The thing that surprised me most about traveling to China back in 2019 was how quiet it was. I expected chaos, noise, pollution—all the stuff you associate with a developing country. Instead, I found electric bikes gliding silently through tree-lined streets. We lived there for five months until COVID hit.
About a week ago, I went back to visit Yunnan. Walking through the ancient towns another reality hit me: China doesn't need us anymore. These towns were packed with only Chinese tourists, I counted maybe ten Westerners the whole week. No Starbucks, no McDonald's, no Western chains at all. Just tea shops selling pu'er, silver ornaments, wooden objects, ceramics, dried mushrooms, and flower cakes. China has built its own enormous internal market—its own tourism, its own brands, its own everything. They've turned inward not from isolation but from self-sufficiency.
Ask a foreigner about China
It's wild how many people still think of China as the place that makes cheap crap. This perception is frozen somewhere in the 2000s. Japan went through the same arc. "Made in Japan" meant low quality in the 50s, then it meant the best electronics in the world by the 70s. But China's transformation happened even faster. In roughly a decade, they went from knockoff smartphones to homegrown EVs that compete head-to-head with Tesla.
The numbers are insane. By purchasing-power parity (PPP), China has been the world’s largest economy since the mid-2010s, responsible for roughly a fifth of global output. Chinese labs and firms now lead in the majority of frontier technologies. And in manufacturing, China’s output is larger than the US and EU combined. Yet somehow we still talk about China like it’s “emerging.” Crazy.
Shanghai in 2019
The great leapfrog
In rural Yunnan, I saw this ancient tractor with no hood—engine completely exposed—passing by a swarm of electric motorcycles. That image captures the development curve here: steep and fast.
Take banking. The US went from cash to checks to credit cards to using Venmo a lot. China went straight from cash to mobile payments. They had limited credit card infrastructure, so when Alipay and WeChat showed up, boom—an instant cashless society. Now about a billion Chinese pay with a scan.
Or look at energy. The West spent 150 years building coal plants, then natural gas, then slowly adding renewables. China went from burning coal directly to becoming the world's solar panel factory. They make 80% of all solar panels globally.
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