Eye on China: Two sides of the very same coin

I feel as awestruck and expectant as a Chinese peasant as I land at San Francisco. My first time in the United States, and San Francisco and Los Angeles are to be my hosts for the week. How will my psyche, so conditioned to China, respond to this superpower?

In some respects, surprisingly well. For a start, the US is physically much less intimidating than I expected. The wave of obese people and stunning buildings I had been told about doesn't really occur. There are some obese people about, but they are clearly a minority - although admittedly that's on the image-conscious West Coast. Still, the buildings are surprisingly low-rise and unimpressive. Compared with the stunning architecture of downtown Shanghai, they simply don't stack up.

It's true first impressions are superficial, but it's not surprising the level of anti-Chinese rhetoric in Congress is so shrill. I can imagine some self-satisfied millionaire senator from Kansas flying to China for a quick peek and being shocked out of his socks by the sheer audacity of China's new buildings - and the speed and force with which they have been flung up, not just along the rich eastern coast but in the interior as well.

So much for the raggedy 1.1 billion worker-ants toiling away in shanty towns the senator had been expecting.

The difference between China and the rest of Asia is crucial. If that senator went to faithful US allies such as the Philippines, Indonesia or even earthquake-prone Japan, he would have had a different impression. Why? Because the architecture in China reflects the ambition of a rising nation. China, although it copies the US slavishly in many respects, wants ultimately to overtake it.

And its soaring, multibillion-dollar skylines show that it does not see itself as a US poodle.

I am also struck by the sheer ugliness of US cities. Even San Francisco is uninspiring. Yet compared with the horrors of Los Angeles, San Francisco measures up fairly well. LA - sprawling, ugly, and fractured along racial lines - is evidence of the American Nightmare.

I don't want to exaggerate the positive of China's mega-cities Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Beijing. Clearly, these cities are way above the average in China. But their scale, beauty and - to students of European imperialism - historic resonance raise them above their US equivalents.

And what can you say about the racial divide and poverty in America? A quick car ride through South Central LA reveals the existence of a vast underclass, something I have never seen in my life. As you cross over a couple of blocks, the neighbourhood suddenly transforms itself into something resembling a long-term refugee camp.

Everybody is living in decaying bungalow housing. One can easily imagine that not too long ago, these once quaint and well laid-out buildings were the pride and joy of post-World War II blue-collar workers.

"How could the city have allowed things to get this bad?" my friend asks as we visit this ghetto, and it resonates even later in the more cosmopolitan Washington DC.

Yes, indeed. How can the richest and most powerful nation in the world treat its own people so heartlessly? That's a conundrum for Europeans to ponder. The number of poor people we meet who are obviously barking mad is testament to the appalling US healthcare standards rather than the choice of people to adopt such a lifestyle.

The consequences of such a society are interesting. As I lounge on the pleasant lawns of Berkeley campus, I notice how people all dress the same way. How oddly dispiriting that the students of the West Coast's most famously anti-establishment university should be dressed almost identically in shorts or khaki trousers, trainers and T-shirts.

The reason is surely obvious. The cost of failure is so high in the US, and so prevalent in terms of the abject physical and mental failures one encounters, that only a fool would buck the status quo. Those Berkeley students have learned their lesson. Heads down in their study books, they are gunning for a comfortable future - and who can blame them?

It is obvious that America's trumpeting of human rights is grotesquely inappropriate. This is a society that clearly puts success and material wealth way above the wellbeing of its less gifted and lucky citizens. How similar to modern China, with its cut-throat competition and obsessions with money.

Even the attitude of US service industry staff reminds me of China - politeness and respect can be guaranteed only by fat tips. The idea that a person has some kind of innate human dignity is laughably out of place in modern America.

Perhaps that why the Americans are so disturbed by China: they look at this vast, dynamic and ruthless Asian country and feel somewhere in their bones that they have inspired a darker version of themselves.