In a recent video on Twitter, he compared the China of today to 2019 and was completely shocked at the speed to progress and change. Says it’s like stepping into the future.
1 - Automation: From trains to taxis to purchases - everything is done seamlessly with super Apple Pay.
2 - EV: 30%-40% of the cars are fully electric. You can get Teslas but you have Chinese brands that offer sedans for $10k.
3 - The air is much cleaner. Partly due to EVs.
4 - People are more respectful of societal norms. There is better service everywhere you go.
5 - Less foreigners, even in touristy areas. Most white people are actually Russian.
6 - In factories, robots do the work in contrast to the perception people have in the US of China just throwing cheap labor at every problem. Factories set up their own e-commerce platforms and sell directly on China’s TikTok.
7 - It feels like over the past 5 years, everything by in China just got better, while everything in the US just got worse.
Google, an american data harvesting operation and advertising company masquerading as a search engine, is blocked yes. They aren’t licensed to operate in China, as they wouldn’t follow the same rules as other search providers do in China.
Baidu however returns plenty of results, even some in english. Top result is a china daily article which explains a chinese view on the events and how the western narrative came to be, and if you add the year 1989 you can get some additional news stories that reference it, like one from Sina about the EU arms embargo, and another about China’s response to a Trump admin pronouncement on the topic.
I mean the majority of its tenets are still being followed, to ensure a stable transition, they merely reject that it is legally binding over their sovereign territory, and claim that the British do not retain a supervisory role over the policies of Hong Kong. I don’t know the exact status legally in China, but the US constitution gives treaties ratified by congress the force of law on the same level as the constitution (“the supreme law of the land”). And yet the US breaks them all the time, we don’t follow our own constitution, for the sole reason that “the president felt like it” (sometimes congress too). This sucks reputationally for the US, but nobody challenges it because the US has sovereignty over its own affairs. Hong Kong is still afforded a “high degree of autonomy” in matters not relating to foreign affairs or defense.
Maybe you were, but look around, clearly that isn’t consensus, in the teaching profession or anywhere else. Also having an almost-always dramatically unpopular government isn’t the flex you think it is.