The China That Replaced Mine

A Return After Nearly a Decade to a Country That Never Stays Still

Hutong lanterns reflected against a Beijing window, October 2012 – one month after I first arrived.

I. Back in the Loop

I went back to China last September for the first time in eight years, carrying both anticipation and uncertainty about what I would find.

I hadn’t planned to wait so long. Life, work, and then the pandemic made returning impossible. By fall 2024, the window finally opened—and I jumped through it, eager to reconnect with a place that had once been home.

Getting to China in 2024 wasn’t easy. Direct flights from the U.S. had been gutted—there was only one from DC, operated by China Airlines, and it didn’t align with my travel needs. I ended up taking a long, multi-leg route that turned what used to be a 12-hour journey into a 17+ hour ordeal. The cost was also shockingly high—more than double what I used to pay back in the early 2010s. This physical distance felt symbolic: China isn’t just harder to reach metaphorically; it’s harder to reach, period.

Once in the country, I traveled for two weeks, taking high-speed trains between Beijing, Wuhan, and Shanghai. My main goal was simple: to update my mental model of China. Even though I still read the op-eds, track expert debates, and work in the U.S.-China space, I no longer trusted my gut instincts on China. Context gaps were getting wider. I needed to see it for myself.

One of the central problems in U.S.-China work today—whether you’re hawkish, dovish, or just trying to make sense of it all—is how little reliable information remains accessible. Foreign journalists have been systematically pushed out. COVID made entry nearly impossible for years. And a potent mix of tightening authoritarianism and worsening bilateral ties has choked the flow of students, researchers, and analysts able to spend time on the ground. As a result, those of us in the field are reduced to reading tea leaves from a distance, grasping at signals, operating on increasingly outdated mental models. Everyone is flying half-blind.

This would be problematic for understanding any country, but China doesn’t operate on normal time. Its scale, pace, and political volatility make it uniquely hard to track from afar. It’s one of the few countries where a five-year absence can leave you thirty years behind. I call this the “China-time math.” There’s probably an equation that captures it, but I calculate it with vibes.

But this trip wasn’t just professional. It was deeply personal. I lived in Beijing from 2012 to 2016—first studying Chinese, then doing college consulting, and later teaching current affairs at the university level. That city raised me during my formative years. It’s where I started becoming an adult, where I began dating my now-husband, and where I built friendships and started to make sense of myself in the world.

Having grown up mostly in Mexico City, I’d always felt at home in vibrant, chaotic urban environments. Beijing’s bustling hutongs and constant energy had felt familiar in that way—a different kind of chaos, but one that resonated with me.

I’d always imagined I’d return much sooner. China was supposed to be a post-college gap year before I moved back to Latin America (either Mexico, where I mostly grew up, or Colombia, where my family is from). Instead, it became four transformative years that rerouted my entire career and set me on the path I’m still walking now.

Before I went back, I knew the Beijing I had lived in was gone. The speed of change in China made that inevitable—but the warning signals had been flashing for years. Over the past decade, most of my friends—foreign and Chinese alike—had trickled out. First, they left Beijing for Shanghai, saying Beijing felt more and more like a government city and less like a hipster haven. Then they left China altogether, many between 2019 and 2022, even those who had once sworn they would stay forever.

This trip, I wanted to reconnect with the few old friends who had stayed—or who had returned. Some I hadn’t seen in nearly a decade. I wanted to visit old haunts, retrace familiar paths, and see what had survived. I knew I wouldn’t find the same city, but I hoped I might still find echoes.

What follows are my impressions—now over half a year old, or about two years in China-time math. I was only there for two weeks and only in three cities, so this isn’t comprehensive. But in an era where firsthand perspectives are scarce, I hope this provides at least a bit more texture to the conversation.

II. Welcome to the Super App State

In many ways, China today is the most technologically integrated country I’ve ever seen. It’s not just “cashless”—it’s a fully digitized society where your phone, national ID, and bank account exist as a single integrated system. If you’re Chinese, life flows through one frictionless (and highly surveilled) app after another. If you’re not, you’re navigating a labyrinth designed primarily for domestic users—which makes sense given that the vast majority of users are Chinese citizens.

