On a recent trip to Inner Mongolia, my first feeling was not exotic surprise, but disappointment.
Street shops, malls, souvenirs, and even temple offerings were less different from Shanghai or Hangzhou than I had imagined. Souvenirs might have come from Yiwu. Local people do not wear ethnic costumes in everyday life. Once the surface of a city is covered by the same consumer system, moving from one place to another can feel like moving between standardized commercial spaces.
What still preserves difference is deeper: grassland, wind, sky, distance, villages, and the distribution of agriculture and herding. A dance seen by chance can still reveal why a culture grew into its shape through movement, rhythm, clothing, and music.
This made me rethink travel. Travel is not consuming the difference of a place. It is entering a scene and understanding why that place became what it is.
Check-In Culture Cancels Understanding
Popular check-in spots compress complex places into a standard action: queue, find an angle, take a photo, publish, leave.
In that sequence, the traveler does not need to understand why the place exists or how it relates to local life. The place becomes a backdrop, and the traveler becomes one node in a content production line.
The more dense the check-in spots are, the thinner the place becomes.
Surface Differences Are Disappearing
Many modern Chinese cities are increasingly similar on the surface: chain stores, mall layouts, milk tea, coffee, snack streets, cultural products, and short-video aesthetics.
This does not mean a place has no culture. It means modern commercial systems prioritize what is easy to copy, understand, consume, photograph, and share.
Culture often survives less visibly: in family memory, language, rituals, festivals, labor, food, and local habits.
Locality Lives Deeper
The deeper conditions are harder to erase:
- terrain;
- climate;
- water;
- land use;
- production methods;
- transportation distance;
- population density;
- language and family memory;
- rituals and bodily training.
A mall cannot explain Inner Mongolia. Grassland, pastoral work, wind power, county edges, road distance, village distribution, dance, and language environment can.
From Geographic Locality to Industrial Locality
In the past, geography shaped livelihood, and livelihood settled into local culture. Modernization weakened geography’s direct force on daily life, but it did not eliminate the way livelihood shapes people.
Today, local differences increasingly appear in industrial structure and work rhythm. A tourism city, a manufacturing city, a finance city, and an e-commerce city are not the same. The question is no longer only “what cultural features does this place have?” but also:
- Where does the money come from?
- How do local people make a living?
- Which industries determine the city’s rhythm?
To know a modern place, one must look beneath the surface.