Back in the Middle Kingdom

I spent nearly a decade of my adult life living in China, and it had been nearly as long since I’d last been. After 8 years and a lot of water under the bridge, I made a brief return amidst more turbulent times and with even rougher seas on the horizon…

I finally got a firsthand look at a post-Covid (and perhaps decidedly post-occidental) China, and it was familiar to me in a way like one recognizes the face of an old school chum in a scandalous looking mugshot that suddenly and unexpectedly appears one day on the evening news – what happened and where did things go wrong? He seemed like such a good kid…

Arrival

At first it seemed it could be that, despite the ever darkening tone of the news coverage on China, things may not have changed so much on the ground after all. Sure, I got an icy reception from the customs officer upon disembarking and presenting my western passport, but rather than a sign of growing hostility toward foreigners this might have actually been one of the first signs things may not be so different these days. It was all as I had known it before – people were still stopping and loitering in front of doorways and in the middle of busy throughways, being ignorantly pushy getting on the tram, smoking in the most inappropriate of places, and the whole place still inescapably smelled like a wet dog who fell into a vat of jasmine tea before being rolled in a bed of wǔxiāng seasoning and huājiāo peppercorns. For a moment it was borderline disappointing. It took a bit after hitting the streets though before it hit me how, same old social disadvantages and familiar aromas aside, the mood itself had really changed…

Dude, Where’s All the Foreigners?

It took just a day or so wandering about before I put my finger on the most obvious change for an overprivileged foreigner like myself… I was no longer a minor celebrity. Nobody approached me to exercise their English. It took nearly a week and a half before hearing my first cheeky “hello” on the street, and even then my wife pointed out it was coming from a guy manning a food stall looking to make a quick kuai off me. Maybe it was Xi’s great evisceration of the English tutoring industry in 2021 or the xenophobic spy scare, all amidst the ambient background radiation of amped up jingoistic Chinese nationalism… Whatever circumstances made it so, English had ostensibly become passé.

At least, that is, on the surface. It might be more accurate to say it’s gone a bit underground, but not completely disavowed. Despite the Bear Stearns-ish downfall of the likes of New Oriental and Wall Street English in the tutoring crackdown, parents are still quietly paying homage to learning the world’s lingua franca in stealth mode, which I’ve witnessed having spied across tables in restaurants at what mom and dad are keeping their kids occupied with on the cellphone while out at dinner. And while one may not want to stand out by showing overt enthusiasm for striking up conversation with strange foreigners, I would occasionally though more rarely still encounter those adorably awkward situations where an embarrassed barista is being harangued by her boss to attempt to put her few months of English education to good use and speak to the foreign customer in English. I guess I’ve come to look at the attempted stamping out of English as I do Xi’s efforts to eclipse the Dollar with the Renminbi – a bold ideological aspiration with no realistic chance of practically succeeding, at least not in the foreseeable future.

While I didn’t find many Chinese folks going out of their way to communicate with lǎowài, my trip was not without foreigners themselves approaching me to speak… Russian. I was accosted multiple times in public by Báirén who were under the assumption I was, like them, Russian speaking. While it was an interesting opportunity to knock the rust off the Russian I learned decades ago in college, I thought it a bit presumptuous to come at me with Russian right out the gate, or at least rather surprising that it wasn’t the presumption that English would be the best bet straight away. Hard to say if this was more a reflection of Russian hubris assuming they have a monopoly on being foreign in China at the moment, but it nonetheless seemed indicative of the geopolitical tide change following the so called “no limits” bromance between Xi and Pooty. This was also apparent in the new prominence of Russian language on multilingual signs and notices, pervasive propaganda promoting China-Russia ties around town, and events celebrating Russian culture exchange like friendship concerts and the like.

There was one particular evening when the change in the expat demographic really hit home for me, on a stroll through a kind of traditionally hipster part of town in Beijing known as Gǔlóu that I had often frequented in my days as an expat in the city. I recall from those times when you could hear American accents overwhelmingly abound on the street with a smattering of Euro twangs for tapestry, and the Russian tongue only intermittently popping out from behind the curtains now and again. Unsurprisingly, it was here on my return trip that I had by far the greatest volume of foreigner sightings, only now those foreigners were overwhelmingly Russian speaking with a rare American accent occasionally surfacing its lonely head above a sea of Ivans.

Russians aside, the place was clearly at a deficit of foreigners since last I lived there, corroborating the narrative that Westerners have all but evacuated. It took nearly a week before my first foreigner sighting (an unmissable and unmistakably towheaded one) bobbing along in the crowd floating down a busy street. Again, hard to pin this decline of foreigners and the change in their demographic on any one given reason – is it a symptom of a lingering hangover from the COVID lockdowns, a continued shortage of flights from the US and Western countries dovetailing with an increasing number of flights to and from Russia, or just generally the trend of a more paranoid and reclusive China? Hard to say, but easy to see China has fewer friends and is hanging out with a different crowd these days.

