It had been a long time since I was in China and I've done Beijing and Shanghai before, so it was time to head west a little.
The landscape is spectacular in places, and green beyond belief for an Australian boy from the Mallee. We stayed in cities that had comfortably more people than my entire country, which isn't saying much, but 32 million does seem like a lot .
There are cameras everywhere, and although that seems to be a trend worldwide now, China has really gone to town. There were constant strobes of light at some intersections taking shots of seemingly every car that passed, and every public area is under observation.
The changes since my last visit were stark: Rail lines everywhere, their stations are like airports and the trains do 300kph+, subways are spotless, there were electric cars from makers I'd never heard of, pollution was much improved, and the streets were clean. I saw no graffiti, no rubbish on the ground, and not a single homeless person or panhandler... although that might not bear thinking about.
I've seen a post where the author was being stared at constantly, but I never noticed anything myself.
China has problems, and huge ones at that, but they're trying.