Travel Back to China: 2026 Edition

Here is the 2026 version of my travel back to China blog. In the last blog of the series, I said I would try my best to continue it. While this year’s blog is a little bit late (we already passed mid-year of 2026!), it’s still better than nothing. If I can give myself an excuse, I’ve been busy since I came back, with both work and my side project. It doesn’t help that we went back later than before this time, during Chinese New Year instead of the Christmas season.

Electric Vehicles, Robots and High Speed Trains

Compared to last year’s saga, which detoured through Europe both ways, we chose to make it simpler this time with a direct flight to Beijing. We thought it would be easier, which turned out to be only partially true: the overall time spent was less but it’s more difficult to handle a single long trip. My daughter only slept about 3 hours on a 12-hour trip and was very tired when we arrived in Beijing. My head was very heavy because I didn’t sleep much either. We took a taxi from the airport to the hotel, where we would spend one night and take a train back to my hometown the next day. The car that showed up was an electric vehicle.

Nowadays, electric vehicles are so common in China that you can hardly get a gas powered car from rideshare platforms. They not only cost much less per mile, but also come with so many choices in all price ranges. When I first came to Canada, cars in North America were much cheaper than in China. Now it’s the opposite. Lots of upgrades are also included by default without any additional cost. To make the deal even better, the government also gives subsidies if you trade in old cars. My sister-in-law bought a new EV for less than $6000 when she traded in a very old car that was worth less than $500. I talked with the taxi driver on the way to the hotel. He has a daughter who studied in Australia and is working there now. When we talked about electric vehicles, he agreed the price is really good for EVs, but also said the battery may be very expensive to replace when it reaches the end of its lifespan, which is about seven years. Replacing it may cost almost as much as the price of a new car. We also talked about the Canadian prime minister’s visit to China that happened just weeks before. Canada and China reached a deal to open the Canadian market to 40,000 Chinese EVs per year. Canada followed the lead of the US to impose 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs a few years ago. It’s funny that when Trump breaks up with the allies, China suddenly seems to be a much better and more stable business partner.

The hotel was just next to the train station. We arrived late at night. A man in his 60s helped us move the luggage into the hotel. It’s not very clear whether he worked for the hotel or for the government. He had a desk in the hotel lobby that functioned as a tiny police station, with signs and some equipment. The only thing I could be sure of was that he was not a police officer, even if he worked for the government. He would be more like a contractor, which is very common in China. The Chinese government take very serious security measures for high foot traffic places like train station, so I was not surprised to see such a setup. The old man was very kind and asked me to sit in the lobby when waiting for my wife to check in, since I was holding my daughter and had lots of luggages. After entering the room, my daughter had a nosebleed because of the dry air. After calming her down, we finally had a good sleep before waking up very early because of jet lag. When closing the blinds, I saw two policemen patrolling with riot restraining forks and shields on the sidewalk. The night was dark and cold, and there was no one else outside.

We had breakfast in the hotel the next day. The food was simple but very typical for a Chinese breakfast, which made me feel at home instantly. A small robot came out from the elevator when we were waiting in the hallway. My daughter was afraid of it at first, but was happy to say hi after a while. Apparently, robotics is one of the trending industries in China. Spring Festival Gala, once the most important Chinese New Year show, had a performance featuring robots dancing last year. This year, it featured more sophisticated robots that can do things like Chinese Kung Fu. When we were leaving China from Beijing a few weeks later, the hotel we booked also had robots. When people need something, instead of a human bringing it to the door, a robot will do that. It also works for food delivery: the delivery person scans a barcode on the robot, the robot opens its door so the delivery person can put the food in, and then it takes the elevator and navigates to the customer’s room all by itself. Whenever you want to eat something, even late at night, you can have it delivered to the door in a very short time, no matter whether you are at home or at the hotel. That’s the convenience that a lot of overseas Chinese miss. The convenience and low cost are possible because of delivery platforms’ ability to squeeze labor from delivery workers with the help of algorithms, and now with the help of robots.

