A Chinese earthquake rescue team deployed drones to light up the night and aid search and rescue operations after the devastating 7.7 magnitude earthquake in Myanmar.

[u/Red_Lotus_Alchemist]

[u/jrm70210]

My cousin, a US Marine, just came back from vacation in China and told me that they're "100 years ahead of us."

This is what happens when you reinforce intelligence over ignorance.

[u/bion93 → u/jrm70210]

I have been in China last summer. I thought that China appears to my eyes just like the US appeared to my father in the ‘80-‘90s. Simply the future, amazing technology and social development. He was in the US very often at that time because he worked in the (small) Italian equivalent of NASA, so there were many shared job with NASA. He have always come back with stuffs that here in italy did not exist and it was always a WOW for me as a kid. Like the first mobile phone he bought in the US (here it was useless, there wasn’t a line still lol). Now, I have been in the same year in NYC and Shanghai. I don’t mean that NYC is a representation of the whole US, it’s just a city in a huge country. But I saw a decadent empire, a lot of social degradation (homeless, drugs, dirty, crazy traffic) versus the future: lights, cars showrooms, drone lights shows, absolute safety at every hour and efficiency.

It’s crazy that everyone marks chiana as a dictatorship and almost as a third world country. Yes, it’s not an example of democracy, but many people think that China is like Iran or North Korea. No way. People are happy there. Maybe our Eurocentric point of view of the history of the world makes us think that ours is the only possible form of government. It’s not. Is it the best? Maybe, but only future generations can tell. We should leave our idea that all world must be like the west!

EDIT: I can’t answer to every single comment, but I want to make clear that I’m not saying that China is perfect or everyone is happy there. I’m not saying that. I said that it’s different from our propaganda. People are free more than we think and regime is less oppressive than 30 years ago. For example the VPN ban is not strictly enforced and people can easily have instagram or google, but they simply don’t need our internet because they have better alternatives.

Also about the genocide of Uyghur: I don’t think that some genocides are better than others. A genocide is wrong, always. It’s a crime. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone“ I would say. It’s better if we stop our crimes (see Palestine and the countless wars the western world caused in the last century) before talking about others with our superiority judgment. I am sure that also the smallest European country dropped more bombs than China in the last 100 years.

[u/datdailo → u/[deleted]]

The human cost came during the industrialization and the great Chinese famine.

Happiness is subjective but it is undoubtedly better than it was in the past 100 years. Maybe the past few years have been bad, since COVID, and the economic turmoil it left behind. But I don't anticipate my next 4 years to be joyful either with a neighbor that elected a deranged criminal and con artist who wants to annex us. An upcoming election that'll be deeply polarizing isn't what I would call happiness either. There's no such thing as a perfect system or government because perfect is subjective too. They just excel in different areas and you make do.