developing village.
It's kind of how we always talk about China though (regarding your initial comment) and I'm not sure if/when it will ever stop.
While I wouldn't phrase it that way, the so-called wet markets where dozens of live animals are sold in unsanitary conditions are a problem. Western nations do have a variety of health/hygiene laws that effectively make such markets illegal. They are seen as a primitive/backwards/dangerous throwback to something rightly done away with long ago.
Western nations don't have those kinds of wet markets, but we have plenty of our own unhygienic, dangerous practices when it comes to food.
Take factory farming, for example. Take the mountains of antibiotics we are shoving into factory farmed animals. Take the numerous warnings from experts in biology about how this use of antibiotics is incredibly dangerous, because it has the potential to be a breeding ground for antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria.
Now, consider what we are doing about shutting down, or even mitigating the danger posed by those factory farms. Next to nothing - there's a few fringe environmentalist groups, there's a small vegan movement, there's a few yuppies who make sure to tell everyone that they only source organic, hand-raised, cruelty-free meat that costs them $40/lb. But the average person doesn't give two damns about it - and the average politician in agricultural-heavy ridings is entirely in the pocket of those industries. [1]
Disclaimer: I don't buy organic, hand-raised, cruelty-free meat, that would cost me $40/lb. I'm part of this problem. There's a lot of utility in cheap meat. Meat is delicious. But alternatives do exist.
[1] See the popularity of ag-gag laws - intended to suppress information, so that the public only gets one side of this story.
Hygiene in China is like in medieval Europe, nowadays in Europe only big cities are dirty which is in the most cases result of mismanagement of mayor/s.
In Southeast Europe where I live cities are clean af. The thing that bothers me personally is absurd amount of pets on the streets in my country. When I go for a walk I see like 30 dogs.
Have you been to China? The tier 1 cities like Beijing and Shanghai are positively manicured compared to the average US city (or Paris, for that matter).
Of course it's a huge country and it's not too hard to find an open-air market with meat hanging on hooks or public lavatories that you wouldn't want to enter without a hazmat suit, but people emptying their night soil out the window into the street below is not really a thing anymore.
In my travels to about 8~9 cities in China, I don't recall seeing anything that was dirtier than, say, Amsterdam or New York or Busan. Not having lived in Medieval Europe, I can't say exactly how dirty it was, but saying China is that dirty seems like an exaggeration.
But those dogs are probably far healthier than they were in the past. You don't fear rabies if one of them bites you. You aren't going to get a parasite if you pet them.
What is the origin of Covid-19? Last thing what I heard is that it is not wet market. Then Chinese blamed American soliders?! I think Wuhan Institute of Virology is the source but they will never admit the virus broke out of the institute.
I certainly saw a lot of people writing things like "they only succeeded because they welded people into their apartment buildings". I've also read that that only happened one time and was strongly criticized within China but oh well.
