There is a precise moment, suspended between landing and leaving the airport, when the traveller ceases to be what they were. Not yet settled into the new reality, already irremediably uprooted from the old one. It is in that threshold — which Heidegger might call the Zwischen, the in-between — that the journey to China truly begins. And in those airports where water, hot or cold, is offered silently to all who arrive, like an ancient gesture of unnegotiated hospitality, one senses immediately that something fundamental will be different. Not slightly. Entirely.
"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful." — Italo Calvino
"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful." — Italo Calvino
The Body in the World: Order as a Form of Freedom
To arrive in China is, above all, to experience an order that in the West we have forgotten how to desire. Not the aseptic order of technocratic efficiency, but something more radical: an order that sediments itself into the fabric of daily life like a second nature.
Public toilets are everywhere. Streets are cleaned with a continuity that admits no exceptions. No one holds out a hand to beg. No body lies forgotten on the pavement. For those arriving from European cities where misery exposes itself as a silent accusation — where the sans-abri has become urban furniture — this absence strikes like a philosophical argument, and yet opens a question mark: an idea of collective care that makes itself visible not through words but through things — or is there something else at work?
Railway stations function like airports — luggage screening, check-in, ordered corridors — and in this something important is revealed: China has applied to rail travel the same solemnity we reserve for flight, as if moving from one place to another were already, in itself, an act worthy of ritual attention. The Beijing metro and the Shanghai metro run with a punctuality that is not mere efficiency but something closer to a lay devotion to shared time.
But at the heart of all this — and it would be a mistake not to name it explicitly — lies something older than any technology: organisation and human presence. Wherever there is a flow of people, there is staff. At intersections, at metro entrances, in stations, airports, attractions, large commercial spaces: human beings in flesh and blood, uniformed, available, alert. Not automata, not touchscreens, not chatbots — people. The West has progressively replaced human presence with automation, convinced this was progress; China has chosen otherwise, and the result is an experience of public space in which one feels, paradoxically, safer and more accompanied. There is something almost archaic in this choice — in the noble sense of the word: a return to the root of the very idea of care as presence, as a body that places itself at the service of another body.
And then there is the question of money — or rather, of its disappearance. Paying with a single application, from the taxi to the most remote fruit vendor, without ever reaching for cash or a card, produces a strange sensation: that of inhabiting an absolute present, cleared of the materiality of exchange. When you return to Europe and find yourself missing that app, it is not nostalgia for technology — it is nostalgia for a fluidity of daily existence that over there has become the norm.
There is, however, another material dimension that strikes the European visitor with the force of a philosophical argument: the cost of everyday life. A taxi or Didi ride of forty-five minutes across the city costs no more than fifteen euros. For short distances — five, ten kilometres — three, four, six euros suffice. Water costs almost nothing. Food at markets, in popular restaurants, in small neighbourhood joints, carries prices that in Europe belong to another era. This is not simply tourist convenience: the system has built a different relationship between the value of things and their price, between need and its fulfilment. And this difference, lived day after day, produces a strange sensation of abundance — not of wealth, of abundance — that awakens an uncomfortable question: how much of our Western anxiety is, at bottom, a problem of access to elementary things?
Hotels complete the picture with a generosity that in Europe would cost a fortune: water, tea, lemonade, toiletries and accessories of every kind on offer, the minibar permanently stocked and always free, the laundry service running like a Swiss mechanism. But it is another detail that delivers the sharpest sense of Chinese contemporaneity: room deliveries are handled by robots. Small, silent, imperturbable. They knock at the door — or rather, call it — with an algorithmic precision that knows no hesitation. Outside, in the corridors and especially in the lifts, a scene unfolds daily that is worth the journey on its own: China is the country where everything is bought online, where last-mile logistics has been delegated to machines, and so every time you press the lift button you are likely to find yourself sharing the space with one of these small technological beings who occupy the centre of the floor with a firmness worthy of a Zen monk. They do not move. They do not yield. They do not negotiate. They are there, and you adapt. There is something subtly philosophical in this moment: for the first time in history, the human being learns to coexist with something that is neither animal nor person, that has no intentions but has trajectories, and that occupies space with a placid indifference no living being could afford without appearing rude.
Incommunicability as Catharsis
And yet. And yet there is a price to pay, and it is not measured in yuan.
The price is the silence of familiar senses. Almost no one speaks English. Google Maps barely works. Signs are in Chinese. The translator makes mistakes. To book a taxi you need one app, to visit an attraction another, to navigate a third, and so on in a layering of interfaces that recalls Kafkaesque bureaucracy transposed into the digital.
But it is precisely here — in this constraint — that the journey becomes philosophically fertile. Finding oneself unable to communicate is not simply a practical difficulty: it is a pure existential experience. One returns to gestures, glances, approximations. One rediscovers that verbal language is only one of the ways in which human beings recognise one another, and not the oldest. Incommunicability as mirror: it reveals how much our identity is built on linguistic fluency, and how much that fluency is, in the end, a geographical privilege we had never been forced to question.
There is also another, subtler incommunicability. Someone spits — with that preliminary sound that precedes the act like a declaration — and no one seems disturbed. In taxis there is no greeting, no thanks. On the street, the codes of mutual recognition that in Europe have become almost automatic — the nod, the thank-you, the glance that grants passage — seem absent, or simply elsewhere: in malls, in hotels, in restaurants, the same people become ceremoniously hospitable. It is another grammar of respect, not absent but dislocated, applied to different contexts from those we are used to. Deciphering this grammar is part of the experience.
