This is my first post that’s not in Culture War or Friday megathreads because I’m honestly not sure that it fits into either thread. It touches on certain Culture War themes (China, industrial decay, and Chinese culture) but it’s much more personal. This is just going to be a personal story of the development, or lack thereof, of my hometown in AnShan, China. It’s probably not going to be well written, or even 100% factual, but it’s going to be true. I’m writing this partly to order my own thoughts on the slow death of my hometown, and partly to contrast with some of the current online sentiments regarding Chinese development. Also, I love to show off some of the interesting parts of North Eastern Chinese culture. A lot of this story may sound similar, especially if you have experience regarding Rust Belt decline but with all things Chinese, it’s got that Chinese twist.
I’m writing this right now in the middle of my visit to my hometown of AnShan, China, though I will finish it when I’m back in America. Located in LiaoNing province, AnShan is one of the southern cities of the North East region of China (Better known as Manchuria abroad, but don’t use that name in China or to Chinese people). At one time, AnShan was considered one of the cities of the Chinese Rust belt. As with many cities in the North Eastern provinces, the main industries in AnShan are steel making, mining, tourism, and farming. AnSteel (鞍钢), named after the city, was at one point (and maybe still is) an important pillar of industry to the whole region, and maybe even the whole of China. Every single one of my grandparents worked at and retired from AnSteel, and they are still receiving their pensions, well into their 80s. Once one of the Crown Jewels of industry in Manchuria, AnSteel has seen better days. Due to increased competition, global trends, and plain old corruption, AnSteel has seen a steady decline over the years. Even 10 years ago, during the housing boom, AnSteel was a functional and operational company, if not a thriving one. Concrete Communist blocks need steel rebar in order to not fall over, after all. But now, even housing has slowed down, sending a formerly floundering company into essentially a coma. As everyone knows, when the major industry in your city goes bust, things start to go wrong. Now downgraded to 4th tier city (from 3rd tier), AnShan is essentially in a death spiral. For more on the Chinese city tier system, take a look at the Wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_city_tier_system
Note that AnShan is still listed as 3rd tier on the page itself. In fact the picture used for AnShan is a pretty iconic part of the city, if you've ever been there.
Here is a picture of the AnSteel museum. It’d be like having a Ford museum in Detroit or an Apple museum in Cupertino. It was pretty fun to visit to be honest.
To say that the decay started with the recent failure of the Chinese housing market is inaccurate. As I’ve mentioned before, the city, and really the region as a whole, has been on a downturn. Historically, Manchuria has always been a resource rich and fertile region. It’s also one of the reasons that it was fought over so often. These resources carried the whole of the Manchuria region to great status after the devastation of WWII and the Chinese Civil War. Over the course of the 20th century, due to many factors, the formerly booming industrial base of China has declined and now is seemingly on its deathbed.
TieDong (East of the train tracks if the meaning is translated literally) used to be the nicer part of town when I was a kid. It seemed that every year there would be new apartments popping up or being built. Here I’ll explain a little bit about how housing works in China. The vast majority of housing in a city is contained in those apartment blocks that you’ll see online. The difference is that some of these apartment blocks are located in gated communities that have their own maintenance and security. Maintenance is usually pretty quick, especially when a community first gets built and lived in. Security is usually pretty lax, with most places letting in everyone except obvious vagrants.
I will be adding some pictures from here on out. I know that a lot of these pictures are not “good” or “beautiful” but then again, I never claimed to be a photographer. There will be NSFW pictures (not sexual, just of some strangeness that happens in China) so be forewarned.
Here is a community that was new around 2008. My grandparents actually used to live here.
As you might be able to tell, it has seen better days. This is the building that used to house the maintenance of the community.
As you can see, it’s completely barren. In fact, the building itself is in miserable shape.
On the right side of this picture, you can see that there are literally holes in the building. From the look of the maintenance building, you might be able to tell that it was inspired by a European style. Many things in the community were inspired by European aesthetics.
Though the management of the community has been defunct for a long while, people still live in the community itself. The inside of the community has seen much better days. Because the maintenance crew was responsible for cleaning everything, trash has begun to pile up at the bottom of the communist blocks that everyone lives in.
There was actually a car that was abandoned in the community. I was even surprised when I saw this.
It seems that someone has started living in the concrete maze that used to be here. I remember playing hide and seek with my cousin here when my grandparents still lived here.
There used to be water and koi fish in this section. This is all open and I used to play here and feed the fish when I was younger. Now it’s all dry. The fixtures that were in the water are still there which makes everything seem even more sad to me.
In fact, one of the gates that used to house the security for the community has been abandoned and the building has turned into a burger spot. Not even a real burger spot because I don’t think they even make hamburgers in the American sense. I think it’s just called a burger spot and makes Chinese food.
Here is the abandoned shell of the police station that used to be in the community. It was actually abandoned quite recently, but it was a long time coming. The city obviously doesn’t lack police presence, so it may have simply been a consolidation. The image, however, was quite striking to me when I came upon it.
With all of that being said, however, there were still parents playing with their kids here. I saw multiple families playing in the public area. Obviously, I didn’t take pictures of random families playing in public. It seems to me that in a hypothetically similar community in an American city like Philadelphia, there might not be so many families playing outside.
To be honest, without seeing how things used to be, it’d be easy to think that things were always like this, especially in a small city like AnShan. The city was already slow in terms of development, and with the slowing of the Chinese economy, development has ground to a halt. Compared to the last time I was here ~2 years ago, barely anything has changed.
Even the better parts of town are not doing as well as they used to be. In AnShan, there’s a part of town called 站前. Translated literally it’s called “Front of the Station.” It’s in front of the train station that is still one of the major transportation hubs of the city. The airport in the city is actually mainly for military use and commercial flights only go to BeiJing or ShangHai. Nowadays, the high speed rail system is what most people use to travel far distances. Driving is fine for nearby cities, but if you wanted to go cross country, you’d generally go on rail. When I first left China, I went to BeiJing by train before flying to America. Not high speed rail, train. I digress. The “Front of the Station” area is where most of the nice things are. Shopping, food, and general merriment. However, even the nicer part of town has become run down.
Here is a picture of a small part of the area.
This used to be a fairly successful mall. On the side of the building, you can still see some of the billboards. Now, it seems that the only remaining shop is Mcdonalds.
This used to be the biggest and nicest mall in the city. During my parents’ day, it was legitimately one of the largest in the area. Nowadays it’s quite run down, but still operational. Even when I talk with my family about it, they tell me about how sad it’s become. More on this mall in the slice of life section.
