I landed in China (for the first time in my life) at the Beijing Daxing Airport around 9 AM local time on January 20, 2026. That airport itself is worthy of note: it’s brand-new, only opened in 2019, and was built from the ground up for maximum energy efficiency. It’s a LEED Platinum-certified complex with solar arrays on the roofs of the hangars, a rainwater collection system, huge skylights for natural light, electric airport vehicles, a giant ground-source geothermal heat pump system, and public transit links straight to the city center. Of course, air travel remains a huge emissions source, but in terms of sheer infrastructure design, Daxing Airport is impressive.
Upon arrival, there was a definite feel of entering The System in an omnipresent surveillance/security state, but it was surprisingly user-friendly, efficient, and easy to navigate. I had my fingerprints scanned by an automated kiosk at the airport, showed my passport and itinerary to the immigration officer to receive the ten-day visa-free travel pass in my passport, and then successfully bought a subway ticket1 out of the airport by scanning a QR code with WeChat2. The subway car was expansive, clean, pearly white, highly digitized, and so shiny-new it actually smelled okay.
The Beijing Subway is the longest subway system in the world by total track length, with 404 subway stations on 28 lines adding up to over 891 kilometers of track. It provides over 3.6 billion rides per year (with, of course, many people taking hundreds of rides). It’s mostly been built since 2000, much of it for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
For context, New York City has the world’s 14th longest subway system, and Paris has the world’s 24th longest subway system. Five of the top five, nine of the top ten, and fifteen of the top twenty longest subway systems on Earth are in China. Eleven of China’s “15 in the top 20” began offering their first-ever rides since the year 2000.
I ended up in a subway station closer to the city center3, where I almost bought a hot beverage from some sort of barista robot arm cubicle thing that I was surprised to observe sitting in the middle of the atrium. (It turned out they were sold out). After a checking the map a bit (Beijing is big) I stepped outside and started just walking around the historic Central Axis area.
It was a beautiful winter morning, not a cloud in the bright blue sky. When I stepped outside, it was bitterly cold (Beijing in January is really cold) but the air felt fresh and easy to inhale even in the city center. I felt none of the eye-stinging and breath-shortening symptoms I’d experienced in places like Mumbai and Mexico City. The air in Beijing today wasn’t smoggy. It was clean and clear!
Just a decade and a half ago, this would have seemed like a utopian dream, an absolutely ludicrously optimistic state of affairs. In the early 2000s, “Beijing in winter” meant “worst-in-the-world horrific air pollution.” Car ownership in Beijing more than quadrupled from around 1 million in 2000 to nearly 5 million by 2010. Smog became endemic, choking poisonous fogs of combustion-derived particles in millions of lungs on a daily basis.
The Air Quality Index, or AQI, is a scaled and calculated measure of air pollution roughly based on but not quite the same as micrograms of pollutant per cubic meter of air. For context, the Biden-era U.S. EPA described an AQI of over 150 as Unhealthy, over 200 as Very Unhealthy, and over 300 as Hazardous. In January 2013, a “crazy bad” “airpocalypse” in Beijing saw an off-the-charts-bad AQI rise as high as 755 — so high that many instruments couldn’t even record it.
But that 2013 nightmare was the turning point, driving the CCP to institute widespread air qualify reforms a trend now supercharged by the ongoing renewables revolution. China has seen a massive decrease in air pollution since 2013. Deadly particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution has declined by 41% in China as a whole between 2013 and 2022, which if sustained statistically gives the average Chinese resident an extra 2 years of life. In particular, Beijing experienced a 54.1% decline in pollution in just nine years, which if sustained equates to the average Beijing resident living 3.9 years longer!
When I checked in the evening of January 20, 2026 while writing this article, just thirteen years later in the same city, the PM2.5 Air Quality Index in Beijing was just 42 — a “Good” level. Beijing’s AQI went from over 700 in January 2013 to under 50 in January 2026! For Beijingers, in 2013 their kids had to breathe toxic soup just to go to school in the winter, and now they’re getting air quality comparable to other major world cities. That’s a major victory for human well-being and environmental progress.
