I'm in China

TL;DR

Streamer documents a live trip through China visiting Chengdu, Shanghai, and Chongqing to interview locals and explore tech cities.

Key Points

• 1.The trip covers China's tech cities, not tourist spots. The crew visits Shanghai, Chengdu, and plans Chongqing and Shenzhen, deliberately skipping Beijing and the Great Wall to focus on factories, AI devs, and game developers.
• 2.A lost passport caused a dramatic train station sprint. At what he describes as the world's biggest train station, he lost his passport, missed his train, but recovered it from a basement lost-and-found and caught a faster 300 km/h train to beat the original.
• 3.EVs dominate Chinese roads with green license plates marking them. Nearly every other car is electric, but despite the macro EV call being right, his 2019 NIO investment was wrong — he saw almost no NIOs and many other Chinese EV brands.
• 4.Everything in China operates through one super-app, Alipay. Taxis, food delivery, in-store payments, and more all run through this single platform, which he compares to Elon Musk's 'everything app' vision for X.
• 5.The Xiaomi SU7 refresh was a day-one highlight. The car reveal was embargoed until 7 p.m., so the crew waited at a mall until the price and door access unlocked simultaneously, calling it a 'beast car.'
• 6.Chengdu is the panda capital with roughly 200 giant pandas. Panda imagery saturates the city's signage and characters, and most zoos worldwide that receive loan pandas source them from this city.
• 7.A random basketball game bridged the language barrier in Shanghai. He played one-on-one with a Chinese stranger using Google Translate on their phones; a second game in Chengdu was repeatedly interrupted by his opponent stopping to smoke.
• 8.Chinese social media app Weibo showed heavy coverage of Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. Doom-scrolling a default Weibo account with no algorithm, he found trending content about geopolitical topics including the Trump-Ishiba meeting, surprising him with the volume.
• 9.Zootopia 2 is the highest-grossing Western film ever in China. It is reportedly on track to beat Avengers: Endgame's Chinese box office record, though it trails the top domestic Chinese film.
• 10.The crew attended a food trade show in Chengdu where a rice cracker company pulled them into a VIP meeting. Despite their interpreter clarifying they were not purchasing agents, the company's boss still gifted them a large bag of Mito Wangzi rice crackers.
• 11.The trip plans to end with gambling in Macau. The group intends to visit Macau, with his stated goal being to sit at a high-roller baccarat table; he also mentioned trying to visit a counterfeit market and confirmed Chinese Nike rival Anta recently overtook Nike in Chinese sales.