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Notes from my latest visit to Shenzhen and Guangzhou. As someone who’s been traveling in and out of China for years, every trip feels like landing in a different country, except it’s the same one, just turbocharged.

Shenzhen Never Sleeps, It Just Reinvents Itself Overnight

Miss a couple of months and you’re playing catch-up. A new app owns the streets, a pricing bloodbath wipes out yesterday’s darling, and the mantra is build, scale, gut margins, pivot, repeat. Shenzhen is ground zero for this frenzy. The place is spotless, sidewalks you could eat off, parks tucked into every corner. In one lifetime it morphed from a sleepy fishing village into the planet’s hardware factory. Phones, drones, batteries, e-bikes, smart gadgets: if it’s electronic and cheap, odds are it was born here.

What hit me this time was the ghost-town vibe for foreigners. My go-to hotel used to be half full with international visitors, mostly American corporate buyers. This trip? I was practically the only non-Chinese face in the lobby. Staff shrugged and blamed the trade war; buyers are now chasing the same factories in Vietnam or Thailand. Chinese firms with deep pockets are cloning their lines abroad to dodge tariffs. Fair enough. But Shenzhen’s edge, with its raw speed and cutthroat execution, hasn’t dulled. Giants like BYD, DJI, and Tencent keep churning out spin-off founders who get seed money from the same bosses they just left. The city still punches way above its weight.

Energy: The Quiet Megaproject 

China is using power and it’s engineering as a national advantage. Ultra-high-voltage lines, which are electricity superhighways, shuttle gigawatts from the wild west (Xinjiang’s wind, solar, hydro, coal) to the factory belts in the east with almost no loss. Cheaper juice for AI server farms, chip plants, EV lines, robot shops. Lower costs, fatter margins, repeat. 

Out west, Xinjiang’s becoming a hinge: dams, transmission corridors, truck routes to Europe and the Middle East. I've even heard talk of piping surplus electrons to Pakistan. Pair that with bullet trains, new airports, and ports that feel like sci-fi sets, and the physical backbone is world-class.

The Human Side: Shiny Cities, Cloudy Moods 

All that concrete and steel looks unbeatable, but talk to people and the vibe sours fast. Youth unemployment is officially 18.7%, but locals swear the real number in big cities is closer to 30%. Add sky-high child costs and you get birth rates in freefall. Many demographers suggest that we will see 200 million fewer Chinese in 30 years.

Work culture is flipping too. “996” used to be a badge; now Gen Z clocks out at 6 p.m. sharp. On a flight I sat next to a 26-year-old coder at one of the big tech houses. She logs off on time, owns her weekends, and has zero money stress; she is sole heir to six adults’ life savings. Kids? Maybe. This is the “lying flat” crowd: raised in plenty, allergic to grind, happy on the couch with a phone.

Deflation Nation

While we gripe about U.S. prices, China’s sliding the other way. Coffee lands at your door for a buck, no tip. Bubble tea for a dollar-something. Luckin Coffee hammered Starbucks into budget mode. Then there’s Mixue which is a milk tea and soft-serve so cheap they plant three stores on the same corner. Scale, not sorcery. It feels great until you realize deflation means nobody’s spending, nobody’s confident, and every retailer is racing to zero.

EVs Everywhere, and They’re Winning 

Driving in Shenzhen or Guangzhou and half the traffic is silent. EVs and plug-ins are closing in on 50% of new sales. Charging stations are denser than gas pumps, power’s cheap, and a DiDi driver will tell you his monthly fuel bill has been slashed by two thirds driving an EV car.

The shakeout is brutal. Xiaomi’s cranking 1,000 cars a day with a skeleton crew and a robot army, so we estimate that it costs $100 in labor per car, not including plant amortization costs. Huawei’s eating the mid-tier alive. Cheap capital, cheap electrons, battery lock-in, manufacturing voodoo: China’s building the EV future at warp speed and shipping it overseas. No wonder Detroit and Brussels are sweating.

Sourcing 101: Spell It Out or Pay Later 

Buying products containing batteries or plastics? Write the spec sheet like your life depends on it. Second-life EV cells are everywhere, pulled from old cars and repacked into e-bikes. Cheaper, sure, but weaker and occasionally sketchy. Same with recycled resin: fine for a phone case, a disaster for anything that carries weight. China will give you exactly what you demand. Forget to instruct and you’ll get the bargain-bin version.

Daily Life: Frictionless and Dirt Cheap 

City living runs like a well-oiled machine. Scan a QR, pay for anything. Traffic lights count down in perfect sync with the GPS on the phone. Streets are safe at 2 a.m. A Hong Kong reversal cracked me up: ten years ago, mainlanders flooded south for “real” baby formula; now HK folks cross north for $30 dental cleanings and $50 MRIs. Border plates aren’t the golden ticket they once were ($100,000 apiece), and people and money flow easier both ways.

Entrepreneurship: Copy, Crush, Repeat 

Everyone’s hustling: private label, white-box, drop-ship, export. The playbook isn’t “invent the wheel”: it’s “make the wheel half the price and flood the market.” Mixue, Luckin, Temu, BYD, they don’t compete, they annihilate. But once the model works, a thousand clones pile in and margins evaporate. Beijing’s now whispering, “Ease up on the price nukes abroad or we’ll all get tariff walls.”

Policy Mood Swings 

Last week’s five-year plan reads like a love letter to private tech after years of public reprimands of major companies’ CEOs. Talent welcome mats, AI moonshots, startup oxygen. Rumors swirl of a bigger reset in 2026, which includes looser capital, global ambitions in batteries and chips. China is going through a classic cycle: clamp down, growth coughs, pivot, hug the entrepreneurs again. We’re in the hug phase.

Bottom Line 

China’s hardware is already ahead of its time.  The software, people, confidence, birth rate is glitching. Everything’s possible here, but nothing comes easy.