Hello! My name is Luciano Drehmer and I’m a design consultant. I have lived, worked and developed projects in China and other Asian countries for a few years. There, I learned that there are many urgent topics in the world, but China is perhaps the most urgent. In the contemporary world, I feel today that if you do not understand China, you have no idea what is happening on the planet.

In the contemporary world, If you do not understand China, you have no idea what is happening on the planet.

Today I start my column here and I want to tell you a bit about the design, business environment, lifestyle and innovations in China and Asia. Have you ever wondered how they do business with the West and why China is becoming the most influential political and economic power on the planet?

Asia has concentrated the majority of the population of our planet and has gradually featured the news of the West. However, it still remains a mystery on this side of the world. This was my first motivation to start this journey — that is where the future of humanity and the vanguards of technology have been defined in different ways. Brazil’s (my home country) economy was not doing well, and Asia seemed very promising, and that decision was natural to me.

Source: World Bank

In 2016, I met nomadlist.com, which indexes the top cities in the world and shows metrics for places with high quality of life and low costs for digital nomads, as people who work remotely are called as they travel the world. That year, Chiang Mai, Thailand, was ranked first — I was very interested in working with more quality and for fewer hours, so I packed my bags and went to the East.

Source: Nomadlist.com

Arriving there, I discovered an ecosystem of professionals from the four corners of the globe crowded in the middle of Asia, driving companies on their laptops while drinking coffees in northern Thailand. Today, the “Chiang Mai Digital Nomads” community of Facebook concentrates almost 30 thousand people.

Already in my first months, I met people who worked with companies from China and painted an opportunity for me to work in Shenzhen. China specifically was a place I had never planned to visit on the Asian continent, but the curiosity I had at that time was greater than anything else.

Shenzhen is “The Silicon Valley of Asia,” according to Wired Magazine. I had read a lot about the city, but the vast majority of people never heard of it. It’s just that Shenzhen was no more than a small village of 30,000 people in 1992 — today its population of 12 million has overtaken its neighbour, Hong Kong. I learned that in China it is like this — they raise a city the size of New York City in a few years, even counting on a great subway network. Infrastructure, for them, is no problem.

Chiang Mai, Thailand

But more than infrastructure, I found a society that was shaped by another logic. What is the result of this? Different values ​​and behaviours — our cultural reference comes from Christianity and Plato and theirs from Confucianism and Taoism. Imagine hundreds of years being influenced by another point of view, add a little Maoism, socialism and ultra capitalism — the result of this is the strangest and most fascinating place I’ve ever been.

Shenzhen, China

“The Chinese never stops, they always move forward.” That was the first thing I learned when I arrived in China. How can I describe the agony I felt in my daily life through the anxiety and haste they have in doing everything for yesterday? The Chinese will not divert from you on the streets and will seek to solve everything in the exact moment — for them, the attitude is more important than any plan.

In the coming weeks, I will tell you from your strange habits — from our point of view! — to the cultural context, political transformations and how it is to work in China. “The Chinese never stops, they always move forward” will be our column theme next week. C ya!