Just got back from a trip to Japan and I found that Tokyo and Kyoto also met most of your criteria.

Cash is still pretty common there and definitely can't go cashless (nor would I personally like to), and there's no delivery drones that I'm aware of (I also don't particularly care for that, personally).

I'm not even sure it's that they're ahead, I think we've just fallen behind in a lot of those cases.

You can if you're local. Either IC card or credit card or payment app. I helped developed Merpay, one of the local payment app. These days I almost never use cash.

In China it's even better, even street vendor use QR payment.

>clean streets, no homeless, practically zero crime

The US regressed on this heavily in the last generation.

no it didn't. crime rates have been steadily declining for over 30 years

The only crime rate data which is really reliable is the murder rate. This peaked in 1991 and has been generally stable (not steadily declining) since 1999, with a spike during the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost all murders do get reported and counted.

https://www.consumershield.com/articles/murder-rate-by-year

I don't trust the statistics for lesser crimes because so many of the victims never file a report. In many cities the police now subtly discourage people from filing reports because they don't want to deal with the paperwork or have their statistics look bad. But I think we can generally use the murder rate as a proxy for the overall level of criminality.

Surely your graph shows it declining dramatically? If you zoom out a bit [https://crimeforecast.substack.com/p/explaining-the-crime-de...] we're currently at almost an all-time low, you have to go back to the 1950s to find similarly low numbers.

I imagine the 2025 section is anomalously low due to lack of data availability and the graph's unwillingness to extrapolate

How do you feel about crime victimization surveys?

The BJS National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is interesting but I don't really trust it. A lot of the people who are most likely to be crime victims are also the least likely to answer government surveys. We have no way of knowing whether their statistical adjustments are accurate.

I agree, but a lot of petty/non-violent crime isn't enforced or reported anymore.

Nope, sorry I don't believe this. I lived in Seattle for 15-years and while the city was never exactly hard on crime, I watched the post-2016 descent into madness and then the post-covid sprint into being actively pro-crime.

I watched it start in the downtown area and then spread into residential neighborhoods, and the homeless/criminal element become more physically aggressive too. "Public Intoxication" also increased except instead of drunks it was fentanyl users.

Car crimes similarly went from simple opening of unlocked doors, to smashing of windows to grab bags or cutting out catalytic converters.

Public transit went from bearable to unusable (though this might be better now, I don't have firsthand knowledge anymore since I stopped using it during the decline).

What are some examples that might blow my mind?

Public transportation is on a different level and all mayor cities are connected via a high speed rail network.

The latter probably will never happen in the US.

Considering the US has far fewer people far more spread out, with two major sets of mountain ranges just in the continental US probably not. It might be possible to have high speed rail on either coast with a single rail line following along a route near I-10 east=west. Even then it's a lot of nature to overcome.

There's a lot of population centers in the US that could be better connected without crossing the Rockies.

Beijing to Shanghai is roughly the same distance as Chicago to New York City. Travel time via train is 4.5 hours vs 22 hours.

Boston to New York is almost 4 hours on the Acela!

I feel like these are the kinds of excuses that would be ignored with Chinese infrastructure projects. Tunnel through the mountains.

Yeah, nobody in the US is working on that at all...

https://www.boringcompany.com/

I’d strongly recommend that you watch this video: “The Vegas Loop Is Getting Progressively More Stupid”.[1]

[1] https://youtu.be/VPjODKUxV5g (22:05)

Where's the high speed rail then? Tunnelling isn't the difficult part.

We have cars... privacy, freedom of movement, independence, flexibility. If you need faster, there are aircraft for that.

This is a very lazy excuse that always comes up. Even Russia has a better train connection and it's even less dense.

So Russia's population centers are on opposite ends of the country?

No and yet they have a working train system

So like in (parts of) Europe?

This also describes nearly all of Europe

I agree with your assessment on the high end of China's development and the lack of awareness of that from people in the US. But I think the story on the low end /lower class is more interesting and I think there is lack of awareness there too.

Even within the US a lot of upper class people don't know what it's like for lower class people here. It's so easy to slip into homelessness because there aren't reasonable options available to many people to live anymore.

In China they still have a huge amount of their population in a developing stage so they still have ample tools and options and knowledge for how to maintain a reasonable life in a less developed state. So it's easier to fall back to a cheaper lifestyle, and culturally it's easier too.

