That New Car Smell: Observations from China and Taiwan

Like many Americans, I delayed visiting China for years. For starters there’s the general unusualness of it. When I told a friend I was going to China, he blinked and said, “You mean China One? The restaurant?”

“No,” I said. “China. The actual one.”

He laughed, then added, half-serious: “And why?”

Well I had a speaking engagement in Taiwan, and I figured that if I was going to cross the Pacific on a sixteen-hour back-breaker from Dallas, I might as well pop over to see the Middle Kingdom with my own two eyes.

The plan was to visit a friend in Shanghai, then take the high-speed train 2,000 miles across the country to Yunnan Province. I wanted to do the old ying and yang travel strategy: the steel metropolis, then the countryside. Shanghai and Taipei would be the steel. Yunnan, way over there in the southwest by Myanmar, Laos, and Tibet, would have the mountains, the ethnic diversity, and the spicy food.

And so I found myself face-to-face with immigraiton duty officer: “Purpose of your visit?” he asked.

“Tourism,” I muttered. He scanned my passport, fingerprinted me, and the digital apparatus churned for five full minutes while I stood there silently. I was wondering what, really, I could see or even comprehend in a little over two weeks.

To be fair, I was prepared to be impressed. Thousands of years. All those dynasties I can’t remember that sound somewhat similar. And a billion and a half people …

Then—I heard the stamp-thud in my passport—and I was in the Orient.

Shanghai: Plugged In

After a long plane travel day, it’s inspiring stepping out of the terminal and breathing the fresh air. One is reminded that, well indeed, I am a living, breathing organic being. And no, it isn’t natural to be stuck in a plastic tube fed cold rolls going 600 miles an hour at 32,000 feet. But stepping outside that cool dark December evening in Shanghai, I myself was struck with the sudden desire to take flight myself.

It would be the best way to see the city frankly. Shanghai is quiet, clean, tame, and most of all … expansive. They say everything is bigger in Texas, and that may be true until you get to China. Riding across Shanghai in a cheap DiDi, the otherworldly shapes of the vast infrastructure take hold: enormous bridges, reaching skyscrapers, spiraling highways streteched up like huge Slinkies to the sky.

The vast anonymizing scale of Shanghai.

Maybe 2 out of 3 cars in Shanghai is an electric vehicle. You can tell which ones by the lime green license plates. They don’t gurgle and gargle like gas engines; they zim and zum.

What surprised me was that no one speeds on the roads in Shanghai: no speeding, no chaos like in so many American cities. It was just a river of cars moving at the same pace. I kept wondering why: speed monitors? cameras? or just … discipline? It was disarming, all this tidiness as a default setting. An American, I used to the speeding, the cutting off, and the gurgle of eternal combustion.

Shanghai has 25 million souls, and the city planners scoot them from one place to another with great efficiency. All the trains were on time. There are so many new subway lines opening up that the residents can’t keep track of them.

From the city’s skyscrapers, it seemed like the city sprawled down the curve of the earth.

The Bund, a gateway to commerce in China.

More of Those Cities You’ve Never Heard Of (Population 10 Million)

The vastness of China was best displayed on my train trip from Shanghai to Kunming in Yunnnan. We first stopped in Hangzhou (population 12 million), home of DeepSeek and much of the tech ecosystem.

Next came Nanchang (population 6 million) and Changsha (10 million).

Dozens of 40-story residential buildings in Changsha. Knock-knock, anybody in there?

Up next was Huaihua (5 million), Guiyang (6 million), and finally, Kunming (9 million).

I had heard of two of these cities.

China reminds me of the father who bought his small child adult-sized clothes hoping she will grow into them. “She will need these when she is an adult,” he says confidently. And of course she will need clothes, who can deny that.

But will these clothes fit her? Will she like them, and what if she doesn’t?

Everywhere in China there are not just adult-sized clothes, but giant-sized clothes. Huge apartment complexes. Wide flowing rivers, upon which ocean-faring container ships can travel inland on the Yangtze 1,000 miles to Wuhan (population 15 million) and Chongqing (population 32 million).

People were mostly quite shy around me or simply minded their own business. The social order was in some odd way almost palpable. I saw very few homeless people or beggars, no gay couples holding hands, and no one propositioning me—a conspicuously tall white Westerner—for drugs or women. No one really paid me much attention; people in China were heads-down,

It was impressive … but somehow not engaging. Of course there was the

China is a great civilization. So I was prepared to be impressed, and I was.

. Of the few folks that I spoke with who spoke decent English, any time the conversation veered toward the political, they would demur. What was interesting is that it didn’t feel like a conscious evasion. Perhaps it was and I am not seasoned in the intricacies of Chinese conversation. But the feeling I got is that an alternative political arrangement, even mild political disagreement, literally does not cross the mind.

Suspension bridge spanning the Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan Province, Southwest China

Indeed there are more than three times the navigable waterways in China than the United States. Earth’s highest mountains are in China. China’s landmass is larger than the United States’. The scale of China’s high-speed rail network is without parallel. There are huge piles of food everywhere and 10-lane roads—not highways—that look like they’re still steaming and oily from the paving machines.