This technological integration offers tremendous convenience and efficiency for those within the system. Many Chinese citizens I spoke with appreciate how seamlessly everything works compared to the bureaucratic hurdles of the past. For them, the digital transformation represents genuine progress in daily life, even as it creates new challenges for privacy and autonomy.

I got a separate phone just for the trip and reconnected my old WeChat account. That moment was surreal. It was like I’d never left. All my old data was still there—ride histories, chat threads, massage appointments. The massage app I used in 2016 hadn’t just survived—it still had my full transaction history from eight years ago. Prices had barely changed: what cost 200 RMB then now cost just over 250.

That kind of digital continuity was both eerie and oddly comforting. Especially since it’s not the norm. Many of my friends who left China were later locked out of their accounts—unable to reactivate WeChat unless someone with a Chinese ID vouched for them. Why I was able to get in so easily, I’m still not sure. I have theories about potential digital surveillance, but I’ll leave it at that.

This digital persistence—the way your data lingers in suspended animation—stands in stark contrast to the physical changes in the city itself. Your digital ghost remains perfectly preserved while the streets you walked have been transformed beyond recognition.

Still, that sense of seamless reconnection didn’t extend everywhere. Because I no longer had a Chinese bank account, I couldn’t use WeChat Pay. Alipay, which now technically accepts foreign credit cards, was glitchy at best. Every other day, it would freeze and ask me to re-upload my passport and visa. Customer service was polite but endlessly circular. And even when Alipay worked, I could only pay verified businesses—not individuals. That meant I couldn’t split bills or send money to friends. No equivalent of Venmo. Just a lot of awkward workarounds.

Ride-hailing apps like Didi were slightly more functional—but only when accessed through Alipay. Standalone versions either didn’t load or blocked payments. Even when integrated, they only worked about half the time. Food delivery was worse. I tried multiple apps I’d used before, and every time the payment failed. It wasn’t the apps—it was the limits of my foreigner-tagged Alipay account. The moment I hit a prompt asking for a Chinese ID or bank account, I was out.

This created a strange paradox: I was physically present in China, but digitally semi-existent—capable of observing the ecosystem but not fully participating in it. A digital half-life.

And forget cash. People won’t take it. Not even street vendors.

Take Panjiayuan 潘家园, for example. Every single stall at Panjiayuan—the sprawling antiques market in Beijing where I used to spend weekends hunting for treasures—had their own QR code.

But it wasn’t just the cashlessness that was different. Panjiayuan used to feel like treasure hunting: most stalls were full of junk, and you had to dig to find the gems. Negotiation was half the experience. This time, it was completely different. Everything was curated. Nothing looked like garbage. Every stall felt like it was professionally merchandised. The pieces I found—beautiful porcelain, Foo Dogs, intricate metalwork—were both higher quality and cheaper than their equivalents in the U.S. Haggling still existed, but only at the margins. You could tell when a seller meant it—when they really wouldn’t go lower—because the prices actually matched the quality.

The market was undeniably more efficient, more professional, and better organized. The quality of goods was higher, the experience more streamlined. It was impressive. And, paradoxically, less fun. The messy treasure-hunting element that had made it exciting was gone—replaced with something more polished but less joyful. Like so much else in today’s China, it had been optimized at the cost of its soul.

That said, payment was still difficult. On a foreign credit card through AliPay, you can only pay official business accounts. No going dutch with friends at restaurants or sending people a hongbao 紅包 (red envelope) transfer. And no paying small businesses without official business accounts. For one particular seller, she had to find a colleague who could receive my payment into her account and then transfer it to her personal one. She had never had this issue with anybody else because she had never had to deal with foreigners and their glitchy payment system.

That was the larger irony: the more advanced the system, the harder it became to access. Japan has Suica cards. Europe has contactless. These are systems built to be interoperable. China’s tech ecosystem is world-class, but it’s not designed to accommodate outsiders. It’s designed to be closed.

It also made me wonder: what about people inside the system who can’t integrate either? When I lived in China, some families hid second or third children to avoid fines under the one-child policy. Those kids sometimes grew up undocumented—unable to get state services, attend school, or fully participate in society. If those dynamics still exist in some form, how do you navigate an ecosystem that now requires ID-linked everything? What does it mean to be undocumented in a digitized society?

