China continues to accrue soft power in the world at the expense of the US. A mixed blessing I suppose, but deserved.
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
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I'm kind of surprised by this. They gave me a 10yr multiple-entry visa when I applied for a single-entry visa, which made me think they really wanted tourists after COVID. I must have gone off-season, because the sites I visited in Beijing and Xi'an were overwhelmingly populated by domestic tourists.
If you are thinking of going. China is very cool and relatively cheap, especially food and lodging. It's a little challenging to get around because a lot of the travel apps are blocked in China. Like the best map app is in Chinese, so you have to use it with a translator app, but that's part of the fun.
Amap has an english mode, good luck finding it in chinese tho.
Well duh. When mercans threaten to jail tourists and attack other countries including europe, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, the decision to skip tourism in the country where everyone has and threatens to use a gun is entirely rational. The next industry to experience a boycott will be mercan streaming and cloud tech companies. In my business, with about 5,000 employees, we have a stated plan to get off Amazon, Google and Microsoft moving to non american suppliers. we are even preferencing chinese over american now. Once we move the business will be out of reach of american bullshit for good.
Ironically I think that about China. I could still say “Fuck the US and Trump” here relatively easily. If were to say “Fuck China and Xi” there’s a relatively good chance I could get disappeared.
I’d love to go back to Hong Kong for example, it’s one of my favorite places in the world, but after what happened there, frankly I’m afraid unless I was on my absolute best behavior.
I’d love to go back to Hong Kong for example, it’s one of my favorite places in the world, but after what happened there, frankly I’m afraid unless I was on my absolute best behavior.
What behavior exactly are you thinking you'll do that you'll get disappeared for? Sometimes when I'm having spicy conversations, Chinese people will use my non-chinese phone for translation instead of their own, or move the conversation to whatsapp instead of wechat (you can send whatsapp apk via wechat lol), but the level of concern was more like fear of getting seriously inconvenienced than disappeared.
There's different conversations you have in different contexts.
No thanks, I don't want to deal with that type of shit at all. I'm not going to be visiting the US or China because of that, I'd rather go chill in Taiwan.
Taiwan is cool, but you're comparing Hawaii to the entirety of mainland US and Alaska, if Hawaii had sone strange history.
I don't think Hawaii is really analogous but I get your point. I'd still rather chill in. Taiwan though even if it's significantly smaller.
It's not a perfect analog, but I mean it's still 1 place, whereas mainland China is a million diverse places.
Comparing Iceland to the entirety of Europe would fit too. It's an interesting place, but if someone said they would rather go to Iceland than an entire continent, you'd assume either the person saying it was a huge fan of something that existed only in iceland, or didn't understand the scale and diversity of the places they're talking about.
Not necessarily, there are different types of travellers. Some people like packing many destinations into a short time and some prefer to spend more time on one place. We're pretty far off the original topic now though because not visiting China has nothing to do with the diversity or size of it but because the CCP is an authoritarian regime who can go fuck themselves. I'd like to go back to Europe sometime though.
I recall the days when folk from China were trying to escape the country. Nowadays...not only do they want to go back...but foreigners want to go there....nuts.
Its a completely different country. Talking to family who went there in the 2000s for work, their experiences are entirely alien.
I'd love to visit China, but that photo is anything but alluring to me heh
That's the densist part of Chongqing, the equivalent of showing someone Manhattan to represent all of America. The rest of China isn't quite so visually loud.
This is a different part of downtown Chongqing.
Yeah, I have a friend who went back and she's bankin'....I'm so happy and jealous of her!!!! Future land of opportunity. I also like the cyberpunk look it's got going!!!