Comment by toephu2
7 hours ago
What many Americans don't realize is that China has already surpassed the United States in terms of development (developing country vs developed country sense of the word). Obviously both are 'developed' countries at this point but compare Chinese tier 1 cities vs American tier 1 cities. I would argue Chinese tier 1 cities are 10-20 years ahead of their American counterparts.
source: visit any Chinese tier 1 city (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen) and it will blow your mind if you've only lived in the West.
And if you haven't visited, for example this is tier 1 China: cashless society, amazing public transportation, clean streets, no homeless, practically zero crime, drone food delivery (in Shenzhen, certain spots only), high-speed rail to every major city in China (and even to smaller tier-2, tier-3 cities), wonderful infrastructure that gets built in years (vs decades in the West), extensive subway systems with protective barriers at every single station (so you can't suicide or push someone on the tracks) etc.
I agree with your assessment on the high end of China's development and the lack of awareness of that from people in the US. But I think the story on the low end /lower class is more interesting and I think there is lack of awareness there too.
Even within the US a lot of upper class people don't know what it's like for lower class people here. It's so easy to slip into homelessness because there aren't reasonable options available to many people to live anymore.
In China they still have a huge amount of their population in a developing stage so they still have ample tools and options and knowledge for how to maintain a reasonable life in a less developed state. So it's easier to fall back to a cheaper lifestyle, and culturally it's easier too.
But in the US were generations removed from these other ways of life, so there's no options or cultural acceptance of not living a highly developed way of life. So people just go straight from a nice house or apartment with modern stuff to being homeless with little to no tools to survive.
Just my probably naive thoughts. Would love to hear others takes on this.
i agree with that. It's as if they tried to outlaw poverty. i mean look at all the insane housing regulations (zoning laws, regulations, permit costs, land usage policy) that prevent low cost housing from being built.
I've seen in thailand, how even the poorest can just build a small hut on a piece of land they own and actually live in it. You'd be risking jail time if you did that in the US.
I think your assessment of homelessness in the US misses some things, though (or at least leaves them unstated):
First, that it's not just that people "don't know how to live more simply", and thus cling to their homes too long when they "should" otherwise be downsizing and cutting expenses. For a lot of people, the fall is sudden—some medical emergency drains all their savings and leaves them unable to work (at least for a time), and there it goes.
Second, what are they going to downsize to? We don't have whole rural villages in the US that are living, essentially, pre-industrialized lives (except with the Amish, I suppose, but that's a whole other kettle of fish). (Also, I don't know for sure that such places exist today in China—I know that they did not too many years ago, but my information is not current.) There isn't really anywhere you can go in the US to live securely, but simply, on $100 a month or whatever. And even if there were, that would involve leaving whatever job you had to begin with, which removes the "securely" part.
As an East Asian, not really trying to argue that China hasn’t accomplished great things.
While I can’t speak directly to this, but from watching The China Show on YouTube, the tradeoff to the amazing amenities is that the personal-injury risk from failing infrastructure has been fatal, but covered up by their propaganda. Anyone on the receiving end of it, will deal with devastating consequences, if not fatal.
Infrastructure and manufacturing corners are cut in ways that look great, but literally kill their population and tourists.
Building foundations are not thick enough, buildings aren’t built to proper fire safety standards, underground pipes leak, leading to roads constantly failing, high rises burn down, sewage pipes literally blow up due to methane build up like someone detonated a bomb.
Drainage grates are fake and flooding cities, drowning people in vehicles, while the QA of car battery manufacturing is causing electric fleets of cars in parking lots to burn.
And the aforementioned occurrences are happening in tier1 cities.
I sound hyperbolic, but China is great at quickly cleaning up and quickly rebuilding, so it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as it does.
Once I learned about the infrastructure, I realized my cousin’s business trip accident in China was not a randomly rare accident.
He broke his back in China when his rental car’s front wheel popped off the car.
Chances are most folks are fine if they go. But I would be very weary, because the probability of a disaster is not nearly as high as it ought to be.
I saw an interview with the director of the FBI describing FBI headquarters as having nets on all sides, so falling debris don’t kill people on the ground.
The fact that the FBI, which is institutionally highly defended, feels the need to spend money and effort on stopping falling debris, tells you something about how accountable government agencies are.
