A postcard from China

Enjoying terere in a hotel room in Asunción seems to be a good time to write some useless posts after eyebrow-raising almost three years hiatus. Let’s continue.

In late May 2023 almost immediately after China suddenly lifted the (Corona) tourist travel ban I’ve decided to use this unique opportunity to take a look what the future will bring.

This post is pretty much just me going through some photos.

Once Corona madness started in 2020 China pretty much closed its borders not only for tourists but also for example for ex-Chinese citizens wanting to visit their wife there. Regular Chinese people abroad could theoretically visit, but such a trip required not only:

Buying extremely overpriced plane tickets
Travelling only through whitelisted routes based on your residence abroad
Getting blood and PCR-tested multiple times
Having your flight cancelled if for example you show raised levels of corona antibodies
Paying a preselected five star hotel for mandatory quarantine abroad on your transfer airport
Getting quarantined on arrival to China for three weeks in a self-paid preselected hotel room
Being bussed around in vans by people in hazmat suits
Getting quarantined again for a week more after your connecting inter-China flight
Getting quarantined one more time in your own flat until your government issue app turns green (at least one more week) while your entrance door is sealed and your neighbours are instructed to snitch on you if you try to sneak out
Getting quarantined again if anyone in your community (group of houses) tests positive for Covid in daily mandatory tests
Getting quarantined again if … you get the idea

After a couple of years of this something changed all of a sudden and most restrictions were cancelled pretty much overnight.

Well, let’s go!

As an EU citizen I needed to get a tourist visa. Interestingly, applying for this visa is not done on the embassy itself but through a dedicated commercial visa company. Point #1 for Chinese communism. This company however walks you through the bureaucratic process and helps you fill in the detailed forms, which ask apart from the expected questions for example also

Your annual income
Your parent’s names, dates of birth and occupation
Your education and current job
All countries you have visited in last several years
and more

Surprisingly, nobody seems to check the answers too much and you are even hinted to just write some random fair-enough-looking answers if you don’t want to provide the real ones. Also you need to provide an invitation letter (you can just get a template, no need to think up something original). Again, nobody seems to check the identity if the inviting person too much. Once you fill out everything necessary and pay the fee the process is pretty fast and you get your visa in a matter of days.

Flying in

Apart from somewhat more-detailed-than-usual drug check on the airport gate the flight was unremarkable. No, no cavity search happened but I had to for example show that my laptop turns on – I guess if it was filled with cocaine it would not.

After landing in Guangzhou and hopping of the plane, you are expected to fill in medical form. How? Using the government-approved mobile app of course! Welcome to the future.

Possibly since my only smartphone at that time ran slightly outdated LineageOS, WeChat did not really work for me. It did install, but registration and login did not work. My guide remotely filled in the form on my behalf before the takeoff, but on arrival this form was almost an hour expired already. After explaining the present health policeman repeatedly I’m a stupid foreigner that can’t even fill out a form, I was shown a plain old web version of the form and could fill it out. So, why was WeChat needed in the first place?

After mere minutes of experiencing this amazing bright future l almost pissed my pants for not running a government-approved OS.

The airport was massive, modern, connected straight to pretty much brand new underground metro system. Something my city might not be able to achieve during my lifetime.

Electric vehicles

Many cars in Guangzhou (and other Tier-1 cities) are electric. You can see it by the green license plate. Seemed like pretty much all taxis are – and there are plenty. All motorbikes are electric as well, you can buy them at every corner for a bargain. Charging stations are everywhere – dedicated ones, sockets at parking lots in front of public buildings and even massive residential towers. Charging sockets for motorbikes are placed in long lines along roads walkways. Or you can just go to a charging station at the corner and swap out a battery for a charged one.

Shenzhen. Not an old car in sight. Electric is the way.

Park and charge. Helmets are so cheap nobody bothers to steal them.