I don’t have those answers. But as tech becomes more dominant—everywhere, not just in China—it’s worth asking: who gets left out? And what happens to them when the future arrives without them?

III. New Pavement, No Pulse

Everything felt more convenient. Less crowded. More streamlined. Service was better, faster, and far more efficient. One of the moments that hit me hardest was when I got on a phone call while riding the train—something I used to do without thinking, and that everyone did all the time. This time, a train attendant politely asked me to stop. I felt uncouth. That kind of public courtesy simply didn’t exist in the same way before.

The experience was jarring in its orderliness. Beijing had once had a quality of spontaneous energy that allowed for unexpected encounters. Now it felt more regulated and streamlined—which undoubtedly represents improved quality of life in many respects, particularly for residents who valued predictability and convenience over the messier aspects of urban life I personally found appealing.

Ironically, I tended to associate this public quietness with Japan, which I also visited recently. Due to the increased number of tourists, Japanese trains are no longer as silent as they used to be. But I digress.

The infrastructure itself is staggering. I’m not just talking about Beijing or Shanghai—those were already modern when I lived there. I’m talking about the places that used to be, to use a technical term, bumblefuck nowhere. Towns that once required convoluted transfers and overnight trains now sit squarely on the high-speed rail grid. They’re not just reachable—they’re regular. Normal. Fully integrated into a national system that makes most Western transportation networks look piecemeal and outdated by comparison.

Airports, stations, sidewalks, streets—it all feels freshly built. The grime is gone. Everything is smooth and gleaming. And yes, it’s impressive. But the feeling it left me with was more complicated.

When I returned to Beijing, I deliberately wandered through the hutongs within the Second Ring Road—the heart of my old life. I used to know it block by block. It was gritty, cluttered, chaotic, alive. Now, I got lost over and over. Everything had been flattened into clean lines and silence. The snack stalls, tiny storefronts, winding bars—they were gone. Even the wonky sidewalk tiles had been redone to perfect uniformity.

For context, hutongs are the historic alleyways that once formed Beijing’s soul—narrow, winding passages between traditional courtyard homes, some dating back centuries. They were living, breathing communities where multiple generations shared communal spaces, hung laundry across alleys, and lived in a jumble of improvised additions. The hutongs I remembered were organically evolved rather than centrally planned.

It’s worth noting that while I found charm in these spaces, many residents also faced challenges in these older neighborhoods—limited indoor plumbing, heating issues, cramped quarters, and aging infrastructure. The improvements brought real quality-of-life benefits for many longtime residents who remained, even as the character of the neighborhoods changed dramatically.

Beijing used to feel like a strange hybrid of Foggy Bottom and Bushwick—part stiff political capital, part hipster haven. It was full of artists, policy nerds, students, poets creating in the cracks of the system. Foreigners weren’t just passing through—they were woven into the city’s fabric. There was this energy of exchange, of mess, of creative collision: the productive friction of different worlds rubbing against each other.

The underground creative scene was particularly vibrant. There were countless hidden music venues and speakeasies tucked away in the hutongs. I remember a “swords bar” where people would drink mead and fight with LARPing medieval suits and swords right next to a tiki bar—what a combination! Or an arrow-throwing bar with a pet pig that roamed around (dangerous but cute). These quirky, non-mainstream spaces fostered a sense of discovery and possibility that’s largely vanished.

To give you some context, during my time living in Beijing, some expats equated the city to Paris in the 1920s due to the plethora of artists, intellectuals, and the sheer energy of creation, all done by people from all over the world. Like anything China-related, people had very strong opinions for or against this characterization. Some rightly pointed out the colonial undertones of such comparisons, while others saw genuine parallels in the creative ferment. Either way, none of these semantic discussions matter for this story—what matters is that Beijing felt electric to many people at the time, including me, despite its contradictions.

Now that energy is gone. The city is clean. It’s efficient. But it’s also been curated into sterility—the urban equivalent of those perfectly merchandised stalls at Panjiayuan, impressive but lacking spontaneity.

