I mean, in terms of social media, there’s XHS like I said earlier. There’s also Bilibili, which is Chinese Youtube. You could also find Chinese people posting videos on Youtube for that matter. Besides Chinese people just posting about their daily lives on social media like every other person who use social media, there’s also domestic tourism. So you could find videos of someone who’s from Wuhan visiting Guangzhou. Stats and charts are one thing, but as they say, seeing is believing.

Front page of Bilibili has this video: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1pevzBKEBx/ You don’t have to understand Chinese to see that the person is filming at a small village and that it’s a rural environment because she’s seen feeding vegetables to calves on top of just seeing fields of crops in the video. In terms of infrastructure, it’s obviously less developed than somewhere like Shanghai, but nothing’s particularly rundown. Some of the buildings look like they’ve been recently painted. The road is old with some cracks, but it doesn’t have any potholes, which is more than what I can say about the roads I have to drive through on my way to work. And those residential roads are through suburbs with nary a cow to be seen.

Here’s another interesting video I found on the front page: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1tBvsBTEdc/ I have no fucking idea why Katy Perry is on Chinese social media, and she’s apparently on Chinese social media enough that she has a Chinese nickname 水果姐, which literally means “Fruit Sister” and this nickname is apparently well known enough that there’s even a Wiktionary entry of her nickname on Chinese social media: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/水果姐

Standard of living is quite high and rapidly rising. For example, purchasing Power in 2022 was 25 times higher than 1978. The gap between rural and urban development has long been acknowledged and is already something worked on. The famous poverty eraducation campaign was focused on just that. Read The Metamorphosis of Yuangudui to see what that looks like in practice.

Another consistent metric is perceptions of democracy and support for the CPC. Over 90% of Chinese citizens support the central government, and ranks far higher than western countries on perceptions of democracy:

For more reading, The East is Still Red, Socialism in Power: On the Theory and History of Socialist Governance, and Socialism With Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners are all great for understanding how the PRC works. ProleWiki’s page on the People’s Republic of China is also good if you just want an in-depth summary.

Not OP, but you can easily find statistics on public transportation, wages, healthcare/life expectancy, government approval, ecological policies, technological development, energy use and so on.

Collecting these statistics takes too much time for a single comment, but you can find statistics from a wide variety of sources such as the world bank, imf, rand (western sources), or Chinese sources like Chinese government data (like from the national burea of statistics).

Either way, the data is quite favorable for China and Chinese citizen’s quality of life. They have a higher life expectancy than Americans, world class public transport, the world’s best green energy industrial complex (by such a huge margin that in comparison, the rest of the world might as well not try). It is quite a decent place to live in, baring the issues with low wages, youth unemployment and high working hours (compared to western nations, as least until the fascists de-develop the west enough).