The Chinese virtual hostess is a cartoon with a big head and a wasp waist. On the screen, he gives flight instructions with ease, especially when he explains how to evacuate the plane and the scene seems even exciting. It is an advance of the triumph of naïve culture that will surround us for three days in Shanghai. And it is that the glorification of childhood is reflected from the imperturbable smile of the Buddha, as well as in his cheeks, because, despite the fact that Siddhartha left the palace to live as a beggar, bewildered by so much pain poured into the world, in the his imagery depicts him as a happy chubby.

At Pudong Airport, Christmas travels in residents’ luggage, loaded with gifts. Delicate packages that the customs police want to check rigorously. While the foreigners leave relieved through the door of “Nothing to Declare”, the locals, hunched over and patient, give an account of their purchases, used to living by reporting on the children they beget, what they read and what they say. They open the colorful bags with a frown, and I think they might well disguise their purchases in the suitcase, but transgression is not in their contract.

In the center of the capital a fog suspends the night in an interlude. Shops close late, and the weather seems strange. The spread of lights on the skyline strikes with its own and borrowed identity. Because next to thousands of stalls where life is coated with soy, glass towers designed by Zaha Hadid and 19th century facades renovated by David Chipperfield are being erected. The Asian attraction to the skyscrapers dotted with lights until they border the horizon has cinematic echoes. Art deco and soups with menacing fish scales. Delicate Hello Kitty blankets and comforters protecting the riders’ thighs. Millennial temples next to sports cars.

And a fierce firewall that disconnects you from the West. Neither Google nor X nor Instagram operate in China. If you’re not a forward-thinking traveller, your VPN will crash and you won’t be able to read the papers or send watsaps. You will finally adopt a sense of real distance that will help you become a true foreigner. And, in the midst of so much analogue loneliness, you will wonder about your freedom and that of the rest.

Even if the avenues were full of global luxury, taking over a humorous beauty, young Chinese cannot talk about their reality or appear on television with a piercing. If they do, as happened with the popular presenter Jing Boran, they will first erase the piercing and then its wearer. It’s a cultural warning. However, the generation of the only child is experiencing a deep crisis of values ??and appetites. They, prodigies of extracurricular hours, were not prepared for the precarious jobs of their parents who turned the country into the world’s largest global factory.

Where is the talent that, reading so much Made in China, we have forgotten that it exists? Ask Ai Weiwei, who spent twenty years in a labor camp with his father, cleaning toilets. In one of his works he placed the Coca-Cola logo on a Han Dynasty vase as a critique of the all-powerful consumer society. And he paid for it with prison and exile.

I think about this back at the airport when, after going through several controls, a policeman is waiting for me at the boarding gate and yells at me to stop, closing his eyes. Jeopardy!, they’ve detected a lighter in my carry-on: a firearm!