How can a country that's been in decline for dozens of years build all that infrastructure. If you want to believe China will collapse soon and you want to believe China is a threat you can read that every single day in your media but think about the logic of that. We want to believe something is true when we want it to be so. From time to time, we know we're being misinformed but we continue to believe it when we don't know. It's simple, we're being misinformed about almost everything we're reading, hearing and watching in Western media platforms. Why did the US invade Iraq when there were no weapons of mass destruction there but that was their reason for doing so? What's going on in Ukraine and why can't I easily find information from both sides of this conflict? Why do people think China is waging a trade war on Australia when Australia was the country that had almost 100 items of trade from China blocked before anything happened with Barley, coal, lobsters and wine? Go look it up, it's true. Why are Australians sure that China is a threat when China has never uttered a threatening word against Australia? I started to question the things I don't know about. But I still wanted to believe the rest of the things I read were true - that was the Gell-Mann Effect. I witnessed how life in China has improved, it was clear that people in the West were being misinformed about this one topic that I actually know about. Education, health, and the economy have all improved and yet, everything I read in the news from the likes of BBC, CNN and others about China says the opposite. Corruption, pollution, and crime are almost non-existent. When I first went o Wuhan city in central China in 2012, almost not many had a car, now almost everyone does. I also noticed that the standard of living has improved. Why is my news telling me one thing, when my ears and eyes are showing me something completely different? China opens an average of eight new airports a year, while reportedly collapsing. Most of it is still being planned and much of it is still unapproved by Parliament - it might be finished in 2045… We shall see!Ĭhina, while in the process of a reported collapse, has put 4,100 km of new railway lines into operation across China in 2022, including 2,082 km of high-speed tracks.Īustralia's Western Sydney was promised a new Airport in 1946, yet the work finally started in 2022 and it's scheduled to be completed in 2026. In the UK, back in 2013, I read about a high-speed rail link that will be completed by 2045 and, if it ever finishes, it will be a total of 530 kilometers. But… China didn't collapse when they said it would.Īs my years of living in China extended then, I started to notice things: China said it would build a bridge to Hong Kong, they said they would put 15 high speed train stations into the city where I lived, they said they would build a new university and another hospital in downtown and I've seen many governments promise to do things like this but then China actually went and did them all. What I was seeing in real life didn't matter at that time because my media consumption was telling me China was slowing, China was collapsing, China was a bad place to be and it must have been true because even the BBC, CNN and other western media platforms said so. It really didn't take me long to understand much of it was wrong probably about 24 hours. I've said it before and will no doubt say it again, when I arrived in China, I had a very different perspective on what I was seeing to what I thought I knew about China. When the news reports something we know is untrue and then reports on something we don't know about, why do we believe that must be true? Well, it's a real thing and Michael Crichton, the famous doctor, writer, scientist movie maker among many other things, gave it a name - the Gell-Mann Effect. How many times have you picked up a newspaper or social media platform and read something on a topic you're familiar with and realized that you're reading something which isn't true? Annoyingly, it happens to us all. Photo taken on Mashows the skyscrapers of the Central Business District (CBD) in Beijing, capital of China.
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