But in the US were generations removed from these other ways of life, so there's no options or cultural acceptance of not living a highly developed way of life. So people just go straight from a nice house or apartment with modern stuff to being homeless with little to no tools to survive.

Just my probably naive thoughts. Would love to hear others takes on this.

i agree with that. It's as if they tried to outlaw poverty. i mean look at all the insane housing regulations (zoning laws, regulations, permit costs, land usage policy) that prevent low cost housing from being built.

I've seen in thailand, how even the poorest can just build a small hut on a piece of land they own and actually live in it. You'd be risking jail time if you did that in the US.

I think your assessment of homelessness in the US misses some things, though (or at least leaves them unstated):

First, that it's not just that people "don't know how to live more simply", and thus cling to their homes too long when they "should" otherwise be downsizing and cutting expenses. For a lot of people, the fall is sudden—some medical emergency drains all their savings and leaves them unable to work (at least for a time), and there it goes.

Second, what are they going to downsize to? We don't have whole rural villages in the US that are living, essentially, pre-industrialized lives (except with the Amish, I suppose, but that's a whole other kettle of fish). (Also, I don't know for sure that such places exist today in China—I know that they did not too many years ago, but my information is not current.) There isn't really anywhere you can go in the US to live securely, but simply, on $100 a month or whatever. And even if there were, that would involve leaving whatever job you had to begin with, which removes the "securely" part.

As someone living in a city with a significant homelessness problem I think this comment misses the point. The vast majority of homelessness in the US is not people falling on hard times and needing a boost to get back into a home. They are drug addicts or the mentally ill. A completely different problem that also needs to be addressed. Few other nations that I can see allow blatantly mentally ill to roam their streets or let people do drugs openly on the streets...

Wow. Sounds like Mega-City One.

Scenes like this are ubiquitous. It has gotten better since a recent camping ban but it only moved the problem into wooded areas.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/south-austin-homeless-camp-drawin...

While I do believe that China is surpassing the West on many points, I'd like to underline that a cashless society is not a good thing. It's a terrible, terrible idea.

With no cash, the citizen passport and the GFW, the dictatorship has total control of society. It's not that there are no homeless, is that they are pushed to even worse conditions, out of sight. It's not that there is zero crime, it's that the crime is from the state, the mafia, and there is a lot of corruption. But nobody can talk about it because there is no free press.

I do think it's important to state how much China is advancing, and surpassing the West, because they are going to rule the world as the Americans did, soon.

But let's not pretend it's some kind of utopia.

I think you over estimate the control and under estimate the need for flexibility for any society to operate. Let's just say even in China, identity can be a commodity. For example scammers are known to buy bank accounts by paying poor people in remote areas. The system needs flexibility otherwise a majority of people will run into problems all the time.

Yes, but flexibility that happens in those conditions is at the cost of tremendous effort and risk from the population, usually under the tutelage of bigger power structures. EG: scammers are usually part of some organisation that has the power to do that, and the guy giving his name on the bank account is basically disposable.

Also the fact the population is so huge make it hard even for such a powerful state to grasp it all.

But regular citizen flexibility when something is not state-approved in advance is very limited compared to ours. The state can limit where they can move because of the citizen passport, limit what they can buy (and say) because of wechat, limit what they can see and know because of the GFW, limit how much you can be anonymous because big cities have cameras everywhere, coupled with AI tracking.

In Europe, if my government does something I don't like, I can pay in cash, or cross a border and do it in a different country. I can complain on the internet and find like-minded people to organize, advice, help...

I want to go to a gay bar and pay without having a record of it? I can. I want to finance an art or political project that the government would not like? I can.

In fact, anywhere in the world there is cash, and I have some secure cash stash, I can pay if I lost my phone, or with no battery. I can pay if my bank account is blocked by the bank. If it's in the red. If there is an outage on their app. I can pay if I've been robbed of my wallet and phone. I can pay if there is no electricity or no internet. I can even pay if war is declared, if I'm under bombs. I can buy illegal drugs, illegal plant seeds, illegal literature, and illegal human services.

Remember when visa prevented us to send money to wikileak? It was not illegal to do so in my country, and it was my money, but they just said no. Yet I could pay in Bitcoin, that I could buy with cash.

