China

Harry visited China in early 2024, spending time in Shanghai on a six-day transit visa, and returned in 2026. He frames the first trip explicitly against the statistic that 73% of people in Western countries hold unfavourable views of the country.

Observations

From I Rented a Chinese Girlfriend in Shanghai 🇨🇳

• Internet: YouTube, Instagram, and other Western platforms are blocked. Locals use VPNs; a foreign phone with a foreign eSIM works without one — Harry’s did.
• Payments: everything runs on Alipay by phone; Harry’s foreign bank card was nearly unusable. Sort out mobile payment before you need it.
• Dating and family: the one-child policy’s gender imbalance helped spawn rent-a-girlfriend services; parents still pressure children to marry early, but urban young people increasingly stay single. The one-child policy itself has been lifted (around a year before Harry’s visit (from video – unverified)).
• Speech: locals won’t criticise the government on camera — “I love China” is the only safe on-record answer; honest opinions come off camera. A subscriber contrasted this with India and the UK, where you can say what you like. See expect a script on camera.
• Safety: low crime, friendly police, and advanced transport — a subscriber rated China’s infrastructure ahead of the other countries he’d travelled.
• Customs: drinking water is served hot, for health. China is multilingual beyond Mandarin — Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hakka.
• Money and costs: Harry’s full rented-date day cost 1,400 yuan, about $200; the Oriental Pearl Tower was $56 (from video – unverified).

From I Ignored the Media and Visited China 🇨🇳

• Six-day transit visas are available on arrival, which is how this trip runs.
• Infrastructure is the first thing you notice — a 270 mph maglev covering the airport run in eight minutes, and Harry’s flat statement that Chinese transport is ahead of the UK’s and the US’s.
• Electric vehicles are around 40% of usage, Teslas are cheapest in the world here because the factory is outside Shanghai, and number plates are colour coded: green electric, blue petrol.
• The one-child policy is now a three-child policy, in response to population decline.
• Communist Party membership is hard to obtain — about 97 million people, under 10% of the population.
• Surveillance is a trade people say they accept. Asked directly, locals report near-zero crime and the ability to walk anywhere at any hour as the return on it. Harry records both his own discomfort and their answer.
• On the limits of what people can know: Harry’s guide says many Chinese are becoming more nationalistic, that access to outside information is limited, and that where state media is the only view available people are easily misled.
• Western brands are aspirational rather than resented, and a middle class Harry’s guide describes as looking for a new identity queues round the block for them.
• Marriage markets are a real institution: parents advertise their adult children’s age, height, weight and job in a park, and brokers take a commission on a match.
• Being gay is manageable in Shanghai and among the young, and very hard in a small city or with family.
• Handshakes are soft, and can seal an agreement without paperwork.
• On the dog-eating stereotype, the answer Harry gets and endorses: 1.4 billion people eat many things, famine has driven people everywhere to it, and in Shanghai people dote on their dogs.
• Religion, per Harry’s figures: roughly a third agnostic or atheist, 16% Buddhist, 7% Christian, 1.7% Muslim.
• Fake goods come straight from the factory, and the sellers will raise the price mid-negotiation to test you. Walking out worked.

From I Went to One of the Wealthiest and Most Advanced Cities

• One country, two systems is a real border. Macau and Hong Kong each run their own currency, legal system, immigration and passports, and moving between them and the mainland is a crossing each time. Cars near Macau carry two or three number plates for exactly this reason.
• Entry is easier than its reputation. UK passports are now visa-free for the mainland outright; otherwise 54 countries qualify for a 240-hour transit visa with an onward ticket, entering one way and leaving another — see use a transit visa.
• Growth at a scale that has no Western comparison: Shenzhen was a town of 30,000 in 1980 and is over 17 million now, on the back of Deng Xiaoping’s first special economic zone.
• New technology launches in Shenzhen first, which is why it looks unlike the rest of the country: driverless taxis at 2.4 yuan a ride, drone food delivery, powered walking exoskeletons on sale in malls.
• Much of it is gated behind a Chinese ID card, including the driverless-taxi app, which effectively excludes a foreigner travelling alone.
• The high-speed rail network runs 45,000 km at up to 350 km/h with 95% on-time performance, tickets bought on Trip.com and travelled on your passport, and — the detail Harry singles out — fares priced by distance rather than by demand.
• Hong Kong feels Western where the mainland doesn’t: Google, Facebook and Instagram all work, and far more people speak English.
• The colonial histories are the reason all three exist: Portugal took Macau as a trading post in 1557, Britain took Hong Kong after the Opium War, and both were built as gateways to China for European trade.