Shock and Vlog

There were four of them—tall, fashionably dressed, blond, wearing sunglasses indoors. They were speaking Russian to each other and English to the desk staff at a small hotel in Shenzhen. They carried with them the tools of their trade, the iPhones and the GoPros, the stacked and folded tripods, the drones. They were unmistakable: They were China Influencers. Over the next few days, on a visit to the Chinese industrial tech metropolis, I would occasionally see them, often the only other white faces in a crowd. There are influencers and there are influencers, and it may not always be altogether clear what it is they are influencing to the uninitiated and uninfluenced, but I was expecting this lot.  

In 2023, I had discovered, semi-accidentally, as is the way when algorithms are on hand to give you what their systems have calculated it is you want, a viral vein of largely non-Chinese people explaining and exploring the architecture of urban China in short videos on YouTube and shorter videos on TikTok. Although they actually trend against the statistics on the numbers of Westerners in China—which are in decline—they are a new and impressive phenomenon, an attempt to map a modern, futuristic, and confident landscape of seamless and smooth infrastructure, and they proselytize for it to an audience in the UK or the US that will never, at home, get to enjoy such things as, let’s say, extensive public transport networks or high-speed trains. These videos are a demonstration that somewhere, it is possible to have nice things or, to use Franz Kafka’s phrase, a vindication that there is hope—just not for us.  

On an average day, several of these videos are promoted into my feed, and they all look the same. Usually the little thumbnail that I can click on to watch the video will feature two young, thin people against a futuristic architectural backdrop, with the name of a city—Shenzhen, Shanghai, Chengdu, and Chongqing are the most frequent locations—with the words “CHINA SHOCKED ME!” They can’t all be shocked, you might ask, particularly given that they all visit the same places.  

Our duo, or more occasionally, our single man or woman, will be shown walking through an area and stopping to eat noodles, preferably in a small corner place in an arcade or a basement or at a street corner (in the Chengdu and Chongqing videos in particular, there will be a lot of this, with much discussion of Sichuanese peppercorns). Then they will point at buildings and exclaim that they are amazing. They will take a lot of public transport. Certain places reliably recur. Some are already globally famous without the need for Influencers, such as the nightly neon lightshow of the Pudong skyline in Shanghai, but others have become famous through Influencing. You don’t have to wait long before you see the massive, domed Gangxia North metro station in Shenzhen; the Liziba metro station in Chongqing, where the train enters through a residential building at around eighth-story level; or the New Century Global Center in Chengdu, a vast glass structure enclosing a mall, a theme park, a leisure center, and much else, claiming, plausibly, to be the largest building in the world. 

I came across these searching for video material on Chinese modern architecture, and that I should find it more apparent on YouTube than in the press is itself a tale. Around the time of the Beijing Olympics of 2008 and the World Expo of 2010 in Shanghai, the Western media, and Western architecture critics, were constantly in China, reporting on new buildings by famous Euro-American architects. Not only has construction of such buildings slowed to a trickle, but the reporting has also decreased: a combination of apparent disinterest on the part of news editors and, to an extent, a greater difficulty in reporting from China (though there are exceptions, such as the Guardian’s architectural critic Oliver Wainwright, whose reporting on China has been exemplary in its nuance, its sophistication, and, when necessary, its severe judgment).  

Where the travel and architecture sections of newspapers have ceased to tread, the Influencers confidently march in, without any need or desire for fixers, local contacts, knowledge of Mandarin, or grounding in history or politics. Moreover, the buildings that excite the Influencers are not “architecture” in the sense of a big shiny new building by Zaha Hadid or Steven Holl, to name two designers who worked extensively in China in the 2000s and 2010s. The four Influencer icons listed above include two metro stations and a big mall, all designed by anonymous jobbing architects at large state-owned enterprises, and a skyline, produced by dozens of architectural firms, only three or four of whom are not Chinese.  

Although by and large, China Influence Vloggers do not discuss their reading, nor, with a few welcome exceptions, do they seem to read books at all, their work fits in rather too perfectly with a current trend in Western discussion of infrastructure, technology, and space. That is, they are all “Abundance” Influencers. The term, popularized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book of the same title, refers to a possibly contradictory fusion of statist ambition at the level of public infrastructure and industrial policy, and a build-baby-build-and-damn-the-consequences antiregulation, prodeveloper urbanism. The one part of the world where, since the 1960s, a massive overbearing developmental state and a ruthless construction and property development industry largely unconstrained by conservation and environmental regulation have worked in tandem is East Asia. This story begins with Japan and Hong Kong in the fifties, expands to South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan in the seventies, and culminates with the much larger-scale urbanization of China since the nineties.  

