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