One Saturday night, I decided to walk through the hutongs just to see what the city still felt like. I stayed within the Second Ring Road, weaving through old streets I once knew by heart. Outside of Nanluoguxiang 南锣鼓巷 and Great Leap Brewing, the hutongs were eerily silent. Before, they were alive with bars, street vendors selling chuan’r 串 (Chinese kebabs, which the character endearingly looks like), people chatting, drinking, lingering in alleyways. Now, everything was dark. Quiet. Residential. It didn’t feel unsafe exactly—but it did feel empty. Like a ghost town with nice paving.

The shift in Beijing wasn’t just organic—it was top-down. Years ago, the city launched a significant urban renewal campaign that involved relocating residents, closing businesses, and redeveloping entire communities. The “great brickening“—marked by the character chai 拆 painted on buildings slated for demolition—was a visible symbol of this transformation. When hutongs were marked with the 拆 character, it meant demolition was imminent.

This redevelopment had complex impacts. While some buildings were preserved for their historical value, others were simply destroyed or “improved” beyond recognition. Many small business owners and residents were forced out in the process, fundamentally altering the social fabric of these neighborhoods. At the same time, the renewal brought improved infrastructure, better sanitation, and more regulated spaces that benefited many who remained. As with most large-scale urban changes, there were both winners and losers in this transformation.

Wuhan, which I visited for the first time, offered a different comparison. It was enormous—so sprawling that I joked with a friend, “How did COVID even happen here? It’s so spread out.” The city felt clean, developed, efficient. I didn’t have a past version to compare it to, but it fit neatly into the new China: megacity energy without the old grit. It did have street stalls, however. That was comforting.

Shanghai still had energy—and a certain artistic flair—but even that felt different. It wasn’t rebellious or weird. It just felt like the only place left where things could still happen without someone’s sign-off.

Everything is smoother. Everything works better. But the version of China I had called home for four years—the disorganized, slightly chaotic, strangely thrilling one—was not there anymore. Or at least not in the places I visited.

IV. The Vanishing Foreigner

One moment that crystallized how much had shifted was at a high-end hotel in Shanghai.

This wasn’t some off-brand place. It was part of a major international chain—one I’d stayed at during work trips when I lived in China. The building also houses several floors of foreign company offices, and the hotel regularly hosts international clientele. It’s a business hotel specifically designed for global travelers.

So I was shocked when the staff couldn’t speak English at a professional level. I found myself defaulting to Chinese—decent, but rusty. At first I thought maybe it was me, or just a fluke. But then a friend who visited a few months later had the exact same experience at a similarly positioned hotel.

In 2016, these hotels had prided themselves on staff who could switch effortlessly between languages. English proficiency was a selling point, a marker of international standards. Now it seemed almost an afterthought—not because of any decline in education but because the international clientele these skills once served had largely vanished.

This wouldn’t have caught my attention in other types of hotels or other cities. But it was striking for Shanghai. This was, after all, China’s most cosmopolitan city, historically saturated with foreigners, generally fluent in English, and shaped by over a century of global exchange and colonialism. During my previous visits, you’d hear multiple languages just walking down the street. Now? Days would pass without seeing another foreigner.

This absence felt particularly jarring in Shanghai because of its history as China’s gateway to the world. The Bund—that iconic waterfront strip with its colonial-era buildings—was built as a statement of international presence. Now it felt more like a museum piece than a living embodiment of global exchange.

Even in hotspots like Panjiayuan in Beijing, which used to be crawling with foreign antique-hunters from across the globe, I kept bumping into the same three foreigners over and over again—doing the same circuit. That’s how few foreigners remained in spaces once defined by international presence.

The only places where I consistently saw other non-Chinese faces were within embassy and consulate compounds or in specific foreign businesses. These enclaves felt increasingly separate from everyday Chinese life—institutional bubbles rather than integrated parts of the city.

V. Gen Z, A Generation Behind the Firewall

More than just foreign absence, I noticed a generational shift in engagement with the wider world. When I was last in China, many Chinese millennials—my peers—had studied abroad, interacted with foreigners, or at least used social media platforms that connected them with global culture. Many of my students had accounts on international platforms from before access became more restricted. They grew up during the 2000s and early 2010s, when international engagement was more actively encouraged under China’s previous development strategies.

