It went way too fast. I met great people, had some amazing adventures, and also had my mind blown on more than one occasion. Full disclaimer, my time was spent in Shanghai and it’s a little bit of a bubble world – so the rest of China may be completely different. Shanghai was wonderful. Filled with amazing people, book stores, beautiful art and architecture, restaurants, things to do, parks, and so much more. I love Shanghai.
First of all – if you haven’t been to China or like me haven’t been to China in twenty years – then you haven’t been to China and I can 100% tell you that your ideas about China are completely wrong. I’m not saying in a good or bad way or any judgment at all, I’m saying that it’s likely that everything you think you’ve learned about China or thought you knew about China is probably flawed. You may have some great insight that I was missing, but here’s the reality I see now (which is probably also flawed – to be fair.)
- Chinese people just want to live and have a way to pay for that living. Just like you and me. They want to hang out with friends, fall in love, have fulfilling work, get the latest gadgets, look good on their social media, and enjoy nice food. Same same but different. But not really that different at all.
- China is clean and everything works like it is supposed to. The trains were on time. No one was blaring their car horn.
- There is no theft in China. Seriously. None.
- You don’t notice the cameras and the security is worth it. There is a reason there is no theft.
- Things are well made and working.
- Things work better than you would expect if you lived in the USA
The real takeaway I had in China though was that if you get left behind the digital divide, you are fucked. The data eSIM card I bought before I left Japan, failed to work for me when I arrived. WeChat didn’t function for me. Thankfully I finally figured out how to get the eSIM to work and then made AliPay work – because if you don’t have WeChat or AliPay – you can’t do shit in China. You can’t pay for almost anything with cash or a credit card. You can’t use vending machines to get water or drinks. You can’t rent a bicycle, ride the metro, take a bus, or call a cab or Didi. You can’t buy food from restaurants or small vendors. Then add in all the other stuff – no phone (no payphone) no internet no email no translate apps no booking apps no way to see your reservations no way to order stuff. One friend told me that she does none of her shopping offline. None. She uses the apps to order food and groceries and clothing and household stuff. It’s delivered in 15 to 30 minutes. If you don’t have a phone or your battery goes dead or you don’t have access to the apps – you are screwed in so many ways. That’s what I mean by the digital divide. The divide between those who have access to everything and those who have access to nothing. The closest I’ve come to anything like that before was when I was hitchhiking through an urban wasteland and no one would pick me up for days. No people to turn to for help, no stores, nothing. This was much less extreme than that scenario – but extreme in its own way. It made clear that we are giving so much power to the tech overlords and we really need to think about it in a logical way, but actually it’s already too late. For China it’s too late and probably for everyone else too – it’s coming.
The reality of China and Chinese People – so incredibly different than I expected – at least in Shanghai.
Chinese people are smart and funny and fashionable. They have good taste and a super friendly vibe. Not provincial, not all wearing Mao coats, not sour-faced like soviets. Shanghai is a better functioning city than any that I have been in. It’s clean, there are no homeless that I’ve seen, there are no beggars. The downside is the consumer capitalist vibe is just ever present. Luxury brands or knock offs of luxury brands (which I sort of hate less than the actual brands) are everywhere. Also, it feels like every American or international brand is there – which is just so wierd to me. I’m not sure how that works in Chinese socialism. I guess I need to dig into that. I don’t understand it at all. (I asked a friend and she told me this: Shanghai and Beijing are a way to extract capital from other countries – almost experimental in terms of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
As to the cameras – I’m not bothered by them at all. Much to my surprise, I think having everything watched and recorded is a small price to pay for safety, cleanliness, and an orderly society. I don’t need to have drug culture, crime culture, scammer culture, or rape culture in any place that I live.
Chinese people seem more free than Japanese poeple who are sort of trapped in their own social pressure prison. I’m not sure what it would be like to be in Shanghai or the rest of China longer but in talking with some foreigners who have been in China for longer periods – they loved it. I was told “This is how the world should be everywhere.” Repeatedly, by people who have been there for lengths ranging from two months to years I can’t really disagree with that. I did meet people who didn’t like it – foreigners or people who felt that they were missing out on all the freedom other countries enjoy or Chinese who were unhappy knowing that foreigners in other countries were getting paid more than them for doing the same work.
The Story of My Mis-Impression.
