At dusk in Guangzhou, the Pearl River catches the city’s lights. Cruise boats drift past illuminated bridges and glass towers, a tableau where the ancient and the hypermodern share the same shoreline. This is the China that Md. Abu Kawsar, a Bangladeshi PhD researcher, encountered when he moved from Beijing to the southern metropolis to join the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He had chosen China over the familiar academic paths to Europe or America, drawn, he later wrote, by a research culture that treats science not as a theoretical exercise but as a tool for solving real problems—a place where laboratories are tightly woven into industry, food security, and the texture of daily life.

Kawsar’s journey mirrors a broader shift in how the world engages with China. A report released in late June by the Xinhua Institute, a think tank affiliated with the state news agency, documents a transformation in inbound tourism: international visitors are no longer content with hurried shopping trips. They are donning Hanfu robes, sitting for tea ceremonies, and trying their hand at calligraphy. “Immersive cultural tourism consumption has become a new trend,” the report states. The numbers bear this out: in 2025, foreign travellers made 82 million entries and exits, a 26.4 percent jump, while tax-refund claims soared by 305 percent. On social media, hashtags such as “Chinahaul” and “Becoming Chinese” have accumulated hundreds of millions of views.

Viewed from Beijing, this is not merely a consumer fad but a deliberate extension of soft power. The same think-tank report frames “Shopping in China” as a bridge for sharing the country’s open development, underpinned by industrial strength, cultural depth, and streamlined policies such as visa-free entry and departure tax refunds. Yet the experience on the ground, as Kawsar describes it, is less about statecraft than about the texture of daily life: the dry cold of Beijing’s winters versus the humid subtropical warmth of Guangzhou, the Cantonese food and local dialects, the seamless integration of digital services. It is a reminder that the appeal of a place often lies in unscripted encounters, not the official narrative.

This hunger for substance over surface finds an unexpected echo in the crisis of confidence plaguing American higher education. Three reports released this spring—from Yale, Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis, and the American Association of Colleges and Universities—grapple with a collapse in public trust: only 42 percent of Americans now express confidence in universities, down from nearly 60 percent a decade ago. The AAC&U report blames external forces, from political backlash to funding cuts, and offers jargon-heavy remedies such as “recommit to inclusive excellence.” The Vanderbilt-WashU study, by contrast, points inward, arguing that in some humanities fields the pursuit of knowledge has been subordinated to social-justice activism, leading to shoddy scholarship and a reluctance to engage with inconvenient evidence. Neither report, critics note, fully reckons with the perception that universities have become more interested in self-justification than self-examination.

A similar dynamic plays out on a smaller scale in Bangladesh, where the websites of public universities have become, in the words of one local observer, “personal websites for vice-chancellors.” Homepages are dominated by large photographs of the vice-chancellor, often alongside the prime minister, and florid self-descriptions, while information about academic programmes and research is buried. A foreign professor considering a Bangladeshi PhD applicant might visit such a site and wonder whether the institution exists to serve students or to celebrate its administrators. The contrast with the Chinese research environment that Kawsar found—where laboratories are tightly linked to industry and societal needs—is stark. On the banks of the Pearl River, the lights shimmer on the water, and a traveller pauses, not to buy, but to look.