Internet

After entering China, you are immediately cut off from the western Internet. Most common websites (Google, Wikipedia, …) don’t work just as pretty much all non-obscure instant messengers (WhatsApp, Signal, Element/Matrix, …). The Great firewall of China protects children and people in general from bad ideas very well. One way to circumvent this is to use Shadowsocks proxy. If you have a server with public IP, it’s reasonably easy to set up. There are clients for Android and desktop. Somehow not everything worked for me using shadowsocks, for example WhatsApp text messages went through but not images and files. Maybe TCP/UDP misconfiguration on my part? Meh, good enough. Despite some info about the Great Firewall actively seeking out Shadowsocks traffic and blocking servers, I had no problems for the three weeks of my visit.

Also be aware, Internet connection is generally tied to your or someone’s name. They are watching and can come knocking.

Show me your ID and I’ll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Infrastructure

When you stick to big cities (as I did), you live in the future. Skyscrapers, huge underground networks, monorails, high speed trains crisscrossing thousands of kilometers.

Standard metro station. All metro stations I was in worked somehow similar and standardized across cities. You can ride the metro for hours and not because it would be slow.

The underground train has warmer and colder cars you can choose from

The train even drives right through a house at one point.

The Chinese are extremely proud of their high speed railway system. It sure is something to be proud of. It’s fast, comfortable, modern, … The effort to build such a system must be immense. The question remains if they built it to move around or to win the dick swinging contests with the Japanese.

The high speed train tickets can’t be bought too long in advance and the prices are fixed. If you plan in advance, it’s cheaper (and often faster) to take a plane.

Oh, you want a high speed railway station? Why not just leave the regular railway station as it is and build a fuckhuge new, separate high speed only one elsewhere?

Regular trains continue to operate. They are overcrowded and slow but cheap.

To buy a train ticket, you have to show your ID and the ticket will be tied to your name. To enter the train station you need to go through a security checkpoint including pat-down and X-Ray luggage scan.

Cashless society

Along with other measures with total population oversight and control come cashless payments. Since Covid you basically won’t see cash in towns in China. Cash is for old people and maybe also stupid backwards villagers.

You want to eat? Better not say something bad on WeChat that would get your account suspended because you need it to pay for food too. Of course this is totally just for your convenience ;)

Spare a yuan for this Buddhist monk? Just send it using the QR code in the begging bowl.

Cities and people

Cities are fucking huge. The Chinese solve the accommodation option by cramming as many huge residential buildings in the city as possible. This makes the cities massively crowded but on the other hand they are more compact and partially thanks to high population density small shops, restaurants, delivery services, … thrive. If you want to get dinner or buy electronic components for your project, you just go outside and find whatever you like in a walking distance.

There’s surprisingly little trash floating in that river.

Old colonial district in Guangzhou is perfectly taken care of.

Self-service delivery location. Buy anything online, get it delivered for pennies, you just have to find it after.

Next to factories, residential buildings are built. You go to work six or six and half days a week but you go there on foot few hundred meters and don’t really need to leave the neighbourhood pretty much ever until you burn out after several years and return home to your village.

Shenzhen – after work you can go for a jog to a nearby park, which is possibly even too well taken care of.

A country of contrasts and unbelievably fast development.

Life in not too distant past used to be pretty grim.

Not much of old China survived the cultural revolution. But something did.

Who came up with painted car tire decorations first, Chinese? Soviets?

In smaller towns, people still grow vegetables in gardens and even keep chicken, goats, etc.

Offline Tinder – “about time I found a husband for my granddaughter!”

As a side note, being a white foreigner in China does get you some attention. People are walking up to you and asking to take a photo with you. This gets annoying fast because they generally don’t really care who you are and what are you doing there, just fishing for likes on their social media. On the other hand, you can get a discount for your dinner for posing with the restaurant owner so it’s not all that bad.

Communism

To get to the point, there is really no communism left in China. Their “communism with Chinese characteristics” or whatever is really just capitalism of the most brutal kind with strict over watch by the emperor that strikes down whoever gets out of the line but basically leaves normal people alone.