Seeing China as Home

In September 2022, I arrived in Guangzhou, a city of 30 million people. Everything about Guangzhou seemed so different from Copenhagen. The late summer was steamy hot. China’s net-zero COVID pandemic restrictions were still in place. I didn’t know the language. I fumbled through an array of incomprehensible phone apps to complete daily tasks. My temporary housing was so newly constructed, I had to peel plastic off everything when I moved in.

I had come to Guangzhou for work. Although I knew some people in China, most of my friends and all of my family were back home—whatever home might mean, given that my homes had already included Miami in the USA, Whitstable in England, various places in Denmark, and many other more temporary residences besides. I was aware of a need to perceive China as a new home.

This is less straightforward than it sounds. When I read blog posts or watch videos by expats or short-term visitors to China, I often feel an entirely foreign country is being portrayed. It’s not that people are showing the wrong China or an incorrect China. But they’re showing China from a very particular kind of outsider’s perspective. Because many content creators don’t feel at home in China, know little about China, or have relatively limited social connections within China, the gaps in their feelings, knowledge, and network get filled by alienation and confusion. As a result, China is often portrayed as a place where the incomer feels out of place.

This sense of being out of place in China has deep roots within Western culture. Across much of the world, China is described extraordinary: alternately mysterious, hidden, horrifying, awe-inspiring, secretive, incomprehensible, romantic, closed. A black box. People who look like me and were raised like me have for centuries been accustomed to thinking about China as strange and mystifying.

Yet for most people who live here, China is simply home.

Every day, I read media reports from Europe, North America, and Australia (‘the West’) concerning events in China. These events are usually discussed as though everything is hearsay and rumour. As though Chinese affairs can only be dimly discerned through a veil of strangeness and silence. As though China—like those apps I needed to learn in 2022—is fundamentally incomprehensible. The China of these media reports is often a China of generalisations; of big, abstract ideas; of an opaque and all-controlling government; of people who all think the same way. It’s an imagined China engaged in existential civilisational conflict with an imagined united West.

And then I consider Guangzhou, an ancient city that encompasses everything. Everything. Factories, rustic villages, urban agriculture, wet markets, Cantonese opera get-togethers. Towering business districts, gleaming shopping centres, world-class universities, live music clubs, heritage zones. This immense diversity of humanity is connected by a digital ecosystem that only partly overlaps with that of Western societies but is unequalled in its complexity and penetration into all aspects of life.

For a country so often described as intellectually inaccessible, it’s remarkable how much information is produced in China and is available to anyone who cares to look.

In this blog, I will occasionally write about how China is extraordinary. But I will focus more on the ordinary China. There are already enough people who write about the strange, unknowable, alluring, dangerous, or extraordinary China. I’ll write about the everyday China of people going about their lives: going to work; eating at restaurants; shopping online; planning travel; watching series on their phones; navigating social, professional, romantic, and financial relationships. I’ll write about China as home.

Sometimes, these observations will lead me to generalisations and big, abstract ideas. This is inevitable, for the human mind is drawn to metaphor and seeks patterns in complexity. But when I do so, it will be based on my impressions of people and culture in the ordinary China, informed by my academic background in cultural geography and ethnology.

This blog will not be a celebration of everything wonderful about China. Like every place, China is a mix of pleasant and unpleasant, people and places you want spend time with—and those you don’t.

I am not and never will be Chinese. I will always look at things from an outsider’s perspective, but I try to understand how other people view the world and interpret their own actions. I believe it’s important to see people and societies as they see themselves, and I believe a more peaceful and sustainable world depends on building understanding across diversity.