Some of this is real. Some of this is aspirational. Some of this is straight-up propaganda (and not even very credible propaganda!).

Life in China is nowhere near as dire as most westerners feel seemingly compelled to insist it “really” is. Life in China is nowhere near as paradisiacal as its strongest proponents feel compelled to state it is. The truth, as is usual, lies somewhere between the extremes and, further, in a nation as large and ornate as China, varies strongly according to where you are.

Many (not all) of the horrific stories you hear (like the Foxconn thing: I work about a 25 minute walk from that campus) are true-ish but usually overstated and are not representative of most experienced life here. (One area, however, where China is very similar to the west is that tech companies are utter dumpster fires as employers.) Conversely many of the rosy pictures you find painted in the above links are also overstated, incompletely analyzed, and again not representative of the lived lives of most people here.

For an example of the latter, I’ll pick on the “own their own home” thing. Yes, it’s true, 70% of Chinese millennials own their own home. Because their parents (and sometimes their grandparents!) took massive hits to their lifestyles to scrape the money together … for a down payment. (A frequent pattern is Chinese seniors taking up a mortgage on a home they’ve owned for decades just so they can meet a down payment for their children or grandchildren.) In the bigger cities people refer to themselves as “house slaves” because the majority of their income goes to service their mortgages, community fees, and other expenses related solely to owning a home. They own their own home, but very little else as a result. What’s going on with housing here right now cannot continue for much longer before there’s a collapse, and there’s some signs of that collapse already beginning as young people put off getting married later and later and later in life (because it’s almost obligatory for the man to own a home before marriage). There will come a time where people will stop bothering to even get married, to have children, because of something as simple as “I can’t afford a house in my lifetime”. The older generations can only mortgage off so much before the well runs dry.

(Source for my opinions: 22 years and counting of living and working in China, observing both my own state and that of my extended family here.)