This is “Computer City.” Or used to be. The sign on top still says “Computer City,” but you can see how worn down it is. It used to be where all of the computer, and later cell phone, vendors and repairers opened their shops. I remember personally coming here with my grandparents when they got their computer and later, cell phones. If you look at the first floor now, that store now sells snacks. I’m not even kidding. There are still smaller computer or electronics vendors on the side, but you can see how the entire building is run down.
This is the unsuccessful half of a successful mall. The mall is called NewMart, and it would have been new about 13 years ago. This mall contains many international brands and is one of the fancier malls in the city. Even though the mall is successful overall, there is still a portion of it that was abandoned.
Here is something that might be interesting. I thought I’d put this in the slice of life section, but it probably fits better here. Here, you’ll see the marriage market in the local park. People, or even people’s parents paste their stats and what they’re looking for here. In fact, you can even read some of these in the pictures. One of these reads:
Male, never married, born in ‘87, Zodiac sign: Rabbit, 1.85 meters tall, college graduate, works in environmental protection, monthly salary 5000 Yuan (736 Dollars), owns car and house, parents healthy and retired, birth family (meaning non-adapted), looking for wife. Parents telephone: telephone number
I’ve written all of the above for multiple reasons. Part of the reason is to order my own internal thoughts. Another part is to contrast what I experienced in China with what I see in America. Because although my home city is in a sorry state, with a stalled economy and shrinking population, most people I met were happy, or at least content. Compare the similar situations between AnShan and Detroit. Or AnShan and Philadelphia. Even with a denuded industrial base, AnShan is still a functional city. To my mind, there are several reasons for this:
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The police state: It’s no secret to everyone in China that they are under almost constant surveillance. In fact, it’s even expected. For all of its negatives, however, the surveillance state does provide security, at least from most common crimes. Thievery and robbery have been generally eliminated. I can still remember when I first came to America where you could leave your wallet or cell phone at your table in a restaurant, and it was considered a surprise if it got taken. In China, I still remember when you were scared of pickpockets. Now, the sentiment seems to be completely reversed. Is that a good trade for constant surveillance? I can’t say.
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Education: People in general in China have had an abysmal reputation overseas due to their horrible customs. It wasn’t too long ago that Chinese tourists had the worst reputation. Shit and piss in public. Being obnoxiously loud. Complete lack of control over their children. I’m thankful every day that global attention has been turned toward Indians. That being said, everything has gotten much better within the last generation. Unlike San Francisco, I did not have to dodge feces a single time out on the street. People stopped throwing trash randomly on the ground for the most part. And in fact, contrary to what you’d find in America, the bigger the city was, the cleaner everything was. I chalk this up to the concerted effort that the Chinese government has made in public education and the fact that the younger generation is now more cosmopolitan.
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Lack of drugs: It’s not a secret that many East and South East Asian countries are vehemently anti-drug. China even has a historical reason. A large cause of the Century of Humiliation, at least according to the Chinese themselves, was due to Opium addiction in the general public. This means that any form of drug possession, outside of tobacco and alcohol, is punished extremely harshly. You are not going to be seeing Fent Zombies anywhere. Quick personal rant. California is trying everything within its power to discourage smoking outside of banning tobacco altogether. In fact, a short while ago, flavored tobacco products became illegal. That means that my beloved Autumn Evening is banned in California, but weed is so legal in San Francisco that I can’t walk three blocks without smelling it.
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General attitude: It seems to me from speaking to some of the people in China, that generally people are much more optimistic in China than in America. In America, there seems to be a feeling of general hopelessness that isn’t present in China. People are still generally content, even in their decline. Why this difference in attitude exists, I’m not sure, but I can definitely feel the difference. Coming back to America, I literally feel myself getting more depressed over time. This can also be chalked up to Chinese propaganda. Most of the Chinese are incredibly assured of their country’s and their people’s greatness.
When I came back to America, I was stricken by how happy everyone seemed to be in China. Even with the economy in decline, the population seemed to be happy, or at least content. I make another comparison between San Francisco and AnShan. If I’m being honest, compared with AnShan, you’d think that San Francisco was the failing city in the second world country. In the people I talked to in AnShan (family and random people), there seemed to be a feeling of “things are going to turn out ok.” Chinese people believe that most people just want a steady job, food and drink, wife and kids, and a warm bed at night. I tend to agree. It seems that for most Chinese people, they can achieve these things. When I’m in the Bay Area, there always seems to be another disaster on the horizon. Another company that did more layoffs. Another thing that Trump or Newsom did that is sure to cause another disaster. I honestly feel the difference and that might be one of the things I noticed most.
There is no real conclusion to this section because the situation is still ongoing. My own thoughts are still not settled. Will everything be ok for all of the people living here, or are we just in the prelude of an even more catastrophic collapse? I can’t really say. I can only try to wrestle with the thoughts and feelings that this recent visit pulled out of me.
That was some of the more depressing writing I’ve done, partly because these feelings are still fresh. Let’s end it off with something more upbeat. The following section is a slice of life of some of the sights I saw in China. I was in AnShan for most of my time here, and spent a day in ShenYang, the provincial capital, with my uncle.
Remember this mall that I was in? The one that used to be really big and nice and now is failing like the rest of the city?
This is what you’d see if you went inside. Rows upon rows upon rows of vendors.
There are still many in China that believes having English letters on clothing makes the clothing more fancy. Obviously, to other Chinese people, this is true. However, it’s also how you get stuff like this:
There are also multiple counterfeit perfume stalls in there. This is more of the China that I remember. When you’re in China, just make sure that cheap cologne you’re buying is actually real.
By the way, if you’re looking for Apple brand shoes, this mall is the place for you. Like Apple Computer branded shoes.
This one is fun. It’s a counterfeit Ferrari branded lighter. If you look closely, however, you’ll notice that it’s actually the Chinese transliteration of “Ferrari,” translated back into English.
These things are now harder to find in the bigger cities like BeiJing or ShangHai, but they are still very common in a small city like mine.
Here we see the Asian style of product endorsement. If you’ve ever been to East Asia, you’ll know that celebrities often endorse any and all manner of products. Here’s international film superstar Ma Dong Seok (Don Lee) in a commercial for an Instant Porridge, Baskin Robbins, and Fried Chicken restaurant, respectively.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=aasw8dfmo8s
https://youtube.com/watch?v=iUeG2u0Wp1E
https://youtube.com/watch?v=8m4dqg8QmB8
Here’s international film superstar Hiroyuki Sanada in an ad for an electric shaver.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zl2tR_LUE_E
And who can forget those old commercials in Japan featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger
And Tommy Lee Jones
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-U33aQXOPxc
Therefore it is with great pride that I present the following ad for a water filtration system with no further comment:
Let’s change gears now. When you’re in China, you have to eat some good Chinese food. Here are some things that I ate when I was in China.
