Jim

A Shanghai tour guide, bookable through the GetYourGuide link Harry publishes in the description and thanks by name on camera at the end of the day.

He is the reason the Shanghai video has any substance beyond impressions. Almost every fact on the China page from that trip comes from him, and he volunteers rather than recites:

• How the marriage market works, including that the brokers take a commission scaled to how eager the parent is, and that a foreigner counts as a rare candidate rather than an impossible one.
• Electric vehicles at around 40% of usage, why Teslas are cheapest in the world here, and how to read the number plates — green for electric, blue for petrol.
• That the one-child policy is now a three-child policy, in response to population decline.
• That Communist Party membership is hard to get and covers around 97 million people — under 10% of the country.
• On being gay in China: manageable in Shanghai and among the young, very hard in a small city and with family.

The most valuable thing he says is the least flattering, and he says it about his own country: many Chinese are becoming more nationalistic, access to outside information is limited, and where state media is the only perspective available people are easily misled. He is equally direct that the surveillance is a trade people accept — his and other locals’ argument being that a woman can walk anywhere at any hour because crime is near zero.

Appears in

• I Ignored the Media and Visited China 🇨🇳 — guides the whole day in Shanghai.