Traveling in China - the most interesting things

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A follow up post to the most amusing things I saw in China and my views on the Chinese government.

Here are the most interesting and thought-provoking things I saw while I was in China

  • Seeing the scale of infrastructure and industry made me appreciate the power of economic protectionism. Chinese construction companies built all the roads in China. They build up institutional capacity and know-how. So they can build the roads in Kenya, instead of Kenyan companies. So Kenyan construction companies do not get that good.

  • At one point a driver asked Jia (my girlfriend who is Chinese but has lived in the US for ~8 years) if she was American. He said she didn’t seem like she was from China “because you act and talk like you have individualism and freedom”

Just a normal book of the Chairman’s sayings…

…but actually it’s a way to learn the tongue of the foreign devils

  • I bought a book that has the cover of a Little Red Book, but inside is a English-Chinese dictionary. So you can look like you are dutifully studying the Chairman’s words, when really you are learning the language of the foreign devils! Apparently this was a common during the Cultural Revolution (not anymore). They also had a similarly disguised Chinese-Japanese dictionary.

  • Jia’s dad had a stack of about 20 classical Chinese texts as the most prominent books in the living room. I was impressed with how many of them were pretty well known in the US (1) - seems like the books that make it over to the west are decently representative.

  • The cultural tourism in China is pretty hilarious. A couple towns I visited were full of “ethnic clothing” rental stores where tourists (95% ethnic Han) could rent “traditional clothes” of the local ethnic minorities (e.g., Tibetan or Daxi) and go take pictures. This would be the equivalent of an white American dressing up as an American Indian and taking pictures by a teepee (2).

A coffee table set of classic books

  • It was also an interesting case study in how a government “sanitizes” a culture. By commercializing the tourism, the CCP can make a show of celebrating China’s diversity and culture while getting rid of any elements that it finds potentially threatening. We want you to show off your flags and prayer wheels to tourists, but we don’t want you to actually follow the Dalai Llama.

  • The propaganda is very high production and entertainment value. On digital billboards I kept seeing what I thought were trailers for action movies but were actually celebrations of the local fire department or successful businesses. There were very cool anime-style posters exhorting you to keep the city clean.

  • Government work is prestigious and hard work. Met one guy who works in the foreign investment office and works 14 hours days. Reinforced to me how complacent Americans are.

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  1. e.g., Sun Tzu’s Art of War, several books by Confucius, the Dao De Jing and I Qing

  2. This still happens to some extent in the US, but it seems to be getting more and more frowned upon. It is alive and well in China.

Traveling in China - How good is the Chinese government?

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About a month ago, I took a 2 week vacation trip to China.

One question I wanted to answer for myself during the trip was “how good is the Chinese government?”

I think that learning about how other countries organize their societies and governments is valuable to do when traveling. Especially when, like me, you are an American who is proud of the American way, and deeply baffled that other countries get along any differently than the US.

I think it’s especially valuable in China because it’s a communist (1) country of over a billion people that is American’s biggest political rival. And China also gets lot of very biased coverage in the US (especially along the lines of “the Chinese Communist Party is evil”) so I was excited to see what things looked like for myself. Here’s what I learned! (2)

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There are two big glaring facts about China that have to form the backdrop of understanding “is the government good?”:

On this second point, government satisfaction is definitely inflated a bit by propaganda. But it’s hard to underestimate how much better things have gotten in China over the lifetime of many of its citizens.

I think that’s uncontroversial so I won’t go through too many stats to belabor the point. Here’s just one: The share of people living in extreme poverty went from 70% to under 1% over the past 30 years.

More qualitatively, here’s what I saw when traveling: Cities are clean. The infrastructure for things like electricity, transportation, internet, education are all quite good. Food and clothes are very cheap. It is so easy to rent a bike to ride around Shanghai and Beijing.

On most of the things that affect your day to day life - the concrete things that make a difference in your day to day happiness - the Chinese government has done a great job. A greater job in a shorter period of time than any government in history.

But there are issues. To my mind there are three big ones:

People can just be disappeared. One friend in China told a story about how a coworker of his had been linked to protests happening in China last year, and she simply disappeared from work. She had been arrested, no telling when she would be let out. After a few months she appeared back for a week or two - and did not want to talk about what happened - before disappearing again.

There’s not much you can say in defense of this.

