How much can you really learn about a country from visiting it?
Not as much as people think.
“Do you want to know our secrets?/ Oops, sorry, we don't have any” — Tokyo Jihen
One recent theme in my writing has been the threat of a war with China. I don’t believe a conflict is inevitable by any means, but it’s enough of a possibility where preparing for it has to be a major concern for policymakers in the U.S. and elsewhere. But over the last two months, a number of people have told me that I should go to China in order to better understand its geopolitical intentions. I’m told that if I go there, I’ll realize that China doesn’t really want a war:
In fact, I have actually been to China a few times — most recently my trip to Hong Kong in 2019, which ended with me escaping from the cops. So why do people think that going again would change my mind about geopolitical goings-on?
None of the four people who have told me things like this is a professional China shill; all of them are people I know personally, and all of them are people I respect. They just honestly believe that traveling to China and meeting people there is a good way to understand what its people want.
Now, the obvious counterpoint here is that the will of the people in a country is not the same as the will of the people who run the country. Xi Jinping is not representative of the average Chinese person, and in fact he probably doesn’t even listen to the average Chinese person except on rare occasions. As Hermann Göring said while being tried at Nuremberg, the common people typically don’t lust after war; they simply support war when their leaders decide to drag them into it.
Hanging out in Shanghai will not allow you to see the fleet of warships encircling Taiwan, nor will you be allowed to tour the vast factories pumping out military equipment at a pace unprecedented since World War 2. Conversations with businessmen in restaurants or young people in nightclubs will not tell you much about what’s being said behind closed doors in the Politburo and the other organs of the party-state. All of the relevant decisions being made about war and peace will be made by people that you, as a tourist, will never get to meet.
So my friends are just pretty obviously wrong here. But their belief in the power of tourism to convey deep understanding of a country and its people got me thinking: How much can you really learn from overseas trips?
Why tourism is a weak tool for understanding other countries
In fact, I’ve always been a big advocate for living overseas. Back in 2021 I wrote a post arguing that life in other countries helps you appreciate both your own country’s deficiencies and its strengths:
But this is different than saying you can understand a country by traveling there, for a number of reasons.
First of all, seeing other countries is not the same as understanding them, even though these are both valuable activities. If you go to Japan and see that they have an amazing train system, it can motivate you to think “Why don’t we have a great train system in the U.S.?”, or even “How can the U.S. get better trains?”. But it will not tell you why Japan has such great trains. It will not tell you how Japan’s train system was built, or why. It will not tell you how much it cost or how easy it is to maintain. It will not tell you about any political problems Japan’s government had to overcome in order to get the trains built, and so on.
It’s good to know that other countries can do things differently, but that’s only the first step in learning about those differences.
Second, a trip of a week or even three weeks doesn’t give you enough time to learn much about a place. Living overseas, especially for multiple years, will allow you to develop deep relationships with the people there — work colleagues, close friends, long-term romantic partners, etc. It will also let you see how people live in their day-to-day life — what their workday looks like, what their house looks like. You’ll experience the frustrations and the inefficiencies as well as the conveniences. You’ll understand the dreams and the heartbreaks and the day-to-day pleasures.
As a tourist, you will learn very little about any of those things. You’ll walk around and see the buildings but you won’t know who lives or works there. You’ll chat with people in restaurants and bars but you won’t learn their secrets. You’ll experience the surface of a place but you won’t perceive the depths.
In my experience, tourists also tend to make mistakes about countries’ economic situations from looking at the public buildings and infrastructure. Tokyo, for example, is a visual marvel, with forests of newly built buildings, immaculate shops and restaurants, and beautiful parks. But only once you live in Japan for a while do you realize that many Japanese people are quietly falling into poverty. And going to Shanghai or Shenzhen can trick you into thinking China is the richest country in the world, instead of a middle income country — China is just coming off of the greatest construction boom in world history, and everything in those Tier 1 cities is at the beginning of its capital depreciation cycle.