No-cash societies make everything easier when everything goes according to plan. When you fit in the box, and the box is not broken. It's why it feels so great, because day-to-day life is mostly this, for most people.

But the lack of alternatives will make you feel helpless the day you really need it. Cashless has never been about convenience, it's about deleting those annoying grey areas, inch by inch. It's about control.

It's not a new thing for China. The first time I went there, I was 17 years old, and there was no internet. So the state appointed us a state guide, and she was following us everywhere during the whole time, to make sure "we were safe".

Now China doesn't need to do that anymore. They know everything you do at any moment except in the remote countryside. And they can push a button if they want to stop you.

agree

there really are far fewer homeless people in china than there are in america. it's not just that they're out of sight, it literally is much less of a problem to begin with. you can't try to equate these things

This is a ridiculous statement on so many levels... on the one hand it's true that culturally folks are more likely to look after their family members. But there's plenty of people who have not had kids and severe alcoholism as well. I've seen plenty of homeless on the streets of Beijing and many years ago too.. more importantly there's hundreds of millions of people who live precarious lives.

China has made amazing progress and the rate of extreme poverty has fallen a lot. But it's also easier to limit the homeless population in cities when they have the Hukou internal passport system to keep many of the poorest people out, as well as forced institutionalization of the severely mentally ill.

>> extensive subway systems with protective barriers at every single station (so you can't suicide or push someone on the tracks)

I find this one most interesting. In London for example this is brought up all the time. There is always an excuse (cost, platform length, trains can't stop at the same spot etc etc) and we accept ~100 suicide attempts per year not to mention various accidents. There's the immediate human cost, the PTSD for first emergency workers + the disruption to public transport.

If we can't invest in simple things that would make a meaningful difference how do we expect to match those big infrastructure projects? Crossrail is fantastic but was delayed many years. HS2 is beyond a joke.

As an East Asian, not really trying to argue that China hasn’t accomplished great things.

While I can’t speak directly to this, but from watching The China Show on YouTube, the tradeoff to the amazing amenities is that the personal-injury risk from failing infrastructure has been fatal, but covered up by their propaganda. Anyone on the receiving end of it, will deal with devastating consequences, if not fatal.

Infrastructure and manufacturing corners are cut in ways that look great, but literally kill their population and tourists.

Building foundations are not thick enough, buildings aren’t built to proper fire safety standards, underground pipes leak, leading to roads constantly failing, high rises burn down, sewage pipes literally blow up due to methane build up like someone detonated a bomb.

Drainage grates are fake and flooding cities, drowning people in vehicles, while the QA of car battery manufacturing is causing electric fleets of cars in parking lots to burn.

And the aforementioned occurrences are happening in tier1 cities.

I sound hyperbolic, but China is great at quickly cleaning up and quickly rebuilding, so it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as it does.

Once I learned about the infrastructure, I realized my cousin’s business trip accident in China was not a randomly rare accident.

He broke his back in China when his rental car’s front wheel popped off the car.

Chances are most folks are fine if they go. But I would be very weary, because the probability of a disaster is not nearly as high as it ought to be.

> the QA of car battery manufacturing is causing electric fleets of cars in parking lots to burn

I've seen a lot of grumbling on this site about why the U.S. doesn't have access to cheap EVs like China, but it's almost entirely because the cheap EVs that China is pumping out aren't even close to being up to the U.S.'s stringent safety standards.

Eventually they will be safe enough, and they will also be more expensive.

I saw an interview with the director of the FBI describing FBI headquarters as having nets on all sides, so falling debris don’t kill people on the ground.

The fact that the FBI, which is institutionally highly defended, feels the need to spend money and effort on stopping falling debris, tells you something about how accountable government agencies are.

Feels like a weird comparison. Granted, I've neither been in US nor China but from my Chinese/US friends that I mingled with while living in Tokyo, I feel like except for that flashy silly thing you cherish (cashless, drones) Chinese cities don't offer much compared to say Seoul or Tokyo.

And even Seoul or Tokyo, depending on your metric, probably fails compared to some European cities (Dutch, Scandinavian, etc)

Comparing to US cities feels weird. Because they don't got much going on for them anyway, except diverse culture and vibrant businesses

US cities just suck, they lose against pretty much any developed nation except Canada (which is US but without money).

Even any Russian cities are way ahead of US counterparts. Places like Kensington avenue or NYC subway are unimaginable in major cities there.