> the QA of car battery manufacturing is causing electric fleets of cars in parking lots to burn
I've seen a lot of grumbling on this site about why the U.S. doesn't have access to cheap EVs like China, but it's almost entirely because the cheap EVs that China is pumping out aren't even close to being up to the U.S.'s stringent safety standards.
Eventually they will be safe enough, and they will also be more expensive.
Just got back from a trip to Japan and I found that Tokyo and Kyoto also met most of your criteria.
Cash is still pretty common there and definitely can't go cashless (nor would I personally like to), and there's no delivery drones that I'm aware of (I also don't particularly care for that, personally).
I'm not even sure it's that they're ahead, I think we've just fallen behind in a lot of those cases.
China has made amazing progress and the rate of extreme poverty has fallen a lot. But it's also easier to limit the homeless population in cities when they have the Hukou internal passport system to keep many of the poorest people out, as well as forced institutionalization of the severely mentally ill.
>clean streets, no homeless, practically zero crime
The US regressed on this heavily in the last generation.
no it didn't. crime rates have been steadily declining for over 30 years
The only crime rate data which is really reliable is the murder rate. This peaked in 1991 and has been generally stable (not steadily declining) since 1999, with a spike during the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost all murders do get reported and counted.
https://www.consumershield.com/articles/murder-rate-by-year
I don't trust the statistics for lesser crimes because so many of the victims never file a report. In many cities the police now subtly discourage people from filing reports because they don't want to deal with the paperwork or have their statistics look bad. But I think we can generally use the murder rate as a proxy for the overall level of criminality.
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I agree, but a lot of petty/non-violent crime isn't enforced or reported anymore.
Feels like a weird comparison. Granted, I've neither been in US nor China but from my Chinese/US friends that I mingled with while living in Tokyo, I feel like except for that flashy silly thing you cherish (cashless, drones) Chinese cities don't offer much compared to say Seoul or Tokyo.
And even Seoul or Tokyo, depending on your metric, probably fails compared to some European cities (Dutch, Scandinavian, etc)
Comparing to US cities feels weird. Because they don't got much going on for them anyway, except diverse culture and vibrant businesses
While I do believe that China is surpassing the West on many points, I'd like to underline that a cashless society is not a good thing. It's a terrible, terrible idea.
With no cash, the citizen passport and the GFW, the dictatorship has total control of society. It's not that there are no homeless, is that they are pushed to even worse conditions, out of sight. It's not that there is zero crime, it's that the crime is from the state, the mafia, and there is a lot of corruption. But nobody can talk about it because there is no free press.
I do think it's important to state how much China is advancing, and surpassing the West, because they are going to rule the world as the Americans did, soon.
But let's not pretend it's some kind of utopia.
I think you over estimate the control and under estimate the need for flexibility for any society to operate. Let's just say even in China, identity can be a commodity. For example scammers are known to buy bank accounts by paying poor people in remote areas. The system needs flexibility otherwise a majority of people will run into problems all the time.
agree
What are some examples that might blow my mind?
Public transportation is on a different level and all mayor cities are connected via a high speed rail network.
The latter probably will never happen in the US.
Considering the US has far fewer people far more spread out, with two major sets of mountain ranges just in the continental US probably not. It might be possible to have high speed rail on either coast with a single rail line following along a route near I-10 east=west. Even then it's a lot of nature to overcome.
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So like in (parts of) Europe?
>> extensive subway systems with protective barriers at every single station (so you can't suicide or push someone on the tracks)
I find this one most interesting. In London for example this is brought up all the time. There is always an excuse (cost, platform length, trains can't stop at the same spot etc etc) and we accept ~100 suicide attempts per year not to mention various accidents. There's the immediate human cost, the PTSD for first emergency workers + the disruption to public transport.
If we can't invest in simple things that would make a meaningful difference how do we expect to match those big infrastructure projects? Crossrail is fantastic but was delayed many years. HS2 is beyond a joke.
US cities just suck, they lose against pretty much any developed nation except Canada (which is US but without money).
Even any Russian cities are way ahead of US counterparts. Places like Kensington avenue or NYC subway are unimaginable in major cities there.