askchapo

[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to civil infrastructure, political structure and social services that I think calling the US a developed country is an outdated mistake.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.

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

Propaganda isn't just about what you show, it's also about what you don't show.

What Americans don't know can't radicalize them

Every single US city outside of maybe NYC (and that's a very big maybe) is a complete dump compared with some no-name tier 3 Chinese city. Like, imagine comparing somewhere like Ningbo and Wuhan to Houston and Miami. Honestly, most of East Asia blows the US out of the water, and SEA is catching up too. There will be a time when cities like Hanoi, Bangkok, and Jakarta also surpass US cities, if they haven't done so already. The US really is that much of a dump and it's only going to get worse. It's just that Americans soyface over Japan and South Korea because they're the good honorary white Asians. They don't even give Taiwan enough credit because Taiwan is too Chinese, which I guess is appropriate with Taiwan being a Chinese island and all.

Okay, but have you considered China = bad

Psssh. Who needs forward-looking architecture? Here in Burgerland every new public building has to be made in the same faux Neoclassical style. Literally, Trump signed an EO mandating this style and afaik Biden has never rolled it back.

I hate Neoclassical architecture so much. And I hate it even more because it seems everyone around me actually likes it and when anyone tries to build anything even remotely modern it gets shot down by white NIMBY types who say “lEt’S dO GrEeK cOlUmNs”

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.

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 , but the comments will of course mention how China is authoritarian.

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

Oh yeah sure, maybe they have all that, but at what cost, mhh?

There’s this one video I found ages ago that’s just a three hour compilation of someone driving around Chongqing. The traffic does seem pretty awful but goddamn. They’re in the year 3000 and we’re routinely bulldozing the homeless camps in my city. How people are not more radicalized here I still don’t understand

Here in Europe we don't build new buildings, but instead reuse ones from around the 1960s (Marshall Plan and all that). To me it's always screamed "we're too poor to build new stuff". And you know, old buildings can only get older, at some point you're gonna have to make new ones...

it's like we like living in the past it's so unreal.