Frankfurt: A Pioneer Demonstration Zone of American-Style Modernizatio

Having wandered around Europe for over a decade, Frankfurt was the only blank spot on my map—I even deliberately avoided transiting through it. The reason? I’d heard it strictly enforced the policy that personal items brought into the country must not exceed 300 Euros (now relaxed to around 500 Euros). There were stories of students having to pay taxes on their personal laptops, so I’d always had this rigid impression of Frankfurt as a place where "a scholar meets a soldier" (i.e., reason clashes with inflexible authority) 🧐. But now that I’m middle-aged, having seen and experienced more, I feel more confident. So I made a special trip to Frankfurt to fill this gap in my travels 🧳. After wandering the streets for a day, it turned out to be just as some social media posts described—messy and shabby in parts. But these days, I’m no longer someone who gets easily "culturally shocked," and I’m better at picking out the key takeaways. So let me share my experience 📝. Twenty years ago, Frankfurt was indeed an oddity in Europe. It was hard to imagine a European city with a population of less than a million having so many skyscrapers 🏙️. From many angles, it reminded people of New York—which also explains why some used to say Frankfurt was like Shanghai. Of course, that’s a thing of the past. Today, Frankfurt is far from the Shanghai I’ve experienced; its overall vibe is closer to Guangzhou—specifically, Guangzhou without the Zhujiang New Town area. The few museums across the river also live up to their impressive names more than their actual content 🖼️. There are two clean areas in Frankfurt: one is the tourist hotspot Römerberg (Roman Square) 🏰, and the other is the area around the Old Opera House. The stretch from Rothschild Park, past UBS, to the Old Opera House and then to Goethe Street—these two areas live up to the image of a developed region with a per capita GDP of over 50,000 Euros (in fact, Frankfurt’s latest figure is nearly 100,000 Euros) 💶. As for other places, like My Zeil (a shopping mall), I even saw buckets placed on the floor to catch water leaking from the ceiling—just like in Guangzhou’s Grandview Mall 🪣. In my eyes, American-style modernization is driven by modern finance; it’s elitist, a paradise for the few—and Frankfurt’s wealth gap perfectly illustrates this 📊. By contrast, Chinese-style modernization aims to deliver modernized lives to the majority, supposedly driven by modern manufacturing. Admittedly, the latter is much harder to achieve, even bordering on idealism ✨. Germany has a high population density, geographical limitations, and no large bays. Manufacturing is its core, so modern finance here feels somewhat disconnected from everyday life. In fact, no continental European country has a city like Tokyo, Shanghai, New York, or London—cities that face the sea and have dense populations 🌊. But regardless of how out of sync Frankfurt is with traditional European cities (which relatively pursue equality), its overall social norms still meet developed-country standards. The self-discipline and mutual respect in the German-speaking world are still present—and I deeply appreciate that 🤝. #EuropeanLife #CityExperience