Gen Z in China has had a different experience. They came of age during a period of changing priorities in international engagement, culminating in COVID lockdowns, with fewer opportunities for international travel, educational exchanges, and spontaneous cross-cultural interactions. Their digital experience is primarily through domestic platforms—Douyin instead of TikTok, WeChat instead of WhatsApp, Bilibili instead of YouTube. This isn’t inherently better or worse, just different—creating an experience more distinctly Chinese and less internationally hybrid than what I observed in previous generations.

That said, it would be a mistake to view this generation as isolated or unaware. Many young Chinese I met were sophisticated about international affairs, just from a different perspective. Their understanding comes through different channels and information sources than their Western counterparts, leading to different—but not necessarily less informed—worldviews.

I saw this most clearly at Beijing West Station. It’s a massive transportation hub handling millions of passengers daily, but if you don’t have a Chinese national ID, you can’t just scan your way through the automated gates. There’s a side gate for the elderly, disabled, pregnant women—and foreigners. I waited in that line while everyone else sailed through the high-tech turnstiles.

A Gen Z woman, maybe 23, helped me. I handed her my printed train ticket and passport. She paused, clearly confused by the dark blue booklet in her hands. Then she turned to a colleague and asked what to do. He said, “Just scan her passport.” She came back and scanned a blank visa page.

It wasn’t incompetence. It was unfamiliarity. She had probably never handled a foreign passport before. She’d likely never traveled abroad. And she’d clearly never been trained for this scenario. I was foreign in a way that had become alien—a rare exception to a system designed for uniformity.

This was a stark contrast to the Beijing I remembered, where station attendants had routinely processed foreigners and often spoke basic English phrases to help international travelers navigate.

Older people—Gen X, older Millennials—were noticeably more confident engaging with me. You could tell they had worked with foreigners before during China’s more internationally oriented period. Many had studied English during an era when it was considered essential for career advancement. Some even smiled in recognition when I switched languages, as if reconnecting with a part of their past. They’d lived through the globalizing phase of the 1990s and 2000s—when China was actively joining the world.

Gen Z hasn’t.

Their hesitation wasn’t hostile. It was curious, but distant. Polite, but disconnected. I didn’t feel unwelcome. I just felt… unfamiliar.

That lack of exposure matters. You can’t relate to a world you’ve never touched, even virtually. And that gap isn’t just cultural—it’s emotional.

And it makes me wonder what that means about China’s future.

One brief exception to this pattern occurred months after my trip, when Chinese TikTokers and Western users briefly connected over RedNote, creating a rare moment of cultural engagement. But even this flare of interaction quickly faded—a momentary glimpse of what global digital exchange could look like, rather than a sustained bridge.

VI. From Ambition to Resignation

When I lived in Beijing a decade ago, there was a restlessness in the air. It wasn’t always pretty. It was chaotic, messy, bursting at the seams. But it felt like a country on the move—filled with young people trying to hustle their way up, migrants from other provinces chasing opportunities, foreigners bouncing between languages, jobs, and visas. People were hungry. You could feel it in the streets.

This time, the hunger was gone.

What replaced it wasn’t stillness. China is never still. There are too many people, too much movement. But it felt subdued. Like the air pressure had dropped before a storm. The same cities that once felt electric now felt... tired. Not developing-world tired, but a different kind of exhaustion—the fatigue of a system that had sprinted too long without a clear finish line. At least compared to my “China” reference point from a decade ago, when the future seemed limitless and the only question was how high China would rise.

Some of this shift is pure economics. China’s double-digit growth rate at the beginning of the millennium was never going to continue in the long run—no economy maintains that pace forever. The country had reached the middle-income stage where growth naturally slows.

A lot of it was also COVID-related. The pandemic took a particularly heavy toll on Chinese people due to the draconian “zero-COVID” policies imposed on them. Major cities like Shanghai endured months of harsh lockdowns that the rest of the world had long abandoned. For a while, people even protested with blank sheets of paper to avoid censorship while still expressing dissent—a powerful symbol of the constraints they operated under. You can tell people are exhausted, and often quietly resentful of the sacrifices demanded of them during those years.

Some of that, of course, is also age. People are older. I’m older. We all see the world less brightly with time. But even Gen Z—the shop attendants, the ticket agents, the kids in trendy cafes—carried a different energy from what I remembered in young Chinese people a decade ago. Not jaded, not cynical, just dulled. Like they were living in a country that no longer expected anything exceptional from them beyond compliance.

