Visiting China's Experiment City

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]I have just arrived to the city that rewrote China's future.

[00:00:15]This city wasn't supposed to be like this.

[00:00:19]40 years ago, it was zoned off from the rest of China so they could run a dangerous experiment. But to the surprise of many, this experiment worked so well that in just 40 years, Shenzen went from a small fishing village with a population of only 20,000 people to today one of the fastest growing cities the world has ever seen with a population of nearly 20 million. In fact, the China you know today, the only country in history to lift 800 million people out of poverty in just 50 years, that China was only possible because of the experiment that happened right here in Shenzen. Man, this place feels so like another planet. There is nothing like this in the world. It's got life.

[00:01:03]It's got youth. This place is beautiful, man. Probably the coolest looking drinks I've seen in my life. Bye, robot.

[00:01:10]>> Oh my.

[00:01:13]So the big question is what was that experiment and why was it so damn successful?

[00:01:25]This is where our journey begins. A train station. It might not seem glamorous, but when you go inside, oh my gosh, look at this place. Now, to figure out why this city is so different to anything else on the planet, for the next 24 hours, we will be testing their self-driving cars, drone delivery system, infiltrating Tik Tok's parent company, Bite Dance, and even speaking to a US citizen who chose China over America. And there is no better place to start than trying rail for the first time. Okay, so we have officially missed that train. Um, however, there's another one around 40 minutes away. So, we can actually relax for a second, get a coffee, explore this huge place. Uh, there's even K coffee Coffee. You Alex, really zoom into that. That's KFC coffee. I've never seen Maybe we go get that. They got the 11 herbs and spices in there, apparently. All right. Well, yeah. Let's see you on the bullet train.

[00:02:31]Fun fact, uh, China has the most high-speed rail in the world. And not just the most, 70% of all the world's highspeed rail is in China. And not just that, China has more highspeed rail than every other country in the world combined. And that's despite starting to build over 50 years later than the likes of France, Japan, and Germany. Damn, look at that.

[00:02:58]>> Oh, wow. Hello. Hello.

[00:02:59]>> First train for us.

[00:03:03]>> It's a whole like cabin. This is pretty much like business flight. You get your own cushion here. That comes out. You can start sleeping. You go all the way back. In fact, you can go fully laying down like this. You get a whole snack box of all sorts of amenities in here. You get a charger, a light, you got a TV screen over here. But basically, imagine if you ever even seen a business class flight.

[00:03:34]This is basically business class train.

[00:03:37]Wow, that's shocking. All of this $30.

[00:03:43]So, we're going to be going uh up to 350 km per hour. That's 217 mph. So, for perspective, what would take a 2-hour drive to Shenzen is taking 40 minutes on the train, and I know that this can go down to 30 minutes. For someone that lives in Europe, the efficiency, speed, and price of this way of traveling the country was pretty shocking. I couldn't stop thinking, how did China build more rail in 18 years than the distance of Earth's equator and still make it affordable? That was hella quick. Just like that. Ah, that was crazy, wasn't it, bud?

[00:04:21]>> Man, I started falling asleep. I was loving life.

[00:04:26]Then they woke my ass up.

[00:04:27]>> And if we were shocked by the trains, the transport to the hotel was even crazier. All right, so we get off of a bullet train and we get to a DD XL Lux.

[00:04:39]You've got ventilated seats, which my seat is being ventilated right now. All your controls here. Um, and you can even get massaging. Uh, here you have a little table. They always come with water. We've got room in the back. Hello children. Hello.

[00:04:55]>> And for four people for a 30inut drive to the hotel, $8.

[00:05:09]Ah, and just like that, we have arrived.

[00:05:13]Here we are at our hotel, uh, the St. Regis. So, this I thought was the lobby, but no, no, no. The lobby is on the 96th floor. So, isn't this one of the highest hotel lobbies in the world?

[00:05:28]>> Wow.

[00:05:30]What kind of lobby is that high up? That means all of the rooms are going to have a really good view.

[00:05:38]>> Wow.

[00:05:38]>> Oh my gosh.

[00:05:44]Look how much concrete is there.

[00:05:47]>> Man, we in the jungle now.

[00:05:49]>> Just think. 40 years ago, none of this existed. It was a small fishing village with a population of about 20,000 people. Now there's over 20 million people here.

