Beijing versus Shanghai, Pastoralism as key to civilization, and why I travel (again)

A grab bag of thoughts from between trips

I taped a conversation with Tyler Cowen last week¹ and the first question he asked me was whether I preferred Shanghai or Beijing and I had no answer. It was an appropriate question since I was still jet lagged from having just come from Asia, but what struck me the most during my two short times in China is how much everything seemed the same. I wrote about that bland ubiquity after walking both cities, which I see as an intentional leveling: A uniform modernity which seems to be one of the goals of the CCP, which I’ve likened to the guardian class in Plato’s Republic, who are playing a real world version of SimCountry, directing, managing, and tweaking almost every aspect of Chinese life. One of their primary goals has been to replace the traditional, which they see as messy, embarrassing, and impoverished, with a landscape that is wealthier, but which to me has all the soul and flair of a corporate business park.

This isn’t so much a judgement as an observation. Given China’s past of poverty, tragedy, and hardship, I understand its desire for a more refined, sanitized, and conventional modern lifestyle. The safety, well-being, and economic flourishing of Chinese citizens is a billion times more important than my tourist’s desire for quaint historical character, and they have delivered that. Regardless of what else you think about China and the CCP, it should be acknowledged how impressive the last forty years of stewardship have been, with the wealth of citizens having grown almost thirty times, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty.

Yet despite the outward similarities between Shanghai and Beijing, I am sure there are differences, and that their opacity is as much about me as it is the built landscape. Walking a city as I do, trekking fifteen miles from the outer beltway to downtown repeatedly, isn’t always the best way to understand its culture, and China’s outward uniformity makes this limitation even more apparent."

Still, part of me is stubbornly sticking to my thesis that China is culturally homogeneous, certainly more than other large countries, especially those outside of Asia, which as a continent has a tendency towards uniformity compared to Europe and the Americas.

Chinese conformity isn’t surprising since one of the CCP’s stated goals is to achieve widespread shared prosperity. Uniformity, not division, is what the CCP understands as China’s strength, and hence, any groups hanging on to past ways, especially ones very different from the modal, are an embarrassment. That is a very different way of imagining the public good, one that we in the West, since the Enlightenment, have linked to the protection and expansion of individual rights, with the primary goal being the flourishing of the self, even if that means it is at odds with the flourishing of the wider community.

I am not blind to the problems of the CCP, and I am certainly not so dogmatic as to pretend this approach hasn’t come with huge issues, but I also believe the party isn’t simply cynical hypocrites consumed by a desire for power. They really do have a different understanding of the public good, at a deep philosophical level, and China’s growing economic might means that worldview cannot simply be dismissed as the ramblings of some bad guys. Western style constitutional democracy, with our emphasis on human rights (as defined by us), is an ideology, and when we say it is the highest form that other nations need to advance towards, we are making a claim on truth that a lot of the world doesn’t necessarily agree with.

China is very different, because of its internal similarities, and that is why it isn’t going away. The next decades of global politics will be framed as being about an economic and military competition between the US and China, but the ideological differences are as great as, if not greater, than those between the US and the Soviets. That is harder to see because the CCP isn’t your father’s Communist party, and for all practical purposes has adopted a market economy. They are, however, still committed to the communalism part of Communism, as well as the materialism part. That means they believe in an elite cadre selflessly managing society towards a communal shared good, which translates into conformity over individuality, national order and rights over personal expression — the nail that sticks out doesn’t get praise, but gets hammered down

As you can tell I am fascinated with China, so my next trip, starting in two weeks, will include eight days in Xi’an, which given the restrictions imposed by China’s ten day transit free visa program, is about as different as I can manage.

That visa-free program is wonderful, since getting a visa to China is intentionally complicated. The map above shows where you can visit. As Substack writer and reader of this blog

Yu Hsing Chen

, Richard (who sent me this image) commented, “Many have said that this is the official list of where it’s a shithole in China” which I find funny because almost all the places I want to go, especially the far West, I can’t. At least not without jumping through a bunch of hoops.

