Deng opened up the economy as much as he could, which wasn’t as much as he wanted to.
Most of the leaders in China today are from Mao’s “lost generation”. The generation that has much less education than the students of today.
Xi is ramping up the communist rhetoric again. Mao is pictured on every piece of Chinese money, his picture is everywhere and he is thought of as the greatest Chinese leader.
I watch YouTube videos made by expats actually living there. Some of it is sadly funny and some is disheartening and some just sickly sad.
There are videos about the ghost cities, cities that are built but not lived in and falling down in five years.
There are even some showing people drinking dogs milk, straight from the teat. These are hard to find but out there.
Those “experts” need to get outside of the first tier cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou) and into the third tier cities to see how the “little people” live.
The Chinese people spend more time than we do figuring ways around government edicts.
I would like to visit just for the hell of it. No way I would live there.
Anyone wanting to see the Chinese culture that westerners think of would be better off visiting Taiwan. Mao destroyed Chinese culture on the mainland.
They were oppressively authoritarian, state-owned and controlled, thieves all along.
There was never some liberal Reagan democracy over there.
IIRC these posts, such as a recent blog post claiming that the average Chinese citizens lives in a new luxury apartment tower, were posted under the Freeper name of Metallicman.
Now somehow another long-running Freeper account is taking credit for this agitprop?
Here! Here!
It’s even more night-day in China between the big cities and outside them as it is Liberal-Conservative here in the US between the coasts/major metros and the heartland.
Base survival in the China hinterlands. Corruption is worse. People are a commodity to be used. Freedom is limited.
There are good people in China, of course and the history and base culture is very interesting; but I’m glad I haven’t had to go back in a few years.