We went to the train station after breakfast. If you ask me what I missed most about China, high speed trains would be one of them. They’re convenient, fast, and comfortable. China is a vast country. It has developed very fast, but the development across different regions is very unbalanced. In Beijing’s train station, you can observe such unbalanced development very clearly since there are people from all over China. Some are upper class in the most developed regions (Beijing is one of them), and some are from the countryside that lags behind (ironically, Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing, is one such region). I didn’t really notice this when I was in China, since it had been like that since I was born. But when going back once a year, the contrast between the people is more obvious to me than before. Think about it: China developed so fast in the past few decades that an older person from an underdeveloped region may have lived a life comparable to that of people in Western developed countries centuries ago. What would you feel if Victorian era farmers were in the same space as Wall Street elites, especially in a place like a Chinese train station that is so shiny and has high-tech high speed trains?

High speed trains also make it very easy to actually go to a different region and experience it. Less than one hour after the train started, the perfect blue sky in Beijing changed to thick fog because of air pollution. Beijing sacrifies its surrounding areas, Hebei province specifically, for almost everything. There is a saying that Hebei is too far away from heaven and too close to Beijing. To make Beijing’s air quality better, the government banned coal for heating in Hebei. While lots of rural people cannot afford natural gas for heating, the government gave subsidies in the first few years. But this year, the subsidies have expired, so lots of people, often elderly people who have little savings or income, have no choice but to bare the cold. That’s why as soon as the train was out of Hebei, the air quality became so much worse. So I hate it when people have just heard or experienced something about China, and then come to a quick conclusion that China’s standard of living is much better or worse than in Western countries: China is a big country. There is no way you can have a single standard of living.

We transferred through another train station because it’s faster that way. When I went to the washroom in the station, there was a long row of urinals. At the end of the row and at the very back of the washroom, there was a small room. An old man was in there, who I suppose was the janitor, having lunch with the door open. When we finally arrived at the train station in our hometown, someone picked us up through the VIP passage, even though I don’t think it makes much difference for such a small station. But you know, they were able to pull some strings to use the VIP passage, and it’s a way of showing hospitality.

A Holiday Back to Business

We went home during Chinese New Year for the holiday vibe, but the holiday was underwhelming compared to two years ago, the first Chinese New Year after the Covid lockdown. I wrote about it in 2024’s travel back to China blog: there were lots of fireworks. This time, there were basically none. The holiday was still a holiday, but it went back to the pre-Covid times. It’s like the trauma and drama caused by Covid have been over, and now it’s business as usual. I think both the people and the government have been tired of the tension and fights during Covid. Compared to all the wars that are happening around the world and the political drama in the US, China in the past year has been quiet. Even many paused or abandoned real estate projects have been restarted and some have been finished. I talked in last year’s travel back to China blog about how it seems I was living two kinds of life: slow and peaceful in Canada, fast and adventurous in China. However, the past year seems to be the reverse: with the moving and AI, the Canada part was eventful and the China part was quiet.

Let me talk more about the quiet part. First, it’s quiet where I was living. We stayed at my sister-in-law’s place, and it is in a newly developed area, which I talked about briefly in the 2024 blog post as well. The newly developed area doesn’t have a lot of commercial areas or other interesting things going on. So people usually need to go out by car, or more popularly, by electric bike. An electric bike is not a very good option with a toddler in the winter, so we mostly went out by car or stayed inside. It created a strange feeling for me: it felt like I was not exactly back in my hometown, even though I was. I didn’t really have many opportunities to walk the streets where I grew up. To be fair, they’re not really far away. It’s just that, with the kid and the packed schedule to visit family members, there was really not much time to go there on purpose. At most I went to places there by car, point to point, but it’s very different from walking and wandering the streets. Because of this, I even started to think about buying a small place near the old area just for when we were back.

Second, as I felt anxious about how AI would change the industry and the world, my hometown seemed to be isolated from it, and gave me a place to calm down. There are no people constantly talking about the impact of AI. Yes, people are still using AI, but it’s just like a good tool that you buy from a shop: there is less hype and debate about it. People just use it when they feel like it, without really worrying about AI destroying society. To be clear, as I said before, China is a big country, so attitudes toward AI are also very different between big cities and small towns. A lot of impactful LLMs, or I’d say most of the impactful open weight models, come from China, like DeepSeek, Qwen, and so on. The majority of people in China see technological advancement as a good thing that is not up for debate. The schools teach again and again that the tragedies of modern Chinese history happened because China fell behind in science and technology. From my observations, Chinese developers accepted AI coding with less struggle than Western ones. Even for the ones who don’t like it, they feel like this is the future. There are lots of theories in Western tech forums like Hacker News about the motivation behind Chinese companies sharing the models for free, talking about the Chinese government’s plan to defeat America’s AI lead and so on. I think the reality is much simpler: the people who work on it and make it open weight do it just because it’s cool. There is no grand scheme.