Like I said before, I’m from North East China, and one of the things we’re most known for are skewers. Lamb is the most basic, and my personal favorite, but you can see chicken cartilage, beef aorta, and chicken here.
Here is a beef offal noodle soup I ate. It’s actually pretty spicy and it’s quite good with the egg and radish I added.
And here’s the lamb offal noodle soup I ate. I added extra chili oil and vinegar into it. This was actually a lunch I had with my grandmother. It really was quite good.
Every time I go back to China, I eat Chinese KFC. It’s actually malpractice how much better Chinese KFC is compared with American KFC. The spicy chicken sandwich is my favorite item on the menu. It’s not flashy, but it honestly blows most of the chicken sandwiches in America out of the water. You’ll also notice that the chicken nuggets are simply McNuggets. At KFC, they’re called the “Colonel's Nuggets.”
Here’s a fun one. Did you know that Pizza Hut in China is actually a sit down restaurant? On the Pizza Hut menu, you can find Tapas, steak, and multiple versions of chicken wings.
I went with a nice pizza and appetizer plate.
Chagee is an up and coming milk tea store. It’s already in LA, and I expect that they will move into the Bay Area, and later nationwide within the next 3-5 years, following a similar trajectory to HeyTea and Molly Tea.
By the way, if you’re ever in AnShan, come to Double Shake for a western style bar. To call it the best western style bar in AnShan would be damning it with faint praise, but it is legitimately a well run bar. I’ve been to dozens of bars in the U.S. that aren’t as good as this. The owner knows the English names for drinks, the house drinks are good, the service is friendly, and the atmosphere is better than most dive bars in the U.S. Ever since I found them, I go back literally every time I go to visit in AnShan. If anyone actually does go, let the owner know that an American told you about them.
Here is the front of a restaurant that sells lamb soup. Not just lamb soup, but also other lamb based dishes. You know their lamb is fresh because there’s a fresh lamb pelt in front of the restaurant.
On that note, here’s a morning farmer’s market that I used to go to when I was a kid. This is a true farmer’s market as well, where farmers will literally take what they grow and sell it here. I’ve seen some people at farmer’s markets in America literally sell supermarket fruits and vegetables.
Here’s people selling meat. Most of the meat is killed and sold on the same day. People will literally just take a whole pig and cut it up on the side of the street.
This has been a brief look at the average Chinese city. I haven’t posted everything that I saw on this trip, but I did post things that I thought would be more interesting. I can post some more if people actually want to see more. I also didn't post any videos of the grandma dance groups that I saw in the parks.
I’ll end this post with this picture. It’s a picture I took while on the way toward the “Front of the Train Station” part of town. I think that it offers one of the better looks of what you’ll actually see in the average city in China. Obviously you see the communist apartment blocks, but you’ll also see office buildings and small businesses on the side. This is the China that I knew, and it’s probably the China I will remember.
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Notes -
I think you have a big point here. Look at current politics. One of the major forces is "Make American Great Again" - what does it say about what America is now? Certainly not great, and nobody is pushing back on that with claims "No, we're actually doing awesomely already, there's no need for all this again business!". While the other side throws all its power of education, entertainment and academic industry to prove that America doesn't deserve to be great at all, in fact, it is so burdened with past sins that it's better for it to cease to exist, or at least cease to be America.
This is very sad to me because I think America and what it represents culturally and societally had been great, is still great and deserves and needs to be great in the future. But that certainly doesn't seem to be the current mood. Everybody uses propaganda as a pejorative, and there's a lot in it that is deserved, but I also think there's a non-zero does of propaganda that is healthy and necessary for the society. Intellectual types may fashionably frown at it, but dismantling it have not proven beneficial to anybody but a bunch of pompous academic assholes that made careers out of it, and I'd rather have a healthy, even if unfashionably crass, society, than a bunch of assholes smugly looking at the desolation and muttering "told you so, it's all lies!".
Difference between medicine and poison is dosage.
Yes, I agree with that, overdose of propaganda is certainly harmful. But, as many things go, the opposite is bad too - nihilistic rejection of everything only makes one open to believe anything, there's a lot written on this mode of failure. And I think we're finding ourselves right in the midst of it now.
May we find the proper balance before we are irreversibly locked into ruin.
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Great post, thank you for sharing.
I have written a lot about this before but the trajectory of a nation and how we compare with our parents' and grandparents' generations is massive for our own self esteem and the vibe of a society. America is in a tough place because we're so obviously doing worse than my grandparents' generation which has largely died out about ten years ago and there's little hope among all classes that they'll be able to afford a better life than their parents or grandparents did. I suspect the opposite is true in China and that accounts for the very different vibe and outlook between the two countries right now.
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Well, I won't say anything about the country, but IMHO San Francisco is a failing city. When I first visited SF in 2006, it was much different than now and much, much better. The decline has been tremendous and completely obvious. It is a disaster area, and the disaster is entirely human-made. Many places in Bay Area are the same. I watched it happen for many years, before leaving, and it had been heartbreaking. And totally avoidable, though at the same time inevitable.
Never been to China, so can't compare really, but it's pretty clear by itself.
I grew up my whole life in the midwest and never visited the west coast until a few years ago and got to visit the Bay Area for the first time about a year ago. I got the sense that it has declined in recent years while I was there and I imagine it's declined in the same way that other American cities have. But I also found the city really beautiful with incredible weather and still a million times better than anything on the east coast, midwest or the south. Californians love to complain about traffic and homelessness and a handful of other things but frankly they are all so much worse in Baltimore or Detroit or even Cleveland or Pittsburgh. All the billionaires leaving California seem insane to me, the weather and landscape of CA are unreal, the rest of the country is unbearably hot and/or humid for at least half of the year and/or suffers from terrible cold and depressing winters etc etc etc
Anyway besides all that I've been all over the world and coastal California from SD to SF is genuinely the best place to live imo. Granted it is expensive (still less expensive than Hawaii and a handful of other places) and, perhaps, the dense majority of people there are left leaning, though I find them less irritating than their east coast counterparts, and really quite easy to avoid if I just socialize with the Mexicans and non whitewashed Asians instead
I'm sure it's difficult and annoying to see your city decline and perhaps I'm naive and just haven't spent enough time in the area but I do think the complaints are overblown or maybe I just don't have the perspective to know what I'm missing but I've only had good experiences there
It's a tricky question. Generally, given enough money that you can afford to live anywhere in California (which is A LOT of money - I am not poor, but I don't see any way I could have enough money for that in my life, barring successfully running one of those $100M childcare scams), there are definitely places in California where one could have a very good life. As long as you don't need to go out of those places too often (if you have enough money, the only reason would be pleasure), those are one of the best places. SF (excluding maybe some places I didn't get to), San Jose (most of it by now) and many other Bay Area places are not such places. And even there you'd be a subject to absolutely howling insane politicians, which one day could just decide you have too much money and just try and take it all from you, because why not. Or let your whole town burn to the ground. Or disconnect you from electricity for months because of some obscure bureaucratic snafu. Or hurt you in a myriad other creative and imaginative ways.