This contrasted sharply with the young people I knew in 2016, who spoke constantly of startups, opportunities, and “China’s century.” Back then, ambition wasn’t just personal—it was national, collective, shared. Now it felt more like people were focused on getting by rather than getting ahead.

Conversations with friends and former students reflected the same shift. I was careful not to push too hard in these discussions—partly out of respect for their privacy, partly because I didn’t know what topics were safe to discuss anymore given the tightened political climate. I was working at the U.S. State Department at the time, in a role focused on subnational engagement that would have been considered innocuous in the past, but in today’s climate of heightened suspicion, even this connection carried potential risk. I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable or create problems for them after I left.

The people I met with were now scattered across vastly different sectors and life stages. Some were working in education, others in business, some in the arts. The common thread? A sense of professional stagnation that transcended industry. Across the board, people told me it felt like they were working harder for less—less security, less mobility, less potential upside. Those who had previously worked in the U.S.-China space—once a booming field with endless opportunities—had mostly pivoted to other careers out of necessity. The bilateral relationship’s deterioration had eliminated entire career paths that once seemed promising.

But beyond work, life had marched on in familiar rhythms. People had gotten married, had children, bought homes (albeit at eye-watering prices in major cities). It mirrored what’s happening to many of my peers globally in an era of diminishing expectations—just with a heavier undercurrent of constraint, like everyone had adjusted their ambitions downward in response to both economic reality and political boundaries.

I deliberately avoided bringing up politics during these reunions. I asked about their lives. Their families. Their jobs. Where they were living now. I just wanted to reconnect with them as people—people I had cared about, people whose lives I had lost touch with because we no longer inhabited the same digital spaces. (It’s a strange realization, how much of our emotional continuity with others now depends on which platforms we can access—the Great Firewall had created not just information divides but relationship divides as well.)

But even without my prompting, some people brought up politics on their own. Or rather—they tried to, in ways that revealed how much had changed.

What stood out most was how often people didn’t explicitly say what they were trying to communicate.

Instead of speaking directly, they would make subtle gestures. Meaningful facial expressions. Strategically long pauses. Coded signs. I remember sitting across from someone I had known for years, initially wondering if they were having a medical episode, only to realize they were essentially playing charades about sensitive topics. Whole complex ideas about current events reduced to eye movements and half-formed hand signals—a sophisticated form of communication that bypassed verbal expression entirely.

At first I was confused. Then I caught on. They weren’t being vague because they didn’t trust me. They were concerned about potential monitoring of conversations. About phones potentially recording discussions. About who might be watching, even in public, even in innocuous settings.

Some people went further—physically turning off their phones, or pointing at them to explain why they couldn’t say something aloud.

That would have been less common in 2016.

Back then, people were generally more comfortable speaking candidly—especially one-on-one, especially outside formal settings. Once they trusted you, they’d typically share their thoughts more openly. But this time, there seemed to be more caution in the air. Not overwhelming or panicked. Just present.

It wasn’t fear in the theatrical sense. No one screamed or ran or whispered dramatically. It was something quieter—more like a habit of discretion. Friends used gestures instead of speaking directly about certain topics. They used indirect references. Phones were turned off, moved to the side, pointed at like unwelcome eavesdroppers. This wasn’t universal—many conversations remained completely normal—but the pattern was noticeable.

That said, I was also working for the United States government at the time, and this fact probably did increase the level of caution among my contacts, understandably so. It wouldn’t surprise me if this influenced the dynamic, and that would mean that my experience wasn’t necessarily representative of how most people communicate.

It reminded me of something I’ve started to see more in the U.S., too. Not from security professionals—just regular people becoming more conscious about their digital privacy. Concerns about data collection that used to be considered fringe are slowly becoming mainstream.

But in China, this awareness seemed more developed and normalized.

And so I sat with old friends, noticed their careful communication styles, and realized I was observing how technology and social norms shape conversation in different contexts. Not dramatic political repression, but something more subtle—a careful navigation of what is discussed and how, influenced by both government policies and technological systems.

VII. Conclusion: China Built the Future. It Just Doesn’t Need You in It.

There’s no denying it—China is developed.

