I am currently living in Harbin, China and I completely agree with you. The cleanest place in Harbin is my apartment. I'm a normal guy, I don't believe in cleanliness, I hate mopping and sweeping, and when I was in Middle School my friends would have fun by 'dumpster diving' outside local factories to find crazy industrial contraptions...and then destroy them. (Yeah Middle School boys are crazy.) So I'm not afraid of or put off by trash, but in Harbin...some of the things I see and smell in the street make me want to vomit.

Outside of the school I work at, men will regularly drop their pants and relieve themselves leaning against a wall across the street in plain view of all 6 floors, 2,400 hundred students, and 32 teachers.

I have lived and traveled across Mexico and Thailand previously and I thought I had seen the worst, but Harbin sinks bellow all previous expectations.

The taxis don't like traveling to the site where my school is located because so many of them have been robbed in this area, and so anytime I get a taxi, it's an argument. Once a taxi driver at first claimed he didn't know where it was, but after I explained it very clearly (at the end of bus route 113 and 58) then he claimed didn't have enough gas, and on and on and on. Finally, he just pulled over and said, "Get out." He knew exactly where we were going, he just refused to go there (perhaps for very good reason).

Last night, while traveling by car, we realized that they had decided to close the ENTIRE HIGHWAY without notifying any of the Chinese Populace. The taxi drivers were waving us down asking us why the highway was closed? Our driver just looked at us to see if we knew (HOW would the Foreigners know if the Local Chinese do not??) and then just yelled, "I don't know!"

While walking down Center Street a local Harbin friend of mine said to me the other day, "Don't you think that Harbin people are the most beautiful people in the world?" I wanted to say, "Are you serious? I haven't seen an attractive person here yet." But instead I just said, "Of...course...*eyes rolled*"

In the neighborhood I live in, they apparently have no trash pick up. So the people simply pile up the trash right in the middle of a parking lot. The trash pile is now a full 10 feet in height and growing everyday. At different places in Harbin the people pour the left-over liquids (chamber pots, food left-overs, ect) down the drain, except that it's too cold so it all just freezes, but they continue pouring at the same spot and it continues to build and build into a giant stalagmite of Horrors. In some areas, the sinks and toilets drain outside of the building where they freeze as they travel down the wall, building into a giant stalagtite of Horror.

So honestly...no, I have no idea why ANYONE wants to live in Harbin, I live here and I am counting the Minutes on my contract, I mean that Literally. Most of the Chinese people I know in Harbin have never been anywhere else, and the ones who have...well, they HATE Harbin. I find myself having to defend Harbin from some of my Chinese friends and I have had to warn some of them not to say bad things about Harbin in front of people who have never left Harbin because it makes them angry. They don't understand and my Chinese friends who have been outside Harbin seem besides themselves sometimes trying to make the others understand.