Of course, staying in a place for years doesn’t guarantee that you’ll understand it at a deep level — some people can live in a country for a decade and have startlingly little insight about it. But there are lots of pitfalls and barriers to understanding that are much worse if you only visit for a short time.
For example, if you don’t spend much time in a place, who you meet will be heavily dominated by selection effects — especially if you don’t speak the local language. If you go to China as an American tourist or to look for companies to invest in, your conversations will tend to be with Western-oriented Chinese people who speak some English. People who like foreign countries and speak foreign languages aren’t always representative of the societies they live in. If there are highly nationalistic Chinese people sitting around talking about how they want war with the U.S., they’re probably not going to be at your hot pot party.
Finally, in my experience, people tend to see foreign countries through the lens of their preconceived notions and pre-existing stereotypes. In my 2021 post, I wrote:
Another pitfall is the tendency to see other cultures through the lens of your own preconceived stereotypes. I’ve seen a few Westerners interpret the boundless creativity and self-expression of the Japanese street fashion scene as some kind of expression of conformity, simply because they had always been told that Japan was a “collectivist” country (even though surveys have found that Japan became slightly more individualistic than the U.S. starting around the mid-1980s). An Australian friend of mine expressed her disgust at seeing Japanese people wearing masks on the train (heh), thinking that it sprang from fastidious germophobia; we had to explain that these people had colds themselves, and were conscientiously trying to prevent spreading their germs to others.
It has never ceased to amaze me how much people from the U.S. and other Anglosphere countries tend to rely on stereotypes to understand Japan. Part of this is probably due to Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword and similar books, but conservative Japanese thinkers who often employed wishful thinking when theorizing about their culture’s uniqueness have to take some of the blame here too.
I should mention that many of these stereotypes are just plain flat-out wrong. The most egregious example is the notion of “guilt vs. shame cultures” — Benedict wrote that Westerners obey their internal consciences (“guilt”) while Japanese people are motivated instead by the threat of social sanction (“shame”). A fair number of Americans still believe this, but it’s complete and utter nonsense.
Both psychological studies and subsequent anthropological studies strongly contradict Benedict’s theory, showing that Japanese people are strongly motivated by feelings of guilt as well as shame. But you don’t even need peer-reviewed literature to know it’s nonsense — Japanese people consistently do the right thing even when no one is watching. A classic example is how Japanese people turn in lost cash that they find, instead of keeping it for themselves, even though no one around them would ever know if they kept it.1 Almost no Japanese people litter, even if they could do it without getting caught. Japanese people are much more careful to put their trash in the right trashcan, even if no one would see them put it in the wrong place. And so on.
If you ask Japanese people why they do the right thing when no one is looking, they will tell you that they’re worried about inconveniencing or harming other people — the classic sign of a guilty conscience.
Yet some Westerners still cling almost desperately to Benedict’s mistaken stereotype. When I pointed out to fellow expats how turning in cash shows that Japanese society is motivated by guilt, some acknowledged the point, but others stubbornly insisted that this was not “guilt”, but rather “internalized shame” — they basically invented a new term, utterly inconsistent with Benedict’s original description, in order to allow themselves to believe that their stereotype had never been wrong.
To many people, these cultural stereotypes are a comforting port in the storm of epistemic uncertainly. When confronted with something terrifyingly novel, like a foreign culture, we grope for anything that will reassure us that we already understand it.
And because those people take their stereotypes with them when they travel, any lessons they learn will tend to be filtered through that lens. People who go to China with the belief that the Chinese are a peaceful, mercantile race rather than a warlike one will tend to come away from conversations in China with this idea reinforced.2 Those who go with a stereotype of China as a militarized, paranoid society with a desire for revenge for the “century of humiliation” will probably come away with that idea reinforced.
