There are two groups in China’s tech scene that have been insulting each other for nearly a decade, with no sign of stopping. One is the Mi Fans; the other is the Huawei faithful — the true-believer user bases of Xiaomi and Huawei respectively. The war between them is one of the longest-running, most intense and most absurd cultural phenomena in the history of Chinese consumer electronics.
What makes it absurd?
The thing they are arguing about is never the actual issue.
Mi Fans say Huawei is an IQ tax — overpriced with terrible value. Huawei fans say Xiaomi is an assembly plant with no core technology, all “self-developed” in name only. Each side repeats its own version. Arguments get swapped out round after round, details get fought over one after another. But if you step back and look at the whole war, you’ll see that every spec comparison, every benchmark screenshot, every “objective review” is a footnote to the same sentence:
The phone I bought is better than yours.
Conclusion first, reasons afterward. The reasons can change forever; the conclusion never does. The other side’s strengths are “marketing,” your own side’s flaws don’t exist, and any objective review can be read as hating. This isn’t a discussion about phones. It’s an identity war over “who is more correct,” and phones are simply the battlefield chosen for it.
To understand the Chinese Android custom-ROM community, you first have to understand a phenomenon I call flashing PTSD.
In this circle there is an almost reflex judgment: a phone that can’t unlock its bootloader is basically a brick. Outsiders find this baffling. Pixel, Samsung and iPhone users find it completely incomprehensible. But the way it formed is actually traceable, and I’d even say quite reasonable.
Starting with MIUI 12, every major version update often made the actual experience worse: the system got slower, ads ran rampant, battery drain increased. Users reported problems; the official response was either silence or a fix patch that broke something else. In that loop, flashing a ROM slowly turned from a geek hobby into a survival tactic. If you couldn’t stand it, you flashed a clean third-party ROM yourself, just so the phone remained usable.
Over time, that logic got internalized. Flashing was no longer an option for people who “like tinkering”; it became a precondition for “whether the phone works at all.” So phones that don’t support unlocking really are, in these people’s eyes, dead — because that cuts off the only route to self-rescue.
In the past, Android flashing existed because the software was crude and users needed to add features. The problem is that today, that self-rescue route should never have been necessary in the first place.
Samsung, Pixel and Nothing users probably don’t flash and are doing just fine. iPhone users never flash and don’t feel like they’re using bricks. Which shows that “must be able to flash” is essentially a patch demand created by poor manufacturer software quality, not something a smartphone objectively ought to have.
Root follows the same logic, and it makes the point even better.
Normally, users get root to extend functionality — an active, offensive move. But in the context of Chinese Android, a huge number of users root in order to remove things: uninstalling bloatware that can’t be deleted, blocking ads inside system apps, turning off the manufacturer’s cloud control. This is passive, defensive behavior. In essence, users are fighting the manufacturer in reverse, taking back the phone that should have been theirs.
Cloud control is especially nasty. The hardware is yours. You paid thousands for it. But the manufacturer keeps a remote control that can throttle it at any time: full performance during benchmarks, quietly limited in daily use. You’ve essentially bought rented hardware whose performance can be adjusted by the manufacturer’s servers at any moment. That’s more thuggish than Apple’s old battery scandal, because at least Apple offered a barely plausible excuse. Chinese manufacturers don’t even bother.
So users who can root gain a kind of “leverage against capital” and become technical players. Users who can’t root, or don’t know how, just pinch their noses and endure it, resentment building. The two experiences combine to produce a group of people who treat “bootloader unlock” as the moral standard for a phone, placing it above system smoothness, privacy, software ecosystem and actual user experience. Every other metric becomes secondary.
The most ironic part: Mi Fans treat “supports flashing” as one of Xiaomi’s great advantages, promote it loudly and take pride in it. But the premise of that advantage is an admission that the official system is so bad users need to rescue themselves. It’s packaging shame as a medal — packaging a debt owed by the manufacturer as a privilege granted to users. This is what I mean by manufacturer defects being transferred onto consumers. It should never have existed.
