In early 2025, I took a 3 month (92 day) trip to Asia, visiting multiple countries – with China standing out as the most interesting1.
I flew from Singapore (SIN) to Shanghai (PVG) on a $120 Spring Air flight, then exited through Busan (PUS). In China, I stayed mainly in Shanghai and Suzhou.
At my Shanghai hostel, I met a cool traveler who was doing a RTW trip before starting a finance job in Chicago. I also connected with a Shanghai local/business guy I originally vibed with in Jakarta at another event.
The vibe in Shanghai2 – and China broadly – felt like work hard: think 996 culture, eat-sleep-code-repeat, build-an-empire hard. Factories run all night, startups push updates daily, and engineers learn AI frameworks faster than we debate which one to use.
I wanted to visit Shenzhen – China’s Silicon Valley – but didn’t have time.
In China, major US tech platforms like Google, YouTube, OpenAI, X/Twitter, Instagram, and Wikipedia are blocked so I had to use Baidu for search, WeChat Pay for payments, and Bilibili for video.
It’ll be interesting to see which model wins in the future: China’s authoritarian style or US/Western liberal democracy. History shows us that economic progress can stall without corresponding political progress e.g. Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika, and glasnost3.
From China, I learned that freedom of thought isn’t free.
The decision tree of choices grows exponentially, roughly 
Authoritarianism acts as a bounding function 
This pruning speeds convergence but risks trapping the system in local optima.
Liberal democracy maintains an unbounded, high-entropy search space with minimal pruning:
enabling broader exploration but slower convergence.
The challenge is applying effective forcing functions 
turning exponential complexity into strategic advantage.
*Disclaimer: This blog post was written with the help of AI.
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