In December I was fortunate enough to have a LOT of PTO banked up, and I spent almost all of it on 3 weeks in mainland China and Taiwan. I hit 3 cities in the mainland - Beijing, Shanghai, and Zhangjiajie - as well as Taipei in Taiwan.

This wasn't my first time in China. I actually went as a middle schooler for one week. It was an exchange program my middle school had with Beijing No. 5 middle school. This was in the early 2010s, over 14 years ago. My memory is pretty bad and obviously that trip was chaperoned and heavily coordinated, so it definitely felt like my first time in the country this time around. This isn't a travel blog, but I made a bulleted list of random cultural observations I have that might be interesting to go through. So in no particular order here they are:

• The Coffee is quite bad
  • Even really expensive $6.25 cups of coffee were pretty mid - the average cup from a Luckin Coffee was like $1.25. This is not surprising, as tea is vastly more popular in the land that originated tea, but there's SO SO SO many coffee chain shops and it felt like every upper-end mall store had its own cafe... yet all but two cups I had on that trip tasted like Nespresso. The best cup I had was a pour over on the 80th floor of the Taipei 101 at the fanciest buffet I've ever attended, on New Years day.
• Tea culture is not really what I thought it would be
  • Based on Jesse the tea guy on Youtube and some of the tea experiences I have in Asian areas of the US, I'd have thought people would make tea part of their morning routine or go to nice tea houses for entertainment and stuff. This does probably occur, but it's way less common than I expected. People do value their tea, but more often than not the aunties I was with (our hosts and friends of my partner's parents) just carried a thermos of oversteeped leaves they would repeatedly add hot water to. Hot water, by the way, is free at most restaurants and tourist attractions that serve food. Iced or even fridge-cold water? Just as hard to find as in Europe.
• Everywhere seems to be BYOB, which is super cool. Some fancier restaurants like the famous Beijing roast duck places have a corking fee but it's fairly nominal (I think 25-50 yuan?).
• They do not care for American culture
  • This is kind of the opposite of Japan and a lot of Europe in my experience. Chinese people love American brands (most made in the mainland anyways) but I felt like outside of some hyper-trendy areas they could not give less of a shit about American cultural exports. They also don't seem to really find our country remotely interesting, either. In Japan or Europe, it's fairly normal to hear someone try to emulate the American accent for fun or tell us they've been to New York City and loved it; this never happened to us in China. In fact, the few inquisitive Chinese people that did ask follow-ups after learning we were American seemed to pity us XD. It felt like their questions about Trump or the cultural state of the US were more out of concern for our wellbeing than anything. The one place that felt like it was trying to emulate a little bit of American culture was the popular shopping districts in Shanghai, and even then it was really only emulating the overpriced boutique shopping experience of an NYC; I can't really say that's uniquely American.
• There is no such thing as being nosy
  • This one is quite funny and somewhat endearing to me, and mostly applies to older folks (50+), but generally they do not GAF if they're looking over your shoulder at your phone or following you around because you look interesting. It's just normal to them to be nosy like this LOL. We had several older folks follow us from one photo spot to another and look straight into the phone's viewfinder as we posed for photos, sometimes making a "not bad" face as the photo was taken, or nodding in agreement seemingly at the pose we had picked or something. It was so funny by the middle of the trip we had started doing it to. Chinese people do take a lot of photos in public and wow their phones are quite cool.
• Personal space who?
  • Yeah they'll stand in your breathing bubble even while fully outside, or they'll have full on phone calls on speaker while on the bus or the tourist trolley. They'll even speak at the same time as the tour guide. This one irked me like you wouldn't believe, but I guess interrupting people is just not that rude there? Or there's some social hierarchy I'm not understanding.
• Beijing pollution is still really bad. Kathmandu bad maybe, but thankfully not as bad as New Dehli. I do read that this has improved in the last 14 years, but it's still stark as soon as you look out a window and somewhat close buildings are foggy.
• Giant Identical Housing Development Blocks
  • I mean they have 1.3Bn people, so it makes sense that when they develop housing it's a fuck ton of units in identical buildings. This was certainly not the case anywhere downtown or in the shopping districts. In fact, they have some crazy cool large buildings that feel very modern. I think my western brain definitely just immediately jumped to "omg it's all the government", but I don't know if that's fully true. I will say, it does trigger the lifelong western propaganda of 'societies of control' that I grew up with, but I think there are other aspects of China that more starkly emphasize that. For now, I leave you with a meme about seeing 20 identical buildings in suburbs around the major cities.