This is a variant of Stockholm syndrome: after being tormented long enough, people stop demanding a manufacturer that doesn’t torment them. Instead they internalize the ability to fight the torment as identity, and then look down on people who “have never been tormented.”
Why don’t Samsung and Pixel users have this PTSD? Because their phone software doesn’t treat users as an opponent. The system doesn’t require users to rescue themselves.
In arguments about phone brands and operating systems, the Android camp has a classic accusation aimed at iOS users: you’ve all been domesticated by Apple, living in Apple’s cage, unfree and yet convinced you’re free.
That criticism isn’t unreasonable. iOS really is a closed system with objective limitations.
But the people saying it forget to look in the mirror.
iOS users adapt to not having certain features. That’s out in the open: the system is designed that way and everyone knows it. But what do Chinese Android users adapt to? Features being tampered with. On the surface it’s an open system; in reality their freedom was quietly taken away by the manufacturer. One is a transparent cage; the other is a cage with windows painted on it, convincing you that you can see outside when it’s actually a sticker.
The Chinese Android user’s adaptation checklist is long: adapting to boot ads, lock-screen ads, preinstalled apps that can’t be uninstalled, mysterious background battery drain, the system randomly slowing down after a while, the emergency protocol of “if something breaks, flash it,” and the industry convention that “cloud control is normal.”
Then they turn to iOS users and say: you poor things, domesticated by Apple.
Honestly, there is no such thing as adapting or not adapting. Everyone is adapting. Everyone lives under some set of rules. The only differences are three: who made the rules, whether the rules suit you, and whether you’re aware that the rules exist.
Being aware is called a rational choice. Being unaware is called “it works great for me.” Both are adaptation. Only the self-perception differs.
Back then, wrong beliefs had a natural correction mechanism.
You lived in a village. Your information circle was that big, your social circle was those few dozen people. If you said something absurd or expressed an unrealistic view, someone would immediately push back and correct you. Strange minority opinions had a hard time surviving long in that physical community, because they constantly encountered feedback from the majority.
The internet destroyed that mechanism completely.
Before, you were the only weirdo in the village: isolated, under pressure, either persuaded or forced to move. Now you can find ten thousand identical weirdos online. Ten thousand weirdos together look like the mainstream from the inside — like consensus, like truth — while “the people outside” become the minority, the misfits, the haters. The correction mechanism disappears: you only encounter information that agrees with you, only talk to people who agree with you, and all feedback reinforces what you already believed.
Worse, algorithms actively complete this process for you. Click one piece of content you agree with, and the platform feeds you ten more like it, usually more extreme. You didn’t walk into the echo chamber; the echo chamber wrapped itself around you. The geocentric model used to need people to spread it by hand. Now the geocentric model has algorithms distributing it, platforms operating communities for it, and traffic finding every potential believer.
This produces a phenomenon I call the idiot resonance chamber: a group of people holding similar wrong beliefs gathers together. Instead of being corrected, they reinforce one another, becoming more extreme and more certain, forming a self-sealing information bubble. Inside, people feel increasingly clear-headed. Outside, they look increasingly ridiculous. Both sides think the other is full of idiots.
There’s another effect in groups: the lowest intellectual level spreads upward, while the highest does not. Emotion travels faster than logic, agreement is more comfortable than doubt, and following the crowd is easier than thinking independently. One idiot entering a rational group doesn’t get corrected; instead, they drag everyone else down. There’s plenty of social psychology research supporting this.
So never pick a side. Picking a side means outsourcing your judgment to a collective, and that collective’s floor determines the ceiling of your thinking.
Now we can finally talk about the flame war properly. All the spec comparisons, all the quoted reviews — peel them back and there is only one layer:
I am superior to you.
What you actually know is secondary. Knowing how to flash makes you superior to someone who doesn’t. Knowing root makes you superior to someone who doesn’t. Using a Pixel makes you superior to using a Chinese phone. Using an iPhone makes you superior to using Android. Using Android makes you “freer” than iOS. Every circle has its own chain of contempt. The contents differ; the psychological structure is identical.
