China for Nomads

January 19, 2026

I was exploring China with Tzeyu during winter holidays, visited Sichuan. And you know, I think if not firewall China could be easily competing with other Asian hubs of digital nomads!

I’ll write from a perspective of living in Chengdu but some details will be the same for other New Tier 1 cities.

Big problems

  1. Internet: it’s very bad and VPN doesn’t help much.
  2. Language barrier: not worse than Vietnamese one if you consider non-touristic cities, online translator helps to talk in-person, in restaurants you order with an app which has a built-in translator.
  3. Authoritarianism and world’s heaviest restrictions against freedoms: same as in Vietnam—another popular digital nomad hub,—okay, this topic is controversial but what can’t be controversial is that it doesn’t affect a nomad.
  4. No bidet shower: ah god, previous century problems.

But

  1. Low prices on food: local dish can cost $2, we’ve been to a temple’s vegetarian buffet restaurant with a price of $4.5 per entry, a European dish can cost $10.
  2. Low prices on accommodation: we were renting a room 5 minutes away from the subway for $15 per night but that could be an anomaly.
  3. Developed public transport: not like Bangkok, even more developed! Subway and buses are cheaper than half of the dollar, taxi costs like the one in Bangkok, bicycle rental is $0.5 per hour at every corner, speed trains to other cities are convenient, well, speedy, and affordable.
  4. Developed logistics: food delivery arrives in 10 minutes, they delivered a cable from another part of the country in 2 days (I paid $0.5 for everything including the cable), in grocery stores there’s food from the whole country, and you can find Russian seafood and South East Asian fruit.
  5. Developed EVERYTHING: maps apps show a traffic light timer and compare prices of different taxi providers, payment can be done by QR, NFC or hand palm. Everything is from the 22nd century except the bidet shower, ah god.
  6. Much entertainment, many gyms, easy to build new hobbies: but need to overcome the language barrier.

Internet spoils everything. If not the Internet, we’d be in China right now probably :-)