Some thirty years ago when I was working as a home staff in L.A., once my wife and kids came to visit me.  Then I took a week off and we joined a local tour to go sightseeing on several meccas in the West.  Among the tour members, there was a couple who were visiting scholars from China's Mainland.  They were quit, somewhat inhibited, but in elegant presence with scholarly looks.  Then I got to know with them and found they were from Nanjing, if I'd remembered correctly, and they said they wanted to leave some memories of the U.S. before returning to Mainland, for they had finished their jobs in the States. 

You know, American tours provide accommodation, but the meals are not included.  So whenever in lunch time at recreation centers, everybody was busy seeking diners to eat at, except the couple.  They just remained on the bus or roamed leisurely along the centers.  I'd never seen them dine in any place, I guess even as simple as a hamburger plus a cup of coke might have been expensive to them at that time when China's GDP was less than one fifteenth of that of America's.  (Perhaps they might have other reasons not to eat American food or they just had traditional habit of thrift, I don't know.  But the tour fee was already too much for ordinary Chinese people when considering the different living standard between two countries then.)

Time has changed.  Now China will emulate America in GDP within forseeable years.  Let's see what the vicissitudes of the two countries in quarter of a century or so, with bitter-sweet description by "侯峰：25年彈指一揮間，中美滄海桑田" at  http://www.guancha.cn/HouFeng/2017_01_28_391669_3.shtml