Capitalism Within Socialism

It’s not to say there was nothing happening at all. Even though there were seemingly few big events, everyday life is much more vibrant than in a North American suburb. Even for the newly developed area I just talked about, the density is very high, if not higher than in the old area. Many shopping malls and streets are packed with people. The variety of consumer products blows Canada away. In Canada, even for many big brands, lots of models are usually not available. But in China, ironically, you may find the same product under many different brands. Especially on the Internet, you can almost buy every niche thing you can think of. I spent lots of time browsing them on the online markets, and it’s fun to see lots of different things like IoT devices and niche tech gadgets. I bought something to DIY a device for my daughter: an ESP32 based music player that plays music by inserting NFC cards. The manufacturing capacity and powerful,low cost logistics really shine in China. All of this inspires innovation.

I once talked with a Chinese immigrant when I took an Uber ride in Canada. He used to sell products in China. When he migrated to Canada, the shipping cost in Canada killed the business. He seemed to have some regrets, talking about how the people he knew in the same business all got very rich with the development of China in the past decades. It’s hard to imagine that China has developed so fast. This time when I was in China, my father and I once walked on a street of antique shops. We saw an old Chinese wheelbarrow. My father told me when he was young, the whole village only had one of that.

It also helps that the zoning rules are not very strict in China: there are lots of street stalls that sell all kinds of things: breakfast, street food, fruits, clothes, toys, books, cookware, and so on, especially during the holiday season. Officially, many of them are not legal. But in China, that is not a problem. Since the Reform and Opening-up, many things have been in a gray area or technically illegal, but they are critical for the economy, so they were rarely enforced. The government actually likes this ambiguity since it allows experiments like private ownership under communist ideology, and it can turn them into law if the experiments look good, or hold some people responsible if they go bad. For street stalls, even if they are technically illegal, most people love them for the convenience. In the early age of Chinese social media, the officials who enforce rules against street stalls were probably some of the most hated people. They became a meme that represented unethical and violent government enforcement. A popular joke at the time was that, given 3000 such enforcement officers, reclaiming Taiwan would be a piece of cake. As street stalls became the status quo, the previous Premier Li Keqiang even encouraged the “street stall economy”. But there is never a clear policy, and the street stalls often swing back and forth based on the small political climate, like I mentioned in last year’s travel back to China blog: the street food stalls contracted to a nearby street when there was an event for being a “clean city”. Even with the ups and downs, street stalls have always been a critical part of small cities’ daily life and absorbed lots of unemployed people while providing convenience to the community. Compared to Toronto, where the number of food truck licenses has been frozen since 2002, I always think about this: instead of only having parking lots surrounding GO Train stations, what if we just allowed some food stalls near them so that people could buy some breakfast or coffee on the way to work, and buy some groceries on the way back. Now almost everyone has a car.

There are abundant products and services in China, but the problem is you need to pay for them. Which sounds like needless to say, but it makes a big difference for raising a kid. In Canada, there are lots of outdoor playgrounds in the parks, lots of libraries and community centers that provide not only books, but also all kinds of activities and community events. There are also lots of free EarlyON programs. But in China, at least in my hometown, while there are some free outdoor playgrounds, often inside residential compounds built by real estate companies as a selling point, many of the more interesting playgrounds are not free, and there are lots of them around busy malls and streets. There is only one library in the city, and it’s very far away and almost in the middle of nowhere. So even reading books needs a membership of some bookstore if you don’t want to buy them. Most of the time when taking my daughter outside, we need to spend some money, like doing arts and crafts, taking a small train, buying a membership for some playgrounds, or buying a membership for bookstores. The most difficult part is not paying for things; it’s the hesitation when my daughter wants something that makes me feel bad sometimes.

Not only things related to kids. Rumor says one of the reasons that the holiday vibe is not so strong this year is that public celebrations like light decorations and drone shows were cancelled so that events in admission based parks can have more visitors.

I find these all very interesting: in Western countries like the US and Canada, the upper class controls the resources and rules with capitalism, and compensates the lower class with socialist policies like free publicly owned infrastructure. In China, by contrast, the upper class controls the resources and rules through strong executive power and state owned companies, while the lower class and everyday life is compensated by capitalism.

School District? Hema District!

