20 days. 11 cities. From Tier-1 megacities to small villages.
No potholes.
No beggars.
110+ EV companies.
China didn’t just surprise me — it reset my baseline.
Over the last three weeks, I traveled across Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Xi’an, Zhengzhou, Luoyang (Longmen Grottoes), Shaolin (Dengfeng), Zhuhai, and Macau — and just as importantly, through Tier-1, Tier-2, Tier-3, Tier-4 cities and villages in between.
This wasn’t a curated tour of showcase districts.
It was a real cross-section of modern China.
The Scale Becomes Real When You Live Inside It
Some context:
- Population: ~1.4 billion
- GDP: ~$18 trillion
On paper, these numbers feel abstract.
On the ground, they’re overwhelming — in the best way.
Cities here are larger than many countries. Infrastructure isn’t built to impress tourists; it’s built to move tens of millions of people every single day, quietly and efficiently.
The People — and How Google Translate Became My Superpower
Despite the language barrier, kindness was constant.
Google Translate (offline mode — absolute lifesaver) became my bridge in taxis, bullet trains, tea shops, malls, street stalls, and villages. Conversations that technically shouldn’t have been possible happened anyway. Smiles filled the gaps where words failed.
Technology, used simply, erased distance.
One Sentence That Changed Every Taxi Ride
In over 100 DiDi rides, I repeated the same small ritual.
I’d type one sentence into Google Translate, turn the phone toward the driver, and wait:
请播放一些中国流行音乐
(Please play some Chinese pop music)
Almost every time, the response was instant.
A smile.
Relaxed shoulders.
Music on.
Sometimes the driver glanced back proudly. Sometimes they nodded. Sometimes they laughed. In that moment, I stopped being a foreign passenger and became someone genuinely curious about their world.
One song kept resurfacing across cities, highways, and late-night rides — eventually becoming my unofficial soundtrack of China. I even caught myself playing it on my own later.
It’s funny how one sentence and a shared song can do what no guidebook ever could — make a place feel human and welcoming.
Infrastructure That Breaks Intuition
I moved between cities larger than most countries:
- Shanghai: ~25M people | ~$750B GDP
- Beijing: ~22M | ~$700B GDP
- Shenzhen: ~17M | ~$500B GDP
- Chongqing: ~32M | ~$450B GDP
- Zhengzhou: ~12M | ~$200B GDP
Bullet trains feel like commuter metros connecting megacities the size of nations. Airports run like well-written software. Public mobility is overwhelmingly electric — EVs, buses, scooters — making cities quieter and cleaner.
And here’s a detail that sounds trivial until it hits you:
In 20 days across cities, towns, and villages, I didn’t see a single pothole.
Not one.
This wasn’t just Tier-1 China.
This was everywhere.
Electric Scooters: The Quiet Revolution
Electric scooters are everywhere — commuters, delivery riders, families, students.
Silent. Cheap. Efficient.
Multiply millions of scooters across hundreds of cities and villages and the impact becomes obvious:
- Less noise
- Cleaner air
- Calmer streets
You hear conversations instead of engines.
This isn’t framed as a climate initiative.
It’s a design choice embedded into daily life — and at scale, it works.
Safety Is Engineered, Not Wished For
Cameras are everywhere. The result is calm, predictable cities.
I walked late at night in Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Chongqing — never once felt unsafe.
Another thing I genuinely did not see: homeless people or beggars.
Whatever one’s politics, that reality forces uncomfortable questions about systems, incentives, and long-term governance.
Shanghai Casually Bends Physics
Shanghai alone — at ~$750B GDP — would rank among the world’s top economies if it were a country.
Pudong feels like a sci-fi render escaped into reality. At times it honestly felt like Shanghai has more skyscrapers than the rest of the world combined. Statistically debatable. Experientially undeniable.
And then comes the flex you’re not prepared for.
The Shanghai Maglev
The Shanghai Maglev covers 35 km in about 7 minutes.