The “Abundance” diagnosis—approximately, let the state build railways, let private capital do what it likes in cities—is mirrored in Dan Wang’s recent book Breakneck, which pitches the “lawyerly state” of the US against the “engineering state” of China. None of this is to imply anything causal, much as one might like Wang to try vlogging or much as one imagines Beltway hacks like Klein watching videos about viaducts in Sichuan in their downtime. It’s more a demonstration of the theory: A lot of the vloggers do not appear to have ever seen the built results of a functioning state acting as it wishes irrespectively of the wishes of civil society groups. When these young Westerners do see it, they seem to like it. In this, they implicitly or explicitly take a side in a geopolitical contest between the US and the PRC, on the basis of built stuff. While the Western press gleefully reports on slowing Chinese growth rates, any argument that the American economy’s “growth” is more beneficial to the public than the “sluggish” rates of the PRC is easily silenced by the Influencer, simply by putting a New York City subway station, leaking and caked in filth, next to any metro station anywhere in urban China—frequently in extensive transport networks in distant cities that you’re expected not to know of: Xi’an, Changsha, or Harbin, all which have more provision than any US or UK city outside of NYC and London.  

One can of course pick holes in the discoveries of these GoPro-carrying explorers. Let’s take a random survey. It brings us to Luc and Chal from the Netherlands, whose headline on their thumbnail reads “THIS is WORLDS LARGEST City?! Cyberpunk City Chongqing, China” and to the Russian vlogger CoolVision, who offers to guide you through “The World’s Biggest City You’ve Never Heard Of—Chongqing, China.” Chongqing is not the world’s largest city—the oft-quoted population figure of 32 million people refers to Chongqing municipality, which is overwhelmingly rural. Chongqing isn’t even the largest Sichuanese city, with Chengdu having 13.6 million inhabitants in its urban area to Chongqing’s 9.6 million.  

But it’s the other epithet—“Cyberpunk”—that is more important. A Chongqing video will always feature, in detail, an extraordinarily overconfident cityscape crammed into a mountain, in which skybridges and walkways will start at ground level and leave you on the 10th floor without your noticing. Combining this with the city’s muggy, damp, misty weather and the ubiquitous neon, the Influencer really can project themself into Blade Runner, into anime like Akira or Ghost in the Shell, or into their recent spawn such as the Polish video game Cyberpunk 2077. Accordingly, young Joel and Emilia, on their video, can tell you of how “WE Spent 48 hours in the WORLD’S most advanced city” or explain through an urban walk how “CHINA IS LIVING IN 2100.” Only a few Influencers seem to have made it to Chongqing’s rotting public housing estates, in which blocks unrenovated since their construction thirty-five years ago, built without elevators, stand beneath the glass skyscrapers. But then, some have visited and filmed these estates, because they fit rather well into the Cyberpunk frame: What could be more Blade Runner than this sort of dilapidation below being overshadowed by a neon utopia above? It’s all part of the game.  

Certain phrases reappear that beg questions. Shev and Dev from India, in one of their urban vlogs, headline their report “THE WORLD WON’T BELIEVE CHINA LOOKS LIKE THIS,” which sums it up. So many times, the phrase “I WAS SHOCKED” or “I WAS SURPRISED” or “THIS WAS NOT WHAT I EXPECTED!” yells from the feed. On the occasions when the Influencer tells you what exactly it was they did expect, it is usually poverty and a highly visible police state. It appears to be widely assumed that a Communist Party dictatorship cannot abet, much less create, say, widespread affluence, clean and functional infrastructure, neon-lit cityscapes, craft beer, and high-quality small-business street food. But it can. Indeed, even the USSR was really very good at beautifully designed and very clean public transport, in the metro systems of Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv, Tashkent, and Tbilisi, among others. The nonarchitectural things this may well coexist with—endemic censorship, a ferocious criminal justice system, misogyny, long working hours, persecuted minorities—are necessarily far less visible to the GoPro.  

Those who are paranoid, and see the hand of the party everywhere, could consider the videos listed above as a sort of gateway drug, leading inexorably to videos that are outright propaganda. The videos that are more directly propagandistic tend to progress through juxtapositions between the filth and inertia of the “lawyerly states” (as Wang describes them) of the US and the UK, and the high-tech dynamism of China: a position put with economy in the title of one video by the account MegaDose – Mega Construction, which reads, “China HUMILIATES United States With INSANE Infrastructure.” The vlogger Sam Tyler, for instance, will offer you a typical clip in which “I Went to China’s Most VIRAL City…” (Chongqing, obviously) and use it to relate the CCP’s official position on development. So too with the account MisterVaughn, whose “Is Beijing really a modern city? Why Living in Beijing Feels Like the FUTURE!” is so celebratory that it could have been paid for by the government.  

Indeed, a few Influencers have been paid by the government. They are, however, relatively easy to spot, because their juxtapositions are so unsubtle. Jason Lightfoot’s account Living in China is full of videos of transport infrastructure headed with lines like “America CAN’T compete with China’s NEW high-speed future!” or more simply “America is done!” or “The West is cooked.” Taking a similar geopolitical frame are the videos of the father-and-son vlogging duo Lee and Ollie Barrett. Their work involves a certain mission creep: Typical touristic videos shot in Xinjiang are interspersed with to-camera addresses denying that there is any forced labor in the Uyghur autonomous region. These are unusually morally dubious. More typical is the middle-aged English vlogger and Nanjing resident Middle Kingdom Productions, whose videos like “Shocking Public Services in Rural China: Toilets, Trash, and the Unexpected!,” depart from the most filmed and photographed inner-urban landmarks to take the viewer around rather functional and modest rural areas, with the parodic “shock” arising from the fact they seem rather well organized and are better at collecting their rubbish than, say, local authorities in UK suburbs.  

