Suzhou, China

Table of Contents

About this Collection

This collection follows the week I spent in Suzhou, China for a sustainable development program for American students. This trip was brought to my attention by my brother, Addison, who found out about it through a WeChat group when he interned in China. While many think that learning all the information over WeChat is suspicious, it is quite common practice, and turned out to be a great opportunity. The whole trip was paid for by the Suzhou Power company, with the leader of the program being a Chinese representative for the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This collection highlights some of the places we visited and people we met along the way.

Su Zhou City Center

Suzhou is a major prefecture-level city in southern Jiangsu province, China. As part of the Yangtze Delta megalopolis, it is a major economic center and focal point of trade and commerce. It has been an important economic, cultural, and commercial center, as well as the largest non-capital city in the world, until it was overtaken by Shanghai.
In 2023, Suzhou had 5 million registered residents. Suzhou is listed as the 48th cities by scientific output according to the Nature Index 2022. The city is home to universities, including Soochow University, Suzhou University of Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong–Liverpool University, and Changshu Institute of Technology.

The city's tourist attractions include canals, stone bridges, pagodas, and gardens. The Classical Gardens of Suzhou were added to the list of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1997 and 2000.

Chinon CM1 | 28mm & 50mm | Cinestill 800T

Suzhou Center Mall is a large shopping mall located in Suzhou, China. The mall opened in November 2017 and was developed by the Singaporean Management company CapitaLand (for reference this is the same company that made the Singaporian airport, IT IS REALLY COOL). The mall spans over 300,000 square meters and houses over 600 different branded stores.

The Suzhou Center mall is currently the largest mall in Suzhou. It is 7 stories tall and features attractions such as an area for horse riding lessons, an Olympic sized ice rink, a gourmet grocery store, arcade, bubble tea stores such as 一点点 (Yi Dian Dian)

Tongli

Tongli, alternately Tong-Li (Chinese: 同里; pinyin: Tónglǐ) is a town in Wujiang district, on the outskirts of Suzhou, Jiangsu province. It is known for a system of canals, it has been given the nickname "Venice of the East". The place retains many of the features of an ancient Wu region town.

Through the program we visited the Tongli water city, a beautiful water city. We ended up having dinner here all together, and sent one of the program managers on a mission; finding Chinese liquor After finishing some very delicious, mushroom stock based hot pot, we finished the night with group shots with everyone, including the organizers joining in.

Chinon CM1 | 28mm & 50mm | Cinestