People in China Don’t Care About Anything Anymore

What I've seen is like a lot of these, whoever these people are, start to push the message of like, you know, we'll look at like what Putin and Russia does or like what China does. They, they're good. Wasn't somebody trying to argue with you that like North Korea was great? Yes, several people. I, like a few, we used to make fun of the guy that Matt met on that May Day protest of saying how great North Korea was, who was just like an extremely clueless leftist, but yeah. But like this is, this is what happens. You see people arguing more and more that like, you know, Putin and Russia, like they understand, like they're not for this horrible American liberalism and wokeness. They cherish traditional Christian values. And like that, that's completely incorrect. Right. I mean, my suggestion is simply, if you, if you believe North Korea or Russia really do things so much better than America, I suggest you go, you go live there for two or three years and just sort of experience that in person. So you're not just basing it off what you hear, but basing it off what you experienced. Actually, the Free Press did an article last year about like American guys who moved to Russia. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And what was the- I think it was a mixed bag. Some of them had better experiences than others. This is also an issue with China. Like you have like, you know, white guys who go there and it's like, well, I'm not being oppressed. I feel pretty free. I can go get my, buy Joe at the club. Yeah. Well, I don't know if that's what white guys in China are doing. You're getting your Pee Joe maybe at the club, your beer. But like, so that's a good point. Cause the last time I was in mainland China and this was a while ago, but like, I felt like I was treated in many ways like a rock star because especially farther out of the main couple cities, it was like, there weren't a lot of white people and they wanted to impress. And they were nice. But I also, because I had my eyes open, I saw the tremendous suffering of the Chinese people under the system where you have a lot of control mechanisms and also just a lot of poverty, a very big wealth gap. I think the urban rural gap must've gotten much worse since you were there too. I saw an absurd, let me give an example. In Shanghai, you go to like downtown and the Bund and it's just like these big, beautiful buildings. And there's lots of shops and Starbucks and everything like that. And I also spent some time in Yunnan province and some of the small towns there. And in one village, I think it was called Dali. And like, it was a pretty small town. There were hardly any foreigners. And I ran into some middle schoolers playing basketball. Unlike this old, like broken hoop grass growing up through the pavement and everything. And they saw me, a couple of them had studied a little bit of English. One kid invited me to go stay with him and his family. So I grab an overnight bag and I go with him. And we walk for like miles out into these rice paddies, like through the rice paddies on these elevated pathways. And we get to this communist style square that's got, I think maybe four or eight houses that are made of concrete, kind of like that, you know, Soviet communist style. They're just like very utilitarian in the middle of these rice paddies in all directions. So these are the families that are supposed to be taking care of the rice paddies. And they invited me for dinner. And I remember the dinner, they had no meat. And I was like, I was thinking to myself, if they had enough money for meat, they would certainly serve it to a foreigner. Who for me, for them, it was like this incredible honor to have a white person staying with them. And I stayed overnight. They gave me like the best room and it was so uncomfortable. Like the heat was sweltering. It was just mosquitoes. Everyone was really, it was for me, someone who's used to living a somewhat more middle-class life, it was hard for me to deal with for one night. And it was just filthy and they tried to do their best, but it was like, it was real like abject poverty. And it really hit me that like, this is how a lot of people in China are living. And you don't see it when you go to like a Starbucks and you see some, you know, some 20 year old worker there in their uniform. And it looks like, you know, middle-class, whatever, but like they go back home and like it's poverty for them or they're living in a kind of like very crowded living situation in a rundown building, whatever. And just, those are the parts that you don't see. And it was very obvious to me just spending two months there on that particular trip, just how bad it was for people who lived there, how the poverty there was far worse than any poverty I'd seen in the United States. And there's bad poverty here too, but in China, it's like another level. But don't worry Matt, because they've lifted all those people out of poverty. Right. By changing the definition of poverty. I mean, I do think that probably materially it's better now in the countryside in general than it was when you were there. Yeah. Which was, that trip was 20 years ago. But what was interesting to me, having talked to this friend who had recently gone to China and I'm not going to say who it was so that they can still go back to China. But they were talking about how the sense of apathy and malaise was really apparent, especially among young people. And they had relatives in China, cousins and things like that, who were working in some pretty industries like finance, good industries where they still were very hopeless about how the economy was going and how things were doing. They also said the ghost cities problem was worse. Really? Than they thought. And what does that mean, the ghost cities problem? Well, we talked a number of years ago, over a decade ago, there were all these ghost cities coming up. Like Ordos. Ordos. And then a lot of them filled in. A lot of them stopped being ghost cities, but he said that they're back essentially because of the real estate crisis and the collapse. There are so many empty buildings, half built buildings, that the ghost cities issue is now, again, a problem where you have a lot of empty apartment buildings, no economic life in certain areas. And so this kind of ties back into even your dad's experience with the milk in the Soviet Union is that today, Russia and China, they're engaged in these psychological operations to demoralize the United States because they don't want the United States leading a unipolar world order. They want to create a multipolar world order where essentially China is the one calling all the decisions. To do that, they are demoralizing, trying to demoralize the U.S. into chaos, factional infighting, the idea that Russia and China are better. Or North Korea. Or even North Korea. It's absurd. Yeah, it's really interesting. But I wonder if the demoralization inside... I mean, I don't have any insight into what's happening in Russia, but I wonder if the demoralization inside China is still outpacing their attempts to demoralize the United States. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how... Because it's in a race. We've talked about how bad the situation is for China right now. And they're trying, at the same time, the Communist Party is trying to overtake the United States. So what will happen first? Will they be able to overtake the United States and solve their internal problems? Will their internal problems explode before they get there? Are you a curious person? Of course you are. We're now putting full interviews only on our new China Uncensored premium website, ChinaUncensored.tv. Your subscription helps support the show and gives you access to tons of amazing content. Click the link below to check it out.