[00:06:00]>> So 96 and take a picture of >> Jeez, that's horrible. I always was like, "Oh, it'd be so cool if they just had a hollow bit in the middle." But it's so unnerving knowing you're stood up here.

[00:06:13]You can see all of that.

[00:06:16]Okay, let's see what the room is like.

[00:06:22]I mean, first of all, the freaking view is insane. get a view of pretty much I thought that this was the only part of the city, but you turn around and it goes even further back that way. Damn, this is fancy. This is real fancy. And the craziest part about all of this is that it wasn't even that expensive. This was like 200 bucks. I mean, it's expensive, but like look at what you're staying in. Like this, if you stayed in this in like London, cuz remember, Shenzen is like a major city. This is got more skyscrapers than New York. So, if you were staying in New York at a place like this, you're paying thousands. This is like the Rits. But we don't have time to hang around because the next location is to see one of the city's drone delivery hubs. We met up with Jackson and Charlie who live in China and could show us the best spots of the city.

[00:07:22]>> One of the coolest KFCs that I've ever seen. KFC.

[00:07:24]>> Does China love KFC?

[00:07:26]>> Yeah, it's one of the It's I think it's the biggest like foreignowned uh fast food chain.

[00:07:32]>> Really? Now, as if getting your takeout delivered by a drone wasn't cool enough, we decided to test it directly against a human trying to deliver the same order.

[00:07:42]On the menu were places like KFC and McDonald's, but we chose the famous Chaji Tea. We placed our drone order on one phone, our human order on another, and let the games begin. the oolong tea.

[00:07:55]>> Four of you guys want the same thing.

[00:07:57]>> Yeah, >> that's so boring. You British people, they are prepping it.

[00:08:01]>> Uh it's going to arrive hopefully within the next 30 minutes.

[00:08:05]>> Okay, so now we've just ordered uh the drone and at the same time we're going to be ordering one on a bike to see which one gets here first. Let's see if the future is really what it's stacked up to be. Now, China doesn't mess around when it comes to drones. In fact, Chinese companies alone control 90% of the world's commercial drone markets.

[00:08:25]And Shenzen is China's drone capital.

[00:08:27]It's becoming a realworld testing ground for what China calls a lowaltitude economy with over 20,000 drone parcel deliveries per day. They even use these drones for law enforcement here. Update.

[00:08:40]Uh everything is ready to be loaded onto the drone. That's the top one. And then on the human side, uh, the driver is only now going to pick up the order. So maybe it's a lot quicker with the human to just load it on there and it's a little bit more of a complicated process with the drone, but so far the drone looks like it's going to be faster. But we were not expecting by how much. Out of nowhere, the drone has won. No way.

[00:09:10]What the hell, man? I really wanted the humans to pull through. And now it's starting a timer for how long it's going to take a human to arrive.

[00:09:22]>> Bye-bye. Thank you.

[00:09:23]>> You really didn't hang around.

[00:09:25]>> All right. So, the last four digits of my phone number that authenticates everything, I guess.

[00:09:30]>> Yeah. Approximately 15 seconds. It's going to drop down.

[00:09:34]>> God. Yeah. Cuz they have to be really stable with it cuz they can't just drop it and everything flies out.

[00:09:39]>> Yeah. And we ordered drinks, which is pretty uh Let's see if Oh my.

[00:09:49]>> Now the big question is, will the drinks be cold and will they be spilled? Let's have a look. They have a little Velcro tab here.

[00:09:59]Whoa.

[00:10:02]Just like that, you have our drinks. And then what's even cooler before I go into here, this is you fold it up again as it gives you instructions here and you place it back in here for it to be used again. Look at that.

[00:10:20]Wow, look in there. Perfect. Unspil and freezing still.

[00:10:30]But despite the drone already arriving, the human was still 500 m away from even picking up the order. All right. Well, let's see. In the meantime, we can now enjoy our ulong teas from Chaji. All right. It is now 20 minutes after the drone has arrived. This is getting crazy. It's that bad now where we might have to just cancel this whole order with the human cuz it's taking so long.

[00:10:55]All right. So, a staggering 41 minutes later, we have it.

[00:11:03]>> That's okay. A staggering 42 minutes late. Uh, that is robot versus human. So, the first point goes to the robot. Shenzen is home to a staggering 1,700 drone companies, but there is one that rules them all. We are heading to DJI's headquarters. This one company alone holds 70% of the world's civilian drone market and it has one of the most insane headquarters I have ever seen in my life.

