Traveling through China today is a whirlwind of breathtaking speed, frictionless technology, and a persistent sense of stepping into a parallel universe.

The Hangzhou East Railway Station, a glass-and-steel colossus with 28 platforms and 30 tracks, is one of China’s main transport hubs. It links Hangzhou—a thriving center for robotics and AI—to other major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing. There are 41 daily high-speed departures to my destination, Suzhou, about 1.5 hours away. Timed with clockwork punctuality down to the exact minute, these sleek white bullet trains can slice through the landscape at up to 300 kilometers an hour.

Even with thousands of travelers passing through the station at any given moment, it runs seamlessly in a marvel of efficiency once experienced only in Japan. At automated entry gates, passengers scan their ID cards (or passports, if they’re foreigners) and gain access to the platforms 15 minutes before boarding. Like a choreographed ballet, everyone forms orderly queues at their assigned carriage markers—no pushing or shoving. And when the train arrives, there are scarcely three minutes to alight or board before it glides off again, punctual to the second and soundless as a whisper.

My first-class ticket, priced at about US$30, buys me a plush reclining seat in a comfortable 2-2 configuration, with two seats on either side of a wide aisle. There are racks for luggage, footrests, foldout trays, free Wi-Fi, and, of course, the now-ubiquitous QR code for ordering drinks or a hot meal without needing to speak to a human.

I sink into the seat as the train gathers speed, watching the city fade into the countryside and then, almost imperceptibly, rise again as Suzhou’s skyline. Air travel, by contrast, feels almost prehistoric with an ordeal of cramped seats, lost luggage, and unpredictable delays. No wonder most Chinese travelers now favor the national railway, with its extensive network of stations that make it effortless to reach the farthest corners of the country, from megacities to misty mountain towns.

All this was inconceivable just a few decades ago. Claire Chiang, the Singaporean co-founder of Banyan Group, recalls her earliest rail journeys through China in the 1980s. “Once, I stood the entire way. On another trip, I shared a sleeper cabin with men, women—and ducks and chickens!” she says with a laugh. “That was the China I saw back then, and over the years, I’ve experienced the vicissitudes of China’s historical and socioeconomic development.”

No doubt, the speed of China’s transformation is staggering. A nation that once moved at the pace of bicycles now runs on digital rails. Next on my bucket list is Chongqing, with its multi-tiered “8D” skyline of neon-lit skyscrapers stacked like digital shards—complete with a train track that punches through a high-rise apartment block, in a cityscape that looks like a setting for the sci-fi flick The Fifth Element.

The visceral rush of being in a futuristic landscape, combined with China’s digital advances, is why traveling to the Middle Kingdom can feel like stepping into an entirely different world, especially for those who have not quite been uploaded into the system. Each time I cross the border and have to switch to the Chinese constellation of apps and websites—WeChat for messages, Didi for rides, Baidu for searches, etcetera—I still feel like I have entered an alternate universe, only without an instruction manual. And for all the seamless automation of the trains, the only glitch in the system is usually the uninitiated traveler stuck at the gate because they don’t know what document to scan, while the rest of the queue stumbles in surprise at the holdup.

An illustration of modern China with skyscrapers, apps, electric cars, and a maglev train. — Illustration by Bayu Harymurti

In some ways, change in China feels dazzlingly new yet oddly reminiscent of old patterns. Chiang recalls the tightly controlled economy of decades past, when she had to acquire ration coupons to exchange for goods. Today, China is a near-cashless society—though one where major credit cards are almost useless outside international hotels and boutiques. If you brandish a wad of cash, it will earn you more curious stares than if you were holding a live chicken or had a pet cricket in your pocket. “I haven’t touched money in years,” a shopkeeper in Suzhou muttered when I handed her some change. The fix, of course, is to get on board with WeChat Pay or Alipay, but it has to be done before you land, or there is a risk of being penniless.

I learned this the hard way on my first post-pandemic trip to Shenzhen. With no e-wallet and hardly any cash acceptance, I spent days relying on the kindness of friends and work contacts to fund my flat whites and taxi fares. On my next China visit, after a labyrinthine verification process, I finally made my first successful mobile payment in a Beijing café—and the entire place actually erupted in applause. No exaggeration: it was the most liberating purchase of my life.

Since then, I have discovered the true power of mobile payments—they make it far too easy to collect Labubu blind boxes from Chinese toy juggernaut Pop Mart, which are almost impossible to find anywhere else. Frivolity aside, dabbling in Chinese consumer culture has made me realize there is still so much more to master. Apparently, these highly coveted blind boxes can even be reserved online and collected from vending machines to avoid the indignity of standing in line at the shop. But this requires a level of fluency in Mandarin that continues to elude my high-school language skills, leaving me feeling as though I have missed out on learning a secret handshake.

It is one thing to master digital payments. It is quite another to see how this same forward momentum has transformed the nation’s infrastructure, down to the very air that people breathe. In many ways, China has leap-frogged much of the world when it comes to sustainable city-building. In Hangzhou, a bicycle-sharing system launched in 2008 has grown into the largest of its kind in the world, with access to these rides made effortless thanks to integrated e-wallets.

In Shenzhen, where Chinese electric vehicle company BYD is headquartered, the public bus and taxi fleet is almost fully electric, as are one in three private vehicles, contributing to a dramatic improvement in air quality. And its “Sponge City” system of permeable pavements, rain gardens, and restored wetlands absorbs and purifies rainwater, mitigating flood risks and creating more sources of renewable water. The sustainable city of the future has arrived.

Still, all this frictionless living can leave the analogue soul slightly adrift. The efficiency is certainly intoxicating: groceries and meals appear within minutes; manicures can be summoned anywhere with an app; and nearly every errand outsourced with effortless precision. Yet there is no app that offers the pleasure of a quick chat, or an algorithm that delivers the satisfaction of picking out your own dinner ingredients.

Or maybe, at the heart of all this acceleration, the future is simply waiting for us to catch up. During a farewell dinner in an old town in Yunnan’s northern highlands, a friend sighed over her search for replacement luggage, having scoured the nearby shops in vain. Barely 20 minutes later, thanks to a local buddy tapping a few buttons on her phone, a neatly packaged duffel bag appeared at our table, delivered from some invisible “cloud shop” while we were still laughing and chatting over our Tibetan feast.

So in the end, perhaps this is what all this speed and precision is for: to give us back the time to be human, even as the world races on.

After dark in Chongqing, China, with the roofs of Qianfo Temple backdropped by the towers of Raffles City Chongqing.

This article originally appeared in the December 2025/February 2026 print issue of DestinAsian magazine (“Altered State”). Buy a single issue or subscribe here.

What It’s Like to Navigate China’s Futuristic Reality

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