China's Rise, America's Decline

What is going on in china you guys have seen the memes on instagram x Reddit it just seems like there's been a crazy shift in tone around What a lot of people are saying is the rise of the chinese empire the decline of the american empire over the past six months and Over the past month i've spent time in new york city shanghai china Now i'm back in bangkok thailand and I wanted to go over a few things that I noticed And by the way guys, most of these things are about shanghai I get that shanghai is sort of like the new york city Of china, but I do think that new york city is oftentimes representative of a lot of the changes in other major cities in america So it use it as a proxy some of these things may be unique to shanghai But I tend to think that they would apply to various levels across the country But you know, like I said guys take it for what it's worth. I mean, you know, um Point number one it is really clean compared to 20 years ago Like I remember seeing the gutter oil thing. I remember seeing street food everywhere that was unregulated And I just think that nowadays man all of that stuff has been I want to say Let's just go ahead and say it's close enough to 100% Eliminated all those things that people used to say about china that were true Are no longer true. So, you know you can say You know people with baby formula and this and that it's just they've just consistently taken steps forward in china And you could argue Some some people would argue yes or no in america We've taken steps back or at least that we've been held at a standstill, right? And sometimes when you're held on a standstill sometimes societal development is a little bit like an uphill thing Where even if you're at a standstill you're still kind of sliding back a little bit because there's natural inertia To push you down the decline as you're trying to push upward on an incline You guys let me know man Like I said china is so much cleaner than it was 20 years ago You could argue that america in a lot of places not all places is dirtier than it was 20 years ago So that kind of plays into the narrative american empire decline chinese empire incline Ascendant, whatever right? Uh point number two, there was a ton of koreans vacationing in shanghai I know this was like a little bit of a micro detail but uh, you know for the longest time I feel like you know Koreans, they only looked up to like america and japan Maybe france but just pretty much america and japan and they always you know, not in an ancient sense But like in the last 50 years since really looked down on china and to see a ton of koreans vacationing in shanghai on the bun with their family Was pretty interesting because it kind of goes to show you that, you know First of all shanghai always did have that idyllic like paris meets Blade runner super, you know steampunk vibe But it just goes to show you that people from cultures that previously would have not been open to appreciating china are now appreciating china Even if it violates their sense of you know You know some hierarchy or whatever like that Uh point number three a lot of people in china that I met and this may be unique to shanghai because there's a over index Of this type of four die or you know Just worldly person a lot of people had studied in a western program for at least a year Like I met a ton of people who had spent a ton of time in australia new zealand uk, of course america America is generally for the richest chinese to study in but uh, yeah I mean education is huge in china and chinese parents will often spare No expense to get an education and that was just so funny because I was thinking about the other day Thailand is generally not viewed as a place to get an education right for chinese But it's a place to have fun And then there was a kidnapping incident or a few kidnapping incidents and everybody got super worried that thailand wasn't safe But new york city and especially like if your kids go to st. John's, you know what I mean? John hopkins I'm, sorry, like in baltimore It's way less safe than thailand But chinese parents will still send their kids to go get an expensive education at john hopkins Or in new york city at columbia the area around columbia university, which is an ivy league in uptown. New york is very dangerous So it kind of goes to show you that it's just how much people care about academies and education And it's just such a confucian society that books like puts like du shu Like du shu almost like it's like well, you know I'm, not saying every family loves academics to like 10 out of 10. Some people may do it for status or whatever but like I know like my family it's almost like Don't go to baltimore ever. But if you get into john hopkins and especially you got a scholarship Go, it's almost like in the pursuit of education Overseas almost everything else gets thrown by the wayside But if you were just in the pursuit of dopamine Then all of a sudden all these like risk calculations like really come into play. I thought it was really interesting I just thought about that because wang xing whatever happened to him and the other people in the scam farms in miyamar it was terrible, but it's nothing compared to like Grad students actually getting killed in la and new york, but people just kind of accept it as like worth it but anyway, that's just like Whatever. So anyway, I mean it's just a china has been rich for the past 20 years And then these are just the trends extrapolating Anyway, not to get too far off on a tangent point number four. I noticed that the streets in china Are incredibly silent due to both the cars and the mopeds being electric So in a lot of places you might have electric mopeds And you might have electric cars or one or the other but then they're still honking and they're still yelling In shanghai the streets would be filled with so many people and nobody would be honking And you know The interesting thing is some people were still jaywalking amongst all the electric mopeds and all the electric cars flying by and that was the part that was kind of crazy because I was like yo when it's Incredibly silent But then there's tons of cars and vehicles whizzing by but there's also so many cameras So there's no not going to be any hit and runs. So everybody is swerving around the pedestrians But then there was still like some maybe Lack of advancement in terms of like crosswalks or like pedestrian behavior So that was the interesting thing by the way, watch this. This is crazy But you just bow and then you know, that's that man. It has to do with high trust societies, man It has to do with everybody being on the same page. But yeah, I would just say this. I mean shanghai in general Is extremely pleasant for women children and older retired people. I think that Younger guys can definitely deal with the chaos and stuff like that. But uh, yeah, I was just thinking in my head I was like man for older retired people women and children anybody who needs peace, you know, who may be more subject to Experiencing the downside of volatility or like violent situations man This is like a shanghai was like a 10 out of 10 in terms of safety Not necessarily freedom and definitely not political freedom But those things, you know, like we said I think people in america are starting to even be like, yeah They can't protest the governmental infrastructure but I don't care because like their parks don't have like Heroin needles in them. Like I said, man, there's always Pros and cons to everything and there's like at different points You're just more aware of those pros and cons, but those pros and cons are always built into the structure of any system Point number five there were no more beggars scammers disabled people on the streets anymore I remember going to shanghai maybe like 20 years ago and there was a ton of scamming there was a ton of this and that I did see a little bit of it like I saw about 15 percent of it remaining around the bun wai tan area there was still some scamming and still a little bit of this and that but it was like A fraction of what I remember especially around the wai tan bun area because even though that's like a tourist attraction like a lot of those little alleyways in the old like, uh European concession are like actually kind of shady. There's like some homeless people in there stuff, too There was still some of it around but i'm just saying it had been greatly reduced from what I remember point number six There are cameras everywhere. It's not like shenzhen Where shenzhen is like 12 cameras on one pole It's more like two or three But there's certainly like everybody is gonna see whatever you do Nobody's gonna get away with a crime in china. You might be able to do it initially It's not a minority report report like grown predictive neural link status yet, but they'll get you and blow and behold guys Knowing that you have a 99 chance of being prosecuted for a crime that you commit even in quiet prevents you from doing the crime You know point number seven Everything can be done with alipay like alipay, you know, wechat pay but mostly alipay got the foreign card acceptance now I definitely would say take a look at getting alipay with the foreign car I think that's a relatively new thing that just like Popped up, so I would definitely say get that if you are going to be traveling to china It's going to make your life really easy because everybody uses it Literally, I don't even know if you could pay with cash in the city anymore And it was really interesting to see some of the older people Sort of struggle with that some of the what we call like lao bai xin, which is like, you know the older more rural villager crowd Um, but it was cool it was cool to see them, you know I mean they're getting like I also went to the village. I went to the village of jinshan and people were still paying with cash So I thought that was really interesting to see that they were they were living like 20 30 years ago Obviously you could do face scam palm pay like even their qr codes You don't have to center it in the box. Like as long as you get any part of the square inside of it They have like a heat seeking Missile qr code reader point number eight I noticed that they don't really like bluetooth in-ear headphones there Like they don't really use that much airpods not even close compared to america because apple product adoption is not nearly at the same level But even the people who did have iphones they were just on speakerphone a lot and maybe that was like interesting to me because I was like that's still a little bit of the rural life in terms of like like that was rural, you know, like it was rural to Yeah, just not yeah, I just noticed and if people were using headphones They were using a lot of like bone induction and open ear instead of in the ear point number nine There was really nice public bathrooms everywhere in china. There were 24 hours a day I definitely would say this is definitely a bigger city thing or a more money city thing But they got 24 hour bathrooms that may or may not have an attendant They might have one attendant for the men and women's and they're super clean They're not they don't have that incense smell from before, you know, the pee smell I think chinese plumbing for some reason It doesn't like maintain the pee smell lock it in as much so you kind of still smell it Well, you smell some sort of like plumbing smell in the toilets, but they're very clean. They're very safe. Nobody's sleeping in them Nobody's doing drugs in them. Nobody's doing this or that trying to kidnap people in the 24 hour bathrooms Whatsoever obviously that would be to be honest people gonna say i'm a doomer that would totally be a fair A fear of 24 hour bathrooms that are wide open in america point number 10. The subway had free wi-fi was super clean you know Yeah, of course. That's just a lot of Subways in asia in general interestingly enough southeast asia jakarta ho chi minh, uh, obviously bangkok got its subway Station maybe eight years ago or something like that point number 11. The new neighborhoods are insane guys So everybody knows that shanghai is a little bit like new york city There's been a lot of dope stuff for a hundred years, you know back to the