Observations in China
On lifestyle and tech diffusion
I spent three weeks in February and March traveling China with a friend. Except for three days at the Huangshan scenic area, we spent our time in some of the country’s big cities: Shanghai (25 million people), Chongqing (22 million), Chengdu (10 million), Xi’an (13 million) and Beijing (22 million). I’ve been following China with an economic and political lens for quite a while now, so it was great to add some real-life experience.
This is not an exhaustive list of the noteworthy things to expect in China. Instead, they are ranked by some function of novelty and interestingness (to me). Here are some other writings that align with my experience and which I highly recommend and won’t repeat:
Notes on China by Dwarkesh Patel
Walking Beijing by Chris Arnade
I’ve split my thoughts into three topics, “Lifestyle”, “Tech Diffusion” and “Government”.
Lifestyle
From a European perspective, consumption habits seem very American, rather than European: high focus on convenience, brand identity etc. Large shopping streets are filled to the brim with luxury stores. Prada, Gucci, YSL, Hermes. Brands appear to be an important signal in Chinese fashion, people in the streets exclusively wear explicitly branded clothing. Foreign brands dominate, but not fully; there are brands that on first glance look like Nike copies (Li-Ning, Anta, Erke) but have flagship stores in great locations, a similar price level, and are worn with pride.
Consumerism and commercialization are omnipresent. Areas branded as “ancient streets” are ancient-style theme parks with commercial chains and mass produced goods. Visit, for example, the City God Temple of Shanghai – originally a temple from the 1400s – and you’ll find it has been absorbed by imitation buildings housing kitsch stores. Feels more like a mall than anything else.
The Chinese dream is to live in an apartment. Apartments are all there is. From the window of a plane, or the High Speed Rail, what you see are endless rows of huge apartment projects. Living in a massive project is not a sign of lower class the way it is in the West. My hypothesis is that an apartment is a symbol of urbanism, a Chinese ideal as it transitions from a rural society. Their externals are dreary and the internals are not necessarily luxurious, but in the parking garage you will find Porsches and Teslas (next to a wide range of Chinese EVs whose price I have a hard time guessing).
Tech diffusion
We got a sense that the diffusion of digital technology into daily life is far along. The West’s worries about the gig economy, social media addiction and technology oligopoly seem silly in comparison.
Online Payments as a Public Utility
We are used to banks fulfilling two societal purposes. The first is financial, aggregating short-term deposits to make long-term loans. The second is providing payment services: ATMs, issuing debit and credit cards, internet-banking.
Our banks cannot skip out on providing these services because it is a requirement to attract customers’ deposits. Especially under ZIRP1, the service side of commercial banks became their bread-and-butter to attract customers and win market-share. It probably helped convenience-focused e-banks, like Revolut, get off the ground.
In China, however, as is by now well-known, 99% of transactions happen through the WeChat (Weixin) or Alipay apps. Download the app, deposit or receive money, pay to merchants, friends, whatever. This takes some of the responsibilities of banks and transfers them to tech companies. In marketshare, their Western equivalents are Mastercard / Visa, but unlike these financial infrastructure providers, Alipay and WeChat also hold their customers deposits. Their omnipresence in enabling c2c and c2b transactions makes them almost like public utility companies. Low transaction friction is a huge economic advantage and lowers barriers of entry for the large rural population. Considering that both companies have active government involvement, in spirit they seem to me like a variant of the digital euro.
Mobile-first ordering
Meituan is China’s Uber Eats, if Uber Eats had won the entire market. Food delivery exists in all major cities worldwide, so seeing a similar thing in China was not surprising, even if the sheer number of Meituan couriers we saw was staggering. Convenience over the backs of gig workers, enabled by wage disparity, sure. But then you walk into the restaurant, and you find that you are expected to order through a QR-code sticker on the table, which takes you to… Meituan. Can you imagine the insane positioning as a middleman to in-person restaurant ordering? Weirder still, Meituan was often cheaper than the physical menu, offering personalized promotions and combo deals. I’m not sure how that adds up. My working hypothesis is that Meituan fulfills the role of a Yelp or Tripadvisor, and offering good deals is a way of getting customers in the door.
