Geese in Chinese ‘Silicon Valley’: Could China offer modernisation tips to Russia and the US?

This October I attended an international conference in Changchun, the capital of Jilin province in China’s northeast. The trip, albeit a short one, set me thinking about China, Russia, the US and the fates of their modernisations. This essay is based on a few impressions and observations from my visit to China, which, like any impressions, are inherently subjective.

As I was leaving for China and standing in line for border control at Vladivostok airport, I found myself next to a couple — a Russian woman and a Chinese man, both around 35 — accompanied by their two toddlers. Notably, the woman spoke to her husband in Chinese but addressed the children in Russian.

Watching this family, I realised that in recent years I have been seeing more Russo-Chinese couples like them. These families raise bilingual and bicultural children, for whom both China and Russia feel like native countries. Such Eurasian families play a crucial role in strengthening ties between the Russian and Chinese civilisation-states. Interestingly, in northeast China, the term “Eurasian” typically refers to a mix of Chinese and Russian.

On my flight from Vladivostok to Harbin, I was seated next to a Chinese boy. We started a chat. He introduced himself by his adopted Russian name, Vadim. Vadim, who is 20, turned out to be an undergraduate student of my own university in Vladivostok.

Just in September this year, he entered Far Eastern Federal University to study medicine. A few weeks after arriving on campus, Vadim caught a light cold and his mom ordered him back to Harbin so that she could take care of his illness. Vadim told me he was going to spend a few days under his mom’s loving care before returning to his studies in Vladivostok.

Vadim’s case is not only an illustration of Chinese parents’ hyper-protection over their children. It also indicates that, in Vladivostok, there are Chinese student kids who can easily afford to fly back to China just for a few days. Per week, there are currently around 20 flights from Vladivostok to Chinese destinations.  

I travelled from Harbin to Changchun by high-speed train, passing through the flat expanses once known as Manchuria, now called Dongbei (China’s northeast). As I rode on the train, I recalled my very first visit to China in May 2001, which also took me to northeast China and involved a train journey from Harbin to Dalian. Back then, it was an ordinary train, not a high-speed one, and Dongbei still appeared to be a poor, though rapidly developing, region.

In October 2024, as I took in the fast-moving views of the Manchurian landscape, I realised that the scenery was nearly indistinguishable from that of the countryside in the US, Europe or Japan. In other words, it resembled the landscape of an industrialised and wealthy country: vast fields of wheat and corn, with few people in sight; abundant modern agricultural machinery; crisscrossing power lines; well-kept village houses; and paved roads.

I had visited China many times before, but during this latest trip to Changchun, I truly recognised, for the first time, how profoundly the country has transformed. Of course, China officially considers itself a developing country and China’s GDP per capita does not allow it to be categorised as a developed one. That said, perceptions matter. And in the eyes of many foreigners, now including myself, China has become a developed, rich nation.  

In Changchun, I took a walk around the neighborhood near my hotel, which was located in the city’s southeast, in the High Technology Zone, often referred to as Jilin’s Silicon Valley. As I strolled along a boulevard lined with buildings housing tech companies and offices, I was surprised to spot two geese at a street intersection. It felt odd to encounter cackling geese in such a thoroughly urban setting. I later learned that this area was rural until recently, which likely explains their presence.

Geese at a street intersection in an ultra-modern metropolis serve as a vivid symbol of a country that has become highly industrialised and hi-tech, but retains a lot of peasant ways. GDP and technology can grow at a breakneck pace, but societal mindset cannot change as fast. Although China is now an urbanised nation, with 65% of the total population residing in cities, its psyche and culture remain rural and traditional in many important aspects. This makes China similar to Russia.

Russia, whose urbanisation rate currently stands around 75%, was until relatively recently an agrarian and traditionalist country. Many contemporary Russians, even those who live in big cities, retain significant traits of archaic peasant mentality. Rural-patriarchal communitarianism does have its advantages. At the same time, it has downsides. The main problem, of course, is its resistance to change and progress.  

China and Russia share similarities as two large civilisation-states that underwent modernisation roughly at the same time, during the twentieth century. However, a key difference lies in their current approaches: while Moscow has moved away from emphasising modernisation, Beijing has made it a central pillar of China’s ideology. The Chinese Communist Party, as reflected in Xi Jinping Thought, views modernisation as a crucial task.

Chinese-style modernisation aims to build a highly advanced society by drawing on the achievements of China’s 5000-year-old civilisation. Xi Jinping Thought explicitly states that, in the course of modernisation, certain old ways and customs must be cast aside: “Chinese civilisation is exceptionally innovative, which explains why the Chinese nation upholds fine traditions but never blindly sticks to old ways, and respects the fine traditions but never indiscriminately restores old traditions. It is also the reason why the Chinese nation is fearless of new challenges and is always open to new things.”

Considering the commonality between Russia and China as late-modernisation countries, the Chinese model of modernisation espoused by the CCP may be of relevance to contemporary Russia. China can provide some advice on how to get rid of archaic and outdated traditions while preserving the core of the national culture.

In 2010, under then-president Dmitry Medvedev, Russia launched a “partnership for modernisation” with the EU. As we now know, this partnership ended in failure. Perhaps Russia should have sought a major modernisation alliance with the East instead of the West. It may not be too late to pursue this path. 

Rural geese in an ultra-modern city, though somewhat absurd, are innocuous and even amusing. Far more dangerous, however, are the metaphorical geese fluttering in the minds of people.

In some countries that were once pioneers of modernisation, there is an undeniable tendency to regress to a dark age in the consciousness of both the general public and the ruling elite. The US is a prime example of a great power where modernisation seems to be moving backward, with irrationalism and primordialism on the rise. Could the US, too, benefit from some advice from China on how to do modernisation?

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