Explaining China to Foreigners

Given China’s size and complexity, it’s hardly surprising that “explaining” it to foreigners can be a fool’s errand – a fact that seems to have escaped the legions of pundits who have built careers out of opining on, and predicting the fate of, the erstwhile Middle Kingdom with a vehement conviction that is little more than hot air.

Projecting one’s fears and fantasises onto an “other” is a human predilection, and for much of the new millennium the world has cast China in that role. Given its seismic rise and global footprint, the country naturally arouses curiosity and wonder, dread and awe. It has unsettled what was naively assumed to be the settled contours of the global order. It operates with an internal logic that is difficult to grasp from the outside and that can make a mockery of received analytical frameworks – Marxism and capitalism, liberalism and tyranny alike.

In Beijing, the authorities have spent the best part of the last half century seemingly squaring circles as they goose-step across a high wire under the pinched gaze-supervision of Xi Jinping. Why don’t they fall off? Why is the coming collapse of China always coming, even as it grows stronger in engineering might and technological competence?

In fact, to know China is to be open to not knowing very much, or at least to an awareness of the partial nature of what one does know. Truth is so rarely about neat conclusions. It is the dappled grey that patterns the world, fading in and out of focus, allowing for shape-shifting epiphanies that depend on the direction of the light.

As in last week’s piece about the difficulty of pinning down an India narrative that is both truthful in letter and spirit, when it comes to China, I find myself constantly oscillating between the good and bad versions of the story.

Whether it is back home in India or in Spain, the questions I am asked about China are essentially the same. They circle around issues like authoritarian control of everyday life, à la “social credit,” the lack of freedoms (political, religious, intellectual), the status of women, the seemingly extraordinary appetite for hard work, food (do they really eat dog?), hegemonic intentions, and happiness- are people happy? 

The sweep of these queries begs for generalisation, but my choice of even broad-brush, caveat-studded answers depends on a range of objectivity-lacking parameters like my mood, how much time I have, and on the interlocutor’s natural prejudices. I tend towards argument (blame Socrates and my philosophical training as an undergrad). 

For the kind of panda-boosters who dream at night of AI bots performing elaborate kung fu choreography, I end up talking about the shrinking space in China for creative freedom and intellectual expression. The slow leaching of the nation’s cinematic, literary and artistic terrain of the nutrients that had made for relatively fertile soil in the oughties. 

I point out how difficult it has become as a foreigner to talk with Chinese academics and think tankers, who are increasingly chary of interactions with outsiders. Unlike in the early 2000s, today any meeting with a foreigner must be officially documented and reported. The paperwork is cumbersome, and if the meeting is misconstrued for any reason, the paper trail can be used as damning evidence.

Old friends, and some new contacts, have braved these obstacles to meet with me over the last few months. But one of them, a former university classmate now working as a government official, insisted on meeting for a walk in a park rather than over lunch. After an hour of striding about, when I suggested we sit down at a café for a coffee, he declined. Any activity that involved us sitting down together apparently counted as a meeting, which would then need to be reported. Walking, however, allowed for plausible deniability. We could just have been two random souls strolling side by side in a public space.

Another contact at a high-level think tank has always been forthcoming in exchanging emails. We have also met for lunch a few times. However, at every meeting he has brought along a younger “colleague” without explanation, a person who sits at the table but never participates in the conversation. I can only assume the uninvited mystery guest is a kind of chaperone ,someone who can vouch for my interlocutor should questions arise about his meetings with me. 

The media in China are tamer than ever. In the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games when I was based in the country as The Hindu’s correspondent, a small number of feisty local media outfits had begun pushing the envelope, particularly on matters to do with environmental degradation and corruption. They had operated within tightly controlled parameters, but by today’s on-a-leash standards they operated with relative freedom. As for foreign correspondents, they are fewer in number and find access to sources harder than before. 

