I first went to China in 2011, racing for the Lotus/Jetalliance team at Zhuhai in the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup. It was a delightful experience, but also a glimpse of China's gritty side. Zhuhai had an unapologetically industrial look, with a permanent, low-hanging haze. The parade through the city felt like the crowd had been instructed to attend on pain of... consequences. Brutalist aesthetics through and through.

From 2013 through 2019, I raced nearly every year at the Shanghai International Circuit in the World Endurance Championship. The skyline got a little brighter with every visit, but the smog remained thick. I still recall a taxi driver straddling lanes all the way to the circuit before blasting straight through a red light, horn blaring. Exciting, but in a very frontier kind of way.

Then Covid hit, the WEC stopped going to China, and so did I. For seven years, I watched China's rise from the West. First the electronics, then the services, and finally the cars. Even from afar, it was clear that China was accelerating at a completely different pace from the West.

But until last week, when I visited Shenzhen, Hangzhou, and Beijing, it was hard to appreciate just how much the country had changed since my last visit. It might as well have been forty years.

There are still pockets of that gritty look, but the main show is now a gleaming, shiny set of cities radiating The Future. From the bullet trains to the lavish airports, from the impressive skylines to Hangzhou's West Lake. Gone is not just the smog, but the sound of diesel engines too.

I've never seen any country change so much, so quickly. In Shenzhen, they talk about "Shenzhen Speed" (like three floors of a skyscraper in a day). It looks like the entire country has been running at that clock frequency for the past decade. And they have all the results to show for their efforts.

Those efforts are clearly considerable. I repeatedly got replies late into the night and early in the morning during our stay. The pace, and the expectations that came with it, felt almost as jarring compared with America as America's pace does compared with Europe. Everyone was just on it, all the time.

I'm sure that has a cost. The 9-9-6 culture (9am to 9pm, six days a week) isn't free. But it's also obvious that all this effort has been buying results. Extraordinary results.

Take Xiaomi. I visited their nearly fully automated car factory in Beijing, and it looked like something straight out of a sci-fi movie. I've done a lot of car-factory tours in Europe, and never seen anything like this. The production lines we saw were almost entirely devoid of humans, and the few who were milling about were mostly holding laptops and clipboards, overseeing the robotized lines.

The company has gone from launching its first car in 2024 to now delivering over 40,000 cars per month! More than 800,000 cars delivered in under three years. And a halo car in the SU7 Ultra that has over 1,500 hp, lapped the Nürburgring in 7:04, and costs just $75,000 in China.

And that's perhaps the biggest material change from the last time I was there: those cars. Long gone are the Soviet-style taxis, replaced by a dizzying array of Chinese EV brands that don't just rival the best of the German giants in style and comfort, but surpass them.

We kept getting into one luxury electric SUV after another, from brands I'd never heard of. Sumptuous leather, quiet cabins, and reclining captain's chairs. With Didi, the rides were as little as $5.

Then at one hotel, they sent a classic Mercedes MPV. Gas-powered too. It felt like a big step back into the past. What would be a very nice car by most Western standards suddenly seemed cheap by Chinese standards. Crude, even.

But what stood out even more than the material differences from Europe were the cultural ones. Everywhere we went, people were not just incredibly hospitable, but genuinely excited to see us and meet. From executives at major tech companies to students at the GOSIM conference, it was just endless great vibes, great interest, and a deeply informed curiosity.

Sure, I came as a bit of a niche celebrity. REWORK has sold over 100,000 copies in China, GOSIM was full of programmers with experience using Ruby on Rails, and just about everyone was super excited about the age of agents and Omarchy's role in it.

But it's not like those conditions aren't present in the West! And still, this just felt different. Much more optimistic, much more ambitious, much more driven.

The contrast is fresh too. Speaking with large American tech companies about Omarchy, then comparing the quality of those conversations, and the pace of the follow-through, with their Chinese counterparts is eye-opening. Whether it was Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Huawei, or smaller players like Beelink. Very different.

And also, yes, tourists are almost guaranteed to get a tinted view of a country through the rose-colored glasses that always accompany a trip as short as a week. China clearly has its own challenges, economically, politically, and culturally. Like any place does.

But it's not at all obvious that those challenges are bigger than what we're dealing with in the West. On the contrary, I'd say. I could even imagine plenty of people in stagnating countries like the UK or France who might not be as bothered by one-party rule as they once were, if it meant a booming economy, national giants sprouting everywhere, and a set of safe, clean cities on the ascent.

As a man of the West, that's a tough pill to swallow. Especially since, while China may well be under one-party rule, the competitive intensity in many of its markets is far greater than what we can brag about in the West. And nearly all the major companies I visited were led by engineers, not MBAs. Difficult not to be a little envious of at least that!

But in terms of the international balance of power and trade, it doesn't actually matter that much what our opinions are. What matters is what is, and that's a formidable country producing remarkable products and services at extremely competitive prices.

There's a lot of work ahead of Europe and America to regain a competitive footing in all these industries where China is now accelerating and ascending.

There's a version of this where it all plays out wonderfully to everyone's benefit. The world gets better, faster, cheaper products and services. The trade imbalances are corrected as Europe and America catch up, reindustrialize, robotize, and revitalize their economies and political systems. Equal players, equal partners.

But there's also a version of this where the West doesn't heed the competitive warnings, and continues to disadvantage itself through eco nonsense, long-term protectionism, and a failure to kickstart moribund growth. I don't think anyone, even China, is interested in seeing where that leads.

Either way, we need more people in the West to realize what time it is. It's not enough to just see the consequences when they arrive in the form of shuttered factories or bankrupt businesses. Not only is it then too late, but it's also hard to understand exactly why, because it remains abstract and numerical.

That Xiaomi assembly line is very concrete. So is going from your first car in 2024 to delivering over 40,000 a month just a couple of years later. And that's just one obvious example.

For Europe in particular, the other is AI. Every single major company I visited had its own models. And China has a whole slew of open-weight labs that are focused just on that too. What does Europe have? Mistral?

The easy answer to all of this is just to go dooming. It's so over! We're never going to catch up! The West, and Europe in particular, just can't meet the challenge!

Nonsense.

Every day is a new chance to make different choices. The world has seen many great empires rise and fall. Some of them more than once.

I have complete faith in the possibilities of the West. In the 1980s, France built more than 40 nuclear reactors! Mercedes-Benz once built the W126. Yes, that's the past. But the present also includes America leading the AI revolution, still dominating in software, and being the home of SpaceX and Tesla. Don't you dare black pill on what's possible in the West!

But enough about the West. This is an account of China, first and foremost. And I've simply been blown away by the ambition, spirit, and scale of what's going on over there. I had an absolutely wonderful time, and I'm excited to go back soon.