Chongqing: City on Steroids

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The Peking Duck has a great link today to a video on current.com about China's rapid modernization. Chongqing: City on Steroids offers an encompassing look into the lives of a few of the various residents of Chongqing, a city of some 12 million people in central China.

While this video is about the rise of a specific city, so much of it is representative of China as a whole. Recent news reports have focused on large masses of nationalistic Chinese citizens, shouting and venting anger at some Western countries and Western media outlets. These news reports do not show average, everyday China; nor do they show average, everyday Chinese. Notice the extreme friendliness and hospitality of the Chinese people in this video. In particular, notice who the most friendly people tend to be: the poorest. I don't know why this is, but it is something that always impressed me during my year in Changsha. The underclass in China works the hardest and gets the least, yet many of them have attitudes, spirits, and work ethics that the rest of us would do well to emulate.

Finally, the gap between the rich and the poor is something to keep an eye on. Highrises are going up everywhere, yet the bang bang men are living in rooms too small to lie down in. This paralleled my experience in Changsha, where migrant workers were building our enormous new college, while sleeping in make-shift tents made of plastic tarps in the dead of winter. It will be interesting to see what changes the next 10-20 years brings to China.

All in all, this video is a great peek into city life in China. Dynamic, fast-paced, and diverse, China's cities seemed destined to only grow in importance and influence as time goes on.