What makes this sense of superiority frightening is how cheap it is. You don’t need to actually live better than others, achieve anything, or sacrifice anything. You only need to have bought the right phone, or learned an operation someone else doesn’t know, and you can enjoy the pleasure of looking down on others online. Tiny investment, enormous psychological return. An absurdly good deal.
So the flame war will never end, because it was never about solving a problem or convincing the other side. It satisfies a need far deeper than “discussing technology”: proving that I am superior to you. And that need can never be fed enough. Feed it once, and it wants the next time. Every new flame war is a sequel to the last, because superiority expires and has to be renewed.
How expensive is it to admit “I chose wrong”? I’ve written about this many times before, but let’s review.
First, you have to negate the original choice itself and admit the money was not well spent. Then you have to negate all the time and energy spent defending that choice: the posts you wrote, the arguments you fought, the data you cited, the reasons you gave your friends. Finally, you have to bow your head in front of all of it — often in front of the very people who once mocked you.
Those three together are more weight than most people can bear.
Economics calls it sunk cost. Psychology calls it cognitive dissonance. But to put it bluntly, it’s four words: saving face.
When reality conflicts with self-image, we tend to distort our interpretation of reality rather than revise our self-image. So Huawei’s problems aren’t flaws; they’re “suppression by competitors.” Xiaomi’s low prices aren’t weak product capability; they’re “an industry conscience.” Reviews that point out problems aren’t objective analysis; they’re “haters stirring things up.” Every piece of information that threatens self-image has a ready-made explanatory frame to catch it and make it harmless.
And the more you argue, the deeper you sink. Once you enter a camp, leaving has a psychological cost, and as time and investment accumulate, the cost grows and leaving gets harder. The people who argue the most fiercely are often the ones already starting to waver. They need to persuade loudly and constantly, because the first person they need to persuade is themselves.
From phone flame wars all the way here, I’ve really been saying the same thing: how hard it is for people to accept that they are wrong.
But if I stopped there, this would just be an ordinary observation about human weakness that applies to any culture. That would be boring.
The genuinely interesting question is: why is this so intense in China? Why can a phone become identity, a declaration of stance, a battlefield where losing is unacceptable?
The answer is face.
Face is not a personality flaw, and it isn’t simple vanity. It is a piece of low-level core code deposited by thousands of years of Chinese society, never truly rewritten. Dynasties changed. Reform and opening happened. Every historical upheaval rewrote many things in society, but face passed through all of those nodes without a single line of code changing.
The reason is that it isn’t a learned idea. It is a structural presence coded into life experience from birth.
A child gets good grades: that’s the parents’ face, their capital for standing tall in front of neighbors and relatives. A child does badly: it isn’t just the child’s failure; it’s a collective shame the whole family must bear. Going further, marrying well is the family’s face; what job you get is your parents’ confidence when they speak in public; what car you buy and what home you live in are your valuation within this network of relationships.
People live under other people’s gaze from birth, and are never given the chance to ask: what do I myself want?
People raised this way are used to getting self-evaluation from outside, used to treating others’ opinions as the mirror for self-knowledge. Without the mirror, they cannot see themselves.
Face is the surface. The deeper thing is the relationship-based society.
In the underlying logic of a relationship society, people are not bound by contracts but by debt. You help me, I owe you, and one day I must repay. The repayment can take the form of money, resources or favors, but the account never disappears; it only circulates through time. The relationship network is an asset. Maintaining it requires continuous investment. Breaking it is bankruptcy.
Under this framework, many behaviors that look inexplicable to outsiders have a complete internal logic. Giving gifts isn’t necessarily corruption; it’s a necessary operating cost for maintaining relationships. Asking for a favor isn’t “going through the back door”; it’s cashing in a historical favor debt. Giving someone face in public is maintaining their credit; making them look bad in public is an attack on their relationship assets.