pearl of the orient days and shanghai jazz or whatever But there are new parts of the west bund and pudong that are almost like More like shenzhen in the sense that they're these hyper new tech cities and like some people say soulless, but it's almost like more like a You know long island city vibe in manhattan like or not manhattan I'm, sorry, new york city like where just everything's like Hyper new and teched out and there's like a lot of stuff for kids And I can see you know It depends on what type of person you are if you're like a hipster or a person who really loves like heritage Culture being mixed with high tech you're not going to like it because it's just high tech. There's no heritage culture but for a lot of people That are just corpo people with kids. They just want like good probabilities And outcomes for safety and just like programs for their kids these type of new Shenzhen style places that are a little bit like irvine california, but more urbanized. They're perfect Uh number 12 street food wise. I didn't really see that much left. I did buy some donkey rolls I forgot what they're called these donkey rolls off the street That are really from beifong. They're really from the north, but they were just selling them in shanghai I did buy some raisins and dates off of xinjiang, dude Those were pretty good, but really There was like maybe a tenth but I mean that's sort of like bangkok too like this In the past guys that this wasn't all like this in bangkok You know these like hyper westernized modern like these are nicer than any like cafes in america to be honest But anyway, what i'm saying is like just the street food is going away and people bemoan that But at the end of the day, you know the alleyway stalls That sell stuff and I got this thing called the jinyun shaobing, which is from zhejiang. I thought it was a guokui I thought it was a guokui from Hebei or whatever henan. I forgot where guokuis are from but like it was not the same the jinyun shaobing is almost like a shanghai zhejiang version of Something from western china, but I believe it still has the same root because they're using the tandoor oven and the tandoor oven obviously more from the middle east more from the daisy regions But you know, that's the one dish that actually chinese cook in a tandoor oven is literally guokuis and jinyun shaobings I don't think they cook anything else in it, which is kind of crazy, but it kind of goes to show you They're delicious, by the way, but yeah, I mean the street food stalls listen guys, not everything it's just Everything's always just gonna change and the chinese street food is gone essentially in shanghai from as far as I know Number 13 healthier food is trying to trend. I saw people trying to do power bowls people trying to do almost like a sweet greens digging but with like kuaichao like like the the the the the the chaoguo which is a wok Like wok hay type things, but you know the success of those I think The power bowl office bowl slop Version thing like the power bowls are here to stay people want protein and they want super greens and they want kale Everywhere around the world. How do you get there? and how does it blend in a place where people are used to eating like a show dropping which is almost like you're or like a jianbing or in shanghai like a xiaolongbao like how does it all work with that, you know, I think You know, but people want the power bowls everywhere on earth That is the first, you know has first world money, but they just don't know how to get there yet So we'll see which shanghai brands are able to do it. It might look more like you know if they ever do like a healthy panda express it like might look more like that or if you've Ever tried to make a macro friendly panda express bowl. It might end up looking like that Number 14 foreign brands are still around but they're viewed as like kind of getting stale they're for like older people who care about class and luxury so Listen guys when starbucks came in To china was viewed as like you speak english. You've been abroad. You're cultured. You're high class That's why you drink starbucks and there was a lot of truth to that I mean even in america, there's a lot of brand signaling right like oh i'm an aloe person I'm, like somebody who likes lululemon, but i'm more stylish, right? There is brand signaling but in america in shanghai or in china in general classism is like a little bit more strict So it's like oh i'm a person who gets international gelato, even if I get asian gelato flavors i'm, not gonna go to michelle michelle is like for like Poor people or like people without lots of means or not into luxury and things like that so that's one thing that I noticed but it's interesting because I think there's a lot of shanghainese with money that would never eat michelle if they were in shanghai But if they go to new york city and they see michelle because michelle is opening up in tribeca I'm gonna try to enter the u.s Market, they would go to michelle maybe not on a regular basis Or maybe they might not want to go to luckin that only go to shing baka reserve in Shanghai, but when luckin comes to new york city They go to get luckin to kind of like support their hometown brand So it goes to show you that cultural positioning and signaling even shifts within whatever micro fishbowl context you inhabit but yeah, I think that From what I could tell like dude if a coffee is going to be 45 kuai Which is like six dollars us and you can get a kudi which is from tianjin A kodi coffee or a luckin coffee for anywhere from like 10 10 kuai to 7 kuai if you got the app discount You know what? I mean With all the crm apps, you know what? I mean? Just uh, whatever They're able to give you the discount to a dollar versus six dollars It's a little bit like luckin coffee in new york city right now. They're gonna give you a coconut. Kyoto matcha latte for two dollars versus eight dollars what you're talking about luck and even undercutting starbucks by 20 uh 80 percent or 75 percent in china as well as the u.s It is disruptive pricing, you know, i'm sure in a starbucks boardroom. They call it