Honestly, I wasn’t aware that I had stereotypes or expectations about China and Chinese people until I got to Shanghai. It’s been an interesting experience to have to face those and to explore where they came from and why they exist. If I’m completely honest, I’m a little bit ashamed of it – but that’s never stopped me from facing myself head on and it won’t stop me this time. So let’s dive in to what I discovered existed in myself – in my views – in my stereotypes. While I hesitate to classify any of this as racist because I’m not, it sort of rhymes with that though I’d mostly describe myself as color blind but having been conditioned to think a certain way by my country’s propaganda machines.
So first – let’s look at my experience with China to explore where these incorrect and borderline racist views came from.
My Previous Experience with China, Chinese Culture, Chinese People in General from childhood through 2025.
I’m a Gen X American, white, male, straight, in my early fifties. I was raised in California and Oregon in the 1970s and 1980s. I was in the US Marine Corps from 1990-1994. I lived in the Pacific Northwest cities of Bellingham, Seattle, and Portland in most of the rest of the 1990s. In 2001, I came to China for a month – then Southeast Asia for two months, then back to the USA and then I moved to Hawaii. Last year, I moved to Otaru, Japan when I bought my house there. All of those experiences have something to do with my perception of China and Chinese people.
The communities I grew up in didn’t have a lot of diversity. California was pretty progressive but we lived in communities that were mostly white with some Latino and African American folks. Asian people were pretty rare in my childhood. I remember hearing about Yoko Ono and Connie Chung was a prominent TV newscaster. I don’t think I had an Asian friend until 7th grade when I went to a University of Oregon summer program and became friends with Robert Shu, a Chinese American boy who introduced me to Elfquest and Riverworld. We became close friends. Other than that – my experience of China was only “Eat all the food on your plate, there are children starving in China” and my grandmother taking us to Chinese restaurants where we ate Sweet and Sour Pork. In the high school I graduated from there were a lot of Laotian kids, but there wasn’t a lot of mixing with the white, black, latino kids. They were recent immigrants, refugees sometimes, and the adults often spoke of them as ‘boat people’. The only grade school/high school history of the Chinese I recieved was that they came to America to build the railroads and some of them tried gold mining but mostly they either went back to China or started restaurants. The old west history of China. And Bruce Lee.
I don’t remember meeting a single Chinese or Asian person serving alongside me during my time in the Marines which is really bizarre. White, black, latino – and one Eskimo kid. Seattle, Vancouver, Portland – they all have significant Chinese communities and Chinatowns. In the 1990s – these were usually low rent districts. Drugs, homeless, and the low priced Chinese markets where a bag of groceries cost $20 instead of $60. I started learning Tai Chi at one point and was taking some Asian history courses in University. Lucy Liu was suddenly a very hot actress in Hollywood and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon exploded on the scene. Jackie Chan movies started really getting attention.
I worked as a community organizer in Seattle and Portland and helped organize low income communities for better conditions. The Chinese communities weren’t interested for the most part. I became one of the homeless living in my VW van for a year to write a book about it. At the end, my brother said something like “You should go to China and see what poverty is really like”. So I did.
In 2001, China was a totally different place. I came to teach English but didn’t take the job – just the visa. In a month, I went to quite a few major cities and a couple of small towns and villages. At the time the Chinese were annexing Tibet and also large parts of Beijing were being bulldozed (and residents displaced) for the Olympics. It wasn’t pretty. Still, China was beautiful. Pollution was terrible – garbage everywhere, bad air, dirty water, open trench toilets and the smells that come with that. The people though were amazing and kind. I drank moonshine on steam locomotives with Chinese farmers, I smoked Honghe cigarettes with low paid workers who were damming up the Yangtze river, I became a rockstar for two nights in Kunming when the band the owner had booked didn’t show up. (“The Chinese kids don’t see American musicians or know the scene so we’ll just put you on the marquis and you can play guitar and sing.”) I should have kept that gig but I had wanderlust and wanted to go to Laos. To be honest, the conditions I saw in China for most people weren’t very different than the conditions I saw in Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia. Maybe that’s where the idea of Chinese being poor came from. All that indoctrination. All the poverty in 2001 China. There was a lot. There probably still is, but it’s not like it was. Modern China has raised more people out of poverty than any other nation in the history of the world. I didn’t know that then, but I learned it eventually.