• Copycat Economy
  • Everything's made in China, and it doesn't take a genius to see that the IP laws in China favor local manufacturers. This results in the fact that every Chinese car and many Chinese products from Android Phones to clothing are very reminiscent of brands that manufacture in China but come from elsewhere. Xiaomi even cloned the iPhone and named it the 'Xiaomi 17 Pro Max' - which according to MKBHD is actually a bit better than the original lmao. Every other chinese car looks like some weird amalgamation of design queues from Tesla to Chevy and everything in between. There are notable exceptions to this: China has crazy and amazing foldable phones, tablets, tech I've never seen in commercial use before, and a lot of their more modern car brands are making cars that are incredibly unique.
  • Sidenote on the car thing... holy shit the cars are so fancy and full of tech. We got in several ubers where the backseats of the vans had fully controllable in-seat AC/heating and every single part of the seat position could be adjusted through a built-in touch screen on the arm rests. Also half the cars don't have rearviews anymore, they are replaced with rear view cameras and digital displays.
• Insane amounts of surveillance
  • It's actually way more stark than I thought it would be even with the western narrative about China. Cameras EVERYWHERE. Our host even said "theres no point in stealing in Beijing, some camera has spotted you and they will find you. There's almost no crime to the point people leave their cars running when they go pick up takeout."
  • The surveillance is so crazy, definitely higher than in the US, though I know for a fact (as I've mentioned Flock before) that the US does do surveillance just in covert and supposedly "public safety"-centric ways.
• The American starvation flight
  • Something that traveling on foreign airlines has really really made me pissed off about is the uniquely bad American starvation flight. Wanna go from LAX to NYC? You get a little bag of peanuts. Wanna go from Shanghai to Beijing (2.5hr flight)? Well if it coincides with meal windows you get a free full meal... in economy class. This is also the case for flights outside of China, and most commonly with non-American airlines. I came back so pissed off hopping on a Un*ted flight and having to bring a sandwich on board so I wouldn't be pissy when I landed on the east coast.
• Being cold is the devil
  • Chinese people believe that being cold is literally the reason for death or something. You can't even be a little chilly. Our first hotel in Beijing had our room cranked up to 26 deg C... (almost 79F). I was so sweaty I slept without the sheets on, and also the room thermostat pretended to adjust but in reality this hotel only had central heating and it was controlled by maintenance. The best they could do for us was open the window... which meant I was breathing smog all night. Rough one. Only the super fancy foreigner-friendly hotels we stayed in after Beijing had a functional A/C we could actually control.
• Shanghai and Beijing have opposite vibes
  • Shanghai is the young, hip, economic powerhouse full of young business people and salary folk. Beijing is the old town full of history but really just slower paced and chill. Beijing is Kyoto without the nature, Shanghai is Tokyo without the insane density.
• Holy fuck the USA is technologically stunted
  • I mentioned it a bit about the cars above and stuff. But holy shit we live in the stone age compared to China it's insane. The tech is mostly piggy-backing on old IP that Chinese manufacturers... acquired... but still. The proliferation and ubiquity of digital living is insane. You cannot pay with cash in most places. You must use a QR code with Alipay or WeChat pay most commonly. Most department stores accept credit cards. The cars are more modern, the phones are more modern (and cheaper), everyone seems to be online all the time and online shopping feels like the way 50% of commerce is conducted. We found almost no brick-and-mortar stores that weren't clothing stores.
  • China is pushing the AI bullshit just as hard as the US, but I'll be honest... at least it feels like the average netizen gets something out of it that's not a bad chatbot spitting out shit code. There was an AI assistant built into one of our hotel rooms in Zhangjiajie, which could take voice commands (in English too) to do everything from turn on or off different lights, warm the bath, close the blinds, turn on the TV and search for a program to watch. Also... mass surveillance + AI shit means that if you're a Chinese citizen you often don't need physical ID to board planes, buses, enter tourist attractions, pay for stays. Half the more popular tourist attractions just scan your face to let you in. Creepy, but at least convenient. All we get in the USA is the right to not strip down to our socks through TSA Pre-check or Global Entry, and that costs money!
• Taiwan is full of grating loud noises
  • The buses play a loud high-pitched beeping noise anytime their blinker is on and you can hear it down the block. Every store seems to have a loud entry ding ding ding. The red light countdown beeps, the train doors closing beeps really loud. It really is not as pleasant as Japan public transit and I honestly was feeling overstimulated just walking around mildly popular streets.
• This one is hard to explain but just trust me bro: Taiwan is giving Japan with Chinese characteristics and therefore ends up being not as fun as Japan and not as interesting as China. The sad effects of colonization...

And that's the bulk of my notes! Long one but I was there for 3 weeks so makes sense.

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