There’s more to China than meets the eye

My son has been eyeing possible job opportunities in Beijing – which horrifies his mother, who conjures up visions of an overcrowded, polluted police state.

Actually, not that dissimilar from my view of China, which has been conditioned by decades of Western media consumption.

For the past fortnight, I have been watching YouTube videos from Westerners living in, or visiting, China.

And they uniformly say the same thing: This massive country is not the place you have been led to believe it is.

As a car fan, I have seen fascinating videos of how the Chinese auto industry – and specifically their electric vehicle (EV) sector – has become a world leader and no longer merely a “copycat” of Western technology.

Even Western experts, who have stripped and analysed Chinese EVs imported into Europe and the US, say the cars have better tech, better performance and are far cheaper than their Western competitors.

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That tech manifests itself in the YouTube videos through the ubiquitous Chinese state-of-the-art payment systems, where your cellphone does the paying.

Then there are the high-speed rail networks – China has 90% of all the world’s high-speed rail tracks, by length – which whisk Chinese citizen across the country in comfort at speed of more than 300km/h an hour… and for a fraction of what you’d pay for similar journeys in the UK, for example.

In recent years, China has registered more patents than the rest of the world put together, one video asserted.

But what does impress an ordinary South African – and at least one of the YouTubers is a Saffer who has been living there for a few years – is the peace of mind which comes from not having to worry about security or crime.

If this is what a police state delivers, then bring it on, I say… Police state, though, is unfair, according to many of the YouTubers, who say the cops in China are respected by the people because they are there to protect ordinary citizens.

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And while Western critics of the surveillance state worry about the presence of tens of thousands of CCTV cameras, ordinary people, like the South African expat, welcome the devices.

Women can walk alone at night. People can leave a phone on a park bench and it will still be there when they return.

What also comes across in most cases is that Chinese people are not only happy, they are happy with their government.

Is China a utopia? I wouldn’t go that far… but there is certainly more to it than meets the Western media-influenced eye.