destructive pricing, but it's certainly Disruptive for sure because you're you're coming in at 20 of the cost to the consumer But yeah that has to do with like class signaling and stuff like that I mean do I see that shifting? I think the richer older people in shanghai are still always gonna be like, oh But then like everybody else is like maybe I just go to luckin to save money um And point number 15 this kind of goes back to the coffee shops, man I saw the density of coffee shops in shanghai because which has always been a tea driven place Places in china have always been very tea driven. Okay Until recently I want to say the density is now the same as japan and korea But with a lot more budget options and a lot more wild experimental flavors I think that in my opinion Japanese shops try to push the the milking of the bean and where the beans are from To a level that even rivals europeans, right? But of course the design is different. I think koreans want to design super swaggy Hyperaesthetic coffee shops and I think chinese they want to give you tastes of the japanese and the korean version But with more tea infused osmanthus oolong flavors But like for like a dollar a coffee maybe two dollars max usd So it kind of goes to show you I mean, it's kind of stereotypical to say that like japanese love hyper Simplistic artisanal like kyoto percent arabica things koreans love hyper lookism Structured like swag riz things and then the chinese like Like a six out of ten version of both of those things at like one tenth of the price But literally it's playing out in the coffee markets it kind of goes to show you these sometimes these like Cultural patterns they still hold true everybody In the on in the internet comments is saying like china is the future and america is the past It's not really true. Like china's really more like a parallel universe Where like, you know, the state and the infrastructures are incredibly strong and people like actually listen to the rules America is a place that does have a lot of rules and sometimes the rules are really enforced like for example when It comes to like paying taxes for like government, you know what I mean for non Entrepreneur people or something like that and then when it comes to like street laws It almost feels like anybody in america can just do anything like you can just anybody can literally like Kill anybody. Yeah, they might they're for sure gonna go to jail afterwards, but anybody could do it and get away with it So almost everybody's like just gonna get punished like post incident so obviously China is more like about the preventative So people are not going to feel that freedom that they can do whatever they want with their lives But that's going to work for like things that they want to do in terms of being outspoken but it's also going to Or maybe even things that they want to do for sure It would be limitations on it, but there would be the same limitations and guardrails strict electric guardrails on the downside Too um in terms of illegal behavior or breaking the rules You're like nobody's getting on the shanghai subway for free And if you it it would be impossible because you're getting in trouble You know what I mean? And you're gonna get in trouble to the point where you get docked your kids can't go to school Your sister can't get alone because you like hopping the subway rail, you know what I mean? and just that's just You know, I know people are gonna be like, oh what's the efficacy of social credit scores or actually how does it work? The system is not how people think it is like how john cena just gets immediately plus 3 000 or minus 3 000 but it's like It's not Not nothing like that either, but that's a whole different video. I just think like this man If you think about it in the west progress is always individual degeneracy is individual as well and in china the progress is Infrastructural And people buy into the infrastructure and the infrastructure is doing really well right now And people have put their trust in it and there's a lot of things that they disagree with it, too Maybe things feel like this or that or there's uh, you know Some people don't always want to feel watched or whatever, but it's getting the job done Like the crime is low. The mass scores are high Yes, they are running into a birth problem. I'm not saying There's not a debt issue There's not a birth rate issue, but everywhere has problems I'm, not saying it's right or it's wrong. I just think that right now everybody's buying into their system and they're Yeah, i'm wearing all shanghai brands right now needs. This is from do shanghai serious player only This is one of the best performance brands Shout out to primo. This is a thai muay thai fashion muay thai, you know, you can train in it But it looks good, too and just man like I said It's just not dystopian It's not utopian 10 years ago. They tried to say china was dystopian right now on the internet with all the memes and people like saying type she and You know people are just like bemoaning every decision made in america both on an individual to a top level down bottom level up level It's not a utopia either. It's just different the control is real But the efficiency is seductive and it absolutely works And you just got to see it for yourself and decide what you want man because I just saw people playing in that west bund park Every generation great grandparents grandparents adults kids to the dogs. No dogs were barking Just no dogs are fighting. The kids are out at 10 30 p.m Nobody's worried about their kid getting snatched up Nobody has to put 75 trackers on their kids and carry a weapon just to defend their family at the park It was beautiful to see well, like I said, you know pros and cons to everything I highly recommend everybody go and check it out for themselves Those are my thoughts on a week in shanghai after being in new york city Anyway, guys, let me know what you guys think in the comment section below. I'm back in bangkok headed to vietnam. Macau we're going to shandong check out the wong feihong Mala peanuts Mala huasheng factory till next time i'm out. Peace