Transcript & Summary: China's city of the future: utopia or dystopia?

[00:00] hey I'm in Shenzhen China which is probably the world's most high-tech city today I spent about a week here checking out all the tech from food delivery via drones to insane highspeed rail autonomous police robots the most futuristic cars and more I also used to live here and I still have a bunch of good friends so I asked them what oldest Tech actually feels like as a resident is it a techno Utopia a techno dystopia or maybe both let's find [Music] out this video was sponsored by insta 360 my journey to Shen started in this [00:30] gorgeous train station because of course I'll be arriving from Hong Kong to Shenzhen via what else but a high-speed train obviously you have a fast rail service 185 km an hour from City Center to city center in 14 minutes one4 how do you do that by putting the whole thing completely into a tunnel completely underground can't see anything on the shenen side there are platform screen doors to keep the wind from sucking you in the tunnel as one of these speeds by and I got to say an Express train to the city center is the [01:03] best way to arrive to a place in my opinion okay after the train we went to our hotel and of course we took a Metro for that this was metro line one which was the only line that was properly finished when I first lefted here in 2007 but things have very much changed since now this is the Metro Network right now if I'm counting this correctly I think they have something like 16 proper lines right now and that means they buil one new line almost every year crazy indeed the buildout of the Metro system has been absolutely staggering [01:32] and that shows in many of the stations too we are at ganga North Station which is their newest and most modern Metro station there are I think four lines crossing here and these look incredibly modern most of the other stations look much more plain than this but this one's really cool as you can see all the trains crisscrossing in their little transparent tubes a couple more Metro fun facts is that you can now first of all choose if you want to have a car with a colder AC or one with more moderate temperatures which is nice then [02:02] I also really like that BYO Maps will actually automatically recognize which station you're at and it will update that on your phone as you've just seen and finally I also encountered this Slightly bizarre thing at ganga this is the next Generation gate that you exit the subway from you can either type your card as normal or you can do face recognition I guess it's not really a choice because it's going to try to recognize your face even if you don't have it set up kind of futuristic kind of creepy now [02:29] sticking with public transportation for a while I really really like shenzhen's buses in large part because this was the first big city in the world that embraced fully electric city buses in 2018 and as a result they're now super [02:47] quiet oh man they're so nice these used to be so loud and smelly and now they just aren't and also completely electrified were all the official taxis by 2018 along with the buses these bys aren't like super premium or anything and private right healing drivers can drive whatever they want including gas cars but none of the right healing drivers that picked me up in the whole week drove anything other than electric given that EVS in China are already cheaper than their IC counterparts and still falling in their prices I think [03:14] that makes a lot of sense but even more futuristic is that chenan actually also has Robo taxes from three different local companies I managed to try one from a company called Pony Ai and ours had a safety driver in it he didn't actually control the car but he was seemingly there to just intervene if something happened this car was surprisingly a Lexus Hybrid so not a Chinese EV which is what I would have expected but yeah the car itself drove pretty well it's kind of weird how uneventful Robo taxi rides feel when [03:40] they actually happen I'm guessing that these Chinese firms are a tiny bit behind what weo for example can do in the US because you can actually only order them in a few small districts in the city which are newly built and have particularly easy to navigate streets plus from what I can tell about half of them have Safety Drivers still the Chinese firms are clearly developing the technology and funnily enough the pony AI car that I tried was from a company called tensent which the US government has just designated as a Chinese [04:05] military company so technically I guess that means I've ritten a Chinese military vehicle now cool now actually getting a robotaxi was rather frustrating four times in a row we waited for about an hour or so just to have our order canceled and the locals said that that's apparently because the taxi drivers are angry and they're trying to sabotage their current Network by placing many fake orders clearly not everyone is happy about losing their jobs to robots even in China which is especially understandable because [04:29] because the country's economy right now is in a pretty terrible shape and unemployment is very high and continuing with automation we saw a surprising number of other robots tool there was this self-driving bus which I didn't manage to get on sadly but it also seems to be in early testing in about the same area as the robot taxis and there's also for example this street cleaning bot it was seemingly fully autonomous and it was just riding around doing robot stuff but perhaps the most bizarre machines [04:53] were these police robots which we saw quite a few of in some of the pedestrianized areas this one appeared to be fully autonomous and was clearly observing stuff and Reporting back to HQ and meanwhile this bigger one was I think still being tested because I saw a guy with a remote control actually directing it this was broadcasting messages on its screen and was telling people to avoid