Granted I never lived on the east coast, and I don't even plan to visit places like Baltimore unless I am paid staggering sums of money by somebody to make it worth it, so maybe I don't know how bad it could be. To be honest, I am not very eager to find out.
Fortunately, SF never have been my city (though it had been, once, a city I loved to visit). But a city that I considered my city for many years underwent a similar, if slightly less acute. degradation. And yes, it hurts. Especially infuriating is that I know it didn't have to be that way. I have seen how it could be not that way. It was a deliberate choice to destroy a good thing out of sheer idiocy. I will never not be salty about it.
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I was in China shortly after the 2008 earthquakes to do some work with some charity relief efforts, and it struck me repeatedly how different China is internally from the image of the one seen internationally, and as far as I know that's still the case. I was last heavily in China in 2022 or so, and even then it was striking how the industrial area of Dongguan and the factories differed from the tier-1 tourism-heavy or new-tier-1 cities.
There are really a lot of different aspects of China, partly down to the size of it. There have been cosmic earthshaking changes in the way the country has developed, but as always the development is uneven.
There was a farmer's child, very tan, who came to language lessons; the rest of the kids in the class respected him massively and treated him like a social leader even though he was clearly poorer than even they were and not very bright. Likely had something to do with how he was the strongest twelve year old I've ever had the pleasure of meeting personally. I found out later from the teachers he walked for three hours to come to school each way, starting before dawn and returning at night, and frequently took absentee to help with work.
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I lived in Dongbei - well, Heilongjiang - when I first moved out to China, living mostly in Daqing (also tier 3) and a bit in Harbin (tier 2). Later on I moved down to Shanghai, and eventually met my wife, a Henanren. Her family lives in a town, still 500k people of course, though technically their original home is in a tiny farming village an hour outside of the town.
Nonetheless, short of the villages, no matter where in the country I've gone, no matter how big or small the city or town is, it really is striking just how similar they all are when it comes to architecture and design. And I'm not just talking about the communist blocks. In every place, there is always a "Computer City". Probably even with the same name. There is always a once shiny, now dilapidated mall. But the mall always has the same rows of clothing vendors and dodgy sellers as in your pictures. I originally wrote a sentence that you were just missing the plaza with massed granny dancing, before seeing you had indeed mentioned it at the bottom of your post.
I also have the same appreciation for Chinese KFCs, though in my case the far inferior version I'm comparing them to are in the UK. I assume it's mostly because KFC is still relatively pricy for China: 40-50 kuai is hardly expensive, but compared to the 10kuai you would pay for a bowl of noodles or whatever, it does position them a bit more upmarket. So they can afford to get better quality in comparison to the Western chains, who are very much positioned as the cheapest tier of food around
IMO the way that KPIs work for local government officials means that to a certain degree there is a model of development that everybody broadly sticks to, since it's the cheapest/easiest way of delivering on those KPIs and you don't get fired for buying IBM. I've always found it interesting when you go around cities that were earlier towards development like Shanghai/Shenzhen/Guangzhou it feels like there's a lot more room for unevenness and idiosyncratic stuff that only really exists there. Whilst going to newer metropolises like Chongqing or Changsha and there's way more of a paint by numbers system displayed.
And like it's a perfectly fine liveable paint by numbers system so I can't complain about it.
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Oh, and a question about food. Is the cuisine different in northern and southern Manchuria? The reason I'm asking is because when a guy from Heilongjiang described what he grew up eating, it sounded like a Soviet or Polish household: sausage, ground meat, potatoes, bread, boiled dumplings, pickled cabbage and cucumbers. Your photographs looked a bit more "Chinese" to me.
It's generally quite similar. There are different regional influences, as @ResoluteRaven said. LiaoNing has a lot of Korean restaurants, and Kimchi is a staple, for example. There's also the fact that Northerners farm a lot more wheat and potatoes than rice because of our climate, so bread and noodles are more common. But the main staples are the same. Pickled cabbage is one of the main staples in the North Eastern region. It's generally cooked in a stew with pork. Another one is lamb skewers. One staple that's more often made at home than eaten at a restaurant is "Eggplant Mixed With Potatoes." You literally steam eggplant and potatoes, then mix them together to create a kind of mash, and put in fermented soybean paste. It tastes like home to me.
By the way, the Chinese claim that all dumplings in Eurasia originated in China. To me, this has some more validity than the claim that Italian pasta originated in China.
Depends on what you mean by dumplings. British dumplings, which are no longer eaten much in the modern day, are essentially dough balls cooked from suet (a specific kind of beef fat) and flour. I very much doubt they come from China.
My Chinese coworker laughed at me when I told him about those.
Damn right. No Asians could understand the red-blooded British man's desire for a meal so massively calorie-dense that one bowl can last a man through the winter, lol.
Though I bet they have something similar in Mongolia area, it's frigid up there.
Sadly central heating has mostly killed traditional British cooking.
They have more meat than wheat out there, so they won't eat empty dumplings.
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To clarify, my mother used to make these boring-lump-of-dough dumplings, and she is from the hot Caribbean, where the houses need no central heating at all. So your theory does not explain the facts.
Oh, I see.
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Heilongjiang does have more Russian influence than Liaoning; its capital Harbin had a majority ethnic Russian population in the early 20th century after all. However, all of the foods you mentioned are still commonly eaten across Northeast China. I would expect that simpler preparations e.g. boiled potatoes, sauerkraut, and pork are less likely to be found in restaurants than as home-cooked meals, and in some cases may be looked down upon as "peasant food" by young, upwardly mobile Chinese.
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Thanks for this. A few scattered thoughts.
It's fascinating to see the fun house mirror reflection of western classical architecture in that development your grandparents used to live in.
The drug problem is much improved in SF under the new mayor - most of the large encampments (e.g. 24th Street Bart, un plaza) have been broken up, though I admit you can still see small groups of fent enjoyers here and there.
That's true to some extent - last time I visited (earlier this year) UN Plaza didn't look like a refugee camp anymore. And I sometimes could walk almost a full block before I met a drug zombie. But the shit is still on the streets to welcome me. It is moving in the right direction, but it's still very deep in the hole.
