Toronto

I can respect your opinion for sure. I don't think China is some kind of utopia. This is a mild curiosity I have had for years. Like watching some of the expat stuff out of China on YouTube, but I go much deeper on this. I am into hobby hardware culture to the point where I have encountered stories of people around Shenzhen in the open source/reverse engineering/hardware security scopes. These people often talk about peripheral aspects of life that are not intended as any kind of politically charged conversation or have intent but do reflect a raw truth. In the space of hardware junk, we largely live in a surveillance state in North America too. The main difference is the disclosure and how obvious these systems are in practice. People volunteer the same information or share it unwittingly. Those that do not, unwittingly step into the lens of a closer security monitoring scope.

China is presently in a position very much like the USA was in 1950. They have a tremendous capacity to expand and a domestic consumer market poised to massively expand. The Chinese are very frugal consumers or have been, but that is starting to change. If they become the consumers that they have every potential to become, China will boom on an unprecedented level entirely from within while we remain irrelevant and stagnate. From what I have seen, skilled workers in China are well paid and valued far more than in the English world. I'm not talking about the contract manufacturing slave like systems that are the product of western firms. I'm talking about the Chinese domestic brands that export products to compete with low quality venture capital contract manufactured crap they demand for exploitation. China is more than capable and willing to produce whatever quality goods people will purchase. They are accustomed to having far more choice in their domestic market than anything in the west. There you can buy anything from the raw castings to make a farm tool yourself all the way up to a robotic combine harvester. We often only see low quality garbage as consumers and are far too stupid to check our prejudice against the fact that all of our other branded quality products were also made in China.

Ultimately, watching passively from the periphery, yeah I would rather be Chinese right now. They have a much better potential future for the next century. The cost of living and particularly housing will never be equalised with Asia without causing complete economic collapse. There is no meritocratic social structure in the western sphere. Most wealth is inherited. Business acumen is not hereditary. The only means of maintaining the hierarchical wealth caste of the chronically incompetent wealthy is through exploitation. You own nothing now. All goods are leveraged using exploitation by their true owners. Information passes through the bottlenecks of two web crawlers, Microsoft's and Google's. Every single query you make passes through one of these two either directly or indirectly. They are not deterministic either. Two identical searches by two different people will have different results. There are less than a dozen people in control of all corporate news media. You cannot have real democracy if the citizen lacks access to all information, unfiltered, with a right to skepticism, the right to discuss openly, and the right to be wrong. Citizens must be autonomous with self determinism and fully informed or democracy is a meaningless label. You do not have such freedom. Even the device you are likely using now has tools running in the background capable of filtering and monitoring you. These devices are built and sold forcing your implicit trust, but trust is fundamentally undemocratic authoritarianism. Stealing your right to place trust where you deem necessary or prudent was the coup that killed democracy long ago.