It’s really easy to identify EVs in China because they all have green license plates, visually distinct from the blue background for internal combustion engine cars. Walking the streets of Beijing4, I saw abundant evidence of the Chinese electric vehicle revolution. The seed planted with Wan Gang’s historic PowerPoint presentation to the Chinese leadership in 20005 has borne incredible fruit, with EVs now accounting for more than half of all car sales across China and spreading rapidly around the world. BYDs, lots of different local brands, and occasional foreign EVs from Volkswagen, Audi, and Tesla dotted Beijing’s parking lots and intersections. I particularly noticed tons and tons of electric taxis with BEIJING rear trunk labels marking them as made locally by BAIC, one of many (MANY!) Chinese EV companies and a domestic rival to international export superstar BYD. As the United States grows increasingly unstable with a dangerously escalating madman in the White House, Chinese export-focused green industrialism appears to be going from strength to strength. In 2026 so far, both the European Union and Canada have signed new free-trade deals lowering their tariffs on Chinese EVs in exchange for new partnerships like price floors local tech investments. That’s a major shift in the global trade balance towards an even more China-centric world system. And it’s not even February yet.
After lunch6, I walked around much of the periphery of the Forbidden City. Beijing (literally “Northern Capital”) was founded by the Yongle Emperor, third monarch of the Ming dynasty, in the early 1400s7. It was built in twenty years of dedicated mass construction after razing over the Mongol Yuan capital of Dadu (“Xanadu”) in the same approximate location.
This Yongle was an interestingly complex figure. He was first known as the distinguished soldier-royal “Prince of Yan,” fourth son of the Hongwu Emperor (aka very successful peasant rebellion leader Zhu Yuanzhang), who founded the Ming in 1368 after his troops took Nanjing (“Southern Capital”) from the dying Mongol Yuan dynasty. But Hongwu chose his grandson as his successor upon his death in 1398, instead of the Prince of Yan. That young man became the Jianwen Emperor and began moving towards more “benevolent” reforms to reestablish the traditional advisory role of Confucian civil society. The Prince of Yan usurped his nephew Jianwen to become the Yongle Emperor, taking Nanjing in 1402 after a three-year civil war and infamously killing hundreds of the innocent family members of officials who refused to recognize his claim to the throne. A classic super-evil fairy-tale villain, so far. But in his long reign (1402-24), Yongle also sponsored the construction of the Forbidden City complex and what is now central Beijing city, the creation of an absolutely incredible 11,095-volume Yongle Encyclopedia (the world’s largest ever until Wikipedia overtook it in 2007!), and the first wave of the epic 1405-1433 treasure ship voyages of Zheng He, the famed Muslim eunuch admiral. As with so many other times in China’s history — and the world’s — unforgivable atrocities coexisted with genuinely humanity-advancing accomplishments in the same regime.
Even though there had been surprisingly few people on the subways and streets of Beijing today (it was very cold out), there was still a gigantic plaza-filling ultra-long queue for entry into the Forbidden City itself — but merely a very long queue for entry to nearby Jingshan Park, which I’d heard contained an artificial hill that offered unparalleled over the Forbidden City and much of the rest of Beijing’s skyline.
Entering the park felt like stepping into the past. Lots of the younger visitors were wearing hanfu traditional clothing, a viral cosplay-based cultural revival movement a bit like a grassroots cottagecore Colonial Williamsburg-slash-Renaissance Fair. Paper lanterns hung from the trees and historic buildings, eagerly anticipating the Chunjie festival this upcoming February that would inaugurate the next Year of the Horse. Magpies caarked in spreading pines as domestic cats prowled through the bare twigs of the underbrush.
What is now Jingshan Park had been the imperial gardens under the Ming and the Qing dynasties. After years of multisided warfare, the last Ming emperor, Chongzhen (aka Sizong), committed suicide here in April 1644 when peasant rebels under Li Zicheng breached the capital. Those rebel forces were themselves defeated by the invading Manchu armies (with some ex-Ming generals on-side) just a month later, with the Manchu-led Qing Dynasty declared in November 1644. After the “Ming-Qing transition,” one of the bloodiest wars of the 1600s, the Qing Dynasty would last until 1911.
Along the crest of the artificial hill were five Buddhist pavilions, built under the Qing emperor Qianlong in the mid-1700s. (Qianlong would later become renowned for refusing the 1793 Macartney embassy’s offer to trade with the British and scorning the devices of the early Industrial Revolution as useless, but that’s another story).
