Why China is awesome, or, why America isn't America anymore

There are a lot of ways to judge a society. Probably the most famous way is to gauge that society's treatment of its prisoners, and that's pretty good, but I'm going to use a different medium because a.) I have no personal experience of being a prisoner anywhere, and b.) I'm frivolous. But in the case of China, this is great, said country is so mired in debate about prisoner's and what not, and there's so much propaganda from the government that it can be hard to reach a decent conclusion about China and its people. Of course, none of that displays societal values, only governmental ones, which are similar pretty much everywhere. So, what am I looking at instead? Simple: Blues music.
So ok, I know, what the hell does China have to do with the blues? Well, on the surface, probably nothing, but this is why China is awesome: the best blues players I've seen live, possibly ever, are both named cheung. And what's particularly interesting about this is not that they're incredibly good at playing Blues music, but playing the blues. Here's what I mean by that: a lot of hipster four piece bands and rockers that want to get more indy cred try to play some blues. Sometimes this is great, sometimes it's terrible, and the reason why is because some musicians innately understand how the blues are supposed to sound, and they're the ones who are terrible at playing it. Blues music is a category, a sound, it isn't, but could be, relegated to sheet music, and one can very easily learn "blues guitar". But the blues is something else. You don't necesarrily need to be depressed to create it, but you do have to have a desire to sublimate all your worries into music and improvise, like jazz, only sadder. So this is what makes the Cheungs so strange, by now we've all kind of accepted that Chinese people can (or at least can learn to ) do everything technically better than everyone else. Yet this doesn't explain why they can still play the blues more soulfully than anyone I've heard live (except maybe Jesse Malin but he wears mascara). This is even more suprising given that professional musicians occupy the top 1% of Chinese in terms of income, societal ranking, etc. Now, granted, 1% of China is around 13 million people, but you get the idea. So what do these guys have to be blue about? Maybe nothing, maybe these two are anomalies that can suss out what the blues is all about. Or maybe there's more in common with China today and the 1920's Delta/Chicago then we originally thought.
There are some fairly obvious parallels, really. In the 20's the US had just moved to a city/industrial society, as China is doing now, only much much faster. This of course, created, and continues to create, pockets of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, and a lot of busy people in between. It also creates a sort of instantaneous nostalgia, and this is very much a part of what the blues is about. The other big effect of China's rise, and Chicago's a century ago, is that, due to the speed of it, both places get hit pretty hard by Stouffer's theory of Relative Deprivation, which has become part of common knowledge, even though no one knows who Stouffer was. Anyway, Stouffer's theory was that, no matter how well off you are, if you reasonably perceive that your society is depriving you, you become angry/sad/revolutionary. This is why the French revolted in the late 18th century, even though, compared to the rest of Europe, the French bourgeoises and sans culottes were pretty well off. In other words, yes, China is growing in wealth and opportunities, but I have to imagine it would give a Chinese guy the blues to see a guy he went to school with making millions of dollars a year and living on the Peak. Now that could be true of anyone. Everyone is jealous of the rich friend. But remember, this is a completely new phenomenon in China.
But anyway, who knows why these guys play better than Americans, maybe America has just abandoned this type of music in pursuit of something better. And if by better, we get rap, then I was right in the title, China is awesome, and it's more of America than America is.