But if you want to see the China of the future, go to Shanghai. I believe it. Of course, Shanghai has all the difficulties of any large urban area. Sprawl and pollution are serious problems. Traffic can be a nightmare.
Rural people come to the city hoping for a better life and end up being one step up from homeless.
For example, on the street on which the Fudan University guesthouse was located, a number of twenty-something men had little signs propped up on the sidewalk telling of their skills and hoping for work as day laborers or carpenters or whatever. I was told that many of them come from Sichuan and other poorer provinces. One person estimated that this floating population in Shanghai totals 3 million. Technically Chinese cannot move from the location of their official domicile but since the rules have been relaxed in the last decade or so, a lot of rural people in particular come to the cities to find work. Chengdu has had, and probably still has, some of the same problems although on a much smaller scale.