The Age of Not Obvious: Going back to China in September 2023

Haven’t seen a foreigner in so long!

好久没看到老外了!

Hǎojiǔ méi kàn dào lǎowàile!

That was a phrase I heard uttered out loud — not once, but twice — during our trip to China last month. It was not directed at me, a Chinese American fluent in Mandarin who can blend in like a chameleon. It was reserved for my fiancée, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed American southerner, who ventured into the Middle Kingdom for the first time to see my family, friends, and the place where I was born.

Unbeknownst to her (and me), she stepped into a China that has had the lowest number of foreign visitors since the 1970s. That was China in September 2023 — like we had stepped into a time machine and gone back to the past, not the future. This “past” is not a descriptor of lack of progress or development — that is hardly the case, especially if you go outside of the visibly stagnant Beijing or Shanghai. It’s an intense feeling that for perhaps the first time since the so-called “New China” was founded, what was in the past is better than the present and, quite possibly, the future.

Tier 1 is lifeless and boring

This intense feeling can spill out in the tiniest of ways and is often imperceptible, if you don’t have the right reference point or know the people.

One night when these feelings did spill out was a dinner gathering with some of my relatives in Beijing, plus their friends, plus their friends’ friends — none of whom we knew. As it’s often the case in a highly communal and relationship-based culture like China, it’s normal to step into social gatherings not knowing who else was invited and walk away with your network a bit bigger, your WeChat Moments a bit more crowded. (WeChat is the messaging, calling, and mobile money app that is most people’s primary means of staying in touch rather than using phone numbers.)

The dinner’s mood, chatter, and even location all encapsulated this tug-of-war between the goodness of the past and the desires of the future. This divide, unsurprisingly, fell along generational lines. My relatives and their friends (folks of an older generation) specifically booked a particular Peking duck restaurant, because it is the best of the three major brands of Peking duck restaurants. They wanted to show us the best that Beijing has to offer, especially for my fiancée. But as dishes began to pile on to the lazy Susan, they started complaining to the servers about how the scallion, an important ingredient for the duck wrap if you’ve ever had Peking duck properly, was the wrong part of the scallion and of poor quality. Also, many of the duck dishes they used to always order, like duck gizzards, are somehow not available. The one dish they like that the restaurant could offer was duck heart, but it was served on a normal dish, instead of on a platelet heated by a small petroleum-jelly fire to keep it warm and give it a “ceremonial feel” (仪式感 yíshì gǎn).

These complaints would seem trivial, if not even a bit rude, to non-Peking duck connoisseurs. What these complaints masked, however, was a reflexive nostalgia that not too long ago, if you have enough money, connections, and taste, you can treat foreign guests to the best Peking duck dinner, without needing to worry about the quality of the scallion or which dish on the menu is actually available.

Besides the duck-related gripes, other complaints were carefully sprinkled throughout the dinner conversation, ranging from politics to COVID to censorship of the entertainment industry.

One person boasted that he got COVID three times. “Does our vaccine even work?” he asked rhetorically. Others laughed in dismay. The phrase, “I miss Deng,” was uttered at least once albeit in a hushed tone (referring to Dèng Xiǎopíng 邓小平, who led and guided the country from 1978 until the 1990s, ushering in the prosperity of the reform and opening-up period).

A younger couple closer to my age was more upbeat, sharing with me and my fiancée that the next time we visit China: Don’t go to Beijing or Shanghai or the tier-1 cities. They are lifeless and boring. Go to Chongqing. Go to Changsha. Go to Wuhan.

They just came back from Wuhan on the high-speed rail that morning for a weekend getaway there. That’s where the action is. That’s where the young people are eating out, drinking, partying, and creating traffic every day until 2 or 3 a.m.

Emblematic of a younger generation, who is better at enjoying the present than worrying about the past or future, they have no kids, have no desire to have kids, and love their puppy. For them, there is plenty of life to live in China. If that life runs its course some day, the world outside is a big place.

Our dinner ended with pro tips on how to get affordable Wi-Fi using China Telecom while on a Mediterranean cruise. People left the restaurant and made plans to meet up in Sanya in the winter — a popular tier-3 city on tropical Hainan Island for Chinese snowbirds — for seafood and beer.

A walled-off modernity

Traveling to most cities on China’s high-speed rail is, of course, exceedingly easy and quite enjoyable. For foreign passport holders like us, however, the rules are just different and confusing enough that you can easily miss your train if you don’t know how things work.

As foreigners, we must go through the manual ticketing and check-in points at every step to eventually board our train, while our fellow travelers who are Chinese citizens rush by digitally with their ID cards. The margin of error is small; everyone only has a 10-minute window to get this right, no matter how crowded the train is.

