The Chinese App That Puts Instagram to Shame
I'm writing to you from Dali, a city in China’s Yunnan province nicknamed “Dalifornia” because of its reputation as a haven for burned-out tech workers, artists, and wanderers looking to disappear for a while.
I couldn’t be much further from the spectacle happening in Beijing, where US President Donald Trump was making his first state visit to China since 2017. Here, my DiDi driver softly sings along to old karaoke ballads as we pass rice fields and mist-covered mountains. Dali isn’t the version of China most foreign visitors imagine when they think of megacities filled with gleaming skyscrapers, high-speed trains, and hyper-efficient delivery networks.
Over roughly the last decade, Dali has become a magnet for a certain type of young Chinese urbanite exhausted by the pressure cookers of places like Beijing and Shanghai, where the competition for good jobs is cutthroat and housing prices remain staggeringly high despite the country’s...
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