This article looks like a goldmine, but I don't have time to read it all and won't be interested in doing that once I have the time. Here's my favorite paragraph of the part I read:
Today the party’s propaganda machine is spinning stories about young people making a decent living by delivering meals, recycling garbage, setting up food stalls, and fishing and farming. It’s a form of official gaslighting, trying to deflect accountability from the government for its economy-crushing policies like cracking down on the private sector, imposing unnecessarily harsh Covid restrictions and isolating China’s trading partners.
Last year I read a book called "Blockchain chicken farm". It was an american-chinese person going to china to meet distant relatives and generally travel around to learn about how tech is changing the landscape of business in general in China.
The government is putting a lot of effort into getting high speed internet out to rural areas and sending out someone that teaches them how to open stores on Ali Express to sell their goods.
The author even interviewed a few people who came back to the rural areas after working in the city, finding equal or better success in various small local industries. It honestly made me sad, thinking about how in the US we're allowing vast swaths of the country rot because their old industries no longer profit. The government makes zero effort to help these communities besides a smarmy "lern 2 code".
These NYT people seem to have no interest in learning about china on the ground and they never will.
They will rediscover China in twenty years, when the behemoth of industry has gobbled up the Amazons and Microsofts of the West and these are the people you need to suck up to in order to stay in business.