Episode 6 | Wechat Groups, the Chinese Expat Community and the Future of a Minority-Majority America
In this episode, they're chatting about their experiences with race in the Chinese expat community. The expat community here is very diverse and hosts people from a plethora of nationalities, races and religions. For many of us foreigners living in China, the expat community presents us with a new range of diversity not quite like anything we've ever experienced before.
To make a long story short, the shades which help colour the expat community in a city like Beijing will definitely come as a shock to the system of your everyday, middle-class White person living in a suburban district which includes 'Orange County' in its name. Oddly enough, our experience here tells us that the demographics of the expat community here - Yuppified, non-religious, and mostly non-white - is a looking glass into the future of the USA.
It's a different space, unlike any that many of us are accustomed to, presenting its own new set of challenges. And in light of this, many of us have embraced this new space and adapted, while others, startled and unprepared for this development, have decided to retreat and double-down on outdated beliefs. Some seem to have even retreated into a solipsistic realm, where their opinion, ideology and race are the only things that matter, where differing opinions and viewpoints no longer represent an alternative, but an inferior, a mere foe or end of stage boss standing in the way of the main character and the next level.
Plug your headphones in tight and LISTEN, because the future awaits.