The internet is behind a firewall, so that it is impossible to access non-Chinese, government-unapproved sites. This equals almost the entire swathe of the global internet outside of the Sinosphere- think Google, WhatsApp, YouTube, Netflix, Instagram, etc. This was not always the case. In fact, I signed up for my first Gmail account in 2004 and joined Facebook in 2007, both while resident in China in the days when VPN had not entered the lexicon of daily life. 

Last, but not least, contemporary China is saturated with surveillance cameras everywhere, from traffic intersections to subway stations, public parks and seemingly random points along the urbanscape. According to some estimates (there are no official ones), larger cities in China have 370-odd cameras per 1,000 people. 

So far so dystopian. And yet this is only one angle from which China can be seen – depending on where the light falls.

When I’m waylaid by the far more numerous China-bashers – people armed with moral certainties born of reading The New York Times, who are looking for an affirmation of their good-bad, free-unfree, West-China binaries – I have a different story to tell. This is of a China that “feels” freer than many cities across the democratic world, from India to the United States.

Where public spaces are filled with grey-haired women, their shoulders back and faces towards the sky, giggling with their friends, practicing dance moves or working out on the exercise equipment that punctuates parks. Because public spaces are safe and attractive. Because women can take a walk without looking over their shoulder every other minute. Because the elderly are healthy. 

This is of a China of free-wheeling energy, of gossip and raucous drinking, of pride in the nation’s development and complaints about the stress of daily life. A China, in other words, that is far from the police state of suspicious side-eyes and guarded words that many outside the country imagine it to be. It may not be a democracy, but this does not mean that everyday life in the country is aberrant or wholly different in texture and form than places with different political systems.

Like most nations, China is more than its government, and it is more than politics, or at least politics in capital letters. Small-p politics to do with jobs, schools and the price of pork is the subject of chatter everywhere. People both complain about the rising cost of living and appreciate how much better they have it than their parents did. 

Many of the Chinese friends I have spent the last few months reconnecting with tell me they are impressed with the achievements of their government (not a sentence I have often heard come out of the mouths of citizens of other countries). Xie tells me how today it takes him only a few hours to travel from Beijing to the third-tier city in remote Gansu where his parents live in. A journey that used to take upwards of twenty-four hours now involves a short flight and a few hours on a high-speed train.

Li, who was diagnosed with breast cancer a few years ago, is grateful at how efficiently her health insurance kicked in, taking care of prohibitively expensive chemotherapy treatments. Both are pleased at how much the city has improved in terms of air quality and greenery. “They’ve (the city government) really done a good job,” Li said, as we walked past Liangmahe, a waterway that until a decade earlier was a garbage-strewn sewer. It is now filled with swimmers and excited couples balancing on paddleboards – scenes I would have thought as likely as pigs flying had you described them to me 20 years ago.

At the same time, both Xie and Li complain of stress and burnout. Li is currently helping set up an alternative-style school for children who find it difficult to cope with the pressure of China’s intensely competitive public-school curriculum. In short, they are proud AND stressed. Like people everywhere, they contain multitudes. Their thoughts and behaviours simply cannot be reduced to a single pathology. The Chinese Communist Party might be authoritarian, it is certainly paternalistic, but it is far from totalitarian. China is a kaleidoscope – shaken it offers up endless permutations of stories, some inspiring, others devastating. 

A former student of mine from when I taught at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute in 2003 is now a well-known TV personality in Hong Kong. She came over for lunch the other day while on a visit to Beijing. We talked about the pros and cons of China’s political system. Her conclusion was in line with what I’ve heard from other local friends. Without the long-term planning and governance capacity that the party-state represents, China would not be as successful. It is too large and has too many deep-seated social and economic for any other system to reconcile competing interests so effectively.

This is obviously propaganda when the light falls one way, wisdom when it falls another, culture from a third. 

What do I think? 

Ask me three times and you might well get three different answers. 

Journalist and writer Pallavi Aiyar brings the Indian perspective to understanding China. With ‘Writing on the Great Wall’, she places her eye on China’s economy, its culture, its government and its people. Aiyar has spent more than two decades studying China, having lived there from 2002 to 2009, and again from August 2025.

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