Around 700 million Chinese citizens—a number twice the entire US population—have risen into the middle class since the year 2000. With new wealth has come new tastes and aspirations: organic food, SUVs, yoga and bodybuilding, vacations overseas—and sending children to Western colleges. Historically, studying abroad was only for a small elite and the exceptionally bright; but it has surged since the 2010s, and today more than 400,000 Chinese students are attending colleges in the West. English proficiency is a key to overseas admissions, so education in which English is the language of instruction—from beginner ESL to TOEFL, AP, IB, A-Level, and college courses—has become a multi-billion-dollar industry in China. In fact, there are now over half a million foreign teachers working in Chinese schools. Imagine for a moment that you are one of them.
Your Z Visa to work in China came through from the embassy in August. You packed your bags, and a guitar, and flew 16 hours to teach in an international school on the other side of the world. Since then, you’ve been on the lookout for the “real China,” beyond the malls, traffic, and construction. But you’re still not sure what the real China is, or where to find it. Now on fall break, you finally have a few days to explore. Two hours on a bullet train takes you to an industrial city in mid-development.
Hundreds of bikes, motorbikes, and taxis speed by as you amble through the dense metropolitan core. Stopping at an intersection, you smell dumplings and tea steaming at a busy corner stand surrounded by people eating on plastic stools. The scent of “stinky tofu” drifts through from streetside eateries. Signs are in Chinese only, an indication that, unlike “tier one” cities like Shanghai and Beijing, Western culture is just beginning to make its mark here. An arc of sparks shoots out across the sidewalk from a worker welding with no protection. You catch a glimpse of Chinese checkers over the shoulders of a half dozen men sitting on crates. Fifty percent of Chinese men smoke, and inside a restaurant doorway, you see a waiter smoking, the smoke wafting over a “No Smoking” sign. A poor rural migrant sits on the sidewalk beside a blanket where watermelons and ears of corn are laid out. Another carries a bamboo pole across his shoulders with baskets of fruit hanging from either end, and a scribbled cardboard sign says he accepts digital phone payments via WeChat or Alipay.
When you wander a few blocks farther, newer high-rises emerge. In front of a mall under construction, “coming soon” signs in Chinese display dozens of store logos, including a few Western chains like KFC and Pizza Hut. And at the center of this swath of new development, freshly spread onto the urban canvas, is a cluster of inhabited condos and shopping for the upwardly mobile. Occupying much of the ground floor of a modern tower is a Starbucks the size of a gym. You step inside, where an enormous counter horseshoes around the center, announced by the hissing and gurgling of espresso shots squeezing out of a machine. Beyond, windows stretch floor to ceiling, looking out on plants in a stone garden. Air conditioning is crisp, wifi strong, leather seats spacious, music acoustics clear. In this city that almost no one in the West has heard of, where it seems no one on the street speaks English, all the baristas here in Starbucks answer your questions about coffee and the city in English. While a traditional Chinese tea house focuses on ancient traditions, here the focus is the new: new sources of beans, new flavors—like the “Iced Purple Sweet Potato Oolong Tea Latte with Mochi Bits”—new music, and conversations about new plans and projects. And in the back is the holy grail for so many foreigners in China: a sit-down toilet with a seat. After pounding the pavement in one China’s emerging cities, the contrast with the cacophonous streets is palpable. It may not be the “real China,” but it’s what you need to get your bearings.
The young lady sitting across from you, Xinyi, took a very different path to this Starbucks. At 24, she is the first person in her family to live in a city. She was born in a farming village 700 km away in Anhui, the next province south. She grew up helping her parents manage the farm, sorting vegetables and clearing irrigation canals. Her grandparents were born in 1960, during the Great Chinese Famine, the deadliest famine in human history. Her parents grew up in the 1980s, when the average Chinese person got 75% of their calories came from grains, meat was a rarity, and dairy was virtually nonexistent. So the fact that Xinyi is sipping a venti iced latte is an indicator of the vast generational differences in contemporary China.
Xinyi learned English starting in elementary school. She had an Australian teacher who fell in love with rural China, and she watched thousands of hours of language videos through a spotty internet connection. She scored in the 98th percentile on the gaokao, China’s college admissions exam. This earned her a scholarship to Harbin Institute of Technology, known as “the cradle of engineers” and a member of China’s “C9” league of elite research schools. Growing up on a farm, Xinyi saw the devastating effects of irrigating crops with polluted water; this motivated her to major in environmental engineering, specializing in water treatment. Last year, she moved here to work on improving this city’s water treatment system, on a project that is part of China’s Sponge Cities initiative. She lives upstairs in one of the new condos and bikes to work. But she’s hoping to buy a car next year. Starbucks provides a window on the first-world prosperity that Xinyi and hundreds of millions of other Chinese aspire to, and that millions have already achieved.
China has gone through staggering economic growth and urbanization in the past few decades, and Starbucks has been along for the ride. As China’s middle class soared from 3% to around 50% of the population, its urban population nearly doubled from 36% to 66%. With hyper-speed urban growth has come a tidal wave of new jobs, apartments, and malls. And for upwardly mobile families, there has been an explosion of international schools, like the one where you teach. As hundreds of thousands of foreign teachers have arrived, Starbucks has helped soften their landing. In its familiar, reliably functional environment, there have been a multitude of papers graded, lesson plans created, emails sent, and cultural differences discussed by educators from around the world.
