I went to Shanghai last weekend for dealing with several issues. Other than a job interview, I had to update my ID which had been expired for almost a year. During this short trip, I realized many reasons why I do not like this country besides my personal experiences in childhood.
First, the Internet is almost useless by my standards. There was censorship everywhere. Most of my Internet services like Twitter, YouTube, Netflix and Spotify were not available in this country. Despite subscribing to a VPN service before I flew to China, the best scenario was I could tweet smoothly. The most annoying thing was that I was not able to download homework from school because there related to some Google services.
Many Chinese people are rude and not well-mannered. Their voices are far louder than Japanese people. Most of them seem angry for no reason though they might not be. Not only their voices, but they also usually do not mute their cellphones in public places like the subway. I simply could not understand why people think they can watch videos with speaker wide open in such place. I felt really uncomfortable on the first day.
In Japan, people always say China is more advanced in high-tech. However, when I was in Shanghai, I did not think that was true. China is indeed digitizing their society quickly but roughly and insufficiently. For example, the Shanghai’s subway ticket solution is a disaster. Instead of NFC, they use QR scanning, which lets people show their QR from a cellphone to a tiny sensor on the ticket barrier to pass the gate. I saw many people fail to pass the gate at once, some of them were extremely frustrated after trying 3 times.
The biggest problem is that as a dictatorial regime the Communist China has no sense. Personally, I do not care about democracy too much. I am basically a conservative. Unfortunately, their idologies, symbols and uniform are not cool by any means. Pre-war Shanghai was a big issue, a model of the latest fashion like modern Tokyo. Now, Shanghai is just a random third-class so-called “international” city. Sometimes I joke to friends if China is as cool as the Third Reich maybe I will like it.