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It was (and maybe still is) very popular to build things in the "European style" in China. For many Chinese, anything "Western" (farther west than the former Soviet countries) is considered higher class. It's part of the reason you might see random English letters/words on clothing or decoration. It's quite similar to how Westerners will get random Chinese or Japanese tattooed on themselves without knowing what they say, sometimes to hilarious effect:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lQB4OXSoFN8
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I grew up in the US but my family is from southern China. Some photos from a visit in the late 2000s to the Guangzhou area. I wish I had better photos of the streetscape, but most of the trip was spent with family.
https://imgur.com/a/3WrINCD
A couple of things that stick out, in retrospect:
Sun Umbrellas are just a thing in Chinese diaspora culture. See it all the time in Malaysia.
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Dongbei as a whole is depopulating rather quickly. And it doesn’t help that Anshan sits right between Shenyang and Dalian, where things are probably better.
Did you get time to visit your friends and so on? What percentage of them are still in Anshan? I mean it’s a running meme that Dongbeiren have all escaped to Beijing or even further to Hainan, but I don’t actually know what it feels like on the ground.
Hopefully that Tumen river port plan goes well with Russia and North Korea and can help the northeast to revive the industry, but I’m not holding my breath.
I left fairly young so I never really made friends in China. I know that every one of my cousins that are working are no longer in AnShan. I was lucky to go during a holiday so I could see all of them. On the ground, basically everyone knows that AnShan is depopulating. Schools are closing and everyone knows the reason. However, compared with America, there's less of the typical depression you might see associated with the population decline.
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I wonder if to some extent this can be chalked up to differences in climate, but I am surprised how nice and clean everything looks. I spent a bit of time around Shanghai and Suzhou two years ago, and though of course especially the former had its glitzy parts, I took in no shortage of sights that were far more decrepit and dilapidated than anything you are showing here. There were rotting trash-covered shopping malls/hawker centres right next to the canonical route from the airport to the center, dystopian arrays of housing blocks made of unfinished water-damaged concrete, and peeling paint and rust all over.
It's definitely at least partly due to climate. The winters are pretty harsh up here so it's not the 24/7 sauna that is the South. In the deep winter, you can keep food out of the fridge and just leave it outside and it'll stay frozen. It's also gotten a lot cleaner over time. Piles of trash and litter was a lot more common in my youth, but nowadays, it's a lot less common, especially in the city.
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I think climate is certainly a factor. It's very difficult to keep building facades in subtropical or tropical climates clear of mold, vines, and water damage, and only places like Singapore are willing to expend the resources to maintain appearances in this way. Another is age; cities like Shanghai and Suzhou were built up long before the rest of the country. Shenzhen looks shiny and new now, but after a century in the same climate it may (differences in architecture and city planning aside) not look so different from Hong Kong i.e. overgrown and dilapidated.
I don’t know that Hong Kong is particularly dilapidated. If anything 50s to 80s brutalism kind of works well in a subtropical environment where you have a lot of green with the gray. It’s why it’s less depressing in Latin America (where it really is mostly very rundown) than in northern climes.
That said, I think it’s also important to differentiate depressing and ugly architecture from general cleanliness. There are plenty of extremely ugly brutalist “commieblocks” in Oslo, in Geneva, in Zurich. But these are also very clean cities, the roads are mostly well maintained, there is civic infrastructure. Hong Kong can feel ‘older’ than much of the rest of East Asia ex Japan because the real construction boom began postwar rather than in the late 1980s, it’s been richer for longer. But I don’t know that it’s dilapidated. If anything I’m always sad to go and see when relics of 80s HK are removed. At least my beloved classic 80s mural on the 17th floor of the Hopewell Centre is still there.
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You can of course find similarly dilapidated parts in Dongbei/Northeastern towns like Anshan. But I do feel like the north is generally cleaner and less smelly overall. And I think this isn’t restricted to China either.
The south, eg Suzhou, Shanghai etc. has a famous “梅雨” (lit. plum rain) season where ambient humidity sits at 80% for something like three months each year. Mold grows in your home, on the paint, on your clothes, and there’s no escaping it short of constant dehumidification. Many buildings end up mold-covered and peeling for that reason.
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Great post and thank you for the interesting pictures. Rust belts are quite similar everywhere, but I think the ‘best’ are either those that have come through the collapse and now have some new industry (like Detroit itself, or like Manchester here) or those where central governments just pour infinite money into fake jobs for the local middle class which at least sustains some economic activity (like much of East Germany or ). Where neither of these are possible, like parts of Belgium, the decay just seems endless.
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Makes sense. IMO the drug issue is the biggest owngoal for the West that could be solved without too much of a shift. Puts exponential burdens on the health system, homeless enforcement and makes long-term criminal careers a lot more viable as a recurring cashflow. Move on from the 'we don't want to put a 20 year old University student in jail for having a little reefer' cultural meme and could get a ton done societally.
It's all social. Alcohol used to be so much of a problem that America went through all that Prohibition insanity to try to get rid of it - and failed. And now, it's not that much of an issue anymore. I mean, alcoholism still is, but as society evils go, it's pretty mild and manageable. Weed, as an addictive substance, is much less dangerous than alcohol, and several other things (like benzos, for example). And yet, the establishment pretended weed and heroin or fentanyl as basically the same level of danger, which makes no sense to anyone.
Also, with all that bickering about which exactly substance is the worst, we still don't have the solution for the addiction problem. People got addicted to alcohol and opium, now they get addicted to fentanyl, say all this valiant struggle is successful and in 20 years people instead are addicted to AI-engineerd neo-meth or some other new shit. The problem is still the same and nobody is solving it while chasing the chemicals. The only people who even try to think in the terms of not chasing the chemicals are some woke academics, and their current solution to everything is more woke communism. We don't only have no solution, we're not even thinking about having a solution.
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Do the two have to be related? Letting university students buying legal marijuana doesn’t prevent you from cracking down on fentanyl and methamphetamine drug traffickers and putting schizophrenic homeless people in mental hospitals.
Personally, I’d rather have college students staying home to smoke weed instead of going to bars, getting blackout drunk, and vomiting on the streets.
I think the biggest problem might actually be tolerated illegality. If you can buy, say, alcohol, tobacco and weed legally in a market, most people will just do that, even if it is more expensive. Especially if black market is treated as smuggling/tax evasion and cracked down on. Getting hard drugs is then not that easy, the friction is too high, so lots of people don't do it.
But if you just tolerate drug dealers selling weed since it's not so bad, then it's relatively easy to also sell harder drugs on the side. Which means that weed really does become an "entry drug". The same would happen of course if alcohol was illegal but tolerated.
On the second point, I used to think that (and my wife as well), but since legalization we changed our mind. Weed is an extremely pervasive, intruding smell and it's FUCKING EVERYWHERE NOW.