[00:11:53]DJI absolutely dominates the global drone market and makes over 11 billion annually. The only reason companies like this are allowed to exist in China was because of that one experiment all those years ago. You see, China wanted to experiment with something that went against everything communism stood for free markets, foreign investment, private companies. But they were terrified of what it might do to their system. So rather than roll it out across the entire country, they isolated it to one city. Shenzen became a special economic zone, which in other words was China's controlled experiment in capitalism. If it worked here, they'd scale it. If it failed, they could contain us. But DJI isn't the only major company in this city. And so we decided to go and visit one that has changed the world forever. Tik Tok's parent company, Bite Dance. Now, because of how sensitive and proprietary this company's data is, we have to be very careful about filming. And so, while I can't show you a lot of the footage that we got, what I can say is that the work culture in China shocked me. It feels almost as if people live here and never leave work. Charlie explained about the grueling 12 to 16-hour shifts that a lot of people do here on a weekly basis.

[00:13:10]You've got people who come here and they work 9:00 a.m., 9:00 p.m., 6 days a week trying to get to that paycheck, right?

[00:13:16]and they they just zone in, right? A lot of people are saying that don't have personal lives, right? So, where are you going to be able to find Americans with that type of work culture and work ethic?

[00:13:24]>> After leaving Bite Dons, there is one last thing to do before we wrapped for the first day. Have an interview with statecontrolled media. Now, normally I would immediately turn something like this down.

[00:13:36]>> I wasn't going to do it, but then I thought this would be once in a lifetime experience. But I'm thinking how interesting and how rare of an opportunity it would be for someone who reports the news like myself to see the questions they would have to ask me and even more importantly the questions they wouldn't. Now while the interviewer is extremely nice and a very friendly human, there are some initial problems with her bosses regarding her being allowed in our footage. But after some discussions, we're able to clear it up and we can film her as well. Even the food in Shenzen is in the future.

[00:14:31]>> Oh, it's like coconut milk. Now that we're finished eating, we go outside and film this interview with a beautiful background of Shenzen and it goes exactly as expected. All the questions are very positive and they get me talking about how good Shenzen is.

[00:14:46]Anything negative or touchy is completely avoided. So, it remains a very positive and easy interview. And this is something that I would not normally get in the West at all. And I guess there's a good and a bad side to that.

[00:14:59]>> I'm so happy to speak with you.

[00:15:01]>> Of course. Thank you very much.

[00:15:03]>> Welcome to center.

[00:15:04]>> Thank you very much.

[00:15:10]>> Actually, all of these hotels that we've been to, they have these robots that literally come in the lift with you. You suddenly know like what floor to get off on. You go all over the place. It's crazy. I think it just does deliveries of like food and drinks and uh like if you order like Uber Eats, for example.

[00:15:29]There you go. Off he goes. See you later, you crazy little thing. Get out of here. Shoo.

[00:15:37]Okay, we are back at the hotel. We just finished up with the CCP and I can literally say that literally.

[00:15:45]It was very interesting and and like I I knew that we had to get our own footage just in case because I didn't know what to expect. It was hard on my side for it to be like an cuz I'm I'm primed for like what's engaging, right? And that felt very much like there was never going to be any engagement because it was just like working off of a very tight script. Uh and so it reminded me how lucky it is that I get to do what I do and I am not that. You know, I think that there's always going to be a debate. Okay. Well, what's the pros and cons of living in China? For me and my work, it does not exist here. So it reminds me how lucky I am, how free I am to do what I do in other countries.

[00:16:30]These are the little moments that remind me despite China doing incredible things, it does come with a cost. The lack of freedom and expression seems to be one of the major things. I'm glad CO is over because that was that was some [ __ ] China's surveillance system is so vastly deployed where it's like they have the ability to bar you from entering public spaces, right? So, they're doing really precise daily tracking of like uh when's the last time you did a test? Uh who are the people you've interacted with recently? All of these things they could track like if in your neighborhood they confirmed that there was like one suspected case, they locked the whole neighborhood for 2 weeks.

[00:17:06]>> What?

[00:17:07]>> So, it was it was a different world, man.

[00:17:08]>> The next day arrives and we wake up to this beautiful morning view of the city.

