This is not the China I expected

A couple of weeks ago, I visited the People’s Republic of China for the first time. I travelled to attend the 3rd China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo held in Changsha City, Hunan Province from June 29 to July 2 2023.

Most of what I knew about China before my visit was from my vociferous reading and based on what I watched on international television networks and movies.

So, the images of China implanted in me were those of a claustrophobic overcrowded country. After all, this is a nation of more than 1.4 billion people! I was expecting to see filthy cities whose air is so polluted one can hardly breathe.

I had images of restaurants full of dog meat, snakes being readied for meals and all manner of food objectionable to me. I worried about being confronted by unfriendly Chinese folks who are supposed to be abusive, racist, exploitative and unhelpful.

I mean, we have the likes of 26-year-old Lu Ke answering multiple criminal charges here after he allegedly filmed some Malawian children singing racist chants about themselves in Chinese without understanding what they were saying.

I recalled one Chinese at the construction of Bingu National Stadium in Lilongwe who was caught on camera chasing a Malawian construction worker with a whip.

Furthermore, the Chinese, I recalled with trepidation, barely converse in English, how will I communicate?

And oh, that one party communist country is dangerous. Won’t I find myself in trouble? The images of Tiananmen Square in 1989 that the Western media like to replay over and over whenever there is some sort of unrest in China were on my mind—students gunned down in cold blood by security agents.

Today, having been there and returned safely, my image of China could not be more different. Granted, I only visited three cities—Guangzhou, Changsha and Shenzhen—out of that country’s 700 official cities.

I mean, this is the third largest country in the world by total area (9.6 million square kilometres against nearly 119 000 square kilometres for Malawi!), how can I change my mind after just exploring a dot on the vast nation?

My answer is that I had seen enough to realise that most of what I thought I knew about China was brushed-off images. For example, while China is one of the most urbanised countries in the world, I wouldn’t say that it is overcrowded. The three cities I visited are some of the cleanest I have ever been to across the world. Even the train stations (and that country has the largest network of high speed railways in the world built within the past 20 years) are some of the most sparkling I have ever been to—and that includes toilets and other sanitation facilities.

As for air pollution, I get it. China is a heavily industrialized and industrializing country, so emissions are inevitable. But they are not as bad as portrayed. In fact, a lot of Chinese cities are getting greener, not less.

You just have to look at Shenzhen City, whose development from scratch over the past 40 years should have been an environmental disaster, but hasn’t. It is probably one of the greenest cities in the world despite its rapid urbanisation and industrialisation and that great experiment is becoming nicely contagious across China and its other cities.

At least that is what I saw across the 672-km high-speed train ride between Guangzhou and Changsha—natural vegetation fiercely protected and exotic ones planted, nourished and cherished.

Of course, on this journey, I did see some nasty Chinese who treated me and my friends like the plague. But I can count them on the fingers of one hand.

The majority were kind, helpful people such as that taxi driver, in Shenzhen, a native of the city who proudly and kindly explained to us the history of his town.

Or that lovely woman at Changsha Railway Station who insisted that I and my friends Wonder and Serah partake in the chocolate sweets she had just bought. And, oh, that helpful teenage boy at a subway station in Guangzhou who, after seeing that our phones were unable to pay by scanning (a popular payment system in China) bought train tickets for us and firmly refused to accept our cash reimbursements despite our insistence—all while smiling.

Using the language translation app, he guided us through the motions of how to connect between trains and went out of his way to ride with us, at his expense, until we made our first connection before returning to embark on his own journey.

It certainly was not the China I had in mind when I set off from Kamuzu International Airport in Lilongwe that chilly afternoon.