I want to say this with the caveat that I am generally a person who always contends with the contradictions of living in a capitalist-imperialist country and my own distaste for it. So this doesn't come from a place of American exceptionalism writ large, but I am a firm believer the we did get this part right:

Public lands and culture of the ability to access wild places, whether for hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, and just generally an affordance of access to wilderness that is codified into the laws of the country. In Europe they have the concept of "Right to Roam" which is a powerful concept that I appreciate (and in ways is superior to our systems for just walking in the woods) but it is also fundamentally different than the almost legalistic systems we have in this country towards public lands.

My surface understanding of China is that there is no such broad remit given to the people of China and there aren't designated places where the people of China can just go and exist in wilderness. Such places might exist by convention but they don't have the sort of legal framework that we have in America to recreate in these places.

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TheDong 11 hours ago | parent [-]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protected_areas_of_Chi...

> China has more than 10,000 protected areas, covering eighteen percent of the country's land

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_areas_of_the_United_...

> As of 2022, the 42,826 protected areas covered 1,235,486 km2 (477,024 sq mi), or 13 percent of the land area of the United States.

Can you be more specific? China has areas of protected wilderness, and you can in fact go to many of them and be in nature. What's the practical difference?

	▲	prescriptivist an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Another comment said it, but that's basically land protected from most use, with some exceptions that are more akin to our national park system, right? I'm talking more about BLM lands in the west, or national forests in the east. Also, there are states with significant public lands holdings that are in the same spirit. With our public lands, I can usually go to them anytime I want, I don't have to reserve anything. I can park my car, I can get out, and I can begin just walking into the woods or grasslands, sometimes on trail, sometimes off. I can basically camp wherever I want in many of these places. If there's a stream, I can fly fish. If it's hunting season, I can hunt. I can basically disappear into a place that feels wild for a bit.
	▲	kortilla 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		A protected area like a national park is pretty much the opposite of what op is talking about.