There's a good reason the vast majority of rich Chinese people move to the West. It's an awful place to live if you have a choice.
Although many are, the "vast majority" of rich Chinese people are not moving to the West, that's extreme hyperbole. China is full of terrible things: massive income inequality, pollution and smog, corruption, scams, copycat, scandals and more. But there are also amazing things: innovation, one of the world's richest histories, strong families, and a hunger for progress. Life has been improving there for the past 30+ years, not steadily improving, but improving at an explosive pace of progress. It's not "an awful place to live" (at least I hope not for the 1.3 billion people there), and there is far worse you could do on Earth right now.
No, and I have no intention to. My girlfriend spent the month of August there visiting her family and complained non-stop about how much she hated it and wanted to come home (and she's a well-off Canadian immigrant from Shanghai).
> The controls on internet access is not as extreme as portrayed in western media.
I write software for a living and it still took me hours to find and set up a VPN + traffic obfuscation solution so I could get my girlfriend on Facebook while she was there. Play Store and Google didn't work at all. Foreign sites that aren't blocked entirely barely function. Even developers at top Chinese tech firms routinely download XCode from sketchy Chinese versions of Dropbox because downloading them from Apple is too slow [1]
> If you're talking about poor factory workers being constrained, well poor people everywhere have a hard time being mobile.
I was referring to the Hukou system (aka the caste system of China) [2]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/09/21...
As for the VPN access, I also write software for a living, and it took me 5 minutes to get set up with a VPN. It was simply enough that my parents could figure it out as well. I get that the Play Store and Google don't work there, I was referring specifically to the fact that for most intents and purposes, a regular Chinese person could use the internet for most of its glory (porn, games, social, news, shopping).
Hukou is unfortunate and controversial issue there. In some ways it makes sense though, you have a massive population and you want to moderate the effects of massive migration. In other ways it's cruel and unfair. I don't know what to do about that, but I don't know if the U.S. has proven a better method. The fact of the matter is that no government has been in the situation China is in right now. To me, that makes it hard to judge.
Overall, I still find your argument that "it's an awful place to live" uncompelling.