In my hometown, the variety of products comes with one exception: fresh dairy products. It’s especially hard to find cheese or yogurt without sugar. It doesn’t matter to me, but my daughter loves those. There was a big milk scandal in 2008, which impacted lots of dairy products, including baby formula. Many big brands were involved and nearly 300,000 children were affected. Since then, trust in food safety has never recovered, especially for baby food. People buy baby formula from overseas if they can, and generally keep using baby formula instead of cow milk until a much older age than is typical in Canada.

So when some overseas brands like Costco and Sam’s Club opened up in China, they attracted many people. For a small city like my hometown, there are no such brands yet, but a domestic brand called Hema (盒马鲜生, which literally means box, horse, and fresh food, but uses a clever pun that sounds exactly like Mr. Hippo in Chinese) opened recently. Hema is a fresh food brand under Alibaba, the largest Chinese online retailer. The brand is usually not a big deal in big cities. To my knowledge, it’s not even known for good quality in big cities. The selling point is more about a convenient grocery shopping experience, with delivery options and long open hours. But when it opened in a small city like my hometown, it was a big deal because it brought lots of products that are hard to find in local grocery stores, like fresh milk, unsweetened yogurt, baby snacks, imported beer, and so on, with the ability for fast delivery to nearby areas. People even jokingly call the delivery area “Hema district homes”, like a school district. You know how much Chinese people value education, so you know what a big deal this is.

At least it made my life easier since I can easily buy fresh dairy products for my daughter. And the quality seems to be good. They have grills and hotpots in store so that you can buy fresh meat and vegetables and eat them there directly. I never tried it, but it looked nice. The place was always packed with people, at least during the holiday. This is another example of something from big cities coming to small cities, which makes me feel like while big city development seems to be weak, there is visible development in small towns, which I talked about in 2024’s travel back to China blog.

Even people eating in other hotpot restaurants sometimes order meat to be delivered from Hema. Not sure if it’s really allowed by the restaurants, but there was a sign in front of the Hema store that says it can deliver to the restaurants directly, which was a surprise to me.

A less controversial thing is ordering alcohol from the online platforms to be delivered to the restaurants. This is a new thing I found out this year. In the past, people usually brought Baijiu, a type of strong liquor in China, which can be expensive and hard to guarantee the authenticity of the brands, so it justifies customers bringing their own. But now, people also order beer from online platforms to be delivered to the restaurants directly, which used to be a large part of restaurants’ profits. The restaurants in general seem to be fine with that. This online alcohol ordering platform really surprised me and made me feel like I was falling behind the times.

New Technology and Ancient Traditions

Not only food delivery, but many parts of everyday life have been integrated into digital platforms. Few people have cash on them anymore. People use either WeChat or Alipay, or both. Not only do people rarely use cash, but lots of vendors don’t want cash either. A new thing I’ve found is that almost every shop, big or small, has adopted a new type of Alipay device that supports face scanning, NFC, and QR codes. It took me a bit of time to figure out how to use it at first, since I was not sure where it scans QR codes and whether it supports WeChat. This is pretty wild, considering I was back from a “developed” country and work in the tech industry. This happened at the train station when I was ordering some Chinese fast food. The cashier was pretty confused and impatient when I asked her how to pay. She pointed to the payment device as if it were the most basic thing that even a kid should know. She was at least a generation older than me.

Playing Mahjong is an activity I usually do with old friends when we meet up. We usually find a small shop that provides the space. This year, I found the old place we usually went to didn’t even accept payment at the counter anymore: you need to buy time from an online platform, which again seems like something everyone should already have installed, and input how many hours you want to play. Then the lights, Mahjong machine, and AC in a selected room would turn on automatically. When time is up, all of them will be turned off automatically. There is no remote for the AC. The customers are expected to use their phones as the remote, which iPhones don’t support because of the lack of IR. When I wanted to buy a drink, they only had a vending machine with another Alipay device to pay. This time I didn’t figure out how to use it since I deleted my Alipay account a few years ago. My friend paid for it in the end.

When buying things like tickets, there are usually cheaper options on online platforms than buying at the gate. Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) is one such platforms. I don’t have it installed either. To my surprise, my grandparents and my wife’s grandma don’t really watch TV anymore. They watch Douyin all the time. They are all in their 80s.

While having the newest technology at their fingertips, people still turn to ancient traditions quite often, even more so in recent years, at least from my observation of my hometown. There are lots of Chinese massage clinics that provide all kinds of healthcare. Some provide more legit services like regular massage and acupuncture, and some are more sketchy, claim to be able to cue hard to treat conditions like nearsightedness. The latter ones operate more like a pyramid scheme, where upper level sells products and/or collect tuition.

