21 Observations About China
What I saw when I visited Shanghai.
Yesterday, I returned from a one-week visit to Shanghai, where I spoke at an academic conference at Fudan University and gave a public lecture about the U.S. elections. I came away with a lot of thoughts and observations—and a keen awareness that I know the country far too little to sculpt them into a coherent whole. So instead of pretending to a wisdom I do not possess, I thought I would share with you the different ideas swirling around in my head. In that spirit, here are 21 observations about China based on my recent visit.
1. The center of Shanghai is not, as one might expect, coursing with energy. Nor is it particularly young. This is in part because the city long ago passed the level of development which displays the striving nature of humanity in greatest clarity; instead of the scores of bicycles and scooters that must have once clogged up the streets of the city—and which still remain such a striking feature of the urban landscape in cities like Saigon—people are populating the vast metro system or teleworking from their small apartments. There is also a second reason, I am told: When scores of people came to Shanghai from the city’s rural hinterland or other provinces in the 1980s and ‘90s, many secured rent-controlled apartments, for which they now pay far less than market price. Many apartments in the most desirable neighborhoods of the city are populated by the aging pioneers of yesteryear.
2. Few cities in Asia match Shanghai’s level of economic development. In the fanciest shopping streets in the city center you can go miles without leaving the realm of luxury stores, with a Hermes outlet abutting a Louis Vuitton outlet, which in turn abuts a Rolex outlet. At times, the city reminded me of an acquaintance’s semi-humorous observation that, in a hundred years, luxury brands may be all that remains of Europe’s once enormous influence on the world.
3. The food is varied, affordable, and excellent. Like in Italy—and unlike in America, or France—you can walk into just about any restaurant outside a major tourist area and expect to eat with delight. Globalization has made excellent food from all over the world available in faraway metropolitan centers, and I didn’t eat anything that is on a different level of quality compared to what I know from my favorite restaurants in, say, Flushing or St. Mark’s Place. But if your idea of Chinese food derives from orange chicken or sweet-and-sour pork, from P. F. Chang’s or a neighborhood Chinese restaurant in some European city, you are completely missing out on the subtlety, the variety, and the sheer inventiveness of one of the world’s great cuisines.
4. Before I went on this trip, a number of well-informed friends urged me not to take any of my usual electronics. So I bought a burner phone, left behind my laptop, set up a temporary email forwarding account, and didn’t log in to any of my normal accounts for the week. In China, even those who are most critical of the regime rolled their eyes at these precautions. “Totally unnecessary,” they all assured me. “Verging on paranoia.” I have no idea who’s right.
5. Traveling in China should be easy. The country is safe. Public transportation is excellent. Taxis are cheap. There are no worries about food safety; the tap water is good to drink. And yet, travel in China presents constant logistical challenges. WiFi is hard to get without a local cell number. The great firewall makes inaccessible nearly every app or website on which one usually relies. You can get around that problem with a VPN, and just about everybody does, but a VPN that works one year may not work the next; mine kept going on the blink, so I had to switch it on and off every few minutes. Then there’s the problem of payment: Visa and MasterCard are next to useless, and cash is increasingly regarded as an oddity. To do anything, you need Chinese apps with Chinese characters and complicated demands for authentication. After struggling with VPN troubles and WiFi troubles and linguistic troubles, I somehow managed to figure out how to pay for things, and even hail rides, with Alipay. Once you have a working setup, everything is suddenly easy—but getting there feels like a minor triumph.
6. American stereotypes about Chinese people derive, in an admittedly distorting and exoticizing manner, from actual features of Japanese culture. Japan has succeeded in applying an extremely elaborate code of norms to a strikingly large percentage of its population.1 But China is completely different, as everyone who has ever set foot in a Chinese restaurant, whether in Shanghai or in San Francisco, should know. Indeed, Chinese norms feel much more familiar to a Westerner: Most people are loud, direct, even strikingly brusque. Beyond a few superficial similarities, the country’s code of behavior bears no more resemblance to Japan than it does to Israel or the Netherlands. This much, I realized long ago. What I did not know until this trip is that many Chinese people seem to hold the same exoticizing stereotypes about Japan as Americans do: When the country comes up in conversation, they too are struck by the cultural gulf that separates them from the remarkable island to their East.
