What Is China Actually Like to Visit in 2024?
What is China really like to visit? The single most overwhelming answer is: enormous. Not in the abstract, statistical way you already know — 1.4 billion people, third-largest country by area — but in a way that physically restructures your sense of what a city, a building, or even a train station is supposed to feel like. After two weeks traveling through Beijing, Chengdu, Emeishan, Chongqing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou, the scale of the country was the first and most persistent impression. Even Emeishan, a city of just half a million people considered a quaint countryside town by Chinese standards, contains a Buddhist temple complex of genuinely comical scale. You enter what looks like an impressively large compound, only to discover it is merely the entrance to something even grander behind it. This pattern repeats five or six times, each building larger and more ornate than the last — like an inverse nesting doll. And the whole place had almost no other visitors.
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First impressions of China's overwhelming urban scale — skyscraper complexes stretching to the horizon in every direction
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The urban design of Beijing reads like something out of James Scott's Seeing Like a State. Enormous apartment complexes — blocks of ten adjacent 30-story buildings — are divided by eight-lane roads. Government buildings follow the same pattern. This layout appears designed at least partly for social control: during Zero COVID, authorities could lock down tens of thousands of residents by guarding just a few entrance gates. The wide boulevards would also allow military forces to move through the city with ease. The only human-scaled relief comes from the hutongs, Beijing's old historic neighborhoods, though only a fraction of those survived the country's modernization push. Dare I say Beijing is too YIMBY.
Is Chongqing Worth Visiting? The Cyberpunk City You've Never Heard Of
Yes — unambiguously, enthusiastically yes. Chongqing is by far the most visually stunning city on the itinerary, and arguably the most stunning city in the world that most Westerners have never seriously considered visiting. It is an insane, cyberpunk, multi-level metropolis of over 20 million people, stacked vertically across hillsides where two rivers converge, shrouded in a near-permanent cinematic mist. A two-floor hotel room overlooking both rivers and one of the most jaw-dropping skylines on earth costs around $60 a night.
Standing at the top of the tallest building and looking out over the city, the comparison that comes to mind is the 1995 Hubble Deep Field image — the one where astronomers pointed the telescope at a seemingly empty patch of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length, and instead of darkness found over 3,000 galaxies. Zoom in on any direction from that rooftop and you find, behind the fog, beyond the horizon, another skyscraper, each one containing hundreds or thousands of people living and working. Chongqing is so rarely visited by foreigners that tourists repeatedly got asked for selfies just for being there. If you go anywhere in China, go to Chongqing.
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Chongqing's multi-level cyberpunk skyline viewed from the top of its tallest building through the city's signature mist
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What Do Young People in China Actually Think and Feel?
Stressed, mostly. Across Chengdu, Chongqing, and Shanghai, the most consistent theme from young people was a sense of pressure and anxiety that bordered on exhaustion. A musician in Chengdu was writing songs specifically about youth anxiety. Modeling school students — not exactly a demographic you'd expect to be crushed by academic pressure — complained about the intensity of competition. The phenomenon of 996 (working 9am to 9pm, six days a week) is not a myth; it is a lived reality for ambitious young professionals in first-tier cities.
Many educated young people are making a calculated retreat. One man who had studied in Australia and returned during COVID explained that friends with prestigious degrees are quietly leaving Shanghai and Beijing. The pay in top-tier cities can be double what you'd earn elsewhere, but the competition is brutal and the hours are crushing. His friends are opting for smaller cities, lower salaries, lower rents, and manageable lives. This helps explain one of the more puzzling contradictions in China right now: how a country experiencing demographic collapse can simultaneously have massive youth unemployment. The answer, as one person explained it, is a mismatch — there are plenty of menial jobs available, but today's college-educated youth simply will not take the low-skilled positions their parents and grandparents took. And the high-skilled jobs that would match their education are in short supply.
In a shopping mall in Chongqing, two high schoolers asked for selfies and ended up giving an unexpectedly candid window into teenage life. Asked what they do in their free time, they said they watch two to three hours of TikTok every day. Asked what kind of content, they said — with apparent sincerity — sexy girls. When asked to prove it, one of them pulled out his phone and scrolled past ten consecutive videos that were, in fact, exactly that.
How Does China's AI Industry Compare to the US?