scams and stuff and overall police robots in public spaces felt rather odd and talking of unexpected things this truck is [05:18] something that I've never seen before either apparently his job is to spray water into the air to get to dust to settle and to improve air quality looks fun and of course it had a green plate so I guess it's also Electric but hey Shenzhen is the city of drones right it's home to DJI the largest drone company in the world by far and also many others and so maybe it's not surprising that shenen also now does flu to delivery via drones and of course I had to try that too specifically there are a few of these giant vending machine [05:44] looking things in some parts of the city like in this park at the seaside there you can get on the mwan app where you can choose from a list of restaurants and cafes that delivered to there specifically you wait after placing your order and then eventually a drone shows up with a box it lands on top of the building the Box detaches and the the Drone flies away and then your delivery comes down in a little escalator and is available in this box [06:11] t comes in a recycling box those are the goods now there are instructions for how to get rid of the Box delivered okay we made it our tea SL fruit drink from a drone cheers for now this two seems to be in a pretty early stage as the locals were all treating it like a novelty as well and the service is also limited to just a few designated spots in the city like these parks where delivery might otherwise be complicated we actually also managed to find the station where the packages were sent from and this was [06:51] in the middle of a busy restaurant area you can see a regular delivery driver dropping off the food over there then the orders get put into a drone box of sort they get attached to a drone and then they're sent off on their way also it seems like every drone gets a battery swap here after its delivery now I personally not necessarily want to have drones buzzing above me all day when I'm trying to chill in a park or something but still I got to say the service worked surprisingly well we even saw them taking away the Drone boxes which [07:16] are kind of reusable so the trash doesn't seem to be much worse than a normal delivery either okay and talking of food delivery another mind-blowing thing about Shenzhen is that only electric scooters or mopeds are allowed there're no gas powered ones at all which is probably the most important step for fighting noise pollution all of these scooters are dead silent apart from their honking that is and on the one hand that is amazing but on the other the drivers are also tolerated on the sidewalks which means you get tons [07:41] of Silent delivery driver E Scooters going full speed in places that people walk which is also really quite annoying at times anyway these E Scooters are also super popular among normal people and I met a friend of mine who not only demonstrated hers to me including its ability to carry her amazingly cute dog but then she even let me try her scooter as well first I was just riding around and then at some point the doggo randomly decided to join me which really made my day oh my God hello anyway in [08:08] many streets there are dedicated scooter Lanes like the one that I'm on which are amazing but as I said people ride basically anywhere and it's all chaos my friend also said that her scooter only cost about $500 which is insane and this is clearly a super convenient way to get around town for short to medium distances interestingly she said that people were not allowed to charge their scooter batteries at home due to apartment fires and in the past so she also sent me this video This is how we charge the bite [08:35] here plug in your charger you see those stand on the street Everywhere by the neighborhood just pluck it in and then scan this code now talking of things in public I've also seen a ton of people leaving their scooters and ebikes often completely unlocked in public and often even with the key in the ignition at times can you guess how that is possible that's right shenen has CCTV cameras literally everywhere that is not an exaggeration I think there's basically no space outside of private homes and maybe toilets that don't have [09:14] at least one CCTV camera pointed at it at all times like in this clip you can see what an average Metro station looks like for example and of course every part of a public road is full of cameras too both from overpasses like this one here or cameras on the side and then there's also this are at a very nice little Park here in Shenzhen Bay and everything is nice until you realize there are security cameras [09:41] everywhere there there everything has cameras surprisingly public parks actually seem particularly full of cameras to the point where I think that on average about three to four of them are looking at you at any given time also every Chinese citizen has to set up facial recognition for just about every service that they use while as a foreigner you have to have your face scanned when you enter the country so it's pretty clear that the government has the ability to use face recognition to constantly track basically where [10:11] everyone is at all times in public with no exceptions my friends have also said that they've recently started seeing some people wearing full face masks that hide their identities from facial recognition in public but I haven't actually seen that myself now that is obviously pretty dystopian and I don't want to defend the system and especially if you're somebody who has trouble with the Chinese government which a lot of people in China do and these things are not your friends but then on the other [10:33] side there's also some very clear benefits 10 years ago people in Shenzhen would still wear their bags in the front like this because if you didn't people would steal your stuff of course that is now almost completely gone at least the perception of petty crime is completely gone because you can't really steal stuff when everything is constantly on camera the other day we went to a random store and this guy super nice guy helped us out he left the store to help us to help us out he left his iPhone unlocked [10:59] locked his bag with all of his valuables on the counter and he just came back 5 minutes later didn't even think about it nobody thought anything about it because he can't steal stuff when everything is always on camera it is kind of like living in one of those Amazon stores where you can just walk in and take whatever you want and walk out and it will bill you automatically that is the whole country everything all the public space you can literally see people leaving bikes unlocked at all times packages unattended at the front desk [11:27] and many bizarre things like this Car Store and there's a paper on the car that says uh I've gone out I'll be back soon what the hell this country this is The Car Store and indeed there's nobody inside just the paper that says I'll be back amazing China is basically at the point where this kind of crime is no longer feasible but neither is any semblance of privacy you can't even pay for most things with cash anymore and you can only use mobile wallets in many places which of course is also tied to an ID so [11:58] you're always leaving a trail now importantly this is not necessarily A tradeoff that I personally approve of but it is one that has to be mentioned now I also wanted to add a side note here because I actually managed to spend some time in Beijing after I already finished and edited this video and that gave me a whole new perspective on all the stuff that I saw in chenhan I last lived in Beijing in 2012 so something like 13 years ago meaning that the gap between this visit and that was even bigger but the change in Beijing [12:24] actually felt way smaller the city largely felt the same and all the high-tech stuff that I saw in CH genen was clearly years behind there were noticeably fewer EVs and still some gas powered buses in some of the places there were way fewer cameras in public so you didn't feel constantly surveilled as much and we even saw a fist fight in a back alley between some drunk dudes which I guess would have been much harder to pull off in Shenzhen clearly despite even being the capital and also having an on paper higher GDP per capita [12:51] than Shenzhen progress here was way slower and that's a good reminder that chenin is not necessarily representative of the whole country but rather one super high Tech island of its own in a way anyway enough of Beijing and now back to Shenzhen now talking of car shops I think the car situation I've seen here is also worth talking about in more detail so shenan is home of byd the country's leading electric car maker and it's also either the richest city in China by now or pretty close to it so the cars on the road reflect this [13:17] reality quite well you can see about a 50/50 mix of green and blue plates on the road green plates in the last few years were only given to Pure EVS while a few years before that they were also given to plug-in hybrids meanwhile the blue plates are everything else and I found that they typically fall into one of two categories I often saw blue plates on pretty obviously older cars that were probably bought before the whole current EV boom or also often on really fancy cars like this hongi luxury car or often also on foreign Brands like [13:43] on Porsches and mercedes's meanwhile the green plates were on the majority of what I'd consider the kind of normal mainstream new cars the vast majority of these seem to be local Brands like byd leeauto xun ziker Neo xiaomi mg GAC Arc Fox Ito and so on and the sheer variety of Brands and models is actually quite shocking now Teslas are fairly common sight in Shenzhen though Countrywide they only have about a 2.9% market share so I think they're probably over represented here and meanwhile for Volkswagen I think I only saw maybe four [14:13] green plated ID models in about the week which is surprisingly few given how aggressive their prices have been in China the ID3 for example costs about $166,000 in China Which is less than half of what it costs in Germany but meanwhile other International Brands were perhaps even rarer with their green plates usually when I saw a green plate it wasn't a car from a Chinese brand so I think if Chinese consumers choose to go electric they also typically choose to go domestic now charging is also an interesting topic some R hailing drivers [14:40] told me that their Apartments have banned EV charges to avoid any fire risk While others told me that they can charge at home no problem I've seen a few public charging networks as well though many of those already looked somewhat dated which really shows you that China has been at this for quite a while but seemingly all the big local Brands run their own Tesla Supercharger like Networks I found one parking lot in Shenzhen where there were a lot of them next to each other and interestingly they all had these little metal blockers [15:05] as well apparently cars from the ride brand can lower the blockers for their own network letting them charge and I've seen a few of them do just that some of these also appear to be ultra fast so this one from Lee Auto for example claims to be a 5c charger 5c means that it will fill up a battery at 1/5th of an hour at its peak which would be in 12 minutes I think there's a peak charging speed which then slows down as you get closer to 100 but it's still pretty impressive oh and even faster is Neo who [15:32] does battery swaps and in this station that was here we saw them do their 3 minute battery swaps the car enters a sort of self-driving mode where it Parks itself into this garage looking thing there it gets lifted up the battery gets pulled out and lowered into the ground then the new battery goes up and the process is pretty much done the car even drives itself off the ramp automatically