Also from my personal experience it's a much less social & fun drug, people are just sitting around blasted out of their mind not really interacting (or already alone to begin with). For alcohol there is an argument that it serves some function as a social lubricant, even if the side-effects are substantial. For weed I really have no positive argument whatsoever, it's entirely "well it's not bad enough to be illegal". Which I consider true, but it's just not something I'd advocate. There is also the problem among contemporary students that they treat it more like tobacco than alcohol so there is always some % of students in class obviously stoned (in fact some seem to be perpetually stoned all the time). They are not a nuisance as a drunk student, true, so they don't get kicked out, but even in the past drunk students weren't a substantial problem, just hangovers sometimes after certain days.
It would be easy enough to just limit wees legalization to edibles. Weed is way to socially acceptable to properly ban. No one wants to see bright young college student Becky sent to the slammer for having a dime bag.
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Agreed. If I have my window open I keep getting gusts of it wafting in. It's disgusting.
That can be handled socially, I think. If the weed is legalized, it is not cool anymore. If it's not cool anymore, it is permitted to say it stinks. Cool people need to start openly saying it stinks, and going around in public stinking up the place is not cool.
Ultimately social sanctions are backed by something. Whether that’s losing your job as with Twitter mobs, or punishment from the state. In certain societies judging stares and shunning can work, but those kinds of places don’t legalise drugs and they still tend to be running on a legacy of extremely harsh legal enforcement. England’s Bloody Code, Japan’s 99% conviction rate, etc.
People do stuff that’s not cool all the time, especially if they’re stoned. And legalisation so far has AFAIK pushed up usage considerably.
To be perfectly honest, I suspect your suggestion results from a dislike of coercion more than genuinely feeling that your suggestion is the most effective way to limit antisocial weed usage.
Well, yes, I dislike coercion. But also, it's not just a personal preference. You can not build a society where there's maximum coercion in one thing, but everybody is chill otherwise. It comes as a package. If you have 99% conviction rates, you bound to have a bunch of false convictions, because nobody's perfect - and Japan, if you mentioned it, has its share of horror stories, and while I share the common educated Westerner's fascination with Japan, I also know its culture has some very dark sides too (as any culture does). So it's not just my arbitrary personal preference, it's the kind of society US founders envisioned, and that's why I want to be part of it, and many other people too.
Also, for weed specifically, it's physical addiction potential is very low. Unlike, for example, alcohol, opiates or other scary things, very small number of users are physically compelled to use it, regardless of the costs and consequences. That makes it easier to suppress it, sure (if you are hard drugs addict, the threat of the jail won't scare you, because you have much bigger and scarier demon to handle) - but it also makes it easier to dissuade potential and casual users by societal means. And it's usually more effective, because the costs of full-field suppression - especially in a society like US - are very high. Both monetary and society-wise - a machine that can be used for repression will be used for repression, and it may start by repressing something terrible, but eventually somebody would have a bright idea of using it against their political opponents (who are, as everybody knows, absolutely horrible people) and there we go. Using milder mechanisms is much less risky and harmful.
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The current state of drug enforcement kinda snowballed out of the conception of drugs that allowed for weed/didn't punish it super viciously. Then it was erosion from there.
I'd rather the full prohibition of most Asian states since it's a lot harder to erode a 'No and we'll fucking kill you' than 'No but we're trying not to ruin anybody's lives'
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It's somewhat related I think. It's about tolerating any recreational drug use at all that isn't a mild stimulant like caffeine. There's tobacco and alcohol, but those are too far ingrained in most cultures to be removed without extreme pushback from the general population. Humans would be better off without lung disease and alcoholism though.
It might be that weed is already too far ingrained in US culture to be removed at this point, so we might just have to add it to the list of socially tolerated recreational drugs. Almost everything else needs a hard ban on both possession and dealing though, if we want to avoid terrible health outcomes and tax dollars wasted.
If you prohibit weed it creates the wedge issue for tolerating drugs, because something like 60% of US college students smoke at least semi regularly nobody really wants to punish Chad and Stacy for a few bong rips.
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I don’t think the Western public has much appetite for waging the War on Drugs even harder after the billions (trillions?) of tax dollars wasted on enforcement that just lead us to have even more potent, more easily smuggled drugs.
I don't think the public has the heart for it either, beneficial as it could be. What doomed the War on Drugs was probably the right to privacy and the fourth amendment, the right to unreasonable search.
When the fourth amendment was written, nobody was expecting highly violent and sophisticated drug cartels to hide behind due process and other legal protections. East asian countries don't care about that stuff and their police has much more leeway in suppressing would-be drug dealers.
Of course, Korea/Japan legal systems are awful for innocent people who happen to look suspicious of a crime, but that's a price they are willing to pay for enhanced safety and security from drugs. And China won't even bother with the legal stuff and just grab anyone remotely suspicious and figure out the truth later.
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I have the appetite for it. Try smuggling that stuff into Japan. Your feet won’t touch the floor. Even the yakuza might turn you in.
As with so many things, it’s not that hard. The trick is preventing the other half of society from sabotaging you. When 90% of people on the darkweb or making calls to dealers are entrapment operations, and having or taking drugs is punished as harshly as dealing them, when drug-takers are socially treated like lepers who fund Mexican cartel massacres rather than cool dudes, then you will see drugs vanish pretty fast.
You can’t say something is not that hard if it requires you to somehow change the mind of >50% of people. AFAIK the US government tried to make drugs uncool with campaigns like DARE, and it backfired horribly. Public attitudes seem to be going the other way, with more and more countries legalising cannabis, even Germany.
There’s no magic wand to somehow turn the UK into China or Japan.
True, but Anglos (including their descendants, popularly the Puritans) have a... unique interaction with Temperance. It's pretty clearly an HBD thing, since most other Europeans don't act like this. The Dutch and Portugese stand out in this regard.
The ultimate problem with Temperance is that the people pushing it are, to put it mildly, scum.
From the point of view of... uh, most normal people, they're redistributionists who would like to take the ability of people who can handle drugs perfectly well away for the benefit of those who cannot. It's a religious thing for them, which is why in years past it'd usually be some flavor of Christianity; the best evidence for this being AA (a child of this movement).
This was a contributor to DARE being a complete joke, too, for you'll recall its mission was 'to resist drugs and alcohol'. Pretty clearly a neo-Temperance movement, a moral craze [no deeper than 'drugs r bad mmmkay'], which is why it was as much a failure as the 18th Amendment was. (Doesn't just apply to drugs, either; they treat sex and guns this way too.)
It's also why tobacco is treated that way, as multiple Anglo nations have rolling age bans on it (I believe NZ, UK, and the US state of Hawaii do this at the moment); Temperance was more successful in this area both because nicotine is a shitty stimulant (and requires you to smoke so much that people want to do it indoors, which is not as true of weed), and because "companies are evil" was a better springboard for "and tobacco companies moreso".
