Day-to-day life depends on your social class. I wouldn't want to be in China earning minimum wage.
There are also crazy countries like Iran and North Korea.
Day-to-day life depends on your social class. I wouldn't want to be in China earning minimum wage.
There are also crazy countries like Iran and North Korea.
I wouldn't want to be anywhere earning minimum wage for that location.
Earning minimum wage is a very bad situation in many democratic countries, the US included.
There's nothing special to China in this regard.
There's very little real data on day to day life in NK, mostly fantasizing by the West, but what do you think is day to day life in Iran? I doubt it's crazy. It's probably a lot like in many other countries. Iran is not a hell-hole.
It's been a little over a decade since I lived there, and yes, it was not all that crazy.
As a foreigner I was generally expected to stay away from big protests when they flared up, and internet connectivity sucked (though this was also a time when the world was less dependent on near-constant internet access). Otherwise it was pretty much like any other "middle-tier" country.
I was a teenager back then, so it was especially nice in certain ways: Tehran was pretty safe, so I had a lot of freedom to get around unsupervised that I later did not have in some other "more free" places.