Sometime in the pandemic years – I can’t remember when, just that it was summer, without being too hot – I found myself walking into a church on the seashore. The coast wasn’t that different from commercial strips in Miami, Rio or Thailand: people taking selfies, others with sound systems cruising around, overpriced drinks. Except that I was in Beidaihe, Hebei Province, a beach town famous for Chinese Communist Party retreats. The real-estate developer Aranya, with its links to the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, has made this spot into a Chinese answer to Brighton – a tiny patch of the capital located 300 kilometres away. A contemporary art centre has been built here, too. Outside of this gentrified micro-patch, the Chinese rural, with its corn farmers and dusty villages, sprawled in every direction, but inside, China’s middle class – whose psychic coordinates are somewhere between Beijing and Palo Alto – strolled in independent bookstores, went to good coffee shops, and took selfies at that church.

China’s economic reforms and opening up to the rest of the world created a generation that grew up facing the West, aspiring to the same minimalist, chic decor as its peers around the world. Today, this generation is oddly stranded. Its members fit in neither with their parents nor the peasants, while the younger generation is even more digital-native, grew up with a sense of the West as being closed off and decaying, and is often as nationalistic as its grandparents. So this stranded group of middle-class bohemians – software engineers, boutique hotel guests, jewellery designers – come to Beidaihe, in search of each other. The beach is a great one to stroll on (but not really to swim off), hands in pockets, wondering what the world is coming to; afterwards, the restaurants are pretty good and there are cocktails. In a China that’s almost a decade away from the realisation of its dream of globalisation, this village by the sea offers a comforting place to hang out. The church is a hit on Xiaohongshu (“Red note”), the Chinese app to which TikTok refugees have fled. On the internet, a generation of young Chinese and Americans whose childhoods were spent as the two countries grew closer, can meet. Maybe that time will come again. Until then, we’ll always have Aranya Beidaihe. .