Seven. Minutes.
You sit down, blink, and the speedometer quietly climbs:
300… 350… 430 km/h.
No drama. No spectacle.
What’s wild isn’t the speed — it’s how ordinary it feels to locals. In most countries this would be a national monument. In Shanghai, it’s just how you get home from the airport.
Ancient China and Future China Coexist
- Xi’an (~13M people): Once the capital of empires
- Luoyang & Longmen: Civilization carved into stone
- Shaolin (Dengfeng): Discipline centuries before productivity frameworks
History isn’t preserved here.
It’s integrated.
The EV Revolution That Broke My Mental Model
China doesn’t have a few EV companies.
It has 110+.
From BYD to Huawei-powered auto platforms, Xiaomi Auto, NIO, Li Auto, AITO, Zeekr, and dozens more — every form factor, price point, and use case exists.
What shocked me wasn’t quantity.
It was quality.
Interiors. Software. UI. Ride comfort. Fit and finish. Some of these vehicles are better than anything I’ve experienced anywhere in the world.
And then comes the punchline:
They cost roughly 40–50% of comparable Western or Japanese cars.
Not one segment.
Every segment.
What Tesla pioneered, China industrialized.
What others call innovation cycles, China treats as manufacturing cadence.
AI, Robots, and Drones — Quietly Everywhere
AI here isn’t experimental; it’s muscle memory.
Across cities, AI runs:
- Payments
- Logistics
- Retail
- Transport
- Surveillance
- Factories
No demos. No hype. Just systems working.
Then you notice the robots.
Warehouse robots moving in perfect choreography. Cleaning robots operating nonstop in airports the size of cities. Service robots in malls and hotels.
And robotic dogs.
Real ones.
One followed me briefly. I don’t know if it liked me or was analyzing my gait, but I behaved extremely well after that.
Look up and the future is already airborne.
Delivery drones flying real routes, carrying real packages. Not pilots. Not fenced demos. While many countries debate regulation, this ecosystem already shipped.
China isn’t chasing innovation moments.
It’s building innovation infrastructure.
Shenzhen: Where Ideas Don’t Die in Meetings
Shenzhen feels like the physical internet for hardware.
Electronics markets stacked floor after floor — chips, sensors, motors, screens, batteries, connectors. Designers, tooling shops, assemblers, factories, logistics partners — all within walking distance.
Concept → component → prototype → tooling → mass production → shipping.
Change the design in the morning.
Update the mold by afternoon.
Ship next week.
Ideas don’t die here.
They ship.
The iPhone Case Mall Moment
I walked into what I thought was a regular mall.
Five minutes later, it hit me: every single store sold only iPhone cases. Thousands of styles. Nothing else.
An entire mall dedicated to protecting one product made elsewhere.
That’s when it clicked:
In China, even accessories have economies of scale.
Commerce at Absurd Scale
Malls with thousands of stores. Entire vertical ecosystems stacked floor after floor.
It messes with your head when you realize almost everything you want on Earth exists here at 1/5th or 1/10th the price.
Which leads to an uncomfortable question:
Is this the same factory, the same manufacturer, the same supply chain — just priced differently elsewhere?
Street vendors casually hawking Rolex, Prada, and LV at prices so low they feel satirical. Real? Fake? Almost irrelevant.
The real insight is manufacturing density, speed, and scale.
The ground truth of production lives here.
Then there are the ghost cities — entire urban systems built ahead of demand. Empty today. Inevitable tomorrow.
Long-term thinking poured into concrete.
Final Thoughts: A Civilizational Reset
This trip wasn’t political for me.
It was architectural, operational, and civilizational.
I captured over 100 videos because words alone felt insufficient. These 20 days forced me to recalibrate assumptions about growth, affordability, governance, and what “developed” actually means.
Whether you admire it, question it, or disagree with it — this scale of execution deserves attention.
Once you’ve seen it,
you can’t unsee it.