To stress the proliferation of food delivery: when taking a high speed train, there is a QR code that lets you order food for drop-off at the next station. The train attendants will then bring you your order. KFC seemed to be the most popular choice here.
Ordering through an app is taken a step further by Luckin Coffee, a coffee chain that has experienced meteoric rise. Luckin Coffee is everywhere, and when we went in for our first coffee, three things stood out. 1) We had to pay the barista through her personal Alipay account, 2) the coffee was expensive, 3) although we were first in the physical queue, we weren’t first in the virtual queue, as about 15 people came in for their mobile-pickup. We later learned that you need to order through the Luckin mini-app (an app living within the Alipay and WeChat apps). When we, two dumb laowai, ordered in-person, the barista bridged the gap and personally ordered for us. Coffee in the mini-app is typically about half the price through an endless barrage of promotions and discounts. The mini-app constantly pushes promotions, picking up on our daily habits and using our location to see when we were about to pass by a Luckin location.
Luckin has been taking market share from Starbucks. They are reportedly planning a 2025 US expansion. I am very curious whether mobile-first stores like this can work in the US and Europe.
Screen time
The embrace of digital tech is not only for convenience. We were constantly impressed by the amount of time people spent on their mobile phones. At multiple occasions we were the only people in a bar just talking, while the 8-10 people around us would all be on their phones, occasionally half-heartedly showing a meme. It's a familiar sight (both domestically and abroad) in a Chinese family restaurant to see one of the tables occupied with toys and coloring books for the kids. In China, the objects on the tables went untouched as the kid, sometimes as young as 2 or 3, was glued to a phone.
Not much is different for the older generations. The travellers around us would spend an entire four-hour train ride scrolling, often on speaker. The flipside of this is that everyone is very fluent with their phone, quickly opening translation apps, scanning QR codes, etc. The phone is an essential tool of modern China, and age is no excuse. I got in the habit of asking people we got along with if they would show us their screen time, and it was usually above 8 hours a day. No wonder there are shared powerbank docks every 10 meters.
But China is not immune to the adverse effects of these phone habits. The group we interacted with most (early twenties, English speaking) were quick to mention mental health issues, such as anxiety or loneliness. The cut-throat academic culture leaves many people alienated, and there’s not much to do when living at home but to scroll. A familiar story, not exclusive to China.
Government
It is hard to get a representative sample of peoples’ views. First, we’re young and only speak English, so we over-select on young English-speaking people.
Still, we met two varieties, roughly:
People that dislike the limits in personal liberties and are pretty frank about revisionist history, but who seem content with the direction of the economy. They point to injustices, such as women in the judicial system or the lack of public services for rural migrants, but they seem to have a genuine hope that the government will address them.
People that are basically ignorant of politics, with no strong opinions about the government. It is not that surprising when you think about it. Politics in a liberal democracy is basically a collective hobby, like watching football or an evening show. If you remove the soap-aspect of politics, what share of people would diligently seek out information and form opinions about government affairs?
We saw very little public propaganda unless we actively looked for it. (Unsurprisingly, the “Anti-Japanese War Memorial Hall” paints a pretty one-sided picture about the roles of the CCP and the Kuomintang). In the streets, we saw no Xi Jinping posters and just a few remnants of Mao’s cult of personality (a statue, a quote). The most nationalistic location in Shanghai is the Site of the First National Congress of the CCP, a small museum located in a commercial area district, ironically developed by a Hong Kong business tycoon & co. But when attending a regular museum, such as the Shanghai museum or the Three Gorges museum in Chongqing, it seemed to present an objective stance on potentially touchy subjects. An exhibition of Marco Polo did not hide China’s pluralistic religious landscape during the Yuan dynasty. The Exhibition of the Ethnic Minorities of China in the Shanghai Museum was also frank about the country’s diversity2. Maybe one notable fact about this exhibition was that items were sorted by type, not origin. Knives from different ethnicities in one display case, their tapestries in another. A conscious focus on similarities over differences, or am I grasping at straws?