Bad for Brand

While Westerners themselves have evaporated, some foreign brands have also seen their market share boiling down since their heyday last I was here. Don’t get me wrong, there hasn’t been a full on comprehensive nationalist purge of foreign products just yet – Coke, KFC, McDonald’s – they’re still surviving despite all the consumer nationalism one hears about… for now. They may find themselves soon getting squeezed out in favor of an indigenous imitator though, like Starbucks being eclipsed by Luckin – a phenomenon whose nationalist bent was highlighted by gloating in The Global Times. Coke might find themselves up next, given the prolific popularity of a domestic cola flavored seltzer by a brand called Genki Forest that seemed to appear on shelves with greater frequency than Coke at times from what I could see. The Economist’s podcast Drum Tower had some interesting commentary and similar observations in their episode “‘I’m not lovin’ it’: why Chinese consumers are turning their backs on foreign fast food”, though they also note foreign brands are not to be counted out and are even currently expanding, for example in the case of the Golden Arches. One sign that foreign fast food may still yet reign in China was especially welcomed by me – Taco Bell, which had virtually zero footprint in China back in my days as an expat, now has multiple locations including Beijing.

Technical Issues

The consumer nationalism can be selective at the moment but intense, and there are particular high profile brands and even industries that are exceptionally caught up in geopolitical crossfire. Apple is prominently one of those brands, and the iPhone one such casualty, perhaps as a result of resentment of the national tech champion Huawei’s fate in the west. It was most certainly noticeable that there were fewer iPhones in people’s hands now than years past, and in their place various Android-based Chinese imitators with their blockishly clunky and over-engineered camera assemblies proliferated. I witnessed first hand the techno-nationalism that has plagued the Big A, as I accompanied an acquaintance affiliated with the Chinese government on a “Delete A” mission to replace his aging iPhone with a Xiaomi, the animus so strong to do so that he was abandoning FaceTime and the blue bubble that smoothed communication with his beloved bǎobèi living far away in the West.

Drive to Succeed

Continuing on the note of China’s drive for tech self-reliance and its connection to the buzzy focus on “new productive forces”, I was keen to see first hand how EVs have been transforming China’s infamously congested and polluted roadways. Given the hysterical fear over China eating the burgeoning global EV market alive and the threat of their overcapacity leading the advent of China Shock 2.0, I’d expected to walk into a transformed domestic urban landscape reminiscent of something like the Jetsons. I was rather disappointed (or relieved?) to find that, at least from what I could see in the streets myself, petrol engines were not all that more rarefied than they are back in the West at this point. Maybe they’re getting there and getting there fast, but the electric car is yet to fully conquer all in the Middle Kingdom, and perhaps that may even explain some of the overcapacity spewing into foreign markets – they’re making them faster than they can sell them at home. Even more curiously, especially considering the aforementioned consumer nationalism, there were Teslas whipping around all over the place, further evidence that Xi still struggles to kill the cachet of iconic Western brands at home.

While electric cars haven’t taken over the country just yet, electric scooters however have taken over streets and sidewalks alike to the detriment of those who might dare to walk on their own two feet. They have always been somewhat of a thing in the south such as in Guangdong and Shanghai, but they’ve now reached a level of utter infestation even in Beijing. Not only are they flooding the streets, they’ve taken over the sidewalks and anywhere a pedestrian might roam – flying about with wanton disregard, you might even say an aggressive entitlement to right of way. It’s a clear and present public safety issue. Even my wife, a dyed in the wool red nationalist who would die a martyr before ever suffering the slightest critical observation of Chinese society, conceded it is out of control. The upside: your kuaidi is going to arrive faster than you can dodge your way down the block to pick it up.

Quick Buck, Slow Economy

If you can manage to pay for it, that is. China has turned into a near cashless society. No, this isn’t an innovative economic feat enabled by China’s digital Yuan (I did not encounter this or see anyone conspicuously using the virtual cash). Alipay or WeChat Pay are the digital wallets of choice, and are pretty much required to be able to purchase the necessities of life. QR codes for payment are ubiquitous at every point of sale. Contactless payment, using your phone’s virtual wallet or tapping your physical card as is common in the West, was not so much a thing regrettably. I for one refuse to install any of the popular Chinese payment apps – I see it as akin to giving Xi Jinping an invitation to take a good long look at me up and down in the buff. So, I got a lot of eye rolling at Starbucks every morning who fortunately accepted my hard cash, though the process required a manager and the retrieving of a key from the back office to open a safe, and the whole transaction felt like I was requesting access to a shady safe deposit box at a Swiss bank. Thank God my wife had already sold her digital soul to the CCP and could play sugar mom and financier, otherwise I could not have survived the trip.

