[simonh]

Get a grip. This is a news article, not a PhD thesis.

Yes, gold is fetishized in the west. However the fact that it's even more fetishized in the East is overwhelmingly obvious to anyone what actually knows what they're talking about. Including actual Chinese people. My Chinese relatives hold a significant amount of their life savings in Gold. This is quite normal over there. In Hohhot, my wife's home town, you can buy small gold bricks in many department stores. They have little sheep stamped on them because that's a lucky sign.

[mikeash]

It's "overwhelmingly obvious" yet nobody can produce any evidence for it, and especially not for the specific claim that the gold iPhone is in more demand in Asia. Even the linked article can't bring itself to straight-out say that gold is more fetishized in Asia. It weasels out of the claim! Is it really "obvious" then?

Until and unless this stuff can be backed up with something resembling actual evidence rather than "everybody knows", articles like these are racist. Calling out a single racial group for behavior everybody is engaging in is pretty obviously so.