Chris Arnade on China, Wall Street, and Walking Around the World
This is part of Reason‘s 2025 summer travel issue. Click here to read the rest of the issue.
Chris Arnade is a photojournalist and the author of the Substack newsletter Chris Arnade Walks the World. He spent a decade walking through American landscapes and documenting what he saw. Now he has expanded his project to include cities around the globe, whether they’re large or small, and whether they’re easily walkable or not. His newsletter documents his mileslong walks off the tourist-beaten paths, showcasing real people everywhere from the Faroe Islands to Albany, New York; from Phoenix to Nairobi, Kenya.
Arnade holds a Ph.D. in particle physics from Johns Hopkins University and spent years as a Wall Street bond trader. In 2011 he left finance to document the lives of lower-income Americans, a project that culminated in his 2019 book Dignity. Along the way, he developed what he calls the “McDonald’s test”—the idea that people’s attitudes toward the fast-food chain reveals their level of privilege.
In February, Arnade recorded an episode of the podcast Conversations with Tyler with host Tyler Cowen, the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and the chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center. Cowen, himself an avid traveler, asked Arnade about what makes a city walkable, the “totalitarian anarchy” in China, and what he prefers when in other countries: McDonald’s or KFC?
Cowen: If you had to live in either Beijing or Shanghai for 10 full years, which one would you pick and why?
Arnade: Beijing ultimately, because there was just more there. The reason I liked Shanghai more initially was because I had a good location. I was right next to People’s Park, and I had a good four or five days. Beijing grew on me with time, though.
If you had to explain the fundamental difference between the residents of the two places, how would you explain it to an outsider?
I don’t have a good answer to that one, because I don’t feel like I know either of them well enough. How would you do it?
In Shanghai, status is money and conspicuous consumption. In Beijing, status is power. In a funny way, that intersects with making the city more intellectual—having better bookstores and having ties to more of China. Shanghai is more tied to the outside world, which is maybe better for the city, but for me, makes it less interesting.
I felt the overwhelming feature, and what frustrated me in some ways, was how similar Shanghai and Beijing were. They were inscrutable to me at the level I do things. A lot of that may be the way I approach learning, which is simply [to] walk 15 miles, and they’re not particularly walkable cities. I walk to learn, but [in] some places that’s not the right approach.
I walked 15 miles in Beijing, 15 miles in Shanghai. I kept on saying that it felt like I was in one of those cheap cartoons where the background kept repeating. I didn’t feel like I got a sense of either place at the granular level like I usually do. I don’t know if that was intentional.
Parts of Beijing are designed to discourage protests and demonstrations, and that correlates with being hard to walk in.
I was thinking in particular of that approach. I’ve been reading James C. Scott, who writes a lot about the idea of top-down regulation as control. That’s certainly the case in Beijing. Gone are the winding dens of small neighborhoods, because those are hard to control. They’re much easier if you replace them [with] 50-story towers with a mall and surveillance.
What struck me when I was in Beijing [was] how top-down regulation is often designed very intentionally for control. Beijing in particular feels that way. That’s what frustrated me initially. I landed and I said, “Oh, I’ll just walk to Tiananmen Square.” Well, I just can’t do that.
I got there. I went through five security checks, and I was supposed to have had a QR code where I’d signed up, and I didn’t. I just walked by. I wrote about there being what I call a totalitarian anarchy. I think they intend to be control-y, but they’re just too incompetent to pull it off.
Some of that’s a bit deliberate, though. I think t
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