And genuine question but what is ya’ll personal opinion regarding these different subreddits?
Neither can. Real mainland Chinese rarely use Reddit. Similar communities such as Baidu Tieba, Douban and Hupu are more popular.
None of them. Especially not r/China.
If you want to see real mainland chinese then go look on mainland social media
r/sino is the common type of propaganda about China that you’d expect Chinese boomers to consume daily and bring up at family dinner.
r/China is the same thing but the boomers are white and speak English.
r/china_irl and r/real_china_irl are quite similar to the environment of Chinese internet if we confine the scope to the tiny pocket of dissidents. Their difference being that the former one is soft anti-CCP and the latter one is hard anti-CCP. With that said, it is still quite different from the general online environment of China itself, because in real life no one spends a whole day just talking about politics.
r/sino: tankies who have never been to China but think China is the heaven on the earth.
r/China: Most are foreigners. Part of them had been to China or is living in China. Most oppose CCP and the Chinese government.
r/China_irl: Chinese who mildly oppose current CCP (i.e. Xi). But they generally support China from geopolitical perspective.
r/real_China_irl: Chinese who oppose CCP AND China. For example, China_irl support Taiwan belongs to China but real_China_irl support Taiwan is independent.
None of them can represent the mainstream mainland Chinese because they support Xi’s leadership (maybe r/sino is the closest but ironically r/sino love China even more than 99% local Chinese lol.
Baidu Tieba corresponds to Reddit, Douyin corresponds to Tiktok, Bilibili corresponds to YouTube, Douban corresponds to Reddit and Imdb, Weibo corresponds to X, Xiaohongshu corresponds to Instagram, and Zhihu corresponds to Quora. Tantan corresponds to tinder
r/china and r/sino are English language subs. r/china_irl and r/real_China_irl are Chinese language subs mainly about china politics. The latter is more radical. However, as other comments put it, none of them are widely used in China because of the gfw.
r/China is what happens when a bunch of American expats get together and decide to start a sub Reddit to talk shit about China and the Chinese people
The racism was especially bad in the early days, but they’ve learnt to be more subtle about it as the sub has gained popularity
r/China : English teachers
r/sino : those who are not Chinese but love China and believe they know China
r/China_irl : politics focused sub, licking CCP’s ass.
r/real_China_irl : politics focused sub, anti CCP.
If you combine them all, you get a more complete picture, only piece missing is those nationals that do use Reddit.
Real china irl got banned for hate speech, but actually it is self hate racism.
None of them.
r/China represents professional haters such as Taiwanese, Hong Kongers who feel threatened by the Chinese government
r/sino represents socialists outside of China
r/real_China_irl represents anti-CCP Chinese, which is a very low percentage of Chinese
r/china_irl is softer anti-CCP.
The majority of Mainland Chinese don’t talk about politics, they are relatively loyal to the government but have a lot to complain too. China is not built by people who speak English well.
99%的中国人连墙都翻不了，被ccp完全洗脑了（比如我家人，政府做什么都拥护，对身边人的不幸漠视讥笑）
none of them because of the gfw
These groups represents 10% of Chinese people. Weibo, Red and other premium Chinese social media represent another 30%. Kuaishou and other ones represents the other 60%. Many of these people in the bottom don’t even use social media.
Baidu corresponds to Google, Baidu Maps, Gaode Maps, Tencent Maps corresponds to Google Maps and Bing Maps, Baidu Encyclopedia, Douyin Encyclopedia, Chinese Wikipedia corresponds to English Wikipedia, Facebook and Snapchat don’t know what they should correspond to… The above is China Apps used by most people
But there are people who live outside China at times for vacation, school, or just traveling or are set abroad that use Reddit that are Chinese like myself. They can also use VPN they download in China or before going back to China. Sino is more accurate China Reddit.
R China and R China irl are Western Mouthpieces. China IRL less so because it’s diverse but r/China is just a US lapdog.
and the latter 2 hate each other
Now I know anti-China = supporting Taiwan is independent.
I love it when r/sino incels love China more and are enjoying the freedoms that don’t exist in China. They don’t even live or visit China lmao.