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Keep in mind that this article was originally written in Chinese and published on WeChat, where it presumably proved sufficiently popular that OP decided to translate it into English. So the author isn't just not trolling you, he isn't even writing to you. All the object-level descriptions of other countries are unlikely to provide you with fresh insight if you're already familiar with them, but you can still learn something from the meta-level implication that this kind of content resonates with a Chinese audience. I don't actually know much about Russia or its masculine energy, but I can speak to the author's observation that "on weekdays, the streets of Berlin were nearly empty, with few people and few cars," which he interprets as a sign of economic depression. Presumably, in his mind the capital of a major economy should also be an economic center, highly dense, full of people and cars, just like Beijing. But Berlin violates all these assumptions and would look basically the same during a boom. It's a political center, but economically speaking just an average German city; the population is below the WWII peak, so density is low; public transport is popular and car ownership the lowest in Germany. Berlin definitely isn't Beijing. (On the meta-meta level, this is also what it looks like when an article about China reaches a large audience on the English-speaking internet. All the actually accurate analysis just isn't entertaining enough to get widely read.) |