very cool and the next Neo car was already waiting in line when the first one was done now another thing I found [15:56] very interesting about cars here is just how the retail experience was also so unexpected we did see an old school parking lot kind of space with a bunch of car stores that felt like what I'm used to from car stores but then we also saw cars being sold inside just about every shopping mall and shopping street that we were in as well now I've seen a few stores like this in Europe as well but here they just seem to be as common as stores for clothes or Electronics showing you just how competitive the [16:20] market has become and talking of phones I of course also had to go to some electronic stores and I found that the Huawei one was the most interesting I'm sure that you've already heard of their triple fold phone called the mate XT and I can confirm that it looks quite surreal in real life not exactly my cup of tea with the exposed screen on the outside and I haven't actually seen any normal person use it on the street myself but they did sell out apparently and I did also hear from a friend's father who was feeling very patriotic [16:44] and bought like five of these for a bunch of their family members so that's something and then in more futuristic Huawei gadgets I also saw the world's first Smartwatch that can measure your blood pressure it does that with this tube on the inside that it can inflate to get a reading of course the band then becomes a little bit un wieldly as a result so this is definitely not for everyone but still kind of cool meanwhile the following gadgets were also really interesting so this is the m pad Pro which has a tandem OLED screen [17:08] that also has a nano texture coating super nice no Reflections at all and the handwriting experience is apparently really nice and this one is running Harmony OS next which is huawei's own operating system that is apparently not based on Android anymore so Huawei is going completely the Apple route with own chip own operating system own ecosystem everything now the retail experiences in Shenzhen are pretty next level in general this is a hyper capitalistic city that is very clearly completely obsessed with chopping and [17:45] that very much shows with all of its good and bad sides most of the retail spaces feel just very nicely put together and just in general this whole city was built in the last 40 years or so from scratch so if you like me like modern architecture and skyscrapers and and stuff you might really enjoy how the city feels Ultra Modern in general but on the flip side everything is extremely commercial and one bizarre occurrence across the city is that you can see so many influencers influencing in public [18:11] everywhere these are typically pretty girls posing for their cameras in the middle of shopping streets or in front of fancy stores but I've also seen grandmas with their kids posing and doing dances in public for the camera and more I mean I can't cast any Stones since I'm Vlogging out here in public myself but it definitely felt a little odd okay and moving on to more positive things since I've told you about every other kind of Transportation in Shenzhen I thought I'd also give you a quick update on what it's like to bike here [18:34] the absolute best biking that you can do is on this amazing new recreational bike lane that they recently added along the coastline my guess is that this goes on continuously for something like 20 kilometers uninterrupted and the city has basically turned half of its Coastline into one gigantic continuous park with a prominent and the Fantastic bike Ling that I'm on this is fabulous and a huge upgrade from the last time when I was here when the bike infrastructure was pretty lacking now in the rest of the city biking on most [19:00] roads still felt a little bit terrifying as somebody who's used to European standards they have started to put up barriers to make protected bike Lanes but I found that there are constantly people walking in these or parking in them so they felt particularly useless for now in my experience Chinese City Transformations typically follow the pattern that they first start putting up the infrastructure and then they very gradually start enforcing the rules around it so my guess is that maybe in 3 or 4 years biking will have become a [19:26] little bit easier for now though it still feels Fair fairly adventurous outside of the coastline okay and you might have noticed that a bunch of the most interesting shots in this video and especially the ones on bikes and scooters are ones that I got with the insta 360 X4 which is a camera that lets you get shots that no other camera could for example I stuck mine on a 3M long carbon fiber stick which the camera could then hide in stitching so in the final video you get a kind of drone view of yourself that you could reframe as [19:51] you wish this is great in sy's like sh genen where drones are ironically not permitted or just impractical due to space constraints and the wide angle allows for insanely good stabilization so it's especially great for action scenes the camera can shoot in a combined 8K resolution using both lenses which is plenty to let you crop in however you want and still get a really high quality output and selecting the perfect angle is also very easy using the app which allows you to automatically track subjects for example [20:18] with just one click and it even lets you tilt and twist the phone around to set what you want to be in focus and with my link in the description you can even get an extra good deal on the X4 the first 10 buyers with my link will actually receive a free bullet time accessory worth $65 until the 2nd of March that is a limited time offer in set 360 also has lots of other creative cameras like the tiny magnetic go 3s or the Ace Pro 2 which I recently took diving with me so I've left links to those below as well [20:46] happy filming and I'll see you in the next video