It’s been ten years now, but I went to Beijing and xian over 10 days and was fairly ignorant and neutral going in on China. There’s some annoying stuff, but I could not shake how it felt like they had surpassed us clearly then, and I was visiting a not horrible near future. This was a decade ago, and you could pay for everything using QR codes, including street vendors. There were fancy coffee shops where you had to use the codes. We didn’t have WeChat with money enabled (you need a Chinese bank acct) but the cashier was very nice and paid for our coffees with her WeChat and we gave her cash.

That’s all window dressing though, compared to the infrastructure. We took a high speed train to xian from Beijing and it took 3 hours, for a trip that used to be 14 hours. As we were travelling you could see other high speed rails being constructed in all of these directions, using huge modular concrete sections, they clearly had optimized the process.

Zero visible crime. There were Chinese army ads everywhere and visible presence in big public areas, but this was not any different than back home so I hardly noticed it. There were… PUBLICALLY AVAILABLE BATHROOMS EVERYWHERE.

Mass transit in Beijing, which is fucking huge, was highly functional, clean and on time. They’d built like 4-5 new major subways in the last decade leading up to the Olympics, on top of the many they already had.

The smog was bad, and it was hot because it was August, but again, we have that here as well. They had a govt program to plant millions of trees going and you could see them from the high speed rail.

Anyway, I was throughly convinced on that trip that they were gonna drink our milkshake and we deserved it. They were selling multiple domestic smartphone brands for the same as iPhones (which is to say quite expensive) and were building tons of tourist stuff all over the place, but for internal tourists, not external.

I could list things I found unsettling, but honestly most of them could be explained by the fact that I was raised in a individualistic culture and not a more communal one, or were things I’ve realized are the same here.

As a foreigner I wasn’t affected by the firewall, and I was against the firewall, but to be fair, it’s not like the internet had been a great thing in the balance, so maybe it was a good idea?