People cannot access information. The internet is entirely censored. You can’t learn about things like the Tianamen Square massacre or the A4 movement. You can’t use Google products. You can’t use ChatGPT.

Now you can get around these with a VPN, but it takes a little bit of work. Two thirds of people don’t bother (3).

Religions are oppressed. The CCP tries to control religious organizations - such as the Catholic Church and Tibetan Budhists - by appointing religious leaders itself. If you are in certain government jobs and are religious, you have to be quiet about your faith (4). And of course there are the terrible things going on against Muslim Uighers in Xinjiang.

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These issues are super important in terms of the American ideal of civil liberties. But they are relatively small in terms of how they affect most peoples lives day to day. You might argue - as many Chinese do - that they are worth trading off for the more tangible life improvements people have gotten (5).

Ultimately I think this idea of “trading off” civil liberties for material comfort is a false dichotomy. You can have both material success and not have to worry about vanishing for having unpopular political opinions. The CCP perpetuates the idea that it is a tradeoff to justify its hold on power.

So I don’t want to minimize the terrible things that happen in China. But they are definitely overemphasized in American media coverage of China. And it’s not like the US has a spotless record on civil liberties.

So overall is Chinese government good? Overall my answer is “it’s ok.” I definitely think the “China is evil, US is not” framing in popular discourse is unhelpful (6)

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  1. Well, you know, at least it has communist characteristics

  2. Caveat that obviously “How good is the Chinese government?” is a super big and complex question, and of course I do not have a definitive answer. I think for people interested in how humans organize themselves, it’s useful to have a “working theory” for questions like this. These are views I’ve thought a lot about over the past few years and built up mostly from discussions with friends, reading a few books, and taking this two week trip, but I am nothing like an expert on political theory or Chinese politics.

  3. Sometimes people make arguments to the effect that the media landscape in the US is not just as biased - even if we have access to information in theory, what we actually get is biased by the interests of small groups of people. I agree this is a big problem (and this is something I have changed my view on within the past year or so). But state control in China is way worse.

  4. It’s not like I ever felt in danger or anything being there. When it came up, people were very respectful of my faith. My girlfriend’s dad even found it important to explain to extended family that there were important distinctions between Catholics and Protestants - alas that it was in Mandarin and I could not understand

  5. One friend I talked to said that the younger generation - especially those educated abroad - care more about civil liberties. Whereas their parents - growing up in the Cultural Revolution and seeing how bad things can be as well as how much better things have gotten since then - tend to not worry about rights and are more grateful for the concrete improvements that have happened

  6. Here is an example of what I mean by that: In discussions about how the US should approach AI regulation, people sometimes make an argument like “The US has to stay ahead of China. Even if moving fast leads to some bad outcomes, those outcomes won’t be as bad as if China is ahead.” I think this argument uses a caricature of “big evil China” to argue for something reckless.

    After my trip I’m also much more open to

    • Government exerting more power over companies to make them promote the public good

    • Trade protectionism - seeing Chinese industry really drove home how well this has worked

Rapid fire of the most amusing things I saw in China

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I just traveled there for 2 weeks:

  • Lotso Huggin’ Bear, the (spoilers) villain from Toy Story 3, is omnipresent. T-shirts, backpacks, stickers on motorcycles. You cannot escape him

  • At dinners with my girlfriend’s family, my main method of communication was through drinking

  • Beijing is the best city I saw, and the people there have the best t-shirts of any city in the world

  • China is the worst food country in the world if you are vegetarian

  • Fewer foreigners than I expected. I learned to introduce myself as “a foreign devil”

  • Upon seeing me, one child said to her family “I just saw the funniest person I’ve ever seen”

  • My girlfriend - who is from China but has lived for ~8 years in the US - was told by a driver: “you act like you have freedom and individualism”

  • The ride-hailing app Didi has a preset message for “The pin is correct. Please follow the map.” Uber Kenya – take note

  • At one dinner, my girlfriend’s friends spent a lot of the conversation talking (in Mandarin) about how “it’s better to date a Chinese”. (apparently one friend was dating a Japanese but they broke up because “she was too polite”)

  • One Chinese friend said the part of America that surprised him most was that “you can’t drink on the street”

  • There was a billboard video ad giving motorists examples of tons of drivers who had gotten into accidents. In every case, the explanation of the accident concluded by saying “they died immediately on the spot”

I’ll do a follow up post with some of the most thought-provoking things from my trip.