Even intelligent tourists fall prey to this stuff extremely easily. For example, Tim Urban, the author of the blog Wait But Why, took a trip to Japan in 2014 and came back reiterating a bunch of tired cultural stereotypes, which he summed up in this rather hilarious diagram:
By his own admission, Urban speaks no Japanese, and could only communicate very crudely with a few Japanese people. But after just two weeks of this, Urban somehow managed to draw very deep conclusions about Japanese people, including the existence of a vast unobserved “inner psyche” that Westerners can never penetrate.
How did Urban manage to see so deeply into the Japanese soul after two weeks of ordering food and asking directions? The obvious answer is that he did not. Instead, his understanding of what he was seeing came from things he had read, and discussions he had had with other Westerners. For example, he writes:
This social harmony is deeply ingrained in Japanese culture, and it’s critical to uphold it—critical because it’s socially disastrous to have a negative interaction in Japan, causing you to “lose face,” a mortifying experience.
This is straight out of The Chrysanthemum and The Sword. But Urban believed that he managed to deduce this from two weeks in the country! Such is the power of preconception.
I don’t want to be too hard on Tim Urban here — or on my friends who enjoy traveling to China. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with going to a new place and forming an impression of it. I do it. It’s fun! But you shouldn’t fool yourself into thinking that this allows you to predict a country’s economic or geopolitical destiny.
Why you should travel anyway
But after having said all of this, I want to emphasize that I think international travel is a very good thing, and that you actually can learn a lot from it. So what can you learn?
First of all, just as with living overseas, traveling helps you learn about your own country. If you grow up in a place and live there all your life, you might not imagine that any other way of life is possible; travel will disabuse you of that notion. Many Americans go to Japan and come back wishing that the U.S. could have a better train system, or airport security that doesn’t make you take off your shoes. Or they go to Amsterdam and come back wishing that the U.S. was more bike-friendly. Or they go to Singapore and come back wishing that the U.S. could have plentiful housing and ultra-low crime. Observing other countries’ strengths tells you that better things are possible back home.
The flip side of this is that travel helps you appreciate your own country more. If you think the average American lives a life of material poverty, a trip to Europe or Japan might make you realize that even most other rich countries’ living standards are far behind the United States. If you never stopped to think about how amazing American grocery stores are, in terms of both quality and selection, a visit to a supermarket in another country may increase your appreciation of Safeway, Kroger, and (especially) H-E-B. If you think America is an unruly country full of disruptive riots and protests, you should spend some time in France.
Another reason to travel is that simply exposing yourself to different cultures can make you less afraid of difference in general, even if you never really understand what you see. Cao, Galinsky, and Maddux (2014) found a number of studies with a breadth of fairly credible research designs, all of which agree that travel increases social trust:
Five studies examined the effect of breadth and depth of foreign experiences on generalized trust. Study 1 found that the breadth (number of countries traveled) but not the depth (amount of time spent traveling) of foreign travel experiences predicted trust behavior in a decision-making game. Studies 2 and 3 established a causal effect on generalized trust by experimentally manipulating a focus on the breadth versus depth of foreign experiences. Study 4 used a longitudinal design to establish that broad foreign travel experiences increased generalized trust. Study 5 explored the underlying processes and found that a focus on the differences rather than the similarities among the countries visited was critical in producing greater generalized trust. Across five studies, using various methods (correlational, lab experiment, and longitudinal), samples (United States and Chinese) and operationalizations (trust game and generalized trust scale), we found a robust relationship between the breadth of foreign travel experiences and generalized trust.
This is probably just a form of the contact hypothesis, which says that being around people who are different than you makes you feel more favorably toward them. It’s also probably the same reason that big cities tend to be more liberal than small towns — cosmopolitanism breeds tolerance.
Going overseas can also help disabuse you of a few of your preconceptions. Turkey — or at least, Istanbul — felt much richer and more modern than I might have mentally expected. Parisians were a lot warmer and friendlier than I had expected. Germany was less urbanized than I was expecting. These updates weren’t anything earth-shattering, but they did help me get a bit more of a complete and up-to-date picture of what the world looks like nowadays.
