I been to Moscow with my father in early nineties. I was like 5 yrs old. So many concrete buildings. It toook a loooong trip on a K3 train, it felt like an eternity, that I remember the most.
You sell Russians lether jackets, and instant noodles from the train, and make an average urban Chinese monthly salary in less than 1 week. I also remember Lenin's mummy. It scared me for some reason, unlike Mao's.
Eventually Guangzhou far overshoot North China by income, and amount of business, and our family returned to Guangzhou, before moving to UK in 200X.
For the last few years, I worked for a number of Chinese engineering contractors doing business on OBOR. We were misfortunate to pick a rail in Kazakhstan, now trying to recover our money after Kazakhstanis declared a forcemajeure when a civil war started in the country in the South in January. My job, and and a lot more is now staked on my ability to recover as much of company's money out of the venture. We also declared forcemajeure, to no longer have to pay lay locals as HQ finally realised they will never have anything out of this now. Trying to liquidate by selling heavy equipment we leased to dig trenches for cables now to locals. Shame is we leased it from another Chinese co here.