7. One of the big debates among local expatriates concerns the current state of the Chinese economy: is it fine, bad, or terrible? As a visitor, it is extremely hard to gauge an answer. The streets are lively. There are few empty storefronts. Homelessness is invisible. And yet the rumblings of discontent are persistent: A prominent economics professor at Fudan, one of China’s most prestigious universities, acknowledged that his students are having a lot of trouble finding jobs. Another told me, “Go to one of the fancy coffee shops in the French Concession on a workday. Lots of young people on their laptops in the middle of the day, killing time.”
8. A few years ago, I am told, a lot of VPNs worked. Now, the list is down to a few. These days, everyone uses Astrill; the company, it is said, is owned by the CCP, which explains (or, depending on your point of view, makes it more puzzling) that it manages to work even during politically sensitive periods, when its competitors reliably falter. “Some time in the next few years, Astrill will fail us too,” one acquaintance speculated, “and then the last remaining foreigners will leave.” But other acquaintances I consulted about this prediction assured me that this is absurd, that the authorities would never cut the country off from the outside world in such a decisive way. Experts on China remind me of the old joke about Jews: two people, three opinions.
9. Reports of Chinese efficiency appear to be exaggerated. Shanghai is, to be sure, an impressive place. Anybody who understands just how poor China was within living memory cannot help but be impressed by how well things work. But things do go wrong, and not that rarely: At the airport, border officials were confused about the kind of visa under which I was entering the country. At the gates of the university, security guards could not match my documents to the dossier they had on file for me. At the conference, the taxis that were supposed to take us to the Bund came in the wrong size and number. For better or worse, the inflexibility and attendant inefficiency of bureaucracies is a human constant.
10. I worry that China has lastingly screwed up its urban landscape. In what the Chinese call a “Tier 1” city like Shanghai, there are many pleasant and lively urban spaces, even outside historic districts like the Bund or the French Concession. I am writing these lines, for example, in a hip third wave coffee shop on 大学路, a lively street close to Fudan University that would resemble Telegraph Avenue close to Berkeley, if it didn’t dispense with the latter’s well-worn pretensions to grittiness. (Those may come at an even later stage of development.) But when you look at the vast, gray expanses of residential housing blocks that dominate the outer districts of even a Tier 1 city like Shanghai, and which house the overwhelming majority of its residents, it’s hard not to feel sorry for the inhabitants of this concrete jungle, with its endless repetition of the same four or five designs. The blocks are new, for now, and many of their residents are genuinely grateful for the amenities they offer—amenities to which their grandparents or even their parents could never have aspired. But in a few decades, when the buildings will be growing old, and having access to a hot shower or a modern toilet will no longer seem so remarkable to anyone, it is hard to picture them taking pleasure in their surroundings.
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11. In Postwar, Tony Judt argues that in the 1960s, the restive mood of Europe’s young was in part fueled by the ugliness of the homes in which they had been raised and the new universities in which they were being educated. Comparisons between Europe sixty years ago and China today are certain to be wrong for any number of reasons, but my mind kept going back to Judt’s observation every time I drove past another island of identical, unadorned housing blocks.
12. When comparing “West” and “East,” we tend to contrast the aspirations of the individual and the call of the collective. But to understand a society, it is more helpful to distinguish between three levels of analysis: the individual, the collective—and the family. In Scandinavia, the individual is primary; the task of the state is, in part, to liberate each of us from the customary demands of our parents and siblings and children. In Japan, the collective really does play an unusually prominent role. In China, it is not, as European or American analysts tend to posit, the community which takes precedence; it is the family. This is visible in many aspects of Chinese culture which might shock a Japanese or for that matter a Scandinavian visitor, from residents recently arrived from rural areas who spit in the street to office workers in nice suits unabashedly pushing to the front of a line on public transport. The works of Confucius may explain certain aspects of the country’s culture and politics; but the sociological analysis of “amoral familism” in southern Europe is no less relevant.
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