Travel

Six Things I Learnt Visiting Chinese Universities and Promoting Goldsmiths in China

Recently I spent over a week visiting universities in southeastern China, travelling through Fuzhou and Xiamen promoting Goldsmiths and exploring new educational partnerships. What I encountered challenged many of my assumptions about contemporary China. This was a country that felt simultaneously ancient and futuristic: bullet trains travelling at over 250 kilometres per hour, QR codes governing everyday life, giant digital infrastructures, but also temples filled with incense, banyan shaded parks, Confucian traditions of hospitality and colonial era streets overlooking the Taiwan Strait. I reflect on the extraordinary communal culture around food, the sheer scale of Chinese universities, the rise of China’s own postgraduate sector, and the way figures such as Mao, Deng Xiaoping, Nixon and Kissinger still haunt the political and historical imagination in very different ways from the West. I also explore how China’s technological self sufficiency, from WeChat to digital payments, creates a society that is both incredibly efficient and deeply distinctive from Europe or America. Along the way, I found myself thinking about great travel writers such as Colin Thubron and Peter Hessler, and how travel changes not just our understanding of another country, but of our own.