Jerry S

When I first arrived in China 29 years ago, everyone I met seemed to bring up how poor China was and how it had suffered because of western colonialism. There was the elderly man in his 80s who spoke to me in perfect English on the streets of Tianjin about this... the student at Tsinghua who echoed the same For the last 3 decades, I have seen an urgency among Chinese to catch up to the West, improve & erase a century of humiliation When Chinese see something bad, they complain & see ways to improve When food safety was a problem, restaurants installed cameras in kitchens to show people waiting for tables food hygiene standards When videos of Japanese airport workers stacking luggage upnernt viral, Chinese airport workers started to do the same When a more developed country did something well, China copied it and improved. There is the overarching sense that China needs to improve to catch up The entire Chinese society. Government. People. Corporations. Sacrificed and unified together to catch up and improve Now, even when China has caught up, like in hotel service, many Chinese don't realize how good China has become until they go abroad and see how bad other countries have become, especially those that once were at the top in the western world America thinks it's the best in everything but has rested on its laurels. It doesn't improve nor is there a collective rallying cry to improve. Everyone blames everyone else Instead of building on the Eisenhower highway system or once best of class subways, we've let our infrastructure crumble Instead of focusing on meritocracy, our schools have focused on DEI and trying to stop crime within the schools Our standards drop but we delude ourselves into thinking we are the best. Our medical and health insurance system sucks. It's takes week or months to see a specialist Public services barely work. Try getting an appointment at the DMV Mentally ill people roam the streets terrorizing neighborhoods Yet we always have enough money for Israel or Ukraine, just never enough for Americans. There's always money for Palantir or Lockheed Martin but never enough for our schools or hospitals We call other nations third world or barbaric and racist but don't look at the anti-Chinese or anti-muslim sentiment that courses through polite society, accepted. We have become the barbaric jungle, decaying month by month while our leaders loot the system more than any African warlord ever did The corruption and overall shittiness is so widespread that we just accept it. But when visitors come to America and visit China, they can be left without doubt - China is the future because society is unified while America splinters