Well it is. I dare you to go to China to places where most Chinese wouldn't go.
Half of the country still lives in places you can't twist your tongue to call cities.
China's biggest cities are a prime case of fancy Potemkin villages. It's a state policy to maintain "the face of the country" at any expense, which may includes things as ridiculous as banning motorcycles to not reveal that people don't have money for cars, fining people for using cloth lines if their windows face major streets, or tourists having their photo film confiscated because they shot photos in less than sightly places.
This is much akin to how USSR ran a showy semblance of a civilized life in Moscow, at an enormous expense to its economy, to rather successfully fool the West into believing in USSR's relative prosperity.
If you think that ideology talks is what sets off thin skinned Chinese political establishment, then you haven't seen their reaction when somebody evokes the gravest insult of calling them poor.