Comment by saberience | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saberience | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I can add my own anecdote here. I've also been to Shanghai (my company has a major office here). The pollution was absolutely terrible, being outside for longer than 30 minutes gave me a slight cough and made my heart noticeably beat faster. We never saw a clear sky the whole time (two weeks) we were there. When you meet long term residents you note that they all have bad skin and are much shorter than average heights in Western Countries (I'm guessing due to pollution and diet). Local Chinese residents also seem to be constantly spitting or smoking (!!!) as they walk around the streets.

I stayed in a 5* hotel (Westin Bund) and some of my Chinese co-workers warned me to not drink any water from the top in my hotel! (Because they couldn't be sure of its cleanliness!). I was also warned to not shower for too long because I mind end up getting a rash!

Getting around the city involves using the terrible cab system. None of the cabs had AC and just opened their windows, letting in huge amounts of polluted and exhaust-fume filled air, along with the cab driver usually smoking! Also (and this is somewhat expected) the cab drivers never could speak English and so we just had to show them a map/address to get where we wanted.

Central Shanghai is massively congested and overpopulated and I would never in a million years consider having a family there. In fact, our office there has lost numerous people over the years due to health fears for their children. They have ended up moving to perceived cleaner cities like Singapore and Taipei.

So for sure, Shanghai IS big and has stuff to do, but so do plenty of cities. Shanghai has major, major negatives in terms of quality of life and especially if you don't speak Chinese (because almost no one there speaks English). To even consider living there I'd have to be paid 10X and even then I'd probably only stay a year or too. I found being there oppressive and depressing.

>and are much shorter than average heights in Western Countries

Not to dismiss the other stuff you said, but this probably isn't relevant to the pollution. Up until recently, China was pretty poor and even now a large number of people moving to cities come from impoverished rural regions. A lot of it probably comes down to insufficient childhood nutrition. Look at the height difference between 20-something Koreans and the 40+ crowd. There's a huge disparity in height.

Also, Asians in general tend to be a bit shorter than Europeans.

>Shanghai has major, major negatives in terms of quality of life and especially if you don't speak Chinese (because almost no one there speaks English).

And this is always a weird thing to me. It's like saying living in Germany sucks because almost nobody speaks Chinese. It's true, yeah, but that burden is on you, not them. :)

> And this is always a weird thing to me. It's like saying living in Germany sucks because almost nobody speaks Chinese. It's true, yeah, but that burden is on you, not them.

It is not about complaining that people in X don't speak Y, but rather English which, for better or worse has become a de-facto universal second language for people to communicate with. In Germany maybe a bit less but the only people not speaking English in Scandinavia are younger kids. For many Scandinavians it is easier to communicate across borders in English than in their respective languages (which are pretty similar already).

For comparison in Asia, in Taipei it is possible to communicate somewhat passably with many people in English.

You can't really compare Scandinavian countries with less than 10 Millions people with one with 1.4 Billions.

Most people there have no real reason to learn English: their customers are mostly all Chinese, their business partners are mostly all Chinese, they don't travel outside of China, every possible type of content you could want exists in local language...

Even in Western countries like France, Spain or Italy, English is not so widely spoken, even if there is a much larger influx of people from other countries.

China is a massive country. The vast majority of people have no need or desire to leave, so they have no reason to bother learning the language spoken primarily on other continents who they’ll never really interact with.

America neighbors Mexico and has loads of immigrants, but most Americans have made zero effort to learn Spanish despite there being clear and immediate uses everyday. And honestly, if they don’t want to, that shouldn’t be a problem.

It sounds like an appropriate description of Shanghai and Beijing to me. I don't know why you are downvoted.

However, I still really enjoy spending time in China. Local young people there are very nice.

My experience in Shanghai is that the only place you can reliably find people that will talk English to foreigners is Pudong airport.

> Shanghai has major, major negatives in terms of quality of life and especially if you don't speak Chinese (because almost no one their speaks English).

FYI, Shanghai is the most anglophonic and westernised city in China, other Chines megacities are much worse in that regard.

In fact, the biggest appeal to those moving to the city for its classiness is it giving you that "Western living" life style.

Maybe it is, but that's not saying much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com