Some of these accounts are rather melancholy. The vlogger Harvey in China, who tells us often of how he’s buying an apartment in China and how good the trains are there (as they are), also has a line in videos in which he returns home. A sample title is “How I see the UK after 3 years living in China (I went home and was disgusted.)” While some of these video-makers have worked for Chinese state media and appear to be aligned, either professionally or otherwise, with state goals, some of these reactions are eminently understandable.  

While it is apples and oranges to compare a vast urbanizing country with an overwhelmingly urban, long-developed, relatively small country like the UK, it is entirely rational to ask questions about why it is that some countries—particularly “Anglo-Saxon” ones—seem unable to build, say, fast and reliable trains or good urban public transport networks, or to keep their cities and suburbs clean, when other countries are able to do these things with apparent ease. And while you don’t have to go to China to find pleasant streets, good trains, and nice metros—the Netherlands, Japan, Spain, Taiwan, and South Korea all readily spring to mind—the scale and drama of their construction in China is obviously greater than anywhere else. Similarly, the pervasive (particularly American) narrative of the Chinese state as an omnipresent oppressive hand, and of the Chinese city as a place where any modernity must necessarily be of the Potemkin village variety, always hiding some deep and endemic poverty, is patently partial and hypocritical. But there is always a protesting-too-much element in these videos, the sense of someone trying to convince themselves as much as their audience. Why else the constant, shrill insistence? 

Thankfully, beneath all of these accounts, which often pile up into an interminable slop of skyscrapers and all-caps slogans, are some rather more thoughtful, or at least rather less crass, vloggers. In their videos, the clichés of Influencing are sidestepped, or sometimes parodied, and the gaps in the image provide some room for spontaneous reactions to the places we are being led through. The China Influencer whose clips I first came to enjoy at length—watching multiple videos out of choice, rather than one or two out of self-disgusted fascination—was Nico, an English Vlogger whose videos, prominently featuring her husband Jack, have a bickering sense of humor I found familiar and comforting, in the context of their sequences of robots and skyscrapers. Although much of their content is touristic and breathless—I recall a video on the electronics industry in Shenzhen in which they promise to show us where “my PHONE and my DRONE” were made—they were more likely to walk you around a working-class area and less likely to lapse into Xi Jinping Thought.  

But there are three much more unusual accounts that the algorithm led me to through association, and that were, for once, genuinely surprising. One of these is Little Chinese Everywhere, run by a Chinese geography graduate who travels, often on a little two-seater motor-scooter, often with her German partner, through the edges of China. There are drone shots and slick photography in her videos, but they bring her most frequently to the rural and peri-urban non-Han outskirts of the PRC and from there into Central Asia. Rather than (politically impossible) condemnation or apologism, her videos of China’s western and northern borderlands build up a picture of a multicultural and extremely uneven country, a place full of complexities and contradictions, rather than one marching in lockstep toward a cyberpunk future. Wang’s record, meanwhile, is an account that has no commentary at all, but consists in large part of long, meditative journeys through the uncelebrated spaces of modern China. Some spaces are shared with the Influencers—Chongqing’s vertiginous walkways appear regularly—but there is neither “shocking” poverty nor “shocking” futurism in these videos. Rather, these are moving pictures of a country’s built environment that require time and thought to fully understand. One can imagine them serving, one day, like the Edwardian English cinema of Mitchell & Kenyon, as documents of how people lived in a bygone age: a warts-and-all portrait of a place and time, without editorializing or drama. 

What is particularly interesting, though, is when the lens is turned back toward the sorts of places the China Influencers are leaving. The algorithm, in its wisdom, took me one evening from seeing English people SHOCKED BY CHINA to the account of the Chinese YouTuber Imalittlemole. Her videos range across Europe but focus on extremely mundane parts of the UK: Slough, Skipton, or my native south-east London. Without ever breaking her deadpan expression, she wanders around, enjoying the green space and the parks, the Victorian architecture, and the pubs of the ubiquitous Wetherspoons pub chain (“let me explain why I always end up in the Wetherspoon,” she asks in one of those videos. “First of all, because there is a Wetherspoon here.” There always is). These videos are sometimes hilariously bleak, depicting a country whose ability to construct and maintain its built environment is in drastic decline, just as the Abundance Influencers would contend. But “Mole,” as she refers to herself, never condemns or judges; she just shows. You can get a sense, in her videos, of urban Britain as a place of very valuable things—ethnic and cultural diversity, a rich architectural history, abundant parkland and trees—that is constantly let down through its dreadful infrastructure, its bland chain store–lined high streets, and its penny-pinching meanness. Without even trying, I think she’s hit on a better diagnosis of the West’s ills than anyone could by pointing and shouting at a very big building thousands of miles away. 

Owen Hatherley is the author of many books on aesthetics and politics, most recently The Alienation Effect, on Central European migrants to Britain. He is currently working on a book about architecture and developmentalism in East Asia.