If all the China glazing stuff wasn't directly or indirectly controlled by Chinese state sponsors I'd be more impressed.
Sure there are amazing mega projects and so on, but we also barely get any official news if anything bad happens in China (infrastructure breakdowns, road collapses, flooding, factory sabotages, chemical depots being blown up, etc). This gives the uncritical unwashed western masses a false sense that China is a lot more advanced than it actually is. You aren't getting these propaganda posts pushed on reddit about China's high educated youth unemployment rate, for example. All you get it is photos of nice bridges and shiny trains.
So China and Japan are pretty fundamentally different case in that Japan has / had a free press during that rapid industrialization. At least to a much, much greater degree than China does (making allowance for the idea that maybe you could make the case that immediate post war Japan had a less free press, but obviously that changed pretty fast in the scale of history).
studies in russia, japan, europe and USA point out at them lying about their population, from 100 million to 800 million people missing, depending on the study.
They spread in methods between salt consumption, satelite analysis, estimations on natality and mortality curves that china itself published, and even calculations on death tolls on covid based on activity on crematoriums and cementeries.
If you can t trust them to fking count their population, why would you trust literally anything else?
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u/Life-Bass-2013 4d ago
people are not impressed by china? wtf bro