In East Asia, personal space is far tighter than in the West. This makes the spaciousness of Chinese Starbucks stores especially surprising to many Westerners. With high ceilings and wide-open seating areas, they often cover 1.5 to 2 times or more the area of the average US Starbucks. Starbucks’ Reserve Roastery in Shanghai covers half an American football field. Unlike the many grab-and-go Starbucks in the US, Chinese Starbucks are designed for larger groups to linger and socialize. And they are often showcases of innovative design, with eco-friendly materials, unique historic architecture, local art, and sleek furniture. Starbucks leases oversized spaces with indoor and outdoor seating in the choicest, most visible locations in China’s cities, making it a “stage” to see and be seen.
Starbucks opened its first Chinese store in Beijing in 1999, with a goal of opening 100. Today, there are over 8,000 across more than 250 Chinese cities. At one point, Starbucks was opening a store in China every 15 hours. One reason for this rapid rise is that the Chinese were already in the habit of socializing around caffeinated beverages. Tea culture has been central to Chinese life since the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), long before tea and coffee were introduced in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively. Starbucks patched into China’s ancient tea house culture and nudged it toward coffee. In fact, before Starbucks arrived, coffee was relatively unknown in China, a niche product drunk mainly by foreign expats and tourists in hotels and airports. The coffee culture that Starbucks started has helped make China the world’s 7th-largest market for coffee today.
In marketing terms, Starbucks in China is an “aspirational brand,” something people would like to have but cannot easily afford. But aspiration takes on a special meaning in a dictatorship—more specifically, a land of nominal communism and de facto state capitalism, or “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” as Xi Jinping puts it. Of China’s roughly 1.4 billion people, the 100 million in the Chinese Communist Party—7% of the population—monopolize the political sphere. For the other 93%, there are few means of pursuing political goals domestically. So their aspirations are often directed abroad: business deals with foreign companies, trips to foreign destinations, foreign language lessons for the younger kids, foreign universities for the older ones. As one of the most successful Western international companies, Starbucks is a symbol of this wider outside world toward which many in China’s middle class aim their ambitions.
Starbucks also gained popularity in China for having an atmosphere built for open conversation. For many, this is refreshing in a country with a long history of restricted speech and government secrecy. In his 1989 book The Great Good Place, American sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third place” to mean informal gathering spots, like cafes, bars, and libraries, where people can meet outside their homes (first places) and workplaces (second places). Oldenburg argued that third places are necessary for engagement in civic life, in part because their neutrality allows diverse people to mix and share ideas. Third places “[bring] together people who may not normally spend time together,” wrote Oldenburg, “in the hope that they will become friends, seeking deeper relationships with each other and with the community.” One of Starbucks’ core aims in China has been to fill this role of third place.
A similar example in United States history is the Automat, a chain of over 150 self-service restaurants established in 1902, mostly in New York and Philadelphia. Like Starbucks in China today, the Automat was a third place with a touch of luxury that helped millions adapt to fast-growing cities. During America’s second wave of immigration from 1890 to 1930, a time when New York City’s population quadrupled from 1.5 million to 6.9 million, the Automat provided New Yorkers with food fast yet not in a fast-food environment. Customers could put a nickel into one of the slots in a wall-length vending machine, open a glass window, and take out their meal. But it came on china with silverware, amid counters and floors of marble, ornate ceilings, and dolphin-shaped silver coffee spouts. At the Automat, everyone from executives and construction workers to migrants and homeless people could eat in style, gain exposure to a diverse cross-section of the population, and feel part of the social fabric.
While Starbucks was the early pioneer of luxury coffeehouse experiences in China and dominated the market for decades, it has become increasingly unaffordable in China’s slowing economy. Faced with competition from a slew of cheaper multinational chains, its market share dropped from around 47% in 2017 to 14% in 2024. Today, Starbucks’ most widespread Chinese competitor is Luckin Coffee. Founded in Beijing in 2017, Luckin has rocketed to over 22,000 stores in China, nearly triple the number of Starbucks. Measured by number of locations, Luckin is arguably the fastest-growing restaurant in the history of the world. But it relies completely on mobile app ordering, and as long as China has a large aspirational class looking for a more luxury experience with a personal touch, there will be a market for Starbucks.
Xinyi pulls a book from her bag. It’s in Mandarin, but you think you recognize the cover. “Ni hao, do you speak English?” She does. “Is that by Jared Diamond?” It is. She explains that her old Australian teacher recommended it. You talk a while about the deep questions and case studies the book explores, one of which is China’s environmental challenges. Xinyi has a lot to say. A barista calls out a customer’s name: “Haoyu!” Xinyi looks over, watching the baristas. She says working at Starbucks seems like a good job: it doesn’t have the “996” work culture that has been common in China the past several years: 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week. You inquire where to find the real China. She talks about places she’s been, and where she wants to go. “China is not a country. China is a world,” she says. “What is it like in San Diego?” She has a friend studying there. For the next hour, you both unfold your mental maps, pointing to highlights, asking questions, filling in empty spots. Your minds fill with ideas for new journeys. Like thousands of foreign teachers and millions of other migrants arriving in Chinese cities, you both find unfamiliar worlds becoming a little more familiar in a conversation over a wooden coffee table.
Image Credit: Worldcrunch
