This story is from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here—or buy the summer issue on its own.

China is a cheerful and optimistic place. There are signs of this everywhere. Signs that say, “ENJOY LIFE”and “GREAT” and “HAPPY.” In the window of a café are the bright burning words: “Everything we do is to remind us that life is good.” I cannot imagine seeing that in London and certainly not in New York. Folk here don’t seem unusually jolly, but the signs are everywhere.

A giant Balenciaga ad in the arrivals hall at Shanghai Pudong International shows a Chinese lad in a very wide cropped jacket, massive jeans, and long dress shoes that curl up at the front. He looks like a Venetian clown. On the taxi ride to my serviced apartment building, I see a woman on an electric scooter wearing a motorbike helmet with a small flower on top of it. The flower is made of little balloons. At the building I wait in the lobby. The elevator arrives, and a child-sized robot in a bowtie rolls out, cheerfully bleeping. There are smiling anime-like characters everywhere, mostly attractive young girls and sweet animals drawn in superflat saccharine styles, possibly by AI. Here, the Ghibli-fication of the world has already happened.

Having circumvented the great firewall, I check Twitter to see what’s going on back home in the West. The very first tweet says, “This is the wildest thing I’ve seen on this site” and leads to a photo of an obscure rapper posing inside a blood-splattered apartment. Below that is a reply with a photo of his dead body down on the road, he’s covered in a white sheet, but you can recognize his skinny jeans and white sneakers. “Damn,” someone comments, “he didn’t even get to change his clothes.” I am far from home.

In the cyberpunk West China metropolis of Chongqing, my taxi driver goes quickly and recklessly, constantly switching lanes as a cute, computer-generated anime girl