Clips of China's Rising Street Poverty and a Looted Meat Truck Circulate, and Japan Watches Coldly — but Not Unanimously
Two clips spread in Japan on the same day: posts claiming that many of China's so-called 'lying-flat' generation have slid into actual street homelessness as the economy slows, and a video of residents swarming a crashed refrigerated truck on a highway to carry off the raw meat inside. Japanese commenters read both as proof of a downturn China can no longer hide, and reacted to the looting with disgust on both moral and hygienic grounds. But the thread did not settle into simple China-bashing: a visible minority relativized it — 'Japanese shoplift too' — and one long comment defended China's cultural legacy and called the anti-China posture historically ignorant. Neither clip could be matched to reliable major reporting, and the scale of any 'surge' is hard to pin down, so the collapse-and-morality framing runs well ahead of what the footage actually shows.