[00:17:13]So, naturally, as everyone begins their workday, we need to see how they get there. Okay, it is day two here in Shenzen and uh we're at a railway station. You think, ah, that's not very cool. Actually, this is the largest underground metro station in China, perhaps the entire world. And this thing is hype. So, let's see if it if it lives up to that hype. This is Kanga North Station. And if you're from the west, you'll notice it doesn't look anything like the subways you're probably used to. That's because most Western metro systems were built between 50 and 120 years ago. So, they kind of feel like it. Whereas many in China were built recently. So, again, it kind of feels like it. I don't even know what this whole thing. They've got a freaking climbing wall. They've got a freaking Xiaomi. Take their uh train stations really serious around here, huh? For real. Now, because this entire system runs on QR codes and mobile payments, we actually can't figure out how to pay. We end up pestering the station's employees so much that one of them just pays for us.

[00:18:19]>> Thank you.

[00:18:20]>> Okay.

[00:18:20]>> Thank you so much.

[00:18:21]>> Thank you.

[00:18:22]>> Okay. Well, that was amazing. She just literally paid for our ticket to get rid of us. Now, we are at the largest underground metro station in the world.

[00:18:32]And if you come over here, you will see exactly what I'm talking about. Those are the trains underneath those capsules.

[00:18:39]>> Damn. So, no pollution. You don't get any of that train brake dust and like smoke coming through.

[00:18:48]>> All sealed inside.

[00:18:50]>> Quiet as well.

[00:18:51]>> Yeah. No, it's all covered.

[00:18:54]>> And look at that. Oh my lord, that's busy. Very busy. In fact, this station can accommodate up to 350,000 passengers daily. But it doesn't stop there because next we are heading to BYD and seeing what China's electric cars have done for the city but also the country. So let's head to BYD and see their Yang Wang Yang Wang Yang Wang.

[00:19:17]Yes, Yang Wong is the name of their supercar. All right, Jackson, where are we today, brother?

[00:19:22]>> We are at BYD HQ. This is the headquarters of the largest EV company in the world.

[00:19:29]>> Yeah. And they don't have too much security, do they? He did not get that joke.

[00:19:33]>> Honestly, it looks like any other factory, but they makes the most EVs and they also make the fastest car in the world.

[00:19:41]>> Now, when people speak about Chinese innovation, electric vehicles are the number one topic.

[00:19:47]>> Wo, you got to record this. It's Yeah, it's starting to like not even really feel like a car. It just feels like uh you know when you're on like a amusement ride or something. Like the area we're in, Shenzhen. Shenzhen and this entire province, Guangong province has the same GDP as South Korea, uh 91 million people. Um and all they do here is manufacture electronics products. If I want to find a display, a capacitor, a special IC, uh a microphone, a speaker, a camera, I can drive 1 hour in any direction to find a factory that can manufacture that. So when we talk about the density of supply chain that has been here, that's been built up here over 20, 30 years, like there is nothing like this in the world. Because not only does China now produce over 60% of the world's EVs, but their biggest company, BYD sold over 4.2 million electric vehicles last year, outpacing Tesla for the first time ever. Yeah. So, this is BYD's what they call a Sky Shuttle, uh, which is pretty cool. They don't only just make cars, uh, they also make trains. But talking about cars, we needed to try some that drive themselves.

[00:20:59]>> What the hell? Stop.

[00:21:02]>> Let's see if it'll stop. Yeah, it is.

[00:21:04]It's slowing down for her. Oh, it even changed lanes. Good. Well done, Clanker.

[00:21:09]I have not seen this clanker indicate once. THAT'S A FELONY. OH, we made it without crashing. Charlie, I'm disappointed.

[00:21:21]Now, as we pack up and say our goodbyes, my final reflections on this city are a lot like how China approaches manufacturing. The experiment that made this city so successful wasn't originally theirs. They simply took the parts of Western capitalism that drive innovation and competition and then grafted them onto a communist system that could build infrastructure at a speed no democracy has been able to do so far. But I also leave with the acknowledgement that that doesn't come without a price. Reporting freely on news is not a job I will be able to do in this system. And for that reason, China is a place where I enjoy visiting.

[00:22:00]But I could never stay. I think in the West, we've spent a long time assuming we had nothing to learn from China. But I'm not sure that's still the case. The best ideas don't belong to any one country. And the sooner we are willing to learn from each other, regardless of who we are or how we're governed, extraordinary things can happen.

[00:22:32]When I'm happy alone, I'm getting good at letting