What's To Be Envied And Not Envied Of China?

[subgradient]

It seems that most of the threads are posted by people who are non-Chinese and haven't lived in China, so I would like to offer my two cents. My list of the most undesirable things about the country (compared to say US) goes as:

1. Unaffordable housing

This would be the number one complaint if you talk to most Chinese you'd meet. Housing prices to income ratio is sky high for most cities (https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/...v0/1200x-1.png).

Property prices are intentionally kept high by the government, which owns urban land (rural land is "collectively owned" by residents and in general can't be purchased). The reason stems from the tax reforms in 1994 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax-Sh..._China_in_1994), after which the central government has ~60% of the tax revenue, but is responsible for <40% of the expenditure. Local governments (provincial and lower) have no choice but to fund themselves with non-taxation revenue, i.e. the sale of undeveloped land to developers. Currently local governments are heavily dependent on land sales and are thus strongly motivated to maximize land sale profits. This explains many of their policies: limiting the supply of properties into the market, prohibition of single family houses, etc., all designed to keep housing prices high.

The other result of the tax reform is a rich and powerful central government which can spend its budget as it likes: highways in the mid-west, high-speed rail, poverty alleviation, etc. Other things you might find in Chinese cities, e.g. huge metro systems and fancy tower blocks, are funded by debt that is to be repaid by future land sales. So indirectly all these costly infrastructure projects are funded by the high housing prices, paid by people who moved into cities in the fast urbanization of the past decades. Once the housing market crashes, the whole system collapses.

2. Censorship

It is way too generic and arguably untrue to say "China is not free", but widespread censorship is tangible and really annoying. Starting from ~2017 any website where users can post something (be it text, image or video) has to have a censorship team. Those that do not conform are taken down. The censorship guidelines (if any) are vague and arbitrary, so websites/apps/content creators have developed different degrees of self-censorship to survive. In general I would rank severity of censorship as: games > movies/videos > websites & apps > books.

AFIAK censorship is violently opposed by people across the entire political spectrum. The liberals oppose it for obvious reasons; the pinkies oppose it as they think they are the majority anyway. Unfortunately things are getting worse during Xi's reign and won't get any better. The list of websites blocked by GFW grew from dozens in ~2010 (mostly google, youtube and facebook) to the majority of websites in ~2019 (reddit was blocked in 2018, wikipedia in 2019). VPN is costly and increasingly unstable.

3. Hyper-nationalism

Currently hyper-nationalists/pinkies create the mast majority of content you might see in Chinese internet. This is a rather recent surge, starting from 2018 or so. Nationalism has been a sort of default ideology for a long time, but most (in both online and irl) were pretty apolitical. Starting from the trade-war with Trump, nationalists/pinkies became much more vocal and since different opinions are more likely censored, the internet gradually became an echo-chamber for them. The level of nationalism is almost comical. People might get ridiculed/harassed online for sharing pics of Nike shoes/buying H&M or whatever brand that's dubbed anti-Chinese. It sometimes makes browsing social media depressing.

4. Questionable economic future

I am not an economist, but the popular opinion is that the economy is stagnating since around 2015. Previous threads also mentioned many deeply worrying factors: the aging and soon-to-be shrinking population, sour relations with the US, etc.

As for what might be considered "enviable" for the US, there are quite a few nice things about life in China (big cities in particular), but they are not really specific to China, and I don't think the average American would find them really "enviable".

Very urban cities and great public transport: Singapore/Korea/Japan/Western Europe/New York;
High speed rail: Japan/Korea/Western Europe;
Low crime: East Asia/Singapore;
Relatively cheap services (e.g. deliveries): SEA; also this comes at the cost of their low-income;
Cheap education: many European countries;
Great food: highly personal.