Finally, even if overseas trips don’t give you answers about why other countries are the way they are, they can motivate you to start asking questions. Traveling to Taiwan made me wonder why the streets are laid out so differently than in Japan, why the buildings aren’t as new-looking, and so on. Traveling to Ireland made me wonder how the country went from centuries of poverty to material comfort and wealth almost overnight. Traveling to Singapore made me wonder how they manage to build so much housing, how they became much richer than the U.S., and how they manage not to have any bugs despite having a bunch of plants on the sides of buildings. And so on.
You can learn the answers to these questions — it just requires time and research.
As for China, I definitely agree with my friends that people should travel there and see it for themselves. No, it won’t tell you whether they’re going to start a war. But you can ride great high-speed trains, pay for everything with one app, get stuff delivered to your door by robot, and see a lot of pretty LEDs on the sides of buildings. If you’re an American, you can see the salutary example of a country that actually builds things, instead of allowing local NIMBYs to force the built environment into a crumbling ruin.
You can probably eat some pretty good food, too.
There is a law in Japan saying that you have to turn in lost cash if you find it, but this law is completely unenforceable. There is also a law saying you’re entitled to a finder’s fee for turning in lost cash, but no one I know has ever bothered to go claim the fee.
One of the friends who urged me to go to China told me that throughout history, China was a peaceful country that didn’t invade its neighbors; I pointed out to him that China has launched at least six major invasions of Vietnam over the last two millennia, as well as many minor ones, with the most recent invasion being in 1979. China has also invaded Korea and Mongolia on a number of occasions. Manchuria, Tibet, and Xinjiang, which are now part of China, used to be independent; they were invaded and conquered. Even much of China’s south was not part of China in ancient times, but was conquered and colonized over a period of centuries.
Americans can easily *travel* to other countries. But almost no Americans can *live* (i.e. indefinitely legally reside) in another country. I'm one of the rare Americans who has done the latter for almost all of my adult life, and to many different countries in two very different continents. And even then it's a humbling experience to accept how limited and perishable my life-experience and observations are about places I've lived.
For example: I've lived in Sweden since 2017. I'm married to a Swede. I have a Swedish son. I live within a small community of Swedish family and Swedish neighbors. I know Sweden very well. But those years in Sweden have seen perhaps one of the most dynamic shifts in Swedish politics and culture in decades. Had I lived in Sweden from 2000 to 2014 and then left, I'd have entirely missed out on the sudden influx of immigration to Sweden and its manifold backlashes since. EVERYTHING changed in 2015.
You could say something similar about the United States right around the same time, of course. And I didn't live there then as I don't now. So though I was a native-born American, very close to politics, and the son of an investigative journalist who saw the late 20th Century shifts in American culture up close and personal, I'm always a chastened by how little I now probably fundamentally understand the post-2015 shifts in American political culture. Sure, I could, like Noah, talk about how the roots of Trumpism go way back, actually, and that the 2020s are the new 1970s (before I was born). I could even dredge up late-childhood memories about the Newt Gingrich Era and its parallels to today. Or, more credibly, talk to the dawn of the 21st Century's GWOT era that was my introduction to adulthood and political awakening. But I don't really *know* Trumpism in my body the way somebody is now daily experiencing it on the ground now might. So, to me, my birth country is now rendered a little like Tim Urban's superficial glossing of the impenetrable psyche of the Japanese.
Or like immigrants and exiles who leave a place and then spend the rest of their days interrogating their memory of it!
Which is to say that even living in a place isn't enough to *continue* to understand it. The place is a Heraclitian river that just keeps flowing... and, worse, changing course entirely! Whatever feel for it you can get over many years or even decades of direct experience is only good for what it's good for: understanding a little of what's happening now, while you're here.
The big problem here is equating a country and its government, particularly in relation to foreign policy. Most of the time, foreign policy is determined by processes within the political class, and ordinary people neither know nor care. Even if you live in a country, you don't find out much until it's too late to change things.