Q2 is here | China is FASCINATING
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For the last few months, I've deprioritized the blog in favor of pushing content out on other platforms, but I'm getting the itch to write something! I have a post I worked on a couple months ago about my favorite books from 2025, which I still hope to finish, but I really wanted to write about something else today that didn't involve referencing several books and figuring out points to make about each of them.
I'm much more drawn in this moment towards typing into the void what I learned this week, but we'll get to that in a second....Can we talk for a minute about just how crazy it is that we're already in the 4th month of 2026? Sheesh, I still need to pay my Q4 estimated taxes from last year. I'll do that today, I promise. Full 2025 taxes will wait till next week — wouldn't dream right now of doing that until then even if I wasn't celebrating my birthday this weekend.
Hudson from the future: Yup, it's next week now, Q4 taken care of, '25 taxes incoming. It was a fantastic birthday weekend... but back to real life! Finishing writing this one week later, on April 9th in a lawn chair on my back porch.
While I'm thinking about it, f**k TurboTax. Not because they personally screwed me over or anything, but if you could just do your taxes directly through the federal government like every other sensible country, that would be awesome. However, on a personal level I do have a couple grievances in the spirit of tax season... the nausea that directly files from my eyeballs down to my stomach when viewing "file for free" ads when I'm trying to watch the incredible animated superhero show Invincible with my roommates threatens yakking (gross), because I know it's untrue having paid almost $400 to file last year (when filing with them for the first time), and the ads don't even have any fine print. I sit there, absorbing the lies flashing across in gigantic letters as colorful people dance around with the palpable joy of knowing they get to use TurboTax. I may not be completely up to date on this, but from my understanding, the U.S. government had directly filing with the IRS as a service/option last year — available to anybody — but it was horribly publicized and therefore not widely used. When it was announced that the Trump admin would get rid of it, some excuse was made about people not using it. Nice. Now, just whooooo do you think may have been the most vehement lobbyists against the existence of this particularly convenient service? A bunch of business nerds from TurboTax. Smart, but annoying. They don't need anyone frolicking around like they get to file with them if our tax system functions where you almost have to use them.
Thanks for attending a classic rant, although since this is a blog with Gen-Z in the title, we'll go ahead and replace rant with crash out. I realized it's pretty nice to have something else to complain about besides the Iran War. Don't even worry about that, actually, since it's just military action and not close to a real war at all. I mean, a ton of people are saying it's definitely a war that's just not called a war, but it's probably fine. Hah. And it's been particularly nice this past week or so to start digging into something completely separate from worrying about how my country can't go back on this like they usually do, and is responsible for even more distressing world news than normal (yeah, "normal" was January and February...). It feels like the beginning of COVID again, where we're all trying to tell ourselves that this will go away soon and not end up being a big deal, so we can talk about other things to distract from it!
China. This country is absolutely fascinating to me. For the last year or so, the gigantic nation has been the subject of many major and minor political, business, and tech stories — and those happen to be the 3 lenses around which my favorite podcast, Lemonade Stand (LS), revolves. Following months of discussing Chinese EVs, open source AI models, tariffs, and manufacturing, the 3 Podcasters hit their first major Patreon goal of 10,000 subscribers; the deal with their listeners was when they hit that goal, they'd plan a China trip, leave LA for 2 weeks to experience the country and its stories on the ground, and record 2 episodes of the pod from there. While there are many smaller countries I'd love to learn more about, China is operating on an unheard-of scale, and that makes comparisons to the United States all the more intriguing.
I want to talk about public transportation for a second. When I visited central Europe back in September, the 4 major cities I went to had competent (at worst) to robust systems to transport the public. Budapest had urban buses, trams, trolleybuses, and 4 metro lines. Vienna had an incredible subway system, 29 tram lines, and 127 bus routes operating on an honesty system (my ticket was never checked). Bratislava? Buses, trolleybuses, and trams navigating through mid-tier foot traffic areas, humming along at an impressively low volume. Prague blew my mind with its integrated public transport system — one of the best in Europe —operated by a city-owned transit authority. The tram network alone was extensive enough for me to use every day, and shuttled me anywhere I wanted in 20 minutes or less... they never checked my ticket either.
While I've never been to China, at least one of the LS hosts has visited several European cities with clean, well-thought-out train systems, and did some comparing and contrasting with the Chinese ones he encountered. After hearing the breakdown, I couldn't help but draw comparisons of my own. For starters, 79.6 million people is a lot more than 3 million people. The greater metro area of Vienna has a population of around 3 million, as does Budapest's. In both cases, the whole country is only about 3 times as populous, and if you combined the populations of all 4 central European countries I visited last year, you'd still have less than half the number of inhabitants of the Greater Shanghai Metropolitan Area. 79.6 million people in that area is obviously a lot to serve, but to put things in further perspective, it's close to the whole population of Germany. Shanghai[[1]] has the 3rd tallest building in the world as well as a higher GDP than Thailand, but the next bit is even more interesting.