Beijing: The City as Memory of the Absolute
Beijing is austere. Not in the sense of dreariness, but in the sense of gravity: it is a city that carries upon itself the weight of having been the centre of the world — not a centre, the centre, the Zhōngguó, the middle kingdom — and has never fully freed itself from that weight, nor perhaps wishes to. Twenty-two million people inhabit it: more than the entire population of Australia, almost the equivalent of all of Scandinavia combined, a number that the European mind — accustomed to thinking of Rome, with its three million, as an imposing metropolis — cannot concretely visualise. And yet the city functions, flows, breathes. This fact alone is already a lesson.
The Forbidden City is not simply a monument: it is a cosmology rendered in brick. To walk through its courtyards is to traverse a conception of political and cosmic order in which the emperor was literally the point of conjunction between heaven and earth. Its immensity is not decorative: it is ontological. And the Summer Palace, with the Yuanmingyuan burned and never fully restored — a deliberate wound in memory — is something more than a historical site: it is a memento of the fragility of every power that believes itself eternal.
But it is the Wall that changes something in the observer. Not merely to impress — to change them. A work that exceeds rational comprehension, the Wall is not understood, it is endured. One climbs upon that millennial stone and discovers that there exist things human beings have made that cannot be contained in any category. It is not architecture. It is not engineering. It is will made landscape. It is proof that collective determination can leave a physical mark on the orography of the world.
Around these monuments — and this is what makes Beijing so visually singular — rise the public housing complexes: towers of twenty storeys or more, repeated to infinity, accompanying every journey like a background chorus. They are not beautiful. But they are true: they say something honest about the scale of the Chinese project, about the quantity of lives this city contains. And ever more frequently these towers enter into dialogue with contemporary architecture of surprising formal audacity — banks, malls, institutional headquarters — that transforms the skyline into a conversation between eras, a visual palimpsest in which the past is not erased but constantly renegotiated.
The hutong — the historic alleys, narrow, labyrinthine, where life still flows at a human scale that the rest of the city seems to have abandoned — are perhaps the place where Beijing reveals its most intimate character. And District 798, that military factory transformed into a contemporary art hub, carries with it the contradiction that is the hallmark of modern China: beautiful industrial architecture, art seeking the market, Bauhaus encountered by chance in the middle of Asia.
Shanghai: The City as Promise of the Future
Shanghai is something else entirely. Shanghai is international in the most corporeal sense of the word: it does not aspire to internationality, it is it, carries it in its blood, sedimented through decades of foreign concessions that left the city with an architectural stratification unique in the world. Twenty-five million inhabitants — the entire population of Australia contained in a single city, almost half of all Italy in a single urban agglomeration. And yet Shanghai does not transmit a sense of overcrowding, but rather one of permanent vitality, of an organism that never fully sleeps, that renews itself while you watch.
The Bund seen at night — with Pudong reflecting in the river like a dream of the future permanently under construction — is one of those spectacles that do not wear out: every time you stop to look, you discover something new. Not because it changes, but because the one who looks changes, because the landscape functions as a screen onto which the traveller projects their own relationship with modernity.
The French Concession is the place where Shanghai breathes more slowly: enormous plane trees, wide streets, art deco buildings, cafés. It is the Paris of someone who has never been there but imagined it with such intensity as to build it. And then, almost by counterpoint, the Museum of the Communist Party — a place no serious visitor should avoid — where the history of the twentieth century is told from a perspective never heard in the West, one that compels a rethinking of narratives we believed settled.
District M50, more contained than Beijing's 798, preserves a precious artisanal atmosphere: techne still seems to prevail over brand, hand over algorithm. Or perhaps it is merely an optical illusion the market is already working to correct. But even as an illusion it is worth inhabiting for a moment.
The Yuyuan Gardens, set within one of the city's most commercially invasive neighbourhoods, remind us that China has an aesthetic tradition of landscape without parallel: every stone is placed with an intention that is simultaneously philosophical and aesthetic, every path a meditation on the relationship between order and nature.
The Parks: The Most Radical Gesture
One thing unites Beijing and Shanghai beyond their differences: the stubborn care for parks and gardens and for all the ornamentation that lines the streets. Centuries-old trees, flowers tended with near-religious devotion, lawns where people sit, exercise, play music, dance at dawn. In these gigantic cities — where traffic is real, where skyscrapers seem never to end — the green is a necessity: a reminder that life precedes the city, that nature is not a problem to be solved but an interlocutor to be negotiated with every day.
The Other as Condition of the Self
To go to Beijing and Shanghai is not simply to complete a journey. It is to reckon with something the journey has stirred. The marvellous is also the uncanny — das Unheimliche in the Freudian sense: that which is simultaneously alien and familiar, that strikes us because it touches something we recognised without knowing it.
China works like this. It is not exotic in the folkloric sense — it is not a postcard. It is a coherent, alternative system, capable of solving problems we in the West have stopped addressing or never knew how to pose. The absence of homeless people is not a detail: it is the visible consequence of political and social choices that carry enormous costs in terms of individual freedoms, but that produce an experience of public space radically different from the Western one. The honest traveller cannot ignore this tension: one cannot simply admire the order without asking what was sacrificed to obtain it.
This, perhaps, is the greatest gift these two cities offer to those who traverse them with attention: the capacity to question one's own certainties not in order to destroy them, but to inhabit them with greater awareness. Finding oneself unable to communicate, dependent on a phone for every action, unable to read a sign or navigate without assistance — none of this is mere tourist discomfort. It is a phenomenological experience of being-in-the-world under different conditions, one that reveals how much our identity is built upon invisible infrastructures we take for granted.
And when you return, you miss that payment app, truly. But you also miss something else, less definable: the sensation of having lived inside a world where the coordinates were different, and of having understood that to exist elsewhere is, first of all, a form of knowledge — and a great open question.
"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." — Ludwig Wittgenstein
