AHAHAHHAHAHAH NOPE

Speaking as a guy who has lived in four provinces of China and taken a billion business trips to every corner of this country, I can tell you that this one part of Shanghai is nothing but some glossy sheen the Chinese spend way too much money on in order to fool investors. Beijing is even worse: if you go to the business or touristy areas you see a lifestyle that would be well beyond almost any Chinese, but you go to a regular Beijing neighbourhood and you’ll see donkeys pulling carts.

There is no sense of quality or working on schedule. Everyone takes large bribes, including school teachers and doctors, and Chinese employers strongly prefer to hire vastly under-qualified people friends-of-friends-of-friends to qualified people. No company will ever make profit a priority, even if they are on the verge of bankruptcy.

Poor Chinese people make their kids work hard and study, but once a family gets comfortable, the kids are spoiled to death. Schools, which depend on grades for funding more than attendance, are willing to fake marks with a little bribe, and if not the schools a comfortable family will have connections with some local bureaucrat, who knows some local bureaucrat, etc. who can change the marks. They take more pride in their bribing than they do in doing a good job, and brag about their bribes like maniacs. They also tend to brag about embezzlement, etc.

I work in IT, and the Chinese guy who is supposed to be my fully-equal co-employee has no education, doesn’t know what email is because he only uses QQ or social networks, hasn’t even the slightest clue what a lamp is even though running a lamp is ostensibly is job (once he took a slight interest and suggested I use windows XP instead of “DOS” because it is easier), or even how to write ‘hello world’ in any language. He is the finance officer’s sister’s husband’s cousin, which makes him more valuable to the company than ten PhDs. When he shows up to work, it’s at 11:00 AM and he just does shots of hard liquor with the other family-connections employees. When my (unusually responsible) boss was being pressured by the -ironically- finance officer to lower the department budget, the biggest waste of money in the department was obvious. But when my boss asked my drunk co-employee not to drink so much at work and maybe show up every day, the kid pitched a fit and threw a monitor on the ground, and -lol- the IT manager ended up being fined for creating ‘workplace disharmony’. Oh, yes, and when I do my job, I guess who gets credit at the big wasteful, frequent company banquets? Here’s a hint: “Five thousand years of strong Chinese family values has shown that traditional Chinese family systems can accomplish even COMPUTERS!” You might think this is an isolated incident but this represents about 75% of the employees in any Chinese office. The only ones who work are the ones without family connections and they are always treated as the bottom strata.

Now, Yankees are a bit parochial, but they know it and they criticize themselves for it. The Chinese are so ignorant about the world, most of them can’t even name five countries. Most of that Chinglish comes from Vietnamese and Indonesian translators who pass themselves off as native speakers because the Chinese never heard of those countries but most foreign countries speak English right? However, every Chinese person is an expert on ‘waiguo’ because FIVE THOUSAND YEAR HISTORY makes them the smartest, strongest, etc so why bother to actually waste effort googling it or – god forbid – cracking a book open. And every problem in China couldn’t possibly be the fault of the Chinese – five thousand year history after all – so obviously foreign country – so jealous of the five thousand year old history that all they can this about is how to ruin China – must have caused it.

I actually love living in China, but this country will never join the developed world in our lifetime. They are still mentally five thousand years behind. Yeah, they can keep themselves afloat by selling low quality nick-nacks, but they will never transition beyond that in the same way most developing countries do. We have nothing to fear from this incompetent, disorganized country. Their arrogance and resistance to change will always doom them into being our cheap crappy unsatisfactory labour.