One of the things my cousin asked for when she came over was a laptop, which she proceeded to install World of Warcraft on. When she got tired of a job, she just quit, because fuck 996. A lot of the younger generation just hole up at home and work occasionally.
The other cities are still ok (for now). Whichever city my mom’s family is in had street vendors that use QR codes, so there’s at least some integration into “Modern China”.
Adding on to this nonsense…
Most of the futuristic paradise is just chinese government propaganda overflowing. Most of the authoritarian hellscape isn’t really seen by normal citizens. My aunt saw police catch a pickpocket once. She felt sorry for the pickpocket because they were beating the crap out of him.
Wechat, yes, sometimes they will ask for your national id in places, but not often because nobody fucking carries that. The good news is I had family all over the place, so they just paid for everything out of their accounts.
Ads are everywhere, but most ads are just walls of text. I can’t read chinese, so it’s actually very easy for me to ignore it anyways.
The last few times I went, we went from dialup to ISDN to DSL. I remember the first time I went back, we got a microwave. We couldn’t use it for a while because it would blow the apartment circuit breaker.
A lot of the niche cultures are just hiding in places. There’s a lot of hiding places. Over the times I went back, Beijing went from 3rd ring highway to 5th ring. I had to take like two hours of bus ride to get to a Magic: The Gathering store.
Chinese PC gaming sucks ass. It’s either rebranded western games, or just pay-to-win gacha games. It’s been like that since the 90s. Black Myth Wukong is a big deal, because it’s one of the first big time non-gacha chinese games.
Most of the younger generation are very global. They’ve had a taste of the unfiltered internet and cannot go back. That’s not to say they have the correct perspectives on things, but there is a distinct lack of the imperialism that the older generation has. Some of the older generation is global too, especially on western movies. My uncle liked to watch western movies that I snuck in.
Every time I go, somehow, there always happens to be some government bigwigs in town, which makes all the factories shut down. The air is actually very clean without the factories.
One of the best and worst things the government did was preparation for the 2008 Olympics. They tore down every single building in the city that was only one story high (and some higher ones), and rebuilt them into at least two story high buildings. In the process, they also redid the streets, which also included clearing out the street vendors. RIP tricycle cooks and kebab vendors.
When my grandparents got cremated, we watched them go in, and took pictures of them right before they went into the furnace.
When they came out, my cousin tried to take pictures, but the official stopped them. As in, she asked if that was the case, but didn’t ask why. I knew why, of course, because I’ve been outside for so long (skeletons).
One of the computers I brought back, my uncle was worried about the Windows 10 install, because it was “unsafe”.
When the censorship is super harsh, the population won’t even know it’s happening, it’s just a giant black hole of “this isn’t allowed”.