Lu-Hai Liang

I am in Qingdao a coastal city roughly equidistant between Beijing and Shanghai on China’s eastern seaboard; population nine million.

It’s a fair city with nice weather and sea mists. My school friend from the UK lives here and I have been staying with him and his American girlfriend. He loves Qingdao with a passion. A somewhat irrational passion but we all have friends with an eccentric passion.

I’ve known him since age 11 as we went to the same secondary school. I remember us both working at a Chinese takeaway in our local town aged 17; he as a delivery boy, me as a receptionist and dishwasher. Much has changed since then.

He has studied at McGill in Canada, lived and worked in Burkina Faso (west Africa), and now resides in Qingdao from where he freelances. We are both freelancers but he is of a different kind: work focused and very busy. He speaks three languages and is working on a fourth and is doing a part-time Masters in public policy and management. He sleeps at 11pm and wakes early. He often says I should be less lazy (a little unkindly I must say).

Having lived with him for a week I can see that our lives differ a lot. Some of this is due to the differences between Beijing and Qingdao, and some of this is due to our differences in temperament. He will be successful and wealthy in the future. Of that, I am sure.

I have no regrets.

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Immediately prior to Qingdao I was in Chengdu.

Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan, a province about the size of France, and it’s found in southwest China.

I was in Chengdu for a corporate writing gig for a content marketing agency (the client is an elevator company).

A friend of mine lives in Chengdu having moved there from Beijing where she’d lived for six years before returning to her home province.

In Chengdu she’s started her own business, a small food company that makes and delivers salads and other healthy food. She says Chengdu is like what Beijing was five years ago. And that’s what makes it exciting.

Opportunities exist in big cities with emerging demographics, and a gold rush can ensue.

Living in China I have often thought about cities as a crucible for dreams and ambitions. And in China those dreams are fast moving and the horizons in which they play out always shifting.

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It was while I was eating a bowl of noodles near my friend’s apartment in Qingdao, under tall buildings recently built, that I realized something.

China is a great country.

It’s the third biggest in the world and if you were to choose a nation to represent Earth, China may as well be it, especially with its number of people.

In 1989 — a generation ago — China’s economy was worth $344 billion.

It’s now worth over $9 trillion.

Chinese students have been going abroad to the US, UK, Australia and elsewhere in ever increasing number. Chinese smartphones take up coverage on US tech websites. Chinese companies are moving to the American south to take advantage of cheap labour.

It’s quite obvious that the achievements of this country to turn itself around with such audacity, verve, and speed, is phenomenal.

No other country on this planet can lay claim to such a heady brew of statistics, history, and enormity of change.

I feel good to have been a part of it, in my youth, and it a part of me, irrevocably expanding my imagination and horizons.