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I follow a couple of guys on YouTube who have lived in China a decade or more, married Chinese women and one has two kids.
They show the bright lights and fancy parks but they also take to motorcycles and scooters to show the REST of China. They don’t sugarcoat things.
Some of the things they talk about are sickening, like milk dogs, gutter oil, the pollution and the rampant corruption.
They have shown videos of people dining on fine foods and people eating rats just to survive.
They attempt to balance things.
I keep an open mind but the truth is the truth.

I spend a fair amount of time in China for business, and both versions are true. Vannrox's blog is one side, and many, many people in the first tier cities are able to live quite well. Many other people are denied much chance to advance because the government is still dominated by Maoists who are scared of the emerging middle class and hanging on to power by their fingernails. Not much different than Pelosi and Schumer, here.

China was essentially on the right path until Xi Jinping arrived - he has stopped the county's progress toward a true market economy and changes to the laws are going to make him very hard to remove. I'm not sure whether to formally label him a "bad guy" or not, but Chinese I speak to privately hate him and consider him a dictator, not a president.

Those guys are ok.

Interesting that the politics under Xi is becoming so bad that they are mentioning it and it’s consequences after being non-political for a long time.