This is because those provinces contain the most significant remaining differences within China. These regions, home to China’s most distinct cultural and ethnic groups, are, depending on who you believe, either being ruthlessly suppressed or gradually integrated to match the rest of the country.

My next trip will begin with nine days in Tashkent (Uzbekistan), followed by eight in Xi’an, and then what is quickly becoming my traditional stopover in Seoul before returning home.

I’m going to Tashkent, because on reflection Central Asia is the region of the world that I’m currently most captivated by, because it is the region least similar to the rest of the world, without also being uniformly depressing. In retrospect, Bishkek and Ulaanbaatar were two of my most rewarding trips, and despite their pollution, they are wonderful places to visit, that are inexpensive, safe, unique, and currently not saturated with tour groups. In both places you can lose yourself in the local culture, without feeling that you are either a mark to be exploited, or so different that your existence there is impolite.

I booked this trip because I’m deeply interested in ancient history and am currently reading two books on the Neolithic Proto-Indo-European language, the world’s original lingua franca. This is the famous mother tongue, and the idea that there was a group that was the origin of so many of the great civilizations of the world, has a long intellectual history, one that got derailed by the support of the Nazis.

Despite the Nazis’ warped fascination with it, the core idea remains valid: a civilization from the late Neolithic to early Bronze Age expanded from Central Asia across a vast region, stretching from England to India, and left a lasting genetic, cultural, and linguistic legacy.

This wasn’t the Aryans, like the German archaeologist thought, but the Yamnaya culture that emerged around 3,500 BC from the region that is currently a war zone between Russia and Ukraine.

I would recommend both of the books, “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language” and “By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia”, although the first is more academic, but also far more insightful.

For those without the time to read them, the quick (and oversimplified) theory is that a pastoral culture from what is now southern Ukraine and Russia, around 5,500 years ago brought together, and perfected, the recent inventions of wool spinning, wheeled travel, domesticated horses, and herding, to learn how to ride horses, build wagons and chariots, and then go forth out both west towards Europe and east across the steppe, and within a thousand years, transform the world².

They did this because they embraced a form of pastoralism which was truly revolutionary, allowing them to leave the narrow river valleys and venture into the otherwise empty steppe, which stretched for 5,000 miles to Beijing, in an almost unbroken series of flat, dry, grasslands.

This lifestyle was so transformative because herds of sheep and cattle were organic factories manage by humans, “grass processors (which) converted plains of grass, useless and even hostile to humans, into wool, felt, clothing, tents, milk, yogurt, cheese, meat, marrow, and bone — the foundations of both life and wealth.”

The amazing thing is that pastoral, nomadic, animal-centered lifestyle, the one that forever changed the world over five thousand years ago, still exists today in parts of Central Asia in many ways unchanged, although it has become rarer and rarer. Yet, only a hundred years ago it was still the dominant way of life.

One side note that I add whenever I write about the nomadic and pastoral life— neither means being fully transient without a home; rather, both are deeply tied to place, often more so than a modern person who lives in the same apartment for their entire life. Nomads do shift between locations, carting their tents a few times a year by horse (or now Prius) as the weather changes, but these moves are often short (just up or down from the hill) and they return to the same places repeatedly. Pastoralism, and the nomadic life, are deeply intertwined with the land, which they know in ways we moderns are clueless about.

I don’t know if I will find any lingering traces of the nomadic lifestyle in Tashkent, as I did in Mongolia. However, even if I don’t, I plan to visit the national museums, since much of the archaeology behind the Proto-Indo-European thesis comes from Soviet-era work, which is now housed in local museums

Both of these books also touched on China, given that early farming civilizations also began around the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. One book included a map of China’s millet/rice divide, which made me realize that, in traveling from Shanghai to Beijing, I had crossed a 5,000-year-old cultural boundary. I began wondering about Tyler’s original question and whether I had actually noticed this difference.