And they were all crowded, all more than 90% full, with few masks. If the crowdedness of high-speed trains is at all a useful barometer of China’s economic vibrancy, as many commentators and analysts say, then it is not hard to find counter-evidence to the doom and gloom narrative of China’s economy. But are people traveling to spend money and party like my new friends, or just visiting family while forgoing larger spending desires? No one knows for sure. What is for sure is that getting off a train, any train, and down the escalator to leave the station is still a sardine-like claustrophobic experience.

Chinese train stations are still displays of the comical colloquialism “people mountain, people sea” (人山人海 rénshān, rénhǎi), with a unique rhythm that I’m familiar with mentally, but have lost all muscle memory to face physically.

Five high-speed train rides in five cities later, we got the hang of it. We also got the hang of hailing a Didi ride, usually getting picked up by an electric car, swinging by a Luckin Coffee to pick up a caffeine boost, and paying for everything with my AliPay QR code.

Of course, none of these digital conveniences are new if you’ve spent time in China before COVID, except for the ubiquity of electric cars — a ubiquity that most of the world is still reaching for. (If you are into sampling different electric car brands, hailing Didi rides is a great way to do it.) The conveniences we touched were also a tiny sliver of what was available, because my AliPay was the foreign English version and we did not have a Chinese cell phone number, which would have unlocked many more levels of digital convenience.

While marveling at the digital conveniences we did touch, my fiancée would lament about how it would’ve been impossible for her, or anyone else who has no prior familiarity with China or the Chinese language, to figure all this out. I nodded. We contrasted things with our travel experience to South Korea a year earlier, where we managed to access its modern economy rather easily, even though we barely spoke Korean and could only count on a few Netflix K-dramas as “prior familiarity.”

There is no dispute that China has become more wealthy and more modern over the last four decades, its current struggles notwithstanding. But however advanced, it is a walled-off modernity and an inhospitable modernity, where you have to play by its increasingly rigid rules. It’s a modernity that serves as a constant reminder of who is a foreigner and who is one of its own.

The Age of Not Obvious

Our finale stop was Shenyang, the city where I was born and where my 92-year-old grandmother still lives and strives. She takes two big walking laps around her senior home every day, makes intricate cross-stitching artworks, and is a VIP ecommerce shopper of semi-legitimate anti-aging cosmetic products, to the chagrin of my other family members.

A decidedly tier-2 city, I always go to Shenyang every time I’m in China to play sudoku with my grandmother. Shenyang and the entire northeastern region have been mostly left out of China’s economic boom. This time, it was noisier and messier than I could ever remember.

The city is adding another subway line — its fourth. It is finally extending a current line to the airport. The downtown district, next to Shenyang’s own smaller Forbidden City (the Mukden or Shenyang Imperial Palace), was going through a dusty renovation to open in time for tourists before the National Day holiday week, the first week of October, kicked off. But it was not just the shops and storefronts near ancient palaces that were being repaired. Family members told me that a big local initiative was fixing up old buildings rather than tearing them down to build new ones — like the building I grew up in, which is still standing but has no elevator. It will soon have an elevator.

A weary traveler by that point, I was annoyed by all the activities. We would get woken up at five in the morning by sounds of drills and tractors. But as now a professional investor and cutthroat capitalist, I couldn’t help but wonder if this is where the next batch of GDP would come from.

That’s the thing with today’s China — it is no longer obvious. It is not obvious where China’s new growth will come from. It is also not obvious that China is in an age of malaise, as the title of a recent piece by the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos suggests. What is obvious is that there are still plenty of things to fix, to build, to work on, and plenty of people are working on them.

You used to be able to literally eyeball China’s economic growth and woes. A new skyscraper just completed with another one digging its foundation right next door. Growth! A group of new apartment buildings just broke ground and all units are already presold. Growth! The same apartment buildings have been left empty and unused for years. Woes! Less people are wandering around in luxury malls. Woes!

The job is no longer that easy. The job now requires both knowing and empathizing with young couples, who are happy with having no kids, have no regard for their country’s policy direction to the contrary, and are content with the trappings of nightlife outside the tier-1s. The job now requires stepping into multiple tiers of Chinese cities to see if aging but still livable buildings are getting new elevators or fresh layers of paint. The job now requires balancing intense nostalgia and frequent complaints with tempered expectations and unfinished work.

The only responsible way to talk about China is with the humility of taking a snapshot. What you just read is a snapshot, my snapshot, of China in September 2023. It is a snapshot that can look both like the past, especially for a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman walking down a side street with dilapidated buildings, and the future, when she sits next to her fiancé in a high-speed train or a brand-new BYD electric car.

And for the first time in a long time, it is no longer obvious in which of these two directions China is heading. Only one thing is obvious: What will happen in the next four decades will look very different from what happened over the last four.