Look up a video in Shenzhen or Chongqing. Everything looks 2 decades out, and the giant crystal skyscrapers light up different colors. Sometimes the whole thing is a TV.
China surpassed USAmerica in GDP already, but it doesn’t look close to tied in development and advanced technologies.
The trains there go hundreds of miles in less than an hour, you could commute across the country every day.
Meanwhile in America the “middle class” is struggling to have some walls and a roof. Record debt and crumbling infrastructure. How is all of this ignored and not talked about everywhere?
Every single US city outside of maybe NYC (and that’s a very big maybe) is a complete dump compared with some no-name tier 3 Chinese city. Like, imagine comparing somewhere like Ningbo and Wuhan to Houston and Miami. Honestly, most of East Asia blows the US out of the water, and SEA is catching up too. There will be a time when cities like Hanoi, Bangkok, and Jakarta also surpass US cities, if they haven’t done so already. The US really is that much of a dump and it’s only going to get worse. It’s just that Americans soyface over Japan and South Korea because they’re the good honorary white Asians. They don’t even give Taiwan enough credit because Taiwan is too Chinese, which I guess is appropriate with Taiwan being a Chinese island and all.
Houston is hell on earth. 80 square miles of unplanned concrete in a swamp, with no life, no hint of earthly nature. Gaia has fled that place, god has condemned it. When storms come it floods, when winter comes it freezes, and in all seasons it’s denizens beg for the sweet release of death.
IMO Taipei doesn’t look nearly as new or cool as the likes of Shanghai, Tokyo, or Seoul. I visited Taipei a few years ago and my first impression was that it was like Shanghai was 15 years ago. Everything was just very worn down. Infrastructure, buildings, and such just looked old and grimey.
That’s what I’ve heard from most people who have recently gone there. But we’re not comparing Taipei to real cities like Shanghai. We’re comparing Taipei to dumps like LA.
Downtown Taipei vs Downtown LA
Yeah, this is kinda cheating because the LA video has Skid Row, but as even the LA video admits, “it’s actually very sad to see downtown LA like this. Much of it is rundown and I hope it has a brighter future.”
In fairness to Taipei, it looks older because most of it was built before Shanghai and unlike Tokyo there’s less need to rebuild everything after 30 years. Also in fairness to Taipei, it’s still a very safe city, especially compared to anywhere in the US.
soying out over taiwan is only for the REALLY egregious liberals. you have to have drunken the liberal kool-aid hard to even have an opinion on taiwan i’ve personally found.
Well, I see videos with artistically lit-up skyscrapers, drone light shows, and modern transit quite regularly, but that’s because I follow people that post that sort of thing. Sometimes you’ll see this stuff on
, but the comments will of course mention how China is authoritarian. 
If you ever see something cool on Reddit In China the top comments will be some flavor of: -this is fake because China lies
-if it’s real it’s secretly evil. That cool building is powered by 6.78quintillion victims of communism
-its fake because China just like made it up. This is my favorite because… So what.
Sometimes you’ll see this stuff on , but the comments will of course mention how China is authoritarian.
This bullshit will eventually backfire in terms of people eventually saying “ok, we want that” and then ending up with a fascist theocratic country instead that’s 100x worse and wondering what the hell went wrong.
Well at least the trains run on time!
(they do not in fact run on time)I already know many people that believe dictatorships are efficient because China
Precisely why the propaganda is fucking dangerous. Meanwhile everywhere else where we’re trying to get similar systems built all campaigning is for MORE democracy, not less. I have to assume the intent among the ruling class is to genuinely hurt democracy because they know full well that communist structuring is more democratic, not less democratic. Anything that hurts “democracy” actually actively hurts movement towards what we advocate for. The average person just doesn’t understand that because of all the propaganda about socialist systems but it’s true.
Yeaaa this is why I get pissed off when communists say it’s not that important to argue about China or the USSR as long as they understand Marxist theory
The Soviets built the world’s 2nd greatest superpower the world has ever seen in a little more than half a century and they still managed to fuck it up because they were the first to ever do it and had no future example
China has constantly learned a lot from their mistakes and have improved upon them
How well would a socialist state function if they believed all the propaganda against the USSR and China? They would never be able to even get a single city functional
I heard a white boomer say something like this recently. They will admit that China is doing well, but they think that it’s because of authoritarianism. What they don’t understand is that this is the authoritarianism of the working class.
Some of the cities look like that, but it’s a huge country and a lot of it is just really normal and of course the rural areas are still pretty old-fashioned. In my opinion it’s still consistently better than the places I’ve been in the US though.
It’s just going to get funnier as time goes on and China’s infrastructure and transit only continues to improve. Americans can have fun laughing at the “shoddy chinese cities” they see in some tiktok video while their own bridges and subways are falling apart, lmao.
My uncle is from the US, when I talked about the cities he said that “the Chinese are using up all the resources!”
I was surprised, I had never heard that before. I didn’t have a response, what could I have I said? I don’t even know how he got to that conclusion, something about ghost cities and poor utilization of resources because of no oversight I guess. Even though he decried planned economies a few sentences before.
