China Meme Generator
Ask for directions in a village and the map is redrawn around the pub. Your house is a dot at the edge, the motorway is "that way, somewhere", and the shop that closed in 2009 is still the most important landmark.
At a family dinner, one person's week abroad takes up the whole table. Everyone else's lives get squeezed into the margins: "Anyway, you were saying something about a job?"
Draw your weekend plans on a napkin and your own flat ends up the size of a continent. Your friend's place, forty minutes away, is a small smudge near the bottom marked "far".
Every office has a desk where all the decisions are made. The other departments are tiny islands around the edges, reachable only by email and the occasional hopeful wave.
Why it caught on: the picture is an old-style map, covered in Chinese characters and with the rivers drawn in, where China fills the middle and its neighbours are tucked around the edges. Someone added English labels, and "ah just as we like it" became the caption. It spread because every map-maker puts home in the middle, and anyone who has only ever seen the usual world map is briefly surprised by that.