I’ve read more and more modern historiography conceptualizing Chinese Communist Party rule as basically another Chinese Imperial dynasty, incorporating the foreign faith of Marxism as part of its legitimizing mythos in much the same way that the Tang and Qing dynasties used the foreign faith of Buddhism. Under President Xi Jinping, traditional Chinese culture is becoming increasingly central to CCP narratives of legitimacy.
One historian described modern China as a hybrid “Confucianist-Leninist” state — a seismic shift given that the iconoclastic ultra-violence spasm of the Cultural Revolution is still well within living memory. In just my first day in Beijing, I’d seen people taking smartphone selfies in neo-traditional hanyu costumes, cutting-edge EVs driving past Ming-era architecture, a completely locally-made payment system that skipped over not just cash but credit cards too, and air quality levels that didn’t seem to evoke a fossil-fueled Industrial Age very much at all. It felt like an alternate history, or a new phase of history wheeling into the present, a fundamentally non-Western modernity tracing its own path.
After sunset, I had dinner in the Jingshan Park cafe, and wrote much of this very article while slurping down noodles in vegetable broth. I then rode the subway again to my lodgings for the night at the Xiyatu Youth Hotel, on the seventeenth floor of a cyclopean skyscraper in a high-rise neighborhood on the megacity’s northwestern fringe. I’m typing these words there now, after which I’ll go to sleep and rise again for Day Two in China tomorrow! Here’s hoping I can keep up a daily writing pace8.
I was flummoxed for a moment upon arrival at the subway turnstile, as the sign’s pictograph and English translation indicated for travelers to place their palm on a glass reader to enter – apparently part of a “WePalm” system, one of modern China’s many convenience/surveillance initiatives to use biometrics as ID or tickets. It beeped and rejected my palm as NOT REGISTERED, but fortunately tapping the ticket worked just as well.
Technically Weixin Pay, the payments part of the WeChat super-app. Just living as a foreign visitor in modern China requires juggling a suite of novel apps: WeChat or Alipay QR code-scanning for basically any financial transaction at all (seemingly no one in modern China uses cash and few use credit cards!), Trip.com within Alipay for hotel bookings, Amap for navigation. Some longstanding travel go-tos for me, like Airbnb and Google Maps, don’t really work in China. Novel interactions between Chinese super-apps, my bank, and my eSIM package provided occasional on-the-spot problem-solving practice for me today!
At one point I saw a subway tunnel blanketed with posters of young Chinese actors dramatically declaiming something written in huge gold characters on a red background. I thought it might be some kind of official notice, so I used Google Lens to insta-translate the text. It was an ad for life insurance.
Near government buildings in the central area, I needed to show my passport again at several seemingly random police checkpoints on the sidewalk. It took about ten seconds each time, and two of the officers gave me directions. I also saw a “changing of the guard”-esque ceremony with a pair of PLA officers in bottle-green uniforms relieving another pair
As chronicled in Akshat Rathi’s excellent Climate Capitalism.
I bought an all-you-can-eat buffet entry ticket at a Buddhist restaurant, and in a completely unexpected spontaneous act of kindness a local family of three invited me to join them at their table and chat. The mom had majored in English and worked for a Singaporean import-export company, while the dad had worked for the Chinese branch of a U.S. health company and visited America a few times on business. Their son was excited for his tenth birthday party planned for that evening. They were super excited to hear that it was my first day in China, asked me about my life, used the Doubao LLM chatbot to summarize my newsletter topics in Chinese, and even urged me to stay with them the next time I came to China. Incredibly nice and welcoming folks out of nowhere! Travel serendipity at its finest.
For a solid broad-strokes one-volume overview of Chinese history in English, I recommend The Story of China by Michael Wood, which I finished in the plane on the way here.
Forgive any infelicities in this article — it’s written fast and completely unedited!
Fascinating! Really enjoyed this. I was in Beijing in October 2016, my first time in China, and the air pollution was pretty bad. So it’s good to hear about the rapid improvement in air quality since then. (The WePalm identification system sounds like a good way to transfer viruses though).
Thank you so much for your article! I want to learn what living in China is like, and how much the actual mirrors the info, and stories we read about in the US.