Other countries' drug control efforts are themselves a lot more tempered specifically because they're not simultaneously trying to combat scumbags using the opportunity to go full Demolition Man on everyone else! The French (and basically every other non-Anglo nation) don't have to worry their government is going to try and ban $traditional_drug_variety, and as a result the median citizen can be a lot more on board with dealing harshly with the more dangerous drugs specifically because it's not really a tool of social control, and the people who are morally developed enough not to want to impose that on everyone understand that.
It's even more complicated in the US because muh racism (especially around blacks and weed), doubly so because the racist solution actually has some factual backing in these countries/counties (re: Indians and alcohol). But because Temperance is a social engineering project, it doesn't actually care about improving ground conditions, and as such doesn't focus its efforts in this area.
When it's not about the drugs, and when people know it's not about the drugs, then normal people start sabotaging the machinery that lets [the people for whom it is not about the drugs] prosecute drug users. After a while, that attitude metastasizes into "fuck it, all drugs are legal, bring on the Fent zombies", and now you have the opposite problem where prosecuting people for a lack of self-control is impossible.
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True, I just think that (dependent on circumstances) “it’s impossible, give up” can and should be countered with “it’s perfectly possible but you are sabotaging it”.
So eg inventing an EV battery with 6000 miles of energy is impossible in a different way than building a massive factory of them in Britain is impossible.
Now, this is dangerous because the response to genuine failure is often to blame saboteurs, as in the Soviet Union, but it’s true sometimes.
On the object point, the government in the UK has pretty much wiped out smoking now, for example. And I’m pretty sure cannabis is going to start slipping back towards illegality. It’s been behind some really nasty murders lately (schizoid breaks), even when legalised it’s heavily associated with crime, it stinks all the way down the road, and it turns people into boring vegetables when it’s not sending them crazy.
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Interesting. I've been curious about the lives of people on the ground in China for a long time and recently stumbled across this youtube channel. It's...honestly been some of the most depressing videos I've ever watched. The grandfather who smokes two packs a day and hides his daily handle of baijiu from his family while watching the kids, truckers working the apps for 16 hours and living in their cabs, the gaokao grind for children, small business owners who never take a day off. Maybe amusingly to the crowd here, the only happy people I saw was the DINK couple working part-timeish with a dog and a parrot. Are these accurate? Is it a working class phenomenon, is the guy running the channel nutpicking, is the entire country just miserable?
I feel like they are nutpicking. I live in China and just looking out my window I see plenty of happy people and have hung out with many Chinese enjoying their lives. China does have a lot of grinding jobs. it also has a lot of opportunities to carve out a niche if you can resist social pressure. Rent is cheap which allows young people to go to Yunan and open boutique coffee business and live off of it.
It's not that it's unrealistic it's just it's a very specific profile. I could profile a failing town in rural Virginia, Amazon warehouse workers, and medical residents and paint a pretty grim picture of America. China has a lot of people grinding themselves to the bone and a lot of people enjoying life, these aren't necessarily the richest either.
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What’s not normal I think is how the well-off people also feel miserable. It’s pretty normal and self-explanatory why someone who works 16 hours a day and lives in their cab feels unhappy, but it’s some weird social contagion when your average Peking graduate also feels miserable despite doing vastly better and objectively living a good life.
To some extent yes the country as a whole is miserable, or to be more accurate, more miserable than it should be imo. I long for the day my people can chill the fuck out and enjoy what we’ve built without all that irrational FUD.
In my observation, this is correlated inversely with poverty.
There is a certain large group of poor (rural?) Chinese who are perfectly chill and some of the kindest, happiest, if crude, people you'll ever meet. Meanwhile the urban centers, while on paper providing better QOL, are highly competitive hellholes (TFR shredders?).
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It’s probably on some level cultural. Overseas Chinese in Singapore and Hong Kong are also strivers who don’t seem happy despite being some of the wealthiest people in the world in the case of the PMC there. Interestingly, Taiwanese seem much more chill, the few times I’m in Taipei it always seems like the locals are eating and drinking outside, relaxing into the evening, but maybe there are cultural or ethnic differences there. The whole thing is interesting in light of Chinese philosophy arguably dwelling far more on the balance of work and play and relaxation than much western philosophy, historically speaking. I suspect it’s a hangover from the republican and later communist reaction to perceived languishing in the 19th century.
I think the difference is that the ambitious and energetic Taiwanese are all clustered in Hsinchu Science Park, doing business on the mainland, or have emigrated to the US.
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The northeast/Manchuria/Dongbei region is also famous for people eating skewers and drinking baijiu outside. Though that could just be the recoil from the long depression of the local economy. Nobody has anything meaningful to work on, so you get more helpless chillers. I remember a year or so ago a small Dongbei town Hegang went viral on the internet because with 60k rmb you can buy a decent condo there, and petit bourgeois from Shanghai were shocked and pretend they want to move there. Of course almost none did because there’s nothing to do, and you’d better move to Yunnan and enjoy the warm weather, not the Siberian winter in Dongbei.
What philosophy are you referring to? Daoism? That’s what people subscribe to when they get kicked out of the imperial court in good times, or when the country descends into total chaos for a hundred years. The actual bureaucrats and “upright citizens” despised that “folk” philosophy, basically calling it laying flat but in classical Chinese, and only when they were completely powerless did they find comfort in the heavily mystified Daoist philosophy/religion (which to be fair is quite different from what Laozi and Zhuangzi intended).
It's simply how people are here. Traditionally, the region has been farmland and pasture generations before the industrial overhaul that took place in the 20th century. During winter, when it routinely snows and goes below freezing, you drink to keep yourself from going crazy due to boredom. During summer, when it's night time, you go and have some skewers, drink, and relax and go soak in the public bath. For most people, it's a quaint living, not dissimilar to what you might find in Italy or Greece.
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Kind of a sloppy question, but if you were to do a k-means clustering of (Han) Chinese regional cultures at what number do you think most Chinese would feel there's no egregious merging of significantly distinct groups? I get the impression government would like it to be k = 1, but curious to know what it feels like on the ground.
Idk maybe seven? Northern Han, Southern Han (Yangtze delta), Southern Han (Pearl Delta), Sichuan/upper Yangtze Han, Tibetan, Mongolian, Uyghur.
I don’t think the government is pushing hard to merge all Han Chinese cultures into one. They’re all “accepted cultures” if you get the EU4 reference. Maybe less so for ethnic minorities but I don’t think there’s systematic effort root out those cultures (and to different degrees; Mongolians and Tibetans are accepted more than Uyghurs, but mostly all treated by the majority Han with indifference and ignorance), assimilation sure.
