Comment by jdw64
1 day ago
No. China is a colonial structure of extreme 1-tier cities, 2-tier cities, and the lower cities beneath them. It's called hukou... That's also why ordinary Chinese young people don't want to go down to the provinces.
People in China's first-tier cities live well and are more up to date than almost anywhere, but in the lower cities, they are not free. I usually think that popular literature reflects a country's social conditions, and even in China's xianxia, there are ranks, and people act according to those ranks. To say that all of China has become wealthy would be an overstatement, given that there are many problems starting with the migrant worker issue. Of course, China is a great power, and the wealthy programmers in first-tier cities are extraordinarily talented.
> That's also why ordinary Chinese young people don't want to go down to the provinces.
Recently you're even starting to hear stories I thought ended with the Soviet Union. People who are literally terrified of getting on a train out of the city because they think they might never be allowed to come back.
We're all navigating through hard times.
The world economy has never done better in absolute terms. I'm not sure where all those hard times are that I keep hearing about year after year, virtually independent of how well the economies are actually doing.
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