There are also more superstitions. The most ridiculous one I saw this time was when I took my daughter to the aquarium. There was a shrine for a turtle specimen. Turtles are an important symbol in Chinese culture and religions for its long life, but for a place like an aquarium that is supposed to be teaching kids science, it’s just so out of place.

Those old traditions have always existed. But I feel in the past, people in general thought they were kind of outdated. Nowadays, it seems more and more people believe in them. I think the reason is fewer people are hired by state owned enterprises: in southern China, where state owned enterprise have never dominated, there is a stronger tradition of things like this. For my hometown, the employees of state owned enterprises used to have guaranteed jobs for life and represented the upper middle classes. And there is a stronger ideology within state owned enterprises. Now with fewer state owned jobs, more unstable jobs, and more economic uncertainty, superstitions have more places to grow.

News Without Newspaper

I had jet lag for almost the whole time I was in China. It was made worse when I needed to drink alcohol. I don’t drink much normally, and generally enjoy it when I do. I mostly drink beer and sometimes wine. But in China, important and formal dinners cannot function without Baijiu. Baijiu is very strong, often above 50% ABV. The price varies a lot and some of them can be very expensive, but I cannot really tell the differences in flavor among them. The only things I can feel are the strong alcohol smell, the stinging feeling, and the numbness afterward. It’s an important tool for networking in China. But to me, it’s just another type of alcohol, and the family and old friends in my hometown are used to it, so while I never drink it in Canada, I drink it when I am in my hometown.

I don’t hate it if I drink it occasionally. It gives people an excuse to spend more time on dinner and socializing. I don’t like to use socializing as a tool other than having fun with friends. Until now, there has been no pressure for me to socialize with people I don’t want to. But seeing my old friends talking about their socializing experience and being more familiar with “dinner rules” made me think that, if I was living in my hometown regularly, I may need to socialize more often, even if I don’t like it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have local news sources.

News and internet censorship have been much stricter since Xi took power. It created lots of tension and people regularly fought over it, especially during Covid. But after Covid, most people seem to be tired of the fight. The government has shown it’s determined to censor things, and most people just feel the risk of fighting is not worth it. So there are really no news outlets outside of government propaganda. In order to get the real news, especially in a small city, you need to get in contact with real people. I can accept having fewer career opportunities as a cost to avoid unwanted socializing, but I’m not sure if I can accept not getting meaningful news.

Even with contact with real people, the news is still hard to verify. Personal experience, rumors, propaganda, social media algorithms, and real events are all mixed together. I realized it’s more important to have a stronger framework in this scenario. I was in the middle of a reading project about ancient human history, but paused when I was in China and thought it’s a good opportunity to read some China related books. So I started a few books about small town politic, land economics, and Chinese governmental structure. Chinese politics are very non-transparent, so it’s still like trying to understand them from different angles. It’s also complex and dynamic, that I don’t think anyone can really get a great understanding of it, even someone within the system, even the president of China. The reading lingered after I was back in Canada, and it made me want to read more related books. But because of the busy work and the other reading project, it’s better to continue when I’m in China next time.

Back to Canada

It’s time to go back to Canada even before the jet lag is fully gone. We transferred through Beijing again on the way back, and I had the opportunity to meet with some friends there. This time we didn’t have Baijiu or any other alcohol, so the dinner finished very quickly. When talking with my friends, AI anxiety is more obvious in Beijing than in my hometown, which is very normal: there are hardly any software engineering jobs in my hometown.

I actually started to miss Canada even before that. One day, I woke up in the morning and suddenly wanted to eat Domino’s pizza. I was never a fan of pizza when I was in China but started to love it after moving to Canada. My daughter missed our home in Canada as well and played with all of her toys as soon as she arrived, even though she was already very tired. After my daughter was born and we moved into a new house, I feel like Canada is more and more like a hometown to me, but it would never be my real hometown because I didn’t grow up here. My real hometown is in China. While it feels farther and farther away from me, I’m still deeply attached to it. Especially with my parents getting older and older, I may eventually need to go back to take care of them. I’m still not sure how that would work out if my daughter is still young when that happens. But for now, worrying about it doesn’t help much, so I’ll just try to go back every year, and hopefully continue this blog series.