[throwawayperson]

This is just so false and uninformed, couple of dacades earlier in China people with glasses on were seen as a rarity, meant he's not a peasant.

The current myopia near-crisis in China is clearly a sociological one, the gaokao is every Chinese teen’s only and foremost task，and they live their lives in drab & carmped concrete forests，don’t have idyllic backyards and weekend outings.

Teens are required to sit in cramped classrooms (we don't change room every course) more than 10 hours a day 6 days or more a week,the already meager physical and art classes (1 class a week each at best) were routinely canceled, to do the countless exam preparation and simulation, to get them to become the ultimate exam-taking machines, the higher score the students get in the gaokao, the more famous their school, teachers, principal will be，and yeah more money.

Beware Americans, this is what happens in China where there are no affirmative action or anything, pure meritocratic admissions.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Maotanchang+Middle+School

This is also why I alwayes laugh it off at Chinese's high GRE or IELTS scores,or wharever high scores and statistics, as a fellow Chinese I just know all too well how they got it and it certainly doesn't represent their real level.

[tdsamardzhiev]

A couple of decades ago, not being a peasant was a rarity outside of developed countries. According to Wikipedia, China's rural population was 97% in 1950. Now it's 50% or so.

I mean no offense, I was born in a Warsaw Pact country.

[throwawayperson]

Non taken, I was referring to "Don't blame it on yourself. It's mostly genes." By this logic, "Don't blame it on yourself. being a peasant or not is mostly genes."

The thing is, myopia is simply caused by eye fatigue, few may be somehow congenital or hereditary, and it might be slightly comminicable through behavior patterns; "Some people can spend 15 hours a day in front of a computer, and still see like hawks" , some people stare at screens nonstop, some look away constantly.

[seanmcdirmid]

My first visit to China was in 1999, and glasses were already common back then, especially in the big cities I went to. The way they did eye sight exams at the eye glass shop was horrendous, however (my friend got a pair while we were there). It really is kids studying too much, I agree, but it could have also been TV back then and other things.

[throwawayperson]

That's kind of a survivorship bias, and again uninformed.

People in China aren't allowed to move to cities freely especially back then, there are hukous to bind you to your birthplace, back then there were even police in Shenzhen dedicated to rounding up migrant workers (so called "blindly-moving migrants") and sending them back.

What I want to say is that you likely went to some major cities and observed people there, without realizing that those people are entitled to live there, meaning good chunk of them are well-educated and that education was a privilege you need to fight for, that means dedicated learning.

If myopia in China is genetic, then there is a big contradiction: in a generation of teens, those early drop-outs who went to factories and those who were putter around in schools rarely were myopic, yet those who are good academically and skinny had a high rate of myopia.

[seanmcdirmid]

Yes, people who study hard and perhaps watch too much TV will have more eye problems, but they also have to use their eyes more and will be diagnosed more often with eye problems. You don’t need great eye sight to pick rice, and it is very probable that many farmers have bad vision but just never care (or could even afford) glasses, especially back 20 years ago.