What’s It Like To Live In China?

China’s provinces and administrative territories; map from wikimedia, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Until about a decade or so ago, I bought the whole western line about China — that their governments were ideological and oppressive, that they kept millions of Uyghurs in forced labour ‘reeducation’ camps in Xinjiang, killed Hong Kong protesters without a second thought, and ruthlessly persecuted the people of Tibet and Taiwan. That government corruption and incompetence had produced whole ‘ghost cities’ of fenced-off uninhabited buildings while nearby citizens were left homeless. And that everything they made was inferior, cheap junk. The endless propaganda from expat and CIA-funded anti-communist organizations like the Falun Gong’s Shin Yun religious right-wing ‘dance’ company didn’t help. I believed all this shit until I actually met and started talking with people who actually lived, and live, in China. I’m now quite ashamed of some of the Sinophobic crap I posted on this blog in its early years,…