On our excursions out and about, sponsored by my wife and her Alipay account, there was a subtle sense of fossilized familiarity for me. The city was still busy and bustling, but with far fewer cranes in the sky hanging over ambitious looking structures on the up and up. This was certainly no surprise, with the cratering real estate market having been the mascot for China’s stalling economy. While a less cluttered skyline was a welcome cosmetic change, a more meaningful one implied by this change in fortune was the attrition of urban migrant workers in the city. I recall back in the heady days of China’s rise in Beijing leading up to the 2008 Olympics, my Anglo roommate and I would attract an observant crowd going out to eat and sitting in view of the street by a window. Migrant workers would literally gather around and watch for entertainment through the glass as if they were patrons at the Beijing zoo agog at some exotic creatures they had never before seen and may never have occasion to see again. We would constantly attract hordes of curious migrant yokels wherever we went out in public. This is no more, many have left and those who remain are the epitome of the woes promising to tank the promise of the “great rejuvenation” over decades to come. The gas has run out of their Ponzi scheme of an economy, the jobs are drying up for many and especially migrant workers, disposable income is non-existent for most exacerbating anemic domestic consumption, and the average joe can hardly feed himself let alone pay a dowry and feed a growing family to avert what increasingly looks like an unavoidable population crisis.

Fresh Air and Empty Spaces

While eating out as a foreigner had become less of an exhibitionist affair, it had also cleaned up a bit. I noticed there was something different in the air at the old “lǎojiā” restaurants, the kind of basic neighborhood restaurants you go to for an affordable hardy meal. I slowly came to realize what it was that changed about the atmosphere dining out… less smoking. Shortly following my last stint in China years ago, a public health law was passed banning smoking in public places like restaurants and cafes, and it is noticeably less in your face these days. I recall on my first day in China in the early 2000’s, I stepped into the lift in the morning with one gentleman who politely waited for the doors to close before lighting up a smoke, hotboxing the both of us. I very quickly came to find this was quite normal then, but it has now gained attention as a public health concern. That isn’t to say it has completely disappeared… while at a cafe in Hòuhǎi in Beijing, an ignorant young urbanite lit up at a table behind ours and my wife gritted her teeth while texting me that she planned to turn him in through a WeChat channel available specifically for the purpose of reporting such infractions. The authorities then levy fines on the venue where the infraction occurred in order to pressure them into enforcing the will of the law. In the end, she let it slide without reporting it, so determined smokers continue getting away with it now and again then…

While eating out at sit-down restaurants had become easier on the lungs, the vibrancy of local eateries was still not quite what it once was. There were noticeably fewer street food vendors, perhaps a consequence of the COVID lockdowns. You just can’t find the same array of deliciously hazardous looking food carts hocking “meat” sticks, ròujiāmó, makeshift málàtàng spreads, and even the jiānbìng vendors were fewer and farther between. A shame perhaps, but maybe understandable why these wouldn’t fly during the pandemic.

People were out shopping, but it lacked a kind of magic it once had before… XiDan in Beijing was a good example, where a vast and ceaseless landscape of stalls run by mom and pop vendors is now a kind of sterile glassy mega mall without a soul. Or even better yet XiuShui (Silk Street), perhaps at one point the world’s most infamous bootleg market, has now become a vacuously spiffy shell of what it once was, with fully legit tailors and boutique stores replacing the rowdy and aggressive stall owners selling obviously and at times comically fake western-branded apparel, haggling over prices that are pennies on the pound for what one would pay back home for the real deal. It was objectively wrong what was going on there back then, but it was oh so much fun, and oh so sad that those days are gone.

Here’s Looking at You, Kid

It was good to get back to China after all these years and see for myself how things have changed, and perhaps how they still haven’t. Life as it once was when I lived in China as an expat years ago was still recognizable in many respects, but in a way like seeing that adorably cute kid you once knew and haven’t seen in ages suddenly appearing before you in all their reinvented teenage awkwardness… you want to remember them as they once were, when you shared those good times that you can no longer have with them now that they’ve lost their innocence. You know these are rough years immediately ahead of them but hope in the end they turn out to be good people that make good choices rather than taking a wrong turn that leads them to play out their worst prospects to find failure in a dark future.

And one last thing… avocados have finally caught on with the wealthy hipster crowd.