The biggest surprise from conversations with Chinese VCs and AI researchers was how capital-constrained they felt. Moonshot AI, one of China's leading AI labs, raised $1 billion at a $3 billion valuation. Meanwhile, xAI's new compute cluster in Memphis alone will cost $3 to $4 billion. The gap in available capital is not a rounding error — it is structural.
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High schoolers in a Chongqing shopping mall demonstrating their TikTok feeds — an unfiltered window into youth digital life
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The Chinese tech ecosystem is still visibly shell-shocked from the 2021 government crackdown on the sector. One VC half-jokingly asked for help getting his money out of the country, which says everything about the investment environment. If you want to keep money in China, your realistic options are: accept a 2% yield from state banks, or throw it into a stock market that has been performing terribly for years. Valuations for Chinese companies are chronically low because exit opportunities are genuinely terrible. There is no guarantee a successful startup can raise its next round. Even if it can, the government might cancel the IPO at will. Even if it reaches public markets, Chinese equities have been a disaster. It is a vivid reminder of how efficiently you can destroy an innovation ecosystem that depends on risk-tolerant capital.
Is China Really a Surveillance State Like North Korea?
It is an authoritarian system — that is not in question. There are cameras everywhere, including in random alleyways where it is genuinely hard to imagine what threat they are monitoring. Beijing had police officers at attention at what seemed like every single street corner. And no, you would not want to be a dissident journalist or an activist there.
But it is definitively not North Korea. People chatted openly in public spaces about problems in the country, about the government, about economic failures. This included people who appeared to have significant professional and social standing to lose. Some casually referenced Tiananmen Square or the Cultural Revolution. One person, at a public restaurant, was willing to discuss the odds of a regime change — though he may have simply been an especially careless individual. What was notably absent, despite expectations, was any visible cult of personality around Xi Jinping. Not a single billboard, screen, or wall displayed his image throughout the entire trip. Mao appeared occasionally, mostly in museums. The hammer and sickle showed up mainly on government buildings. Whatever control exists, it does not appear to operate through the kind of omnipresent leader-worship visible in other authoritarian states.
What Do Ordinary Chinese People Think About Their Government?
The picture is genuinely complicated, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably oversimplifying. One person argued that the younger generation is significantly more nationalistic than older Chinese who personally lived through both the catastrophes of Mao and the tangible improvements brought by reform-era liberalization. His pointed observation: the current CCP regime is likely more liberal than what an actual election in China would produce. That is a fact worth sitting with.
Another perspective framed the vocal nationalists as roughly analogous to the progressive activist wave in America around 2020 — perhaps 10% of the population, aggressively loud on Weibo (China's Twitter), making everyone else uncomfortable but not necessarily representative of how most people feel. A recent university graduate confirmed that the vast majority of his classmates are simply apolitical. And in practice, taxi drivers in Beijing and elsewhere responded enthusiastically when told a visitor was from the UK, saying they loved Britain and wished more foreigners would visit. The scarcity of foreign tourists — in Chengdu and Chongqing, foreigners were rare enough to prompt selfie requests — is, by every measure, a loss for both sides.
Why Is China's Economy Struggling Despite Its Scale?
China and America have, in a sense, inverse structural problems. America subsidizes demand and restricts supply — it can barely rebuild a fallen bridge, while historic preservation blocks development in its most desirable cities. China subsidizes supply and restricts demand — it builds bridges to nowhere and bulldozes 500-year-old temples to erect skyscraper complexes that nobody particularly wants to live in. The construction binge of the last few decades produced endless rows of ugly concrete boxes, built during a period of particularly uninspired architecture, now showing visible blight and discoloration. If the great building frenzy is over, it is a shame that China's infrastructure was locked in during that aesthetic low point.
From the windows of a 12-hour train ride from Chongqing to Shanghai, the countryside told its own story: small paddy farms surrounding clusters of 5 to 10-story apartment buildings dropped in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, many of them looking ghostly, with no visible people anywhere. The pattern of development — massive, centralized, and sometimes disconnected from actual human demand — runs throughout. A country with extraordinary productive capacity, constrained by a political system that makes capital allocation genuinely difficult and the exit of investment returns nearly impossible, is not going to punch at its full economic weight. That is the clearest takeaway from the ground.
