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I have been to China for work and to visit my in laws. I have been on a few work trips to Korea totalling a few weeks. Korea is very far past China on a subjective newness and technological advancement scale. I have spent months working in Chinese factories and rate them well below Korean factories in technological integration.
Also everything is so dirty and half-assed in China. It really dings them on an aesthetic level. You walk up to your apartment and you see when they painted around some fixture they just slopped it on rather than laying down some tape and making it look neat. I've painted a lot in my life and would never do that shitty a job.
There's some ditch on the side of the road and it has lots of trash in it. One of my college educated coworkers eats a packaged snack and just dumps the packaging on the ground at the bus stop. Everything is dirty. You blow your nose in the winter and your snot comes out grey from the pollution.
At the factory cafeteria (which serves great food, 10x better than American public school food, literal communists are effortlessly dunking on what our government feeds our children) a very sick coworker dips her chopsticks into a shared jar of food. It was quite culture shock.
The food is great. They like foreigners. There's a lot of value there. But fresh, clean, technological, modern. Those terms belong somewhere else. I nominate Korea based on my limited experience.
I don't doubt that China today still lags behind most of the first world in terms of cleanliness and modernization. But more importantly, how does China today compare with China 30 years ago? If the average 30 year old in China is living a much better life than the one they were born into, that is more important in terms of outlook than most of the first world where conditions have stagnated or declined in the past few decades. I see this as similar to the boom of postwar USA and Japan compared to the stagnating powers of England and much of western Europe during the same time period.
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I concur, although I will say that the comparison is skewed thanks to China's size. Shanghai is clean and modern, Shenzhen is dirty and modern, Dongguan is dirty, full of industrial factories and meh construction. Beijing is somewhere in between but with some of the worst pollution in China.
Food in Korea I found generally better in winter, although that might be personal taste and my love for Korean soups and banchan.
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