Ah well, you see, if the resources of the colonial periphery are being used by the USA and it’s hegemons it’s good and efficient, if it’s being used by China or the third world, it’s wasteful.
Because they’d feel bad. Burgerland is supposed to be exceptional and
is supposed to be the unique special Main Character to guide us there.[content warning: not answering the given question whatsoever]
I put forth that they are not futuristic. They are present-day, present-time, not pretending to be beyond the present reality, but merely cutting-edge.
To someone who has grown up in a relatively very undeveloped area (consider rural Sudan) or even somewhat undeveloped areas in the West (rural North America), I imagine many Western cities would seem ‘futuristic’ relative to their life experience. Towering skyscrapers, underground rail networks, animated LED billboards and cameras everywhere, and if you’re lucky, slick ‘modern’ designs for buildings and infrastructure. But, to a person raised in these cities it probably wouldn’t be futuristic. Many of these things are kind of common in cities, actually. They’d look at the other communities as ‘underdeveloped’. It’s all relative!
So, in the same way, I think that China’s modern cities aren’t futuristic but merely present. The US infrastructure is notoriously underdeveloped given their power and technological capability. I don’t see why (political structure aside) they couldn’t build such a planned city. In fact, they generally lag so far behind other Western countries when it comes to civil infrastructure, political structure and social services that I think calling the US a developed country is an outdated mistake. China, on the other hand, has rapid development.
China isn’t in the future. We’re stuck in the past.
Psssh. Who needs forward-looking architecture? Here in Burgerland every new public building has to be made in the same faux Neoclassical style. Literally, Trump signed an EO mandating this style and afaik Biden has never rolled it back.
I hate Neoclassical architecture so much. And I hate it even more because it seems everyone around me actually likes it and when anyone tries to build anything even remotely modern it gets shot down by white NIMBY types who say “lEt’S dO GrEeK cOlUmNs”
It is overdone, even in revivalist architecture. Where’s our Neogothic revival? I want spiky buildings!
Brandonhammer (laughably inadequate) 40(1)k
Okay, but have you considered China = bad
That’s a perspective I overlooked! Have you considered writing for The Economist?
My parents aren’t rich enough
The trains there go hundreds of miles in less than an hour, you could commute across the country every day.
Oh yeah sure, maybe they have all that, but at what cost, mhh?
The ticket prices are relatively inexpensive, and lots of people ride the train. It’s horrible.
I enjoy freedom a hell of a lot more than riding on a superfast train
Some months ago I spoke with a petite bourgeois white boomer who didn’t even know that bullet trains existed. I had to explain them to him, that they’re like airplanes that fly only a few feet off the ground (unlike many Burgerlanders I have used bullet trains many times).
It’s not just centenarians in congress who think that the internet is a series of tubes you can throw in the back of your pickup truck. Many many Americans, including members of the bourgeoisie, are willfully unaware of how far places like China are pulling ahead of them.
Propaganda isn’t just about what you show, it’s also about what you don’t show.
What Americans don’t know can’t radicalize them
“futuristic Chinese cities” is a genre that trends on TikTok once in a while, but that’s the closest I’ve seen it get to the mainstream.
That’s because it’s obviously Chinese propaganda, fellow liberal
Oh, you’re talking about futuristic Chinese cities?
+5000 social credit for you ;) Nice try, CCP bot
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There’s this one video I found ages ago that’s just a three hour compilation of someone driving around Chongqing. The traffic does seem pretty awful but goddamn. They’re in the year 3000 and we’re routinely bulldozing the homeless camps in my
city. How people are not more radicalized here I still don’t understand
Cannot describe the incredible feeling of hope I got when I unblurred the pic
Light pollution 🤮
dw they turn it off at later times in the night, this is just for the party anniversary
Here in Europe we don’t build new buildings, but instead reuse ones from around the 1960s (Marshall Plan and all that). To me it’s always screamed “we’re too poor to build new stuff”. And you know, old buildings can only get older, at some point you’re gonna have to make new ones…
it’s like we like living in the past it’s so unreal.
That’s how I feel about transit infrastructure in North America. We can’t be bothered to spend the required money or effort to solve transit issues properly, but we accept ever-higher costs for constantly having to maintain and build car infrastructure because you can always kick that can down the road, so to speak.
It’s pathetic. I was in Minneapolis when the I-35 bridge just up and collapsed. Majorish city, population of millions, I-35 is one of the country’s major transit cooridors, and this giant fucking bridge just folds one day.
Minneapolis has like 400K people. Even if you add St Paul you still are only up to 750K. The full metro area is 3.7M but that’s including a LOT of decidedly not urban areas
Edit not saying that means their bridges should collapse but it is definitely not comparable to any cities in Asia.
Here in Europe we don’t build new buildings
This is a 100% spot on take. I live in one of the supposedly “richest cities of Europe” and every damn building was constructed between 1950 and 1970 (much thanks to the Royal Air Force bomber command).
Nobody builds any new shit, it’s just the rent goes up and the cars in front of the buildings get bigger and bigger. I guess that’s progress or something.
Having buildings that can last long term is mostly a good thing (The 1920s construction in Vienna for example is great.) But I can’t imagine that something thrown up in 3 months in 1952 is going to be particularly well built.
