Evelyne&Jeff’s Excellent China Adventure Series. Months spent traveling the back roads of China. Short videos with transcripts, captioned photos, articles and critical commentary. The REAL Chinese people you do not know!
Shenzhen
Note: I lived and worked in Shenzhen, 2016-2019. Amazing place!
Photos and videos
Scooter parking
#1: we never saw anyone park or remove a scooter from this storage system, but the platforms of ones up top apparently extend into a slide that angles down to the ground. Scooters are heavy, so you have to be strong enough to handle it, as it comes off the ramp. Looks more for storage than for daily parking.
Trendy cafés, European-style coffee and Starbucks gets sideswiped by serious local competition
The coffee craze has taken the Chinese by storm. Everybody and their dead dog are opening mom & pop cafés, while Starbucks is being pushed to the wall with national chain brands, like Luckin and Cocci. These mega chain outlets are half the cost of Starbucks, wresting the latter from its once cushy monopoly status. This has forced Starbucks to partner with a domestic investment firm to the tune of US$4 billion, only taking a 49% share and essentially licensing its brand and letting locals take care of the business. The new Starbucks is talking large, saying it will have 13,000 outlets in China. Clearly, they are going with Luckin and Cocci, for high volume, low margin sales.
High volume/low margin consumer sales are the only model that works in a communist-socialist country of 1.4 billion customers, because there are always others who want to go in business right next to you.
Independent cafés can be surprisingly upscale and tony. Below, even Ralph Lauren, of polo shirt and fashion fame is getting into the coffee biz in China.
Like every commercial craze, there will be over-expansion, over production, with the ensuing purge of the market that only the strong and well-managed will survive. This is also probably part of Starbucks’ strategy: saturating the market with one’s brand name.
China is taking its coffee model overseas. Luckin just opened a café in New York City, selling the same cups of joe as Starbucks, but for half the price. It has been a massive success. If this trend continues, the once vaunted Starbucks may see some tough competition and rough days ahead.
Even Ralph Lauren?
#2a: polo shirts and coffee? Who would have thought? Even China Post is getting in on the act and offering fresh coffee in trendy postal and stamp souvenir shops.
2b-2c: competition is so fierce that Ralph Lauren’s marketing angle is to have fresh-cut roses on every table. Evelyne really appreciates the idea. The quality of brewed coffee in China is just as good as in Europe and the portion sizes are sumptuous. The cups here are huge. Yunnan Province, south of Tibet has some of the best coffee varieties grown anywhere in the world and all the cafés have the best Italian coffee machines, which are likely manufactured in-country for export.
#3: by not having to import coffee beans from halfway around the world, café prices tend to be reasonable. We always get lattés/cappucinos and even in a fancy shopping center, where we went to repair my Huawei phone, in an upscale café like Ralph Lauren, our two cups were ¥76 (€9.28).
Video: take a tour of a typical trendy, Chinese café
#4-Transcript: I did another video about how KFC is promoting coffee and there are thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of these really trendy cafés all over China. The coffee is good, the ambiance is nice, they’ve got good internet. So, this has become a real staple of Chinese life, at least among the urban people.
The above café in Hengyang, Hunan Province, filmed during this last summer’s Amir&Jeff China Adventure (see below) is not atypical and could easily fit into a trendy hot spot on the West Coast of the US or Canada. These days, there are millions of chic coffee shops like this all over China, even down to smaller cities.
Shenzhen greenery
One the reasons Shenzhen is such a pleasant place to be is how green it is. Fifty percent of its surface area is covered in greenery. Imagine a city with 17.5 million inhabitants and half of everywhere you go is green. Unlike cities like Hong Kong, where the greenery is very sparse in the city center, where you have to travel to get to parks, Shenzhen is dotted with over one thousand little parks all over the urban city centers, like the one pictured below. Every neighborhood has a green public park within walking distance. This is above and beyond numerous larger parks around town, some many square kilometers in size, dotted with hiking and walking trails.
Right near our hotel, which is in a very busy part of Shenzhen, there is a large nature reserve, where visitors can’t even go. They just let Mother Nature take it over and leave it alone for flora and fauna to thrive! This being some of the most valuable real estate in the world.
Most Shenzhen streets – in truth all Chinese cities – are lined kilometer after kilometer with tall, mature shade trees. The two most common varieties are plane/sycamore and poplar. Go further north and it’s elm, pine and spruce. Thus, even on hot, sunny days, we can walk much of the time in the shade.
I don’t know what Shenzhen and all the rest of the cities and towns we visit in China budget for parks and greenery, but it must be in the billions of your favorite currency.
Video: a typical urban Chinese park
#5-Transcript: Shenzhen is 50% greenery, including public parks like this everywhere. They are along the sides of roads and there are some that are actually quite big, where the mountains are, including sidewalks, shrubs, plants, gardens, parks, etc., 50% is green.
Note: that is An Chan, our friend, joining Evelyne, as they walk further on.
China has millions of public parks like this – big and small
#6a-6c: every public park has a name, and sometimes, it’s just a small patch of trees and bushes on a corner or between buildings. It all adds up to 50% green. That’s yours truly on the left in the last photo.
Many parks will have statuettes of animals and themed shapes; topiaries – some huge – are very popular. Amphitheaters and stages are in many of them, for local, neighborhood performances. Larger ones will have maps, trail signs, a posted history of the place and historical markers of anything that happened nearby. Spotless, free public toilet are always nearby.
Potted flowers are everywhere, on pedestrian crossing bridges, all along sidewalks, off- and on ramps of bigger boulevards, and medians that go for kilometers.
Older trees are tagged with QR codes and tracked by the Ministry of Forestry, to keep them healthy and growing.
Clean, with well-swept walking lanes, well-marked with signs, no graffiti, no drugs, no weapons, no crime, no homeless, no tent cities, no beggars, no trash. It’s the way all public parks should be around the world. In public parks in France and the USA, you risk your life, your chastity, bodily harm or children getting kidnapped for human trafficking.
While Shenzhen is among the best for greenery, all Chinese cities are similar, even down to small towns and villages.
Fake it until you can make it!
#7: it doesn’t count in the greenery category, but to keep the ambiance as verdant as possible, Shenzhen goes to the extra expense of putting up AstroTurf on the outside walls of its thousands of construction projects. That’s Evelyne ahead of me.
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Evelyne&Jeff’s Excellent China Adventure Series. Months spent traveling the back roads of China. Short videos with transcripts, captioned photos, articles and critical commentary. The REAL Chinese people you do not know!
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https://yellowlion.org/asia-trip-2025-part-11/
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