Look up a video in Shenzhen or Chongqing. Everything looks 2 decades out, and the giant crystal skyscrapers light up different colors. Sometimes the whole thing is a TV.

China surpassed USAmerica in GDP already, but it doesn’t look close to tied in development and advanced technologies.

The trains there go hundreds of miles in less than an hour, you could commute across the country every day.

Meanwhile in America the “middle class” is struggling to have some walls and a roof. Record debt and crumbling infrastructure. How is all of this ignored and not talked about everywhere?

    • spectre [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      “futuristic Chinese cities” is a genre that trends on TikTok once in a while, but that’s the closest I’ve seen it get to the mainstream.

  • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Because they’d feel bad. Burgerland is supposed to be exceptional and my-hero is supposed to be the unique special Main Character to guide us there.

  • viva_la_juche [they/them, any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    There’s actually nothing in those towers, they’re just big empty buildings with a bunch of led panels on,

    anyway I was late to work today bc the bridge on my commute collapsed

    • temptest [any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Speaking of big empty buildings, even Pyongyang, DPRK has some Neo Tokyo lookin’ night photos.

      There’s a fucking North Korean city that looks cooler and more ‘futuristic’ than most US cities.

    • duderium [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      Some months ago I spoke with a petite bourgeois white boomer who didn’t even know that bullet trains existed. I had to explain them to him, that they’re like airplanes that fly only a few feet off the ground (unlike many Burgerlanders I have used bullet trains many times).

      It’s not just centenarians in congress who think that the internet is a series of tubes you can throw in the back of your pickup truck. Many many Americans, including members of the bourgeoisie, are willfully unaware of how far places like China are pulling ahead of them.

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    The driving narrative is still ghost cities and assorted racism. The idea of a China as a leading tech hub with massive modern planned cities isn’t really something that exists in the American noosphere.

    Like six companies control everything 90% of Americans see, all the media coming in. Where would people even learn about this shit? Even if they knew someone who had personally been there and said it was cool, that’s one voice against the hegemonic false reality of the Demiurge.

  • temptest [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    [content warning: not answering the given question whatsoever]

    I put forth that they are not futuristic. They are present-day, present-time, not pretending to be beyond the present reality, but merely cutting-edge.

    To someone who has grown up in a relatively very undeveloped area (consider rural Sudan) or even somewhat undeveloped areas in the West (rural North America), I imagine many Western cities would seem ‘futuristic’ relative to their life experience. Towering skyscrapers, underground rail networks, animated LED billboards and cameras everywhere, and if you’re lucky, slick ‘modern’ designs for buildings and infrastructure. But, to a person raised in these cities it probably wouldn’t be futuristic. Many of these things are kind of common in cities, actually. They’d look at the other communities as ‘underdeveloped’. It’s all relative!

    So, in the same way, I think that China’s modern cities aren’t futuristic but merely present. The US infrastructure is notoriously underdeveloped given their power and technological capability. I don’t see why (political structure aside) they couldn’t build such a planned city. In fact, they generally lag so far behind other Western countries when it comes to civil infrastructure, political structure and social services that I think calling the US a developed country is an outdated mistake. China, on the other hand, has rapid development.

    China isn’t in the future. We’re stuck in the past.

  • iridaniotter [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Well, I see videos with artistically lit-up skyscrapers, drone light shows, and modern transit quite regularly, but that’s because I follow people that post that sort of thing. Sometimes you’ll see this stuff on reddit-logo , but the comments will of course mention how China is authoritarian. smuglord

    • TomBombadil [he/him, she/her]@hexbear.net
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      If you ever see something cool on Reddit In China the top comments will be some flavor of: -this is fake because China lies

      -if it’s real it’s secretly evil. That cool building is powered by 6.78quintillion victims of communism

      -its fake because China just like made it up. This is my favorite because… So what.

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      Sometimes you’ll see this stuff on , but the comments will of course mention how China is authoritarian.

      This bullshit will eventually backfire in terms of people eventually saying “ok, we want that” and then ending up with a fascist theocratic country instead that’s 100x worse and wondering what the hell went wrong.

        • duderium [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          I heard a white boomer say something like this recently. They will admit that China is doing well, but they think that it’s because of authoritarianism. What they don’t understand is that this is the authoritarianism of the working class.

        • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          Precisely why the propaganda is fucking dangerous. Meanwhile everywhere else where we’re trying to get similar systems built all campaigning is for MORE democracy, not less. I have to assume the intent among the ruling class is to genuinely hurt democracy because they know full well that communist structuring is more democratic, not less democratic. Anything that hurts “democracy” actually actively hurts movement towards what we advocate for. The average person just doesn’t understand that because of all the propaganda about socialist systems but it’s true.

          • GaveUp [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            Yeaaa this is why I get pissed off when communists say it’s not that important to argue about China or the USSR as long as they understand Marxist theory

            The Soviets built the world’s 2nd greatest superpower the world has ever seen in a little more than half a century and they still managed to fuck it up because they were the first to ever do it and had no future example

            China has constantly learned a lot from their mistakes and have improved upon them

            How well would a socialist state function if they believed all the propaganda against the USSR and China? They would never be able to even get a single city functional

  • SnAgCu [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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    Some of the cities look like that, but it’s a huge country and a lot of it is just really normal and of course the rural areas are still pretty old-fashioned. In my opinion it’s still consistently better than the places I’ve been in the US though.

    It’s just going to get funnier as time goes on and China’s infrastructure and transit only continues to improve. Americans can have fun laughing at the “shoddy chinese cities” they see in some tiktok video while their own bridges and subways are falling apart, lmao.

    • spectre [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      I don’t see it explicitly done in this thread, but to build on your comment a bit, the “futuristic cities” are a result of the liberalization of the Chinese economy and should not be upheld as a socialist achievement while the inequality still exists imo. The best you could say is that “under a socialist government, you’re not necessarily gonna be banned from doing cool shit while we work towards building a socialist economy”.

    • IzyaKatzmann [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      My uncle is from the US, when I talked about the cities he said that “the Chinese are using up all the resources!”

      I was surprised, I had never heard that before. I didn’t have a response, what could I have I said? I don’t even know how he got to that conclusion, something about ghost cities and poor utilization of resources because of no oversight I guess. Even though he decried planned economies a few sentences before.

      • Mardoniush [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        Ah well, you see, if the resources of the colonial periphery are being used by the USA and it’s hegemons it’s good and efficient, if it’s being used by China or the third world, it’s wasteful.

      • CarbonScored [any]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Ah yes, the trade balance definitely does not betray an enormous imbalance of garbage being imported into the US. Precisely who here is using up all the resources?