The pictures and facts coming out of China is amazing. That society is changing at an amazing rate.
No kidding. Back in 1990, I had a Chinese professor spend the summer in my 3rd floor apt. while doing research at a local university. When he left, I offered to buy his wife and daughter some makeup and other girly stuff. He declined, saying that they would be ridiculed. Now when you look at pictures of Chinese women, they are all made up, stylishly dressed and with fashionable haircuts.
It used to be that when you walked around campuses, you could tell the mainland Chinese because the men generally wore black pants and white shirts and the women had very dowdy clothes - and these were young people. The mainland Chinese and the Taiwanese were polar opposites as far as appearance, with the Taiwanese quite stylish. Now, the Chinese students I've met over the past 5 years or so drive cars, dress fashionably, have cellphones, and more tellingly, their parents have enough disposable income to send them some extra money. Obviously this isn't true for all Chinese, but the ones who make it to American academe certainly are quite different than they were not 15-20 years ago.
It was never that bad. Up till the Communists took over, mainlanders moved freely back between Hong Kong and Macau and the mainland. After the Communists took over, border controls had to be instituted. Even with these border controls in place (combined with generous immigration quotas for mainlanders), Hong Kong's population ballooned seven-fold - from 1m people (around the time of the Communist victory in 1949) to 7m people by the late 90's. Given that Hong Kong's birthrate is less than 1 per family (2 is replacement rate), you can probably guess where the rise in population came from - Chinese migrants.