Chinese Takeaway (Hangzhou / Shanghai)

At 302 km/h, China's hills and cities rush past me. On the screen next to the speed display of the high-speed train, propaganda videos about the civil war alternate with eyewitness interviews and recruitment calls from the People's Army, along with tourist commercials.

The landscape outside reminds me of the green hills of Northern Vietnam. But it feels a bit like someone tried to tame the wild nature and laid down a carpet lawn over it, adorned with rows of identical houses. As if not only China’s products were produced on the assembly line, but also its cities.

Actually, I hadn't planned it, but the day in Shenzhen with the harmonious scene in the park made me want to travel through China after all. I do a detour, fly back to Hong Kong, and board the train there. This time I'm better prepared and have not only the Chinese apps with my new SIM card but also the necessary internet.

My first stop is Hangzhou. Smaller than the neighboring city of Shanghai, it is still a metropolis with a million inhabitants. I order a taxi using the Didi app. I can see not only how the driver navigates through traffic but also how many seconds the traffic light takes to turn green at the stop he's at. What I quickly realize during my trip in China is that the Chinese love zones. And so my homestay is located in a zone cordoned off by walls, fences, and barriers with small gatehouses on both sides. The entire complex consists of nothing but homestays and hostels with attached cafés, shops, and restaurants. The quaint residential area for tourists and their hosts, as well as the overall cityscape of Hangzhou, appears to have just opened yesterday. Cleaning staff are sweeping individual leaves into their dustpans in the streets. It's autumn in China. Within just a few hours, the high-speed train has catapulted me from the tropical temperatures of Hong Kong straight into the cold. I rummage through the depths of my backpack for my sweater and winter jacket. I haven't worn them since the over-air-conditioned train in Turkey three months ago.
The lively homestay owner Lilly spreads out the map of Hangzhou, which had just been folded up on the breakfast table, in front of me. When she asks what I want to do today, I confess that I haven't really thought about what I want to see in the city yet. Aside from a hike through the tea fields, I had no other plans. I now have a plan after Lilly diligently showed me tourist attractions on the map and gave a brief overview of the Chinese dynasties.
My hike takes me over a mountain ridge. It’s quite busy for a weekday. The path is completely paved, and instead of uneven inclines with natural stones, the inclines and declines are built with uniform stairs. Every few hundred meters, 360-degree cameras ensure that everyone follows the rules while hiking. A friendly cardboard policeman smiles and pronounces a Chinese sentence while I walk by. A hint, a warning? The Chinese know how to interpret it. As the paths become a bit overgrown, I am, apart from two boys walking ahead of me, the only hiker. I nod at them, and they smile and nod back. 'Ni Hao.' 'Hello.' We don't exchange more words, but we walk as a team. When a fallen tree lies in the way, one of the two offers me his hand to help me over it. Not really necessary, but a nice gesture. I take a right turn, while the two continue straight. We say goodbye with 'Bye Bye' calls.

In the valley, tea fields cling to the gently sloping hills. Tradition meets modernity - a platitude that cannot be dispensed with in any ZDF travel report, no matter what country it is about. 'But it really holds true for China,' I think, as I observe a drone lifting a few metal poles into the air. Some villagers are watching, one is controlling it. The tea fields here might have looked the same for a hundred years. The single-family house settlement that rises in between could have been built just yesterday. The American Dream lives on. At least in China.

Just when I'm about to reach the peak, I have to turn back. It's getting dark. The partly moss-covered steps are too slippery, and my battery is down to about 25 percent. Using the flashlight function, I walk downhill and order a Didi. I have no worries. If I were to get lost, I could surely be found quickly through the camera footage.

Xiawei and I met and became friends online during the first summer of Corona. She was able to give me some insights into her homeland back then. I soon realized that she is not uncritical. This arose from her access to Western music. Since her youth, she has been listening to the same classics as I do. Once, she even attended a Bob Dylan concert. Today, that's unthinkable, but it seems to be mutual. China doesn’t want Bob Dylan. Dylan doesn’t want to go to China. It must have been significantly freer here less than a decade ago. Every year, the government determines a quota of films from the West that may be shown domestically. This has shrunk significantly in recent times. The foreign-language films that are not shown in cinemas are illegally uploaded to the internet by a collective of cinephiles and subtitles are added.

Xiawei lives in Hangzhou and shows me her city. The large lake in the southwest is lively and full of music, with dancing groups of young and old strolling along the promenade. Influencers use the spot for recordings and photos. Accordingly, we have to dodge the cameras and those posing. My battery is down again. No problem, Xiawei says and takes me to one of the many yellow rental stations for power banks. I pay for half an hour with QR code and Alipay app and can comfortably charge my phone while walking before I return the power bank at the next station.

The next day, Xiawei and I meet to visit an exhibition of a Chinese-Taiwanese artist who studied in Paris in the 1920s and remained in exile. Small niches are possible, which I also notice when Xiawei takes me to a bar. There are no signs visible outside the high-rise building, but we enter a lovingly decorated alternative pub filled with stickers and graffiti, which you could also find in Kreuzberg. A live band plays Chinese blues rock.

On my last evening in Hangzhou, there is Chinese opera in the homestay district. A tip from Lilly. She jokingly says there will be more retirees performing traditional pieces as a hobby. The audience is older, and the performers are all young women with white makeup who present the typical vibrato in a studied high pitch. With glued-on flimsy beards, they play old scholars. At least that’s what I gather without understanding much. But that often happens to me with operas in German or Italian as well.

The impressive skyline of Shanghai from the other shore has its charm. I agree with the Austrian who just had to pose with me for a few Chinese tourists. The days when it was stated: 'Look, a foreigner, let’s take pictures with him.' are long gone in Shanghai, but the three are probably from a northern province without foreign tourists. At least one of them talks to me in a few words of Russian, proudly showing me his police badge with an alcohol-breath and no valid reason. I like posing for the policeman on vacation. My face is already on numerous surveillance videos from Chinese cameras. One more photo won’t make a difference.

In the quirky Museum of Broken Hearts, grieving Chinese men and women have provided their mementos of past loves for the exhibition. Alongside stuffed animals and crumpled love letters, crumpled cigarettes symbolically represent unfulfilled love. A whole wall is filled with them, just like one with original cassette mixtapes, once carefully compiled.

In a room with a white cage, plastic doves hang from the ceiling, and more of them lie on the floor. It seems to be a metaphor for letting go of a beloved person. To me, it looks as if the private museum merely had to fill another exhibition space.

Xiawei showed me in Hangzhou how easy it is to rent one of the thousands of rental bikes via Alipay. No one in China seems to own a bicycle anymore. The small yellow and blue bikes populate the streets just as much as the many e-scooters and the SUVs of the newly rich. All of this creates a wild traffic jam. It takes almost two hours to get to the hotel in the north of Shanghai. Riding the bike without gears and lights, I pass other cyclists and am overtaken by electric scooters on the narrow side strip tightly confined with barricades. I have felt safer in the traffic of Vietnam before. The cityscape changes from the core to the shell of Shanghai. Skyscrapers, shiny lights, and tourists disappear. The nightlife of the outer districts passes by, and after 1.5 hours, I am surrounded by high bridges and wide highways. On both sides of the road, one colossal futuristic architectural project after another rises. The round facades of glass and steel look like parked spaceships under the night sky. An armada of Chinese star destroyers.