The Chinese state builds gleaming public works and doesn’t flinch from locking up ethnic minorities or locking down whole cities. Too many outsiders see only the enrichment or the repression. Living there puts you face to face with both a sustained rise in living standards and authoritarian pulses emanating out of Beijing. It became no contradiction for me to appreciate the things that are getting better and getting worse. I saw how China is made up of both strong entrepreneurs and a strong government, with a state that both moves fast and breaks things and moves fast and breaks people.

It remains one of China’s poorer regions, its economy sustained by tourism and resource extraction, particularly minerals and tobacco. The northernmost part of Yunnan is historic Tibet, home to a chunk of the Himalayas— including Kawa Karpo, one of the most sacred mountains in Tibetan Buddhism. Shangri-La is the largest city. In the region. The small roads around Tibetan monasteries are strewn with prayer flags and studded with impassive yaks. In Yunnan’s south, where I flew from Shanghai, the mountains are greener and gentler. Tea hills and rubber plantations rise above the Mekong River, carrying snowmelt from Tibetan highlands that eventually drains beyond southern Vietnam. Xishuangbanna is one of China’s most biodiverse regions, home to many trees and plants, wild elephants, peafowls, bears, and birds galore.

Around half of China’s officially recognized minority groups have their homes in Yunnan. They live between its snowy mountains, rainforests, rice terraces, and fast-moving rivers. Many of them have historically resisted rule by the dominant Han. It is part of a vast zone of highland Southeast Asia that various scholars have labeled Zomia, which holds innumerable hill peoples who have developed state-repellent practices. James C. Scott has written most elegantly about how people in Zomia have become “barbarians by design,” who cultivate shifting root crops (which are less assessable by tax collectors) and maintain an oral culture (which makes their histories and ethnic identities more malleable). It is not surprising that people in these hills claim various liberties, like foraging wild mushrooms, hunting game, or trafficking harder drugs. Not even the Han-Chinese state has been able to assert jurisdiction over the dense jungles and rugged mountains of the region.

Silvia and I spent several months in the city of Dali, which has a lake on one side and a mountain range on the other. The local Bai people built lovely lakeside houses, made of white walls ornamented with wooden carvings and blue ink paintings. The Bai are mountain farmers who have a long culture of craftmaking, producing marbleware or indigo linens for trade with the Han.

Mountains have beckoned, as Scott has written, to dissenters, rebels, and subversive types. It is not only the air that thins out at higher altitudes: The tendrils of the state do too. Small bands of people tired of tax administration or the other ills of governed life have climbed upward. As a consequence, the mountain dwellers tend to be seen as unruly folks, be they Appalachian Americans, Highland Scots, or various ethnic groups in Yunnan and other parts of Zomia. What is a difficulty for government administration and industrial growth is often a positive for personal liberties.

6. Fortress China

“China feels like a space in which the ceiling keeps getting lower,” Yiju told me one day. “To stay means that we have to walk around with our heads lowered and our backs hunched.”

Young people in Chiang Mai told me they’ve felt a quiet shattering of their worldviews over the decade of Xi Jinping’s rule. These are people who grew up in bigger cities and attended good universities, some of them overseas, which endowed them with certain expectations: that they could pursue meaningful careers, that society would gain greater freedoms, and that China would continue to be more integrated with the rest of the world. These aspirations have mostly shriveled. Though their lives in big cities can be quite pleasant, with new milk tea shops to try or art space to take selfies around, they work in jobs that are stressful and menial. They feel smothered by political controls. After the lockdowns, many of them grew aware that they had an unwelcome tendency to inflect every future scenario with a sense of catastrophe.

Not everyone has been thrilled with the move to Thailand, where they don’t foresee great job prospects.

After six years in China, I missed pluralism. It is wonderful to be in a society made up of many voices, not only an official register meant to speak over all the rest. I missed the ambient friendliness of Americans combined with a government that mostly leaves people alone. Most of all, I missed the ability to order books. To be able to read physical books, I relied on my folks to mail me periodic packages, usually in batches of twenty kilograms, while accepting the uncertainty that any of them might be confiscated by customs agents.