help !!!

I know very little about Chinese lifestyles. As a start, can you compare your life with the life your parents lived when they were your age?

Check out Japan, South Korea, Singapore, HongKong, etc. They are as westernised as it gets.

I'd be happy to give you my view, I just got back from China, a week or so in Guang Zhou, a few days in Beijing.

The factories I was looking around, it's not uncommon to have workers start at 9am , take an hour break at 6pm, and then 7pm to 11pm , 6 days a week and sometimes on Sunday too. Get paid in a month what a westerner is paid in a day, live in the factory in boarding and have their meals provided. Pretty tough, and over the government limit of 12 hours a day, but it's common practice.

One company from Taiwan (Hon Hai), has a factory complex with 120,000 workers , its a small village. Actually brings a lot of work in to the community. The factories are not sweat shops, mostly clean and roomy, the government is prohibiting certain areas from setting up new factories, the ones they have enough of already like textiles.

People are not complaining too much, it's just what everyone does, so it's the norm. Comparisons can be made to the time of the industrial revolution when in England we had little boys clean out the chimneys by climbing up and down them, the rich factory owners and so on.

There is a large rich and a much larger poor group, and a clear divide. The freeways are prohibitively expensive for the poor as is the airport, which is probably why a cup of coffee in Guang Zhou airport (very nice and new and fancy) will cost more than any other airport in the world I visited. There are shopping malls filled with people buying designer products at the same price you would pay in the west.

I think if many westerners saw how advanced China is now (the stereotype pictured in Hollywood is a long way from reality) and how hard the workers are working , for how little and then look around their own cultures, I think many might be a bit intimidated , and quite rightly. There's a huge resource of people, a lot of smart minds, and a large wealthy class to fund innovation.

Ultimately, I think of cultures like fruits, each one with their own special traits, and not really possible to take one aspect and use it to prove something over another. each needs to be accepted in it's entirety and you either like it or you don't.