Visiting China: Some thoughts and observations

By Antonio Cheong on on Permalink.

Context

I lived in China between approximately 2008-2012 in Beijing and 2018-2023 in Chongqing where my father works as an engineer. My point of reference will mostly be comparing to Malaysia, my home country, and the UK, where I am currently studying for my bachelor's degree.

Pollution

This was the first thing I noticed as the plane landed in Chongqing. I could barely see beyond a hundred meters. Perhaps that is why the country feels so dystopian, with everything being the same shade of gray. The problem was meant to have been fixed years ago when more than half the cars on the road became electric and factories were moved to other provinces. Perhaps it was just that week when the wind blew from the wrong direction. I remember it being somewhat clearer back in 2023, though of course nothing like the UK or Malaysia. The sun in China never felt warm. I doubt its possible to get sunburns when most of the UV gets absorbed by dust.

Then I fly to Beijing. The skies are a clear blue, a stark contrast to when I was last there in 2012. Apparently they planted a whole bunch of trees near the Gobi Desert to stop the sandstorms. The buildings were all still the same tall communist blocks with no sense of style. Much different to Chongqing's cyberpunk theme.

Hyper-capitalism

Attention economy

Streamers are the new big thing in China. They promote products on TikTok (Douyin) and take a commission. I heard some of them have deals with manufacturers to sell branded products that fail QA at a discount. It honestly scares me how this has become almost the primary medium for purchasing certain products like clothing. Everywhere I go: on public transport, at restaurants, I can always hear someone watching a streamer without headphones.

Unsustainable competition

Everything seems to be dirt cheap. Maybe the UK has just had too much inflation but I refuse to believe these prices are sustainable. ¥30 (~£3) for a winter jacket, ¥16 (£1.7) for a bowl of ramen with beef, and various cheap toys for ¥5. How is anyone making a profit? Apparently the Chinese government has even stepped in to stop EV prices from dropping even further such that companies must compete on quality instead. Surely resources can be better allocated (e.g. Fixing their undrinkable tap water) rather than burnt on a bunch of low cost, low quality products.

Gambling and loot boxes

Usually I associate this problem with western game companies, but somehow China has made it worse. While trying to buy a train ticket the other day, rather than simply letting me pay, it became a sort of lottery system where you can pay or send an affiliate link to friends to boost your chances of actually getting the ticket. This sort of dark pattern shows up everywhere. When calling for a taxi via WeChat, various pop ups show up that lead you to gamble for discounts. As someone that barely knows Chinese, I keep misclicking on the wrong options to close the pop-up. If it really is a government for the people, why haven't they made any European-style regulations on this? China is feeling more and more similar to the US.

Low wages

Saw a job posting at a restaurant I was eating at yesterday. ¥25-¥35 per hour for a waiter and janitor. I suppose that is survivable based on the low cost of living but it really is so much lower than minimum wage. Mind you, this is in Beijing, not some rural village.

Overall, I don't like the direction China is moving in. There is nothing communist about it & if you have a dictatorship that favors companies over people, might as well just become an oligarchic democracy like the US.

Demographic changes in international schools

Ever since the trade war with the US, many international companies have moved to Vietnam and Malaysia. Korean companies have downsized and now hire more locally. It used to be that international schools would consist of rougly ~70% Koreans, 20% Chinese, and 10% other. Now, Chinese students make up more than 80%. This is weird when you consider that Chinese nationals are banned from attending international schools. Apparently many of them pay millions to get a citizenship or green card in European countries.

A change in behavior among 富二代

"富不过三代" was a common saying back in the day in reference to how lazy the children of the newly rich were. Those kids blew their parent's money on lavish parties and luxury goods while never getting good grades in class. They didn't have to. They could always just live off their parent's hoard.

This seems to have changed recently. Rich kids here are now getting pushed into multiple tutoring sessions a day, often with expensive teachers from abroad. Beyond academics, they also do violin, ballet, art, all at once. Why this change, I have no idea. There were some rare cases of this before, but now it has somehow become the norm.

Internet censorship

Well, not much has changed here. Everything is still blocked. GitHub loads painfully slow, and I can't even download anything off PyPi. Thankfully VPNs still work. Even Wireguard which makes no effort to conceal its handshake protocol is easily accessible and let through by the firewall. Cardiff University's firewall is more strict than this. I swear there is some corruption somewhere within Cardiff. Mullvad's website is blocked while their official documentation recommends NordVPN. Who is taking the commission, I want to know... (I've gone off topic)

Anyways, everyone I know here uses VPNs. Even non-technical boomer parents are bound to have friends that know. It feels relatively safe to ignore whatever government policy exists.

In contrast, the UK's new proposals to require age verification for VPN use scares me. In China, if they want to go after you, they must first go after a large segment of their own population. In the UK, barely anyone uses VPNs, and so there would be significantly less backlash if they started arresting a few random tech people.

On the topic of backlash, the UK government can seemingly ignore any dissent from the general public without repercussion. The population is docile. Rather than risking anything in protesting, we'd rather wait till the next election to once again vote in the lesser of two evils. Unlike Southeast Asia where governments are constantly in fear of simply being overthrown, the UK has a bunch of elitist snobs that think "populism" = bad. Off topic again...

So yeah, I don't actually mind the censorship too much if the law is only there on a surface level.

TODO

Update: I lost my phone along with all my photos. There will be no update...