“Just when you think you understand China, it has already changed again.” That’s roughly what Tom Van de Weghe thinks when he returns in 2023 to the country where he served as a correspondent for VRT from 2007 to 2012. He hadn’t been back in China for eleven years. For years, his visa applications vanished into thin air, until he was finally granted permission to re-enter the country.
What he finds has, in many ways, become a different country in the blink of an eye. The Beijing he knew as a city shrouded in a thick layer of smog now has remarkably clear air. Electric vehicles, digital payments, and high-tech applications have since become part of everyday life. At the same time, the relatively more liberal period under President Hu Jintao has been replaced by a society in which the state, under Xi Jinping, exerts a much more pronounced presence through the use of cameras, data, and censorship.
Van de Weghe describes these changes clearly, but constantly places them in their historical context. According to Van de Weghe, anyone who wants to understand why the Chinese today view concepts such as freedom and progress differently than we do in the West must look further back than Xi Jinping. The so-called “century of humiliation,” the chaos of the twentieth century, and the excesses under Mao have left deep scars. However, the book is more than just a history lesson. By linking this background to conversations with ordinary Chinese people he met during his travels, the book remains highly readable.
Economically, too, a great deal has changed during his eleven years of absence. China has evolved from the world’s factory to a country that is increasingly developing advanced technology on its own and playing a leading role in various industries. From electric cars and batteries to solar panels, artificial intelligence, and robotics: in many fields, copying has given way to improvement, scaling up, and—increasingly—innovation of its own.
At the same time, *Back to China* is certainly not an ode to the Chinese model. The real estate crisis, youth unemployment, demographic challenges, overcapacity, surveillance, and declining confidence among a segment of the population are discussed at length. China’s geoeconomic model—which seeks to expand its influence in other countries through infrastructure, loans, raw materials, and investments—is also described critically.
Van de Weghe does not try to reduce China to a simple “right or wrong” framework. He shows why many Chinese people are proud of what their country has achieved in recent decades. Hundreds of millions of people have escaped poverty, cities and infrastructure have transformed at breakneck speed, and China has once again become a major power.
The most interesting thing about the book was that it provides a clear insight into how Chinese people think and act differently—something that is often difficult for us in the West to understand. For them, stability often takes precedence over freedom, collective progress over individual rights, and sovereignty over universal values. According to him, this different way of thinking is also reflected in the way China conducts itself geopolitically. He compares Chinese strategy to the game of Go. Whereas, he argues, the West tends to approach geopolitics more like chess—with direct confrontations, attacks, and defense—Go is more about patience, positioning, and long-term thinking.
The book combines history, economics, geopolitics, and personal encounters without ever becoming a dry analysis. Anyone who wants to understand how China has once again become an economic and political superpower—and what tensions this has given rise to today—will find *Back to China* an excellent guide.
