I’ve been wanting to write this for a while.

I’m a 31-year-old single Indian woman currently living and working in China, and honestly, my heart is filled with so much gratitude for this country.

I don't think I have ever felt this peaceful and genuinely happy in a place so far away from home.

Before coming here, I had heard all kinds of perceptions about China. Some of them made me wonder what it would actually be like as a brown-skinned foreign woman. And yes, I have experienced a few uncomfortable moments because of my appearance or simply because I am foreign. I don't want to pretend those things don't happen.

But they have been so much smaller compared with the kindness I have experienced.

What has stayed with me far more is how patient people have been with me.

My Mandarin has improved significantly over the past few months. I've been studying and practicing diligently, but I am still very much learning. And when I stand in a supermarket completely unable to explain what I want, or struggle with something in a public place, people have generally been incredibly patient with me. Sometimes we communicate through gestures, translation apps, smiles, or just somehow figure it out together.

And those tiny interactions have meant so much to me.

I've experienced strangers helping me, people going out of their way to make things easier, colleagues welcoming me, and ordinary everyday moments that have made this enormous country feel strangely familiar.

And then there is the country itself.

The mountains.

The coastline.

The parks.

The cities glowing at night.

The incredible public transportation.

The food.

The little neighbourhoods tucked between huge modern buildings.

The convenience of everyday life.

The feeling that there is always somewhere new to explore.

There is something incredibly beautiful about waking up in a place that once felt completely foreign and slowly watching it become your life.

I came here from India expecting to miss home terribly.

But surprisingly, I haven't felt that way.

Maybe home isn't always a single geographical place. Sometimes it is the people who make you feel welcome. Sometimes it is the stranger who patiently helps you when you can't find the right words. Sometimes it's sitting somewhere beautiful after a long day and suddenly thinking,

“I am actually really happy here.”

I'm not trying to make a statement, and I'm certainly not saying China is perfect. I'm simply sharing my personal experience as one Indian woman living here.

China has given me a chapter of my life that I didn't know I needed.

I feel grateful to be here.

Grateful to be learning.

Grateful to be teaching.

Grateful for the people I've met.

And grateful for the opportunity to experience this beautiful country with my own eyes rather than through someone else's perception.

谢谢，中国。🇨🇳❤️

I genuinely hope I continue discovering this country, its people, its languages, its food and its little everyday stories for a long, long time.

I want to buy a car from China, specifically an hybrid BYD. I live in Africa so a friend of mine can ship the car from Ganzhou. Is Guazi suitable for that ? Or is there any better reliable and/or affordable service/way to buy it ?

Thank you

I've seen a bunch of these getting pretty popular these days, but when I really examine some of the videos there's some really fishy stuff to say the least.

I saw one particularly egregious one which I don't know if I'm allowed to link, but it was just super dubious. It was a girl who lived alone in the mountains and worked a menial labor job to get by. In that video, she's talking about how she has to do this job to get by but doesn't want to stay there forever, but with the implication that she'll likely have to live there regardless for the foreseeable future. She also left a comment saying she recorded the video herself on her phone, despite SHOWING HER PHONE in one scene.

But the next video is where things get really weird. Just a week later, she posts a video stating that she's leaving the village to move to the city and find work. Completely out of the blue, which is extremely bizarre seeing as that's something that would've been mentioned in earlier videos. In that video, there's a part where she's getting a ride from a village guy to a station or something. But there's several staged shots where the camera is set up on the roadside and recording them going past (these staged shots of the subject passing by is super common among a bunch of these vlogs). This would mean she would've likely paid the guy to drive past and then drive back to collect the camera, because why would he do that for free? Then, during the subsequent bus ride she very obviously has a cameraperson recording her. In one part she's showing herself going through security, and she's being recorded by someone already past the checkpoint. She claims to be poor and not have any friends, so who is this person recording her? I'm sure she's not just asking random people to record her, especially since they'd probably be busy and find it weird. So what's going on here?

A lot of people in the comment section were sending her money, and she always gave them nice replies. But surprise surprise, she never responds to the people pointing that out.

Does anyone know more about these? It's very odd how people who paint themselves as dirt poor can manage to do all this. I don't doubt that there are many people living lonely, impoverished lives, but I'm just wondering if these vloggers are really part of them.

I’m genuinely curious about this. China has obviously accomplished something remarkable economically over the last 40 years. But at the same time, China has a fairly high level of income inequality.

The World Bank puts China’s official income-based Gini coefficient at 46.5 in 2024.

What’s interesting to me is that this seems quite different from the experience of many of the European countries that previously had socialist economies. For example, research on the former German Democratic Republic found that income distribution there was far less unequal than in West Germany. One study puts the Gini for East Germany at about 0.185 in 1990.

More broadly, the IMF notes that Gini coefficients in socialist Eastern European economies in the late 1980s were generally around 23–24, substantially below those of Western market economies at the time.

Obviously, I’m not arguing that the GDR or other communist countries were better places to live. They had plenty of serious economic and political problems, and low measured income inequality doesn’t tell you everything about living standards or access to goods.

But it does make me wonder: How does China have such high inequality and claim to be socialist? There are many capitalist countries that have much lower income inequality.