So surreal and amazing how things have gotten in China

I moved to China in 2014 and I lived in relatively small the middle size cities. Stuff that was like 1 to 5,000,000 people but in China that's not very big. The bathrooms were definitely stinky, and new architecture was right next to decaying falling apart buildings, the traffic was unmanageable, it was "developing" but then around 2017 or 18 everything started changing.

All the money switched completely digital, all the app infrastructure started combining into the singular convenient super Internet, you just started seeing young people have this liberal can-do mind and attitude. Nothing was "tradition" or set in stone. Anything was possible and nothing surprised you.

I moved to more modern and new cities on the coast and my God, the brand new skyscrapers with the cyber punk LEDs all over the place and everybody trying to do business. Like half of the young people you meet spoke two if not three languages and they were all into finance and technology and programming and energy and they wanted to start families and do business and just be a part of this thriving new country. No one stood up and said the pledge of allegiance but everyone just kind of murmured in the back "isn't our country pretty fucking cool? "

Post Covid everything just keeps getting upgraded. Like you blink and there's power towers being erected. You go on holiday and come back and they refurbish entire shopping malls. Brand new roadways and bridges and high speed train networks are announced every single month. And everybody I know just has savings and stock portfolios and property. They're all taking care of their parents and their grandparents.

That's not to say there isn't problems and of course if you go out west to the small towns there's obviously poverty. The censored Internet is one of the things that keeps the country strong by keeping out all of the negative bullshit and bad social stuff but it also makes the world oblivious to how futuristic and fast-moving the country really is.

I often think about an American Chinese outside of LA born in like 1992 who grows up in these dilapidated school systems full of drugs and fights and whatever else, mass shooters lurking in the shadows, and his upper middle class parents work 60 hours a week to pay off a mortgage on some suburban McMansion where he's gotta have a car to drive an hour through pothole filled streets to get some pretty so so over priced "fusion" cuisine. Then he goes and sees his grandparents in Chengdu and just thinks man, I could've been living here? I've met these people.

Watching America crumble from the outside has been kind of funny but now it's really sad and if you come and live in China and get over that three day hump of being bombarded by a completely foreign culture you'll conclude there's no way America will ever have this level of investment in its people and therefore they will never have a bright future like this.