This article was originally published in The Perspective Magazine in March 2026.
For most of the last twenty-five years, China felt like a faraway foggy place. It was where cheap plastic toys came from. The polluted, unattractive neighbour of a more desirable Japan, and later South Korea. China existed, but mostly off-screen. China existed in the background, useful, but rarely looked at. In 2025, this changed rather suddenly. An online wave of interest swept across platforms, from the “Very Chinese Time of My Life” trend to influencers showcasing how advanced cities such as Shanghai or Chongqing have become. A culture, once mocked, reappeared as a new aspirational trend.
Shooting on film gave me the chance to step outside that sudden fascination. Analogue photography slows things down. It forces you to look longer, to accept what is there without filters or algorithms. From the humid streets of Hong Kong to the icy towns of the North East, the question became a simple one: How does China feel today? And has China changed from the first time I visited it more than ten years ago?
Hong Kong is where the clock seems to have stalled. The city still feels very early 2000s. Bilingual signs everywhere. Roads packed with Western and Japanese cars. Bamboo scaffolding, for now, still holding up the skyline. Cash still changing hands without friction. Hong Kong feels like a humid, hyper-dense European city dropped into southern China. Efficient, familiar, and oddly frozen.
The contrast arrives quickly. From Kat O, a small Hakka island, the outskirts of Shenzhen rise abruptly behind wooden boats and low houses. One Country, Two Systems still means a physical interruption: a border, a stamp, a pause. Then everything accelerates. A silent 300 km/h train later, I am in Changsha, capital of Hunan.
This is where the last 25 years become impossible to ignore. China is now effectively cashless. Smartphones are no longer accessories but infrastructure. Being offline is not a choice so much as an inconvenience. And yet, continuity is everywhere. Parks are still filled with dancing crowds, retirees moving in loose synchrony, groups forming and dissolving as they always have. What has changed is mediation. Where routines were once led by instructors with portable speakers, Chinese social media platforms now set the choreography, supply the soundtrack, gather the audience, and turn these everyday performances into something shared far beyond the park gates.
Just outside Changsha is Shaoshan. Mao Zedong’s birthplace. People arrive from across the country. His favourite cigarettes are placed beside his statue. Flowers are arranged carefully. Mao is still here, not as nostalgia, but as almost a stable reference point in a society moving fast.
Further north, Beijing feels controlled and stately. The capital has a stern calm. Tian’anmen Square now requires a booking. So do most major sites. Unlike Shanghai or Shenzhen, Beijing has stayed low. No skyscrapers loom over the Forbidden City or the hutongs. Life stays close to the ground. Siheyuan courtyards now have air conditioners, alleyways hum with electric bikes, and old Beijingers still sit outside playing mahjong when the autumn sun is kind.
From the old Beijing Railway Station, restored to its 1950s look, green slow trains head north. China has built tens of thousands of kilometres of fast and convenient high-speed rail, but I take the slow and squeaking Friendship Train instead. It moves at a different pace. It leads to Dandong, on the border with North Korea. On the riverfront, a woman rents Korean dresses to tourists posing with Sinuiju behind them. Even the edge of the map has become a destination.
In Shenyang, Mao appears again, this time towering over a central square. Around him: Luckin Coffee, WeChat-unlocked bikes, endless rows of Chinese-made EVs. In the Shenyang Forbidden City, posing for photos feels mandatory. Historical costumes, playful exaggeration, influencer logic applied to imperial space.
Even in places I expected to feel left behind, the future is already under construction. In a historic village in Shanxi, workers warn me about freshly laid pavement. They are restoring the entire area. When I tell them I came to see the locations where films by Jia Zhangke were shot, they laugh. I arrived just in time, they say. Soon, everything will look new again.
Over the past 25 years, China has changed in ways that go beyond infrastructure and wealth. Time itself feels compressed. Photographs taken in 2015 already sound like echoes of a transition now largely complete, a moment I am glad I did not miss.
By Filippo Fioretti Boccato
October 8, 2026