I started thinking about Tyler’s original question and if I had noticed this boundary. Was the food different? Did I eat more noodles in Beijing and more rice in Shanghai? I don’t think so. While I am sure both cities have distinct culinary traditions that persist today, I didn’t notice many differences. Aside from a few small things, like the ubiquity of sweet yogurt in Shanghai, most of my meals were in mall food courts, where most people ate outside the home. In both cities, the variety of available food struck me as largely the same.

I did find this graph, and while I am skeptical of broad theories like this, I have more time for stereotypes being largely true than most travel writers.

Regardless, would love to hear from those of you who know way more than me about this!

Why Travel and self realization

I was reading a recent post by Freddie deBoer, broadly about unrealistic fantasies, when I came across this:

I have no idea if this refers to me, but on the off chance it does, I’d like to set the record straight. First, I don’t disagree with his broader sentiment that if you are traveling because of the endless novelty, then you are eventually going to find yourself depressed, frustrated, and jaded. I’ve met those type of travelers, and I generally come down on the side of Freddie, Plato, Socrates, and many others, that a life spent in the meaningless pursuit of pleasure will eventually end up in vapid despair. Chasing the high ever higher, until you crash, hard. The travel version of this is seeking out ever more obscure, remote, and often dangerous places. I’ve done a little of that, but I have no interest in doing it anymore. I don’t want to flirt with death, nor do I like the crushing loneliness that often comes with such experiences.

(As a controversial aside, I believe that this phenomenon, chasing an ever more potent travel high, only to end up deeply alone, contributed to Anthony Bourdain’s suicide.)

The constant pursuit of the novel isn’t why I travel though. I also don’t travel to ‘try to find myself.’ As I’ve said and written multiple times, traveling ‘to discover yourself’ is a misguided notion, driven by the modern understanding of identity, that there is some true inner self that can be revealed and liberated with enough therapy, or enough trips to odd places.

Instead, I travel to learn, mostly about others: how they experience the world, make sense of their place in it, and organize their lives. While I sometimes learn about myself in the process, I see it less as self-discovery and more as intellectual growth.

There are times over the last four years where I have felt a little burned out, a tad jaded, but that has so far proven to always be about logistical fatigue. About having done too much and needing a break to focus on my personal life, and reading.

l will likely take fewer trips this year, not because I’m tired of traveling, but because I want to focus on reading in-depth scholarly works to explore some emerging ideas from my travels, such as how cultures form, who shapes them, and how they evolve? Both ways of learning—experiential travel and solitary reading—are valuable, and sometimes you need to shift between them.

But that doesn’t mean my sensations have been dulled by the last four years. The opposite actually. I’ve learned more than ever, and I’m as excited as ever. I feel incredibly fortunate to spend weeks reading, then pick up and travel anywhere in the world for a month. Our world is endlessly fascinating, and if it ever seems boring, then you’re doing something wrong.

PS: As usual, if any of you are in Tashkent, Xi’an, or Seoul, please reach out to me. My exact dates are

Tashkent: March 19th - 27th

Xi’an: March 28th - April 4th

Seoul: April 4th - April 8th

1. I will post when it comes out, but honestly, I wasn’t very happy with my performance. I regret not asking him more questions. I will plead jet lag, but honestly, I was simply out of it that day and I don’t know why. Oh well. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

2. Everyone impressed by AI, but reading about Neolithic and Bronze Age periods is a reminder of how stunningly inventive humans are. From domesticating, then selectively breeding wool heavy sheep (not natural at all) to basic bread production to basic metallurgy to irrigation — none of it is obvious, especially agricultural, and all of it requires centuries of practice, learning, and dedication to passing on knowledge.

Go look at pictures of wild animals (horses, sheep, etc) and wild fruits and grains. Wild corn is like four nasty ass seeds on a thumb sized stub. Native Americans, over centuries, turned that into something resembling what you can buy now.