What China taught me about the future, the past, and my own blind spots
And why you actually need to visit if you care about expanding your mind. Edition 21
If you’ve been following my recent Instagram reels, you’ve seen the highlights: hyper-modern skylines, bullet trains gliding silently at 300 km/h, and street food stalls serving recipes older than most Western nations. But short clips only capture a fraction of the story. Moving past the camera lens, my time in China completely reshaped the questions I ask before forming an opinion.
Here is the deeper story behind the footage.
What fascinated me: the frictionless future
The sheer pace of daily life in China’s mega-cities is mesmerising. What fascinated me most was how effortlessly technology is woven into the mundane.
Cash is virtually non-existent, and plastic credit cards feel like ancient relics.
Everything - from buying a 50-cent steamed bun from a street vendor to booking a cross-country train - happens seamlessly through a smartphone.
Yet, right beside a neon-lit, cyberpunk boulevard, you’ll find a centuries-old courtyard temple with incense drifting through the air. It is a place where the year 2026 and 1000 AD exist in harmony, proving that rapid modernisation doesn’t have to mean erasing history. Nor does high-tech living have to strip away human warmth.
In a bustling café in Shenzhen, I accidentally knocked over a fresh cup of coffee the waitress had just brought to my table. Entirely my fault, I walked up to the counter to pay for a second one. She stopped me resolutely, waving her hand with a warm smile, and made me a fresh cup free of charge.
These quiet acts of kindness followed me everywhere.
In Shanghai, the clerk who sold me a local SIM card wrote down his personal WeChat handle, telling me to message him if anything went wrong or if I needed help returning it in another city.
In Kunming, when my Alipay app glitched at a kiosk and no cash could be accepted, the shopkeeper simply handed me a bottle of water with a dismissive wave, refusing to let me walk away thirsty.
Behind the dizzying infrastructure and high-tech headlines, it was these quiet, daily gestures of generosity that truly defined my experience.
What amazed me: scale, speed, and human energy
You can read about China’s infrastructure, but experiencing it firsthand is staggering.
The Cities: Places like Shanghai and Shenzhen don’t just feel big; they feel like living, breathing organisms of light, engineering, and architecture.
The Mobility: The transit systems make travel elsewhere feel like it’s stuck in slow motion.
The Public Life: Parks come alive at dusk with locals practicing group dances, playing chess, or painting calligraphy on the pavement with water brushes.
The sheer scale of development paired with the everyday vibrancy of the local community is undeniably breathtaking.
What puzzled me: the paradoxes
China is a masterclass in contradiction, and navigating it as an outsider is genuinely puzzling at times. You step into a completely different digital ecosystem where familiar Western apps are replaced by all-in-one super-apps that control every aspect of living.
Then there is the cultural dynamic: a society that feels intensely communal in public spaces, yet deeply private in personal interactions.
Trying to reconcile the rigid narratives I had consumed back home with the warm, helpful, and curious people I encountered daily created a constant state of eye-opening cognitive dissonance.
Beyond black-and-white: escaping Western dualism
The narrative surrounding China in the West often defaults to a rigid binary: freedom vs. oppression, good vs. bad. We are told to view the country almost entirely through a single lens, usually dominated by its government’s authoritarian structure and human rights record.
When you travel with an open mind, you don’t ignore those heavy realities - if you were Uyghur, Tibetan, or a political dissident, your lived experience of China would be vastly different and undeniably painful. But travel forces you to confront a deeper truth: the world is rarely dualistic.
It is almost always both/and, never either/or.
To focus exclusively on a nation’s dark chapters while blinding oneself to its monumental achievements - lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, engineering world-class infrastructure, and fostering a dynamic middle class - is to hold a fundamentally incomplete view.
Every “good” country harbours quiet injustices, and every “bad” country is home to human beauty, progress, and everyday joy.
Living in a constant state of geopolitical tribalism is exhausting. Real perspective means holding space for complexity: recognising real concerns while celebrating genuine human progress.
The cost of the future
There is another side to China’s relentless push toward the future. The same obsession with technological dominance, hyper-efficiency, and rapid economic output that amazes visitors creates immense pressure on the people building it.
During my journey, the most striking conversations weren’t about grand national ambitions - they were about the human cost of the grind.
In Guangzhou, a 23-year-old architecture graduate told me his main goal was making money to support his parents. When I challenged him to think beyond filial duty, he sighed.
“I’ve spent my life fulfilling other people’s expectations,” he told me. “I don’t even want to be an architect. If I had no obligations, I’d become a Buddhist monk. I just want to slow down, pause, and listen to myself.
The Reality of the “996” Culture: Many young adults (ages 20–27) face the infamous 996 work culture - working from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM, six days a week - in pursuit of corporate success.
The Desire for “Quiet Life”: Rather than dreaming of climbing the ladder at a tech giant in Shenzhen or Beijing, a growing number of young people talk about tang ping (”lying flat”) or bai lan (”letting it rot”).
Seeking Peace over Prestige: Their ultimate dream isn’t a promotion; it’s escaping to a quiet village or small town, growing their own food, running a modest café, and reclaiming their peace of mind.
China’s race toward tomorrow has created a generation that is deeply tired. In a culture that has sprinted for many years without stopping, the most radical act for a 25-year-old today isn’t inventing the next app - it’s choosing to slow down.
China isn’t a monolith, a movie villain, or a flawless utopia. It is a vast, hyper-complex realm where the future is being built at breakneck speed, while the humans living inside it search for the same things we all do: connection, dignity, and a moment to breathe.
Why you need to go (to change your mind)
Let’s be honest: our days are filled with short soundbites, curated feeds, and second-hand opinions. It’s easy to form rigid ideas about a country when you’ve only ever viewed it through a screen.
Travel at its best isn’t about confirmation; it’s about challenging your own assumptions.
On a train ride to Chengdu, a retired math teacher named Lin noticed me struggling to translate a snack wrapper. Using a voice-translation app on his phone, we ended up sharing an hour-long conversation about his grandkids, British rain, and Chinese tea. Without a word of shared language, a small screen bridged a gap that news headlines make feel impossible.
If you truly want to expand your perspective, China is an essential destination. It forces you to unlearn simple narratives, sit with complexity, and witness a completely different model of modern human development. You don’t have to agree with or understand everything you see, but you will leave transformed.
This resonates. One of the things I value most about traveling in China is that it keeps resisting easy conclusions while expanding my sense of what's possible.
Really enjoyed reading this and truly hoping to visit myself some day