The Shanghai High Speed Rail Station

The train stations are shaped like gigantic Kleenex boxes, horseshoed on the inside with chain noodle restaurants and 7-Elevens.

Everything was so cheap in China. No wonder they don’t have enough domestic consumption, with the prices as low (for Americans) as they are.

The trains go 200 miles (300 kilometers) per hour, and to power them all, China uses 58% of the world’s coal power and now consumes 30% more electricity per capita than Europe. It is the factory of the world. China’s environmental concerns resembles the bootlegger’s support for alcohol prohibition.

China is immensely plugged in, to the grid and to the Internet. One annoying thing as an American in China was that all of the smartphone apps were different. There is the Chinese Uber (Didi), the Chinese Google Maps (Dianping), the Chinese WhatsApp (WeChat), and the Chinese Venmo (Alipay). These are all powerhouses of commerce and efficiency. Setting the language to “English” on these apps rendered little help. My photobox is littered with screenshots for the translation app. To my mind, the digital infrastructure was nearly as impressive as the physical infrastructure. The food-delivery game is elite. You buy all the train tickets on your phone.

One night in Kunming I stayed in a “Howard Johnson” that must have been a five-star hotel. It cost $55, and there was hardly another soul in it.

In the morning I went down to the vast gym in the basement. They had exercise rooms and rows and it was the best hotel gym I’ve ever seen. And it was completely dark and cold. “Does this place make any money?” I thought, as a hotel employee tried in vain to find the right electrical circuit for the treadmills.

Later I heard they made money from events—sure enough, the Ministry of Education was holding a conference there later that month.

It felt like a fresh museum exhibit labeled Hotel.

The Process of Civilization

China was very impressive. Everything was either five years old, or five hundred. It was humbling to realize how vast across time and place human civilization is. And now here is a whole race of people, pushing forward to blazing speed to a more connected, more enabled future.

Starbucks in traditional Chinese architecture

One thing China lacked, in my opinion, was finesse and marketing. The Chinese are not about polish so much as elbow grease. There was not the ease of movement, of sales, of advertising, communication, and storytelling. The service was often hesitant and confused. China needs to work on soft skills like branding, sales … broadly, sex appeal.

Lijiang Old Town, close to Tibey, was one place in China which understood tourism as an industry. This UNESCO World Heritage site in Yunnan Province has been perfectly manicured for the tourist yuan.

• Old Town—ancient architecture was very lovely*

The old town is a maze of cobblestone streets, wooden houses with curved tile roofs, and canals running through it all. Every storefront was optimized for Instagram, even the beatufiul mountain dogs trained to sit outside cafes all day. This city housed an ethnic group called the Naxi. Yunan __

The picturesque streets of Lijiang—perfectly preserved, perfectly commercialized

When the topic of politics even remotely entered the conversation, it felt as if the conversation had entered a black hole. Night market in Lijiang. Huge piles of wild mushrooms everywhere.

The electric vehicle infrastructure was remarkable. The food was all right—I had better food experiences in Malaysia and Japan. The scale of everything was breathtaking. Worlds within worlds.

Is it what the people want? How could you tell? Suppression of human rights for the greater good—is it what people want? Choice and consent seem absent from the equation.

Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan, a famous trek. China is a civilization that has built adult-sized clothes for itself. Whether the country will grow into them comfortably, whether the people will truly like wearing them. That remains to be seen.

Those who champion the state-led growth of China conveniently fail to mention that from Wuhan came the most disastrous things to ever come from centralized governments: COVID-19, born in the Wuhan Institute for Virology, and consequently strict lockdowns, born in Beijing.

Taiwan

Hunter S. Thompson said we Americans should just fess up and admit we’re a nation of 340 million used car salesmen. Entering Taiwan after China felt like walking onto the used-car lot after stepping out of a showroom.

My Taipei hotel was three times more expensive than Shanghai and packed with people, but it was a little moldy and run-down. Everything felt condensed. Taiwan was messier and grittier—and somehow more familiar. My hotel in Taipei with three times more expensive than in Shanghai, and packed with people. But it was somewhat moldy and rundown. Everything was condensed in Taipei. It felt like the city planning officials didn’t get the memo from the mainland.

Taiwan was messier, grittier, and felt more like home. Maybe this is the natural course of democracy: fighting the inevitable triumpg of entropy in some lazy, haphazard way.

Taipei skyline - smaller, grittier, older, moldy - a different energy from mainland China

Taiwan felt like a mashup of Japan and China. That makes sense because it was ruled by Japan from 1899 to 1945. Then after World War II and the Chinese Civil War, Chaing Kai-Shek and the Nationalists fled to Taiwan and took it over as miliary dictratorhsip. Now it is

7-Elevens and Famaily Marts were on evrery courner in Taiwan. Similar to Japan - peak convenience store.