&gt; <i>I&#x27;m interested to hear about the abuse and impoverishment.</i><p>Disclaimer: I&#x27;ve only been in China for a week so far, so what I can tell is just what I see (besides what everyone hears in Western media, that is) and it may be biased.<p>Shenzhen is a city of many contrasts. I work in a relatively modern office building and live in a not-totally-crap hotel. I travel to work via taxis which seem to be staffed by poor people trying to make a living. Forget about Uber here.<p>When I get out of the hotel, I can turn left and find myself next to KFC, Starbucks and a big shopping mall full of expensive-looking clothes. Everything is plastered with ads like you wouldn&#x27;t believe. Or I can turn right and find myself on a poor street that is flooded with trash and occupied by tons of people selling absolutely everything - meat, fruits, phones, barber services. Those people look impoverished and from what I can tell, pretty much sit there 24h&#x2F;day 7 days a week trying to sell something to someone. They are all incredibly friendly, but you can feel the lack of perspective for a better life; it&#x27;s heartbreaking. There&#x27;s a family of street food vendors making fried pasta with various meats; a father, a mother and a son. I&#x27;m buying food from them pretty much every day. They&#x27;re extremely proficient at what they do (and they use up scary amounts of propane for that), but you can see that they&#x27;ll be doing it for the rest of their lives.<p>There&#x27;s a big construction zone next to a metro station nearby. They&#x27;ll probably be building skyscrapers, like a lot of others that are currently in progress. The zone is fenced off with 2m high concrete walls. I managed to take a look through a crack, and what I saw was something akin to a labour camp. Some metal sheds, minimum sanitation, lots of people cramped together. I&#x27;ve been told they&#x27;re workers from local villages. They looked hungry and impoverished. They don&#x27;t seem to have any safety equipment.<p>There&#x27;s a fucking Starbucks and a KFC and lots of people with smartphones few hundred meters downstreet. And a modern, high-tech metro station on the other side of the wall.<p>Then there are electronics markets. Tons of fancy stuff. Everything you could imagine. Sold by people cramped together in small spaces that look like they couldn&#x27;t afford what they&#x27;re selling. Basically third world selling first-world products.<p>It&#x27;s really unnerving that you can have a place that is so amazing and yet so sad at the same time, with nothing but an occasional concrete wall separating the two pictures.