Beijing and Shanghai are truly amazing cities, but as you get to their second tier cities like Xian and Guillan you start to see middle class mafia, beyond that it’s poverty, slums and Communism in it’s full glory.
I don’t know why, but it reminded me of Russia 10 years before it’s demise.
Good analogy. I visited the Soviet Union numerous times between 1975 to 1987. We used to joke in the State Department that the Soviet Union was either the most underdeveloped developed country or the most developed underdeveloped country in the world. It was quite apparent looking at the shoddy construction, poor infrastructure, and the communist way of administration that the Soviets were only a military threat, and a hollow one at that given their performance in Afghanistan.
Excluding HK, I have only been to China [Beijing] once, but I was far from impressed. It did resemble the Soviet Union, only worse.