Edit: If we’re talking about only Han Chinese then maybe the Northwestern (Gansu, Ningxia, Shannxi, Shanxi) and southwestern (Guizhou, Yunnan, Guangxi) also counts, but their cultural output is significantly smaller than the others. Also Fujian, southern Zhejiang and eastern Guangdong are probably another cluster.
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Many Chinese won't be satisfied until you recognize the unique culture of the village of Niaobulashi and the special way they fold their dumplings, but about the smallest number you might get would be 8 or 9, lining up more or less with Patrick Chovanec's Nine Nations of China.
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I haven't seen that channel, but I'll watch a few videos and get back to you. I'm definitely not saying that life isn't miserable for anyone in China, and the GaoKao system is completely psychotic, but most people, even younger people starting out in their careers, can afford to rent their own place. They can afford to eat out and have a drink. Even if people aren't as rich, it seems that their quality of life (in the ways we measure it) is at least improving. Maybe that's just because I have my own goggles on.
Edit: I've watched some of the videos and they're not unrealistic. There are a lot of people who are bring ground down to the nub in China. There are also a lot of people who are content.
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I spend a decent amount of time in China and whilst there's definitely cases of people hustling absurdly hard. I think there's definitely a mindset with most Chinese that things are getting better and that on some level you can work hard and actually get ahead somewhat in the system. Whilst I think a lot of lower-class Westerners no longer have that optimism.
IIRC this has also been heavily supported by all of the data collected on the topic, where the Chinese routinely rank as some of the most optimistic people in the world, in many cases taking away the top spot. I concur that there seems to be a general vibe in China that their lives in the future will be better than it is today, whereas many people in the West seem not to believe that, appear to believe their future is mainly governed by institutional forces, and take stagnation as a given.
Like OP mentioned even Rust Belt-ish depopulating industrial cities in areas like Dongbei don't seem to have this same downbeat view nor do they have the same level of self-destruction, drug use and crime that impoverished areas in the West do. There's just a lot less self-sabotage in general, IMO.
There's also the fact that alcoholism is simply a given here in the North. Similar with Russians and Vodka, the North Easterners have spent multiple generations cultivating the strongest livers with BaiJiu so that while clinically, a large part of the population are alcoholics, they are all well functioning enough for it to be seen as more quirky and quaint instead of dangerous and terrifying. Alcoholism is simply a part of the North Eastern stereotype.
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This is a very interesting post, and I appreciate the photographs. Thanks!
Some of us are old enough to remember when it was a sit down restaurant in the United States, too. Apparently the company is exploring a possible return to that norm.
I find that most western fast food chains are much nicer than they are in the west. I think it’s because they were perceived as fancy when they came to China simply because they were western. Over time, they deliberately cultivated this perception so that now, they simply are fancier.
It's not just western fast food in China, I think it's western fast food in any market where it's still seen as foreign, so (as you say) fancy.
McDonalds and Burger King in Spain blew my mind. I even saw a Tim Hortons there and was amazed at how posh it looked, I hope not too many spaniards are disappointed if they ever come here and realize that their image of fancy canadian coffee shops is a complete lie.
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I hadn't realized the Tommy Lee Jones commercials were shown outside Japan. He's still doing them, though the way they're set up I suspect his parts are now all filmed stateside and CGd in. Enjoy reading this.
I don’t think they ever did. I just knew about them from the internet. Boss, as far as I know, is not a brand in the US or China in any major capacity.
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SF is nasty with the permissive public drug culture, but not all places in the US are like that. I think it's just the left coast cities like Portland, LA, Seattle, etc.
I think it's normal for SF residents to be generally unhappy if it smells like piss when they're walking to the grocery store and they have to be on alert for an addict on a binge.
If you're out in the suburbs the culture is more relaxed and people are generally happier, in my experience. The food options are even better, and you don't have to worry about stepping in human shit accidentally.
To be fair, you'd want to compare run down malls in US suburbs to your AnShan rundown mall.
I mean some of the point is that the wealthiest areas in the world randomly tolerate meandering JRPG encounters with homeless people since nothing effective can be done in the current system of legal malaise around it. Which is a huge owngoal for no adequate reason.
Rebalance request: homeless encounter rate is overtuned it's almost every step, pls fix thx.
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The only useful frame for this is as a 100% willful political decision, though. It’s not a state capacity issue.
Yeah, the fact that it's trivially resolved overnight when it would be unbearably embarassing for the politicians in charge kind of proves that point.
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Thank you for this post, I love the pictures. The city reminded me of Chelyabinsk a bit.
I’ve found that there are distinct similarities between all communist (or former communist) cities. The biggest I can think of is the ubiquity of the communist apartment block design.
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I suppose one of the benefits of a one party state is you don't constantly have large swaths intentionally playing up how shitty everything is and generally doing everything in their power to make sure vibes aren't too good, lest the side in power gain brownie points for the next elections. Democracy dictates that at any given time somewhere around half of Americans think (or are led to think) everything is going to shit (justified or not).
Also most Chinese have a direct sense that tangible change is happening and can look back at their parents/grandparents generations and see meaningful living condition improvements.
Not even my parents/grandparents generations. When I first visited BeiJing in 2004, there were only 2 or 3 lines in the BeiJing subway. Now there are over 20. The amount of development in my lifetime alone has been quite staggering. I know I harp on the lack of development in AnShan in my post, but it's honestly a fairly recent problem. As far as I know, new apartment developments were going up as recently as 2019. Covid and the real estate collapse shortly thereafter put an end to a lot of it.
Can you elaborate a little on the real estate collapse that you mention? You bring it up a few times like it's common knowledge, but I've never read anything about it.
I only know the large picture, but the Chinese real estate crash came as a result of the one-two punch of Covid and the Evergrande disaster. Even Evergrande wasn't really the cause. The real cause was the fact that almost every single major real estate developer in China was leveraging a lot of debt to fund their developments. The Chinese government instituted their "Three Red Lines" policy in order to reign in the developers, but it meant that many of the developers were retroactively made non-compliant. Evergrande was one of these companies and was not able to petition the government for a softening of the policy. Evergrande was in violation of all three of the red lines and was essentially made insolvent. Evergrande was later delisted from the HK stock exchange in 2025. When the second largest property developer in China gets essentially put into a coma, the entire real estate market in China goes into a freefall (this, by the way, was the stated goal of the Three Red Lines policy in the first place). This is my understanding.
There's also a story of their shady wealth management products that I'm not as familiar with.
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Look up Evergrande
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It's sort of like a controlled release of frustration though for democracies. In one party states when the frustration runs hot it doesn't usually have a release valve, resulting in drastic changes.
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