By Isaac Stone Fish, Foreign Policy, August 13, 2012

[....] The cookie-cutter approach is such that even someone like Zhou Deci, former director of the Chinese Academy of Urban Planning and Design, told the paper he has difficulty telling Chinese cities apart.

This model of endless fractal Beijings wouldn't be so bad if the city itself were charming, but it is a dreary expanse traversed by unwalkable highways, punctuated by military bases, government offices, and other closed-off spaces, with undrinkable tap water and poisonous air that's sometimes visible, in yellow or gray. And so are its lesser copies across the country's 3.7 million square miles, from Urumqi in the far west to Shenyang way up north. For all their economic success, China's cities, with their lack of civil society, apocalyptic air pollution, snarling traffic, and suffocating state bureaucracy, are still terrible places to live.

I spent seven years in China, living there until the end of last year. I've visited 21 of China's 22 provinces and all five of its questionably named "autonomous" regions [....]