An individual in this system is never an independent entity. They are a node in the relationship network. The node’s value depends on the number and quality of its connections, how many resources it can mobilize, and how many points it is worth in others’ eyes. Once detached from the network, the node becomes an isolated point — nothing at all.
So Chinese people have two deepest fears: loneliness and losing face.
These two fears are essentially the same thing: once separated from the crowd, you no longer know who you are.
Loneliness isn’t just an emotion. It means you have fallen out of the relationship network, your social assets have gone to zero, your valuation in this system has hit bottom. Losing face isn’t just embarrassment. It’s a loss of credit, the network re-pricing you, your position in the web being downgraded.
So Chinese people impose on themselves a pile of rules and constraints that outsiders find baffling: what age to marry, what stage of life to buy a home, what attitude to have toward relatives, how to handle social obligations, what image to present in public.
Most of these rules are not what people actually want. They are forced out by that invisible audience: not really wanting to marry, but afraid of being called “left on the shelf”; not really wanting children, but afraid of being called “unfilial”; not really valuing relatives, but afraid of being called “clueless.”
You live an entire life performing for an audience that is never fully satisfied. And that audience’s scoring criteria are never consistent. One household says you should do this; another says you should do that. No matter how you live, someone gossips. In the end, what you protect is not any real value system, but a minimum defense line: “most people can’t currently say anything bad about me.”
There’s a comparison I’ve looked into that deserves a closer look.
When Westerners lose their direction, they still have two anchors: religion and individualism.
Religion provides an inner coordinate system: my relationship with God, the value of my soul, my place in the eternal dimension. This coordinate system is internal. It doesn’t depend on how the people around you see you. Even if everyone opposes and belittles you, your relationship with God remains, your inner value remains. This isn’t to say religion has no problems, only that functionally it provides a mechanism of self-affirmation that doesn’t rely on others’ gaze.
Of course, I’m an atheist. I’m not trying to promote Western religion. It’s just a simple comparison.
Individualism provides another kind of grounding: I am an independent individual. My feelings have value in themselves. My choices are legitimate in themselves. I don’t need to be accountable to the collective or to others’ expectations. Even if society collapses, even if nobody approves of you, “this is who I am” is itself a place to stand.
In China, both anchors are weak. Religion has always been marginal in Chinese culture and never developed a tradition as deeply embedded in daily life and value judgment as Western Christianity. Individualism has long been treated as a synonym for selfishness and unsociability, suppressed by family ethics and collectivism.
So face filled the gap. It is a substitute spiritual structure that grew naturally over thousands of years in soil without inner anchors: using others’ gaze to confirm one’s existence and value. This structure is crude, rough and extremely costly, but it works. It solves the fundamental question of “who am I and what am I worth” — except it solves it outward rather than inward.
The problem with outward is that “the outside” is never stable. It can always change. It always needs you to maintain it, perform for it, fight for it. You live forever inside others’ evaluations. You can never stop. The moment you stop, you are suspended in midair.
With this framework, we can return to phones. And suddenly the explosive popularity of foldables in China becomes very easy to understand.
A foldable phone is a face machine — and one of the most exquisitely designed face machines in consumer electronics today.
It’s expensive enough to signal wealth directly. Its form is distinctive enough that it looks different from ordinary phones on a table. The key moment is the unfolding: going from folded to tablet takes about two seconds. Those two seconds are a natural performance window. People around you can hardly fail to notice; they can hardly avoid a second glance.
That glance is the phone’s real core feature.
Thick, heavy, creased, awkward to hold with one hand: for someone buying a phone to actually use, these are real defects. But for someone buying a phone to perform, none of it matters, because the performance was completed in the second it unfolded. The ticket price has already been repaid.
Interestingly, truly wealthy people often don’t buy foldables. They don’t need a phone to prove anything; their wealth and status have more direct, less explained forms of expression. The most enthusiastic foldable buyers tend to be people who need to be seen and need to be acknowledged.
