Plenty of people have been pushed away over the years, which is why smart people spend time commenting on SB. You can say smart, controversial things without being called names or screamed at too often. It’s nice.

I think it's perfectly plausible to spend a week in a CBD of a city which contains millions of people and come away with a sense of it being extremely clean and its streets safe at night, but this is an experience I have had all over the world.

The sense I always got about Chinese cities is that there is a level of cleanliness evident when the effort is taken in very specific places, but that there is also a level of disrepair and dinginess that can usually be found an extremely short distance a…