An Aussie travelling across China is completely stunned and “mad” at the standards we accept at home.
Shauney Bowen told Yahoo News her month-long trip across China has been eye-opening.
She said the experience has forced her to question the things she had come to accept as normal in Australia.
Shauney said she has travelled to around 30 countries, but said China had changed the way she sees everywhere else, and left her feeling “mad at Australia”.
The 33-year-old was in awe at the clean streets, well-maintained public spaces, electric cars and buses, reliable public transport, high-speed rail, and rapid construction across the seven cities and regional towns she visited.
“Speed and precision, everywhere,” Shauney said. “Every service ran on time for the entire trip.”
Her hotel sat directly across from a construction site, where she said the steel and panelling were erected within three days.
“I don’t think China is ahead of the future. I think the rest of us just haven’t caught up yet,” she said.
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Shauney said her experiences overseas have made her question the cost of building a life and raising a family in Australia. Source: Supplied
Shauney is originally from Melbourne but now lives in Bali, where she runs an online business with her partner, having previously moved to Perth.
After living overseas and seeing what China has achieved, Shauney said Australia now feels less like the developed country she once took for granted and more like “a place still working out its own infrastructure”.
The infrastructure gap between Australia and China
Shauney believes Aussies have become too accepting of the status quo, with potholes, transport delays and infrastructure problems increasingly treated as simply part of everyday life.
“Most of us have never seen the alternative. If you’ve never left, you don’t know what you’re missing, so you stop asking for better,” she said.
“We’ve become comfortable with ‘fine’, and comfort rarely invites change.
“I also think we’ve gone quiet as citizens — we’ve stopped pushing back on what our own government should be attending to.
“Australia has so much potential, and watching it get squandered is genuinely heartbreaking to witness up close, especially comparing it to some places in Asia and Europe.”
“China builds entire cities faster than we finish one train line,” she said.
“At some point you have to stop asking why it’s taking so long and start asking harder questions about where the money’s going.”
Why China moves faster than Australia
Professor Bingqin Li, an expert in urban governance and development at UNSW Sydney, said Shauney’s observations were broadly accurate, although the comparison between Australia and China had some limitations.
“Her basic impression is accurate as a snapshot of the current system,” she told Yahoo News.
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She said China’s infrastructure advantage was not limited to major cities, with modern transport infrastructure increasingly reaching smaller cities and inland regions.
“As a Chinese person who travels to China a couple of times each year, what strikes me even more is the speed of change and the extent to which less developed regions are catching up,” she said.
Professor Li said the nation’s faster infrastructure delivery is partly connected with land ownership, construction capacity and government processes, with major projects generally facing fewer procedural delays than in Australia.
Shauney, pictured with her partner, said China’s infrastructure, public transport and well-maintained public spaces were among the things that stood out during her trip. Source: Supplied
A different way of life in China
Shauney said it wasn’t just China’s infrastructure that surprised her, but the way she felt people lived across the country.
“People there seemed genuinely happy, across every region I visited over that month, not just the polished parts of the big cities,” she said.
She was particularly struck by facilities for children, including multi-level centres dedicated to “music, art, play, all under one roof”.
Shauney stressed that “China isn’t perfect, and I’d never claim otherwise”, but said the contrast she experienced had been difficult to ignore.
Li said Australia could learn from China’s approach without simply copying it.
“The main lesson is long-term thinking, integrated planning and a stronger ‘can-do’ mentality,” she said.
“Australia could think more clearly and strategically about what transport system it wants in 20 or 30 years, or even 100 years, about how infrastructure can support regional development, and whether some regulatory and administrative processes have become unnecessarily cumbersome.”
But Li cautioned that “not everything about the Chinese model can be reproduced here”, given Australia’s different population density, workforce and institutional arrangements.
“The lesson is not that Australia should copy China. It is that Australia can think more ambitiously and recover some of its own earlier can-do mentality.”
Shauney said China showed her what’s possible when a country “actually” decides to focus on the right things.
“I’d love to see Australia try.”
Melbourne-born Shauney Bowen lives in Bali and says her month travelling through China left her frustrated with the state of Australia. Source: Supplied
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