The Chinese App That Puts Instagram to Shame
Key takeaways
- 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.
- The ancient city is now dotted with vintage stores, trendy cafés, ceramic studios, tattoo parlors, and DIY art spaces—the aesthetic markers of a globally recognizable “cool neighborhood.”
- The city’s atmosphere is shaped by its surrounding geography.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story 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 Di Di 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 recent property downturn. The ancient city is now dotted with vintage stores, trendy cafés, ceramic studios, tattoo parlors, and DIY art spaces—the aesthetic markers of a globally recognizable “cool neighborhood.”