Not “developing with caveats.” Not “emerging.” Developed.

Claims about China being a developing country—often made in international trade and climate negotiations—feel even more disconnected from reality than they did in 2016. When I lived there, I could at least understand the argument, given the stark urban-rural divide and pockets of genuine poverty. Not anymore. (And yes, I acknowledge the limitations of my perspective—I only spent two weeks in three major cities. Rural China might tell a different story. Still, the transformation is undeniable.)

The infrastructure alone makes this development status obvious. From the ultra-fast trains connecting even formerly remote regions, to the seamless integration of daily life into a single phone ecosystem, to the pristine streets of its megacities—China looks and operates like one of the most technologically advanced nations on earth. The gap between Chinese infrastructure and that of the United States is no longer even a contest in many areas—China is simply ahead.

I’ve traveled extensively in the last two years—France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Uzbekistan. Nowhere I’ve seen is as digitally integrated as China. Not even close. Other countries have digital payments, smart transportation, advanced infrastructure—but they’re still discrete systems rather than a single unified ecosystem. Nowhere else has achieved China’s level of integration between your ID, your money, your transportation, your communications, your entire life. For pure convenience, it’s unmatched.

China has eliminated virtually all the daily friction that exists in developing infrastructure—the small inefficiencies that collectively consume time and energy—creating a seamlessness that even the most advanced Western economies haven’t achieved.

What’s left is a country that is, by many technical and infrastructure measures, ahead of the curve. And at the same time, it appears to be pursuing a development path that prioritizes internal cohesion over international integration. China is more modern than ever, but increasingly following its own distinct trajectory rather than convergent development with Western models.

This challenges a central assumption of globalization theory from the 1990s and 2000s: that economic development would necessarily lead to greater political openness and integration with global norms. China has demonstrated that a nation can selectively engage with aspects of globalization while maintaining its own distinct systems and priorities.

This self-contained development is evident in initiatives like “Made in China 2025,” which aims to reduce dependency on foreign technology and expertise. The digital ecosystem that makes life difficult for foreigners, the barriers facing international businesses, researchers, and journalists—these aren’t bugs in the system, they’re features. They reflect a deliberate strategy to develop on China’s own terms, without the external influences that once seemed inevitable companions to modernization.

Maybe China will reopen more fully to the world. Maybe it won’t. But whatever happens next, it will be on China’s terms, not due to external pressure or inevitable forces of globalization. And increasingly, those of us outside China will be peering in through whatever narrow windows China chooses to provide—trying to understand a system that no longer needs outside validation or participation to thrive.

In the end, I realize I lived in a version of China that no longer exists. That iteration—gritty, strange, alive, contradictory—was the China I experienced and internalized. But China was never mine to hold or define. It has always been vast, shapeshifting, older than any of us and fundamentally unbothered by our attachments or interpretations.

I’ve seen similar urban transformations in Mexico City’s Roma neighborhood, which used to be gritty and hip when I’d visit friends during college breaks. Now it’s still cool, but has become very international, reminiscent of Los Angeles—in part due to an influx of U.S. remote workers. It feels nice but much more curated than before.

What’s striking is how different types of development create similar effects. In Mexico City, the sanitizing force was foreign influence; in Beijing, it was internal policy. Yet both result in something more orderly but less spontaneous.

Interestingly, as China has become more difficult to access physically, its global presence has only expanded. In Mexico City today, you can find high-end Chinese restaurants, markets, and businesses established by Chinese companies avoiding U.S. tariffs while accessing North American markets. I’ve enjoyed these connections, speaking Chinese with newcomers and accessing aspects of Chinese culture that would otherwise be harder to reach now. It’s a reminder that even as China’s development model has become more distinct, its international footprint continues to grow—a complexity that defies simple narratives about isolation versus engagement.

The Beijing I became an adult in, the people I knew, the rhythms I once moved through—they were all part of a particular chapter. What I saw in late last year is another. And there will be more.

China has been many things across centuries: empire, revolution, experiment, machine. It morphs fast, unapologetically. The only constant is change. Even the China I saw half a year ago is likely already receding in the rearview.

The one thing that stayed the same is that nothing stays the same. And maybe that’s the most honest thing I can say about it.