I’ve been back in Guangzhou for the past four days. I hadn’t been back in three years. China just dropped their quarantine requirements sometime in the past year making it a reasonable prospect to actually go. Since I had left money in a bank account there, I had some incentive.

made it impossible to get the money out when we left in July of 2020. The banks were all closed. The school wouldn’t deposit our pay to a foreign bank account if it wasn’t in your name, so they wouldn’t send it Ma Belle Femme’s account. I didn’t have an account, you see? No need.

In short, it was a mess.

I went to China during the Khmer New Years break — still one of the best new years of the year — because it differs from the Chinese Lunar New Year celebration and everything there would be open. Just as an aside, it took a solid eight hours of effort and numerous documents to get my money out of the bank and then out of China.

In China, they track every yuan anyone makes and spends. Literally. They know it down to the cent. Few people use cash anymore. It is all done through electronic transfer of funds either using a credit-debit card or through a third-party payment app. Either way, it is all traceable.

The government knows everything about you. Where you are and what you are doing. All they need to do is to check their vast database of information that they collect on their billion plus population.

I had to prove that I had legally earned the money remaining in my account, even though I had supposedly already done so when it was deposited by my employer. I had to prove that the taxes on the money had been paid, even though at the point of deposit that had already been done. The bank has my contract, payment information, and tax documents on file. But, we had to resubmit it all again. They had to suck their teeth and hem and haw over it all trying to verify that it wasn’t a forgery or I wasn’t trying to pull a fast one.

As it turned out, I could prove that all but a thousand dollars had been earned by me. I would’ve needed another month’s pay and tax receipt to lay claim to it. Here’s the weird thing, they transferred all of the money out my account to Ma Belle Femme’s Canadian bank account, except for that thousand. But, they would gave me the thousand in cash as long as it was in RMB, not dollars.

They wouldn’t even tell me how much money I had in dollars. I had to convert it myself, which is never the same as to what the actual exchange rate is.

I promise this is getting back to US stupidity. Honest. Just stay with me.

Then, they wouldn’t transfer the money to my account in Cambodia because there is too much Chinese mob activity there. They are literally recalling every Chinese citizen back from Cambodia and requiring them to prove the legality of their earnings and existence in Cambodia. I guess that’s a good thing, but my Chinese co-workers have been massively inconvenienced and scared to death of it. It is a frightening process. They treat you like a criminal. One of my friends was detained at the police station for THREE DAYS, as in locked up in jail, while she contacted every employer and bank and produced records for the last ten years. Anecdotally, the process can take anywhere from days to a year in at least one case I know of.

I couldn’t even get a SIM card to use while I was there. I couldn’t link my Chinese apps (WeChat and DiDi, if you know them, to my Cambodian bank account). China hates Google. I had to use Apple Maps, which really sucks instead of Google Maps. I couldn’t access my gmail or use Chrome. The whole thing just sucked.

I only left three years ago in 2020 but a lot has changed since then. These are the changes that I observed:

First, they have really closed off the country. Using the Internet is nearly impossible as we know it. The Great Fire Wall of China has only gotten longer, taller, and thicker. No major news or social media websites are accessible without a VPN, which is illegal, but still widely used.

They are restricting everyone’s freedom of movement and behavior by using social points. Any rules infraction results in a deduction of points. Any. Rule. Infraction. Any.

When I landed, they went through the plane and pulled about a dozen people off for some kind of special treatment, and not in a good way. They looked like normal everyday folks. They had just screwed up somewhere somehow or had to prove they weren’t mobbed up or something. My Chinese friends in GZ weren’t surprised that it had happened, though. They had seen it many times at airports and train stations.

Second, delivery drivers rule the streets. Everybody and their uncle is a delivery driver in China. They ride everywhere and ignore all traffic laws. They clog the sidewalks, they ride against the flow of street traffic, they weave in and out of cars. Everything is delivered.

It’s dangerous. They drive like mad people. Paid by the delivery, I guess.

And third, and this is the real point, the air in Guangzhou was A LOT cleaner than it was three years ago. It is still bad, don’t get me wrong, but in the four days I was there, I could see buildings from many city blocks away instead of having trouble seeing the buildings across the street — literally.

The air is so much cleaner because over half the vehicles (cars, motor scooters, trucks, vans, and buses) are either electric or using LPG. Everywhere you looked electric scooters were zipping around the town. Electric cards were gliding through the streets. It made a big difference in the air quality of Guangzhou.

China is investing heavily in renewables. They are still building coal-burning power plants, albeit at a slower rate than before, but those plants are seen as transitioning them to renewable energy sources.

They have cheap reliable electric cars, trucks, vans, and scooters. They are mass producing them for their billion plus population and for export to other countries. They already have the recharging station infrastructure built.

Why the fuck are we so stupid? The fossil fuel and transportation industries have known this day was coming for sixty years. The only intelligent thing to have done was plan your transition from a fossil fuel energy producer to a renewable energy producer, from a gas-guzzling car and truck producer to an electric car producer. Instead, we get Elon Musk’s manic ridiculous electric cars and trucks and Ford’s unaffordable F150.

What the actual fuck?

Seriously, if profit is your motive, then planning should be your game. You should be able to forecast sixty years into the future and come up with several game plans to cope with changes to the market place. The state of our energy production and vehicle design makes no sense. None.

The only way it does make sense is if we were being deliberately sabotaged by corporations that actually don’t care about liberal democracy.

Comment on that, why don’tcha? What future do we have if we can’t produce cheap affordable electric vehicles that will complete with China’s? What future do we have, if we can’t transition to renewable energy sources? Why the fuck are we so fucking stupid?