But the typical Chinese day is mostly spent online, so that is possibly the arena where propaganda is rampant. For what it's worth, my Rednote feed showed more Chinese commentary on American politics than internal affairs. At some point, a 40-something guy next to me on the train was watching a video on JD Vance. I held out an asking thumb, but he shook his head dismissively and I got nothing.
Generally, “Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away”, as the saying goes. There is much wealth to be gathered, things to do, a personal life to establish, and the CCP is far away. We (again, as two ignorant tourists) got no sense of a “police state”. Yes, there are cameras everywhere and (mostly performative) bag checks at every metro stop, but the people seem to shrug these off and do not live in fear. A man in Chongqing pressed us to climb a fence that said, “Do Not Climb”, for a better picture. In Chengdu, we visited a techno rave on the 21st floor of an abandoned apartment building, complete with a bondage performance. In the same city, police interrupted a rowdy family gathering we were serendipitously invited to. The drunken singing and guitar playing had caused a noise complaint. We were spooked, but our hosts hushed our worries away and continued in full spirit. The police knocked two more times. These are anecdotal data points that you do not expect in a society where you’re constantly worried about some “social credit score”.
Having read a bit on the hectic decades before the reform era, I was hoping to get the perspective of the second generation’s indirect experience. “Yesterday’s history, tomorrow’s a mystery, today is a gift” was one poetic but cryptic response we received. A girl in her early twenties said that she was not used to talking about these difficult topics, and her (grand)parents have only ever vaguely referenced it. She associates the painful recent history with awkward conversations. This was a unique response, because the default was blank faces and a sudden lack of eagerness to continue the conversation. Interpret that as you will.
Bonus: miscellaneous observations
These massive online retail apps (Didi, Trip.com, Meituan) are deeply embedded in society. Since the State exerts a significant amount of control, they could be used for targeted consumption stimulus. Just deploy a bunch of promotion codes.
Is the Great Chinese Firewall only for censorship, or actually mainly for economic protectionism? For a large part, China operates on a parallel digital ecosystem. The exceptions are Apple and Microsoft, both of which are tech companies from a different generation than Google or Meta. Is it a coincidence that the banned companies are all from a time when China had the internal capacity to build alternatives?
Electric transport: so, so, so many EV brands. Brands you’ve never heard of. A brand you thought made simple electronics suddenly takes jabs at Ferrari. In design, most of them are blatant Tesla rip-offs, a mere 6 years after the company opened its Shanghai Gigafactory . Why hasn’t Elon Musk complained about this IP infringement? Perhaps, after all, his brazen personality can be controlled when he really wants to.
Traffic lights in China are another example of technological leapfrogging. Navigation apps display a countdown to when traffic lights are about to switch, allowing your Didi (Chinese Uber) driver to watch a few Douyins3 (TikToks) while waiting for a red light.
Caution and instructional signs everywhere, for everything. If this was in the US, I’d point to the people’s inclination to litigation. In China, I have no clue. Cautious people? A paternalistic State?
Uniqlo has recently popped up in the West as a stylish, Japanese alternative to H&M and Zara. The marketing in Europe is almost exclusively with Asian models. To our surprise, the Uniqlo in Shanghai explicitly markets itself as a Western brand. Slogans like “Dress like Copenhagen”, “This is New York”, and “Oxford Preppy everyday” plastered throughout the store.
Overall, I had an incredible time in China and was treated kindly at every turn. A group of rough looking construction workers would stare at us at a restaurant, but once we gave them a hesitant “Ni hao”, they melted into big smiles and started enthusiastically talking to our uncomprehending faces. I’m hoping to be back soon to see a different part of the country!
Zero Interest Rate Policy.
“Diversity” might not be the right word. The Chinese nationality is very big-tent. A notable example is that everyone we asked considered Genghis Khan, the 13th Century Mongolian Emperor, to be Chinese. Paradoxical because he climbed the Great Wall, which was meant to keep his people out, and conquered China. But his descendants ruled China for 100 years under the Yuan Dynasty, and the rule seems to be: if a people ruled China, they are Chinese. The converse does not hold.
The youth considers Douyin very boomer-coded. They use Xiaohongshu (RedNote).