So when someone spends tens of thousands on a foldable, they aren’t buying a phone. They’re buying the flash of envy in the other person’s eyes when the screen unfolds. For them, that’s a good deal.
The same logic applies to cars, bags and educational credentials. Anything that can be seen and compared in a social setting can become a carrier for this logic.
More than a hundred years ago, Lu Xun was studying medicine in Japan when he saw a slide. During the Russo-Japanese War, a Chinese man accused of being a spy knelt on the ground awaiting execution. Around him stood a circle of Chinese onlookers, their faces numb, some even wearing a kind of satisfied smile.
Lu Xun said that at that moment he decided to abandon medicine for literature. Physical illness was not the most frightening thing. Spiritual numbness was.
He later wrote many onlookers. In “Medicine,” the revolutionary Xia Yu is beheaded, and not one person in the crowd knows the dead man died for them. In “The True Story of Ah Q,” Ah Q is paraded through the streets on the way to execution, and the onlookers find it “not exciting enough.” “A Public Example” has no plot at all, only a crowd watching — what they watch and why is never explained, but the circle of people is there, craning their necks, looking.
Lu Xun wasn’t writing about villains. The onlooker doesn’t hate you or love you; they simply treat your suffering as entertainment, a way to pass the time. That is more despairing than hatred, because hatred at least has warmth — it means you matter to them. Indifferent watching means you are just a passing spectacle. They look, then leave, and nothing remains.
And the people fighting online today are essentially onlookers too, just with a stronger sense of participation. They treat others’ wins and losses as entertainment, their own mockery as participation, feeling present while never actually being present. The topic changes again and again, the battlefield moves from place to place, but the core psychological posture — observing others from above — never changes.
Everyone is performing desperately for an audience that doesn’t exist.
“Doesn’t exist” doesn’t mean nobody is watching. It means that audience — the “others” we spend our whole lives trying to please and prove ourselves to — mostly isn’t paying attention to you at all. They’re busy performing for their own audience, and their audience is busy performing for yet more audience.
The whole theater is full of actors. Nobody is really watching.
Everyone is giving everything to an absent gaze, and the time, energy and attention that truly belong to them are drained away little by little in this performance. Buying phones you don’t need, fighting pointless arguments online, maintaining relationships that aren’t sincere, completing milestones you don’t care about — but “the others” never arrive as expected. The recognition you long for is always faintly visible, never complete, never enough.
The most tragic part is that stopping is more frightening than continuing.
To stop is to face a question that the noise of performance has always covered:
Take off the costume. Who am I?
This is a question many people never get a chance to answer seriously in their entire lives. Because they started performing as children and never stopped. Every stage of life brings a new script: school, the college entrance exam, work, marriage, a home, a car, children — and then the children’s school, exam, work. Script after script, with no blank space, no chance to stop, and no reason to stop, because stopping means “not doing proper work,” “being clueless,” “letting down all those eyes that have been watching you.”
So the choice most people make is to keep performing.
Not because they aren’t tired, but because they don’t know who they are if they stop.
Premier Zhou Enlai coined a wonderful phrase: seek common ground while reserving differences.
Those words are more precious today than they were then, because today they are harder to practice.
Seeking common ground while reserving differences presupposes acknowledging that the other side’s “difference” has a right to exist, that “sameness” is not the only correct answer, and that disagreement is a normal state of the world rather than an error to be eliminated. Behind it is a kind of cognitive maturity: the world lives in the gray zone, and most real questions do not have either-or answers.
Only people who can accept gray can truly see things clearly. Only people who can be persuaded at any moment are truly lucid. Never being absolute is the ability to keep updating your understanding at any time. This ability is the most valuable thing a person has when facing a complex world, and it is also the first thing worn away inside a group.
From the Mi Fans vs. Huawei fans war, to flashing PTSD, to the truth about adaptation, to the idiot resonance chamber, to face and the relationship society, to foldables, to Lu Xun’s onlookers —
It has always been the same thing:
How hard it is for a person to live for themselves.
