A last-minute invitation turned into a two-week, state-hosted trip across eastern China for Daily Sabah's opinion editor Ayşe Begüm Gürkan, and her account is a useful read for anyone curious what carefully curated travel in China actually looks like.

The programme, run by the Global Development Promotion Center under China's aid agency CIDCA, was titled a seminar on Chinese local development practice. Thirty-one participants from 21 countries — ministers, diplomats, mayors and journalists — toured from a hotel overlooking Yundang Lake in Xiamen, through pilot villages and industrial centres, to the Shanghai Institute of Artificial Intelligence. The route traced Xi Jinping's career stops, from his 1985 stint in Xiamen to Shanghai in 2007.

Her practical observations are the most traveller-relevant bits. Internet censorship is a real hurdle: most Western apps she relies on are blocked behind the Great Firewall, so anyone whose work depends on connectivity needs a workaround sorted before departure. Visually, she describes a country blanketed in high-rise apartments — the skyline stays residential even on hours-long intercity bus rides — punctuated by lit-up skyscrapers and immaculately kept parks.

The guides themselves were candid that the itinerary showed only one side of the country. East of the Heihe-Tengchong Line, China is dense and developed; west of it, large areas lag well behind. The numbers back that up: China's 2025 GDP sits around $19.5 trillion (largest in the world by PPP, second by nominal GDP), yet GDP per capita is only about $13,862, keeping it an upper-middle-income economy just below the World Bank's high-income threshold of $14,375.

There's a clear soft-power purpose here. China runs these seminars annually for Global South delegations, framing its post-1978 reform story as a replicable model and pitching a multipolar world order. Most participants Gürkan spoke to — from Africa, the Middle East and former Soviet states — were cautiously impressed, saying Chinese investment often beats Western offers on profit. One unresolved worry kept surfacing: what happens when a partner country can't repay its Chinese loans?

For holidaymakers, the takeaway is narrower but real. Xiamen's lakeside and old town, the Shanghai tech scene and the gleaming eastern seaboard cities are genuinely polished and easy to travel between. But what you see is the showcase half of China, and travellers should go knowing the less-developed interior is a very different country. — Daily Sabah Travel