I studied in western countries since undergraduate and came back to Beijing, my hometown, after my graduation from Cambridge. It was surprisingly simple to adapt to the current Beijing culture as everything has been changed towards American and western style. We have H&M, Zara and Uniqlo everywhere and we eat pancakes, waffles and Full British Breakfast for brunch during the weekend morning.
Although, my family is quite old-fashioned and most of my middle school classmates stay in Siheyuan 四合院 when they were children. People living in Beijing and other modern cities in China have changed a lot because of the explosion of Internet. By 2000, the Internet was free without the Great Firewall so I could search on Google, read news on CNN and even met some friends on reddit. Then, we tried so hard to find resources of American/British TV series, movies and many TV programs. At that time, American dream was somehow another formation of Chinese dream, to study abroad.
Young people like me who study abroad for several years are very common in Beijing and Shanghai now. We enjoy the great opportunities to work in China while still miss our school life in US so we want more western-style restaurants, bars, gyms and even apartments. There was a Harvard meetup I attended where people spoke in English even though 90 percent of them were Chinese. Then, we tried so hard to find resources to overpass the Great Firewall in order to use Instgram, Facebook and Whatsapp.
But lately, I find out that these young people start to complain about Beijing and they feel uncomfortable about this crowded city. People are everywhere and you can hardly find a place to be quite and peaceful unless it's expensive. Although these young people have excellent background, they always find themselves helpless to work in such a business market with no fixed rules. Then, we tried so hard to find resources to learn how to survive here and forget everything learned abroad.
As China has grown stronger and stronger, the young generation has no preference between mainland and Hong Kong / Taiwan or even western countries and they were told to have their Chinese Dreams. But, we still have many many things to learn from the success of western societies in the last several decades otherwise China will fail quickly.