Then I moved to Hawaii. Chinatown again. The cheap place to buy fruit and veg. The Chinese in Hawaii are mixed pot. There are those from the Mainland, from Taiwan, from Canton ese speaking regions, from Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysian Chinese, and the Hawaiian local Chinese who often don’t even identify as Chinese but just as local – a mixture of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Protuguese, and Hawaiian. I’m not sure why Portuguese get thrown in that pot instead of the haole pot with the rest of the European descent folks, but that’s the way it is. Chinese chinese in Hawaii are sometimes called pake – cheap. They are known for pinching pennies and driving hard bargains. God forbid you have a pake landlord – I’ve had a few. Some were good, some were not, but mostly they were just like every other landlord – in it for the money, not for the friendship or relationship. Still the Chinese landlords get the bad rap and honestly, they do often cut corners on repairs or construction or wherever they can. Solid business, profit over people stuff. I’m not sure if that changes if you are Chinese – maybe you can argue better – or maybe it’s a matter of who fights harder – but I suspect if you are fighting in Chinese you get a better bargain or faster repair, I would expect that. I’ve had Chinese landlords in other places, it felt the same. Landlords are the real problem – especially when they scale. Not a specific ethnicity but landlordism in general.
I dated a few girls of Chinese descent while I was in University but never had a relationship of any duration – just a few dates here and there. I had classmates at the University of Hawaii who were Taiwan Chinese or Local Hawaiian Chinese. I had friends that were local Chinese in Hawaii, but they weren’t immersed in Chinese culture.
At this point, I really thought I understood the world and how it functions. During my time living in Turkey and Morocco, during all my travels. China was rising and expanding – the belt and road initiative, the growth of Chinese tech, the explosion in Chinese third world development, the changes to the Chinese Communist Party, the lifetime term of the President, the gradual evolution of Chinese Communisim into Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. I saw the Chinese tourists in Hawaii. They were wealthy, the elites, those who had all the money, the new Chinese Capitalist Class buying up condos in Kaka’ako. They were profundly different than the Chinese that lived in Hawaii who had largely emigrated from 3rd world China. I guess that I probably thought there were tiers in Chinese society – but only two. This is what I put together now in my consciousness – I assumed two tiers. Poor, like the farmers I drank Chinese whiskey with on steam locomotives in 2001 or the people evicted from their homes in Beijing in 2001. Then there were the Jack Ma types. The ultra rich. For some reason I simply didn’t concieve of a massive Chinese middle class. I should have. Normal people just like you, like everyone trying to just live and make a life.
It wasn’t until I moved to Otaru that I started getting this reality imprinted. In Otaru there are waves of tourism – Japanese from Honshu, Koreans, Australians, and Chinese. The Chinese were a surprise for the sheer number of them and the expense they didn’t seem to mind. Luxury cars, luxury resorts, designer clothing – maybe designer, but maybe not – and so much fashion. So much style. Most of them seemed to come from Shanghai – eventually I figured out that the flights are really cheap – which is why I came. I’m a budget traveler though I think I don’t enjoy it as much as I used to. The Chinese way of travel seems to be way over the top – but it looks like fun. Luxury always looks like fun.
I took a trip to Vietnam in November of last year. I guess that’s sort of how I thought China would be – but guess what? China has been offshoring their manufacturing and labor to Vietnam and Bangladesh while China became an upwardly mobile middle class oriented society. I did a transit through Pudong Airport on that trip and was annoyed with how awful the experience was because of how similar it was to US airport security culture.
Getting on Chinese social media apps and watching the Chinese wave of tourism in Otaru really started to blow my mind.
I had known that Chinese tech and tech society was passing up the US and Europe but for some reason I had still pictured it as Chinese farmers and child labor and poorly made crap with lead in it. I mean that’s all propaganda I was fed in the US and I wasn’t even aware of how sticky it was. I was wrong. I was so wrong. My perceptions and ideas were wrong. I was propagandized – 100%. I didn’t even know it and I’m a person who was looking out for it.
Is China Already Living in the Future?
I’d say yes. I’ve also been saying for a long time that if you want to learn a language, it should probably be Chinese. I guess I should probably get to it.
Ah – one more thing. Fun fact: American’s going to China can now get a 10-day Transit Visa as long as they are going to a third country from the one they are arriving from. I didn’t have that when I went to the airport so I had to book a flight to Hong Kong which is a part of China but also not a part of China depending on who you speak with. I wasn’t sure what to expect of Hong Kong. I guess I thought it would be ultra-modern, clean, and like stepping into the future and just like my impression of Shanghai being a third world city was wrong, so was my impression of Hong Kong. Don’t get me wrong. It was nice but it wasn’t as nice as Shanghai and didn’t function as well. I saw what were almost certainly homeless and 100% I saw beggars. The capitalism there is working like capitalism does – making some very rich and making most have to work all the time to survive and making others so poor that they have no options. I found Hong Kong to be crowded, not as clean as Shanghai, and a bit depressing. I enjoyed my time there, but I was happy to go back to Shanghai.