The hosts talked about how impressed they were with China's public infrastructure — it does not feel as pristine as it does in some of the European cities, but after having long form conversations with 10-15 locals across their trip (they had an interpreter with them) and using the public transportation themselves, the confirmation of its satisfactory operation to everyone is an impressive feat. The metro in Shanghai is known to be fast and efficient, with plenty of lines to serve plenty of people. Getting around the city is easy on many accounts, and again, you gotta be impressed by the city planning, engineering, and government funding something like this takes. And what about getting around the country?
Lemonade Stand visited 4 "tier 1" cities last month; Shanghai, Chongqing[[2]] , Chengdu, and Shenzhen. I can't remember the exact order they went, but that's roughly it, and I wanted to mention the high-speed rail lines they used to travel for at least a couple of the legs....because it is CRAZY!! You can board a high-speed sleeper train in Shanghai and wake up in Chongqing, meaning you've gone from the East China Sea to southwestern China via public transport. I don't feel like I really have to say it, but in the U.S., you're always doing that by plane or car. Want to know some comparable distances between large cities in the U.S. (about 1000 miles, or 1600-1800 kilometers)? Sure, I gotchu.
Denver to LA | Miami to NYC | Dallas to Chicago
Yep. I live in east Alabama, so imagine if I had a sleeper train from Atlanta to NYC! It would be pretty awesome. After 2008, China poured heavy investment into these things, doubling down on their public infrastructure. The U.S., at one point in its history, thought it would become the greatest at this — there was a race to be the next country to develop reliable high-speed rail following the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games, where the whole world laid eyes on Japan's latest technological wonder: their Shinkansen (bullet train). President Johnson passed the High Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965, but the Interstate Highway System construction in the 1960s played into rail travel being perceived as a thing of the past, rather than the future. Other factors played their cards, too; the U.S. has longer distances between major cities than Japan, air travel was becoming much cheaper, and there was no sustained political commitment towards building high-speed rail lines. But longer distances between cities and other geographical challenges never stopped China, and that fact caused one of the key takeaways of the LS trip.
If it's possible to pull off in China? The reaction is, of course, "holy SH*T that means this could be accomplished in a similarly successful manner... in America." It comes down to doing this at an insane scale when compared to Japan and European countries, plus the elephant in the room — it's not just could we do it, but also posturing the question of.... would we ever do it? I feel optimistic from learning about the could we part, and the opposite for would we. In an effort to keep this post focused on my remarkable impression that it can be and has been done (by our main global competitor, no less), I won't be diving into all the reasons why we haven't been working on it in the U.S. in the past couple decades. But, I'm definitely aware of the obvious ones, such as the immense challenge that building and incorporating new transit systems into already developed, existing cities would present. I'm feeling a lot of things about the direction of our nation right now, but better public transportation infrastructure within our cities and high-speed rail development to get between them without the requirement of car ownership is certainly not a priority at the moment.
China is much higher tech than the vast majority of Americans give it credit for. Their people are normal, just like us, and they generally don't feel super repressed by their government (like we are taught to believe about them). It's not like they feel as though they can never say anything or never post anything critical of their government officials[[3]] for fear of heavy crackdowns — it's much more chill than that[[4]] . I loved hearing my favorite podcast hosts be so passionate about talking to real Chinese people on the ground about what it is like to live in China, and when they say good things that are contrary to what we've heard about the country in America, it isn't simply explained by "They clearly feel like they HAVE to talk positively about China." No. What LS experienced during their 2 weeks in the country was that people did speak critically about the government to them, and they were comfortable talking about the challenges that their country is facing, be it in the job market, education, anything!
I've learned more about China in the past 2 weeks than I think I ever have, and it's been fun to have this blog as well as my friends as an outlet to talk about it.[[5]] There is more to learn as always, and I hope I get to visit China someday as well. Thanks for reading — this post is now over!😁
[[1]]: https://www.thechinajourney.com/how-big-is-shanghai-china/ The "regular" metro area population of Shanghai was 29.86 million in 2024. Still huge!
[[2]]: Fun fact: The Chongqing municipality has a land area of approx. 82,400 square kilometers - the size of Austria.
[[3]]: Lemonade Stand episode 55 (best episode if you have to pick one) and 56 are the China episodes, where you can listen to a much more in-depth analysis about how the Chinese central government monitors things like social media for criticism, how China enforces traffic laws, or at what point your post may actually get taken down.
[[4]]: Basically, if your post is getting enough views and is deemed to be too critical of the government, it will be taken down, or maybe you even lose your account and therefore your influence (if you are a larger creator). That stinks, but you're not going to prison. It's fascinating to learn more about... Once again, highly recommending LS ep 55.
[[5]]: Crossing China with no map This series came out last month, and involves some of my other favorite content creators traveling to China and doing a challenge where they go from the South China Sea all the way up to the Mongolian border, with no map and no translators. They interact with locals a lot, in broken Mandarin, with brilliant translation editing work to make it entertaining and easy to follow. I am about to watch their finale!
