正是我人生中一段非常中国化的时期
YOU MET ME AT A VERY CHINESE TIME IN MY LIFE
One year of making China my obsession before it became everyone else’s, too.
Maybe your first glimpse of China came from your feeds — drone footage of impressive infrastructure projects, influencers discovering the best coffee shops in Shanghai, panoramic views of ultra-modern city skylines. Maybe you’ve seen western travelers doing Tai Chi in the park, drinking Tsingtaos with the locals. Each glimpse deliberately curated and algorithmically optimized.
Or maybe China came to you earlier, and less kindly: as a pandemic origin story, a geopolitical threat, a surveillance state. Either way, someone handed you an image.
In 2025, I was in China during three different seasons, and from my travels was born my master’s thesis researching the role of social media on the changing perception of China. But the more time I spent scrolling on my phone, the more I kept coming back to what exists beyond it.
This trip is my answer. I’ve put together two journeys in November 2026 to let you discover China offline, with me as your guide.
I grew up between two worlds, California and China. I spent childhood summers in the early 2000s taking slow trains to my grandparents’ home village in Anqing and playing with cousins in the center of Shanghai. In college, I made China studies an extracurricular interest, and spent a summer in Kunming doing a Mandarin intensive and exploring southwestern China. I just finished writing my master’s thesis at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands on how social media has rewritten the West’s relationship with China. I interviewed the digital diplomats behind it — the local creators, the expat influencers, the accidental ambassadors — and came away convinced that the most interesting version of China isn’t the one on your feed. It’s the one you have to show up for.
I’ll be taking you to the China I’ve been returning to since I was four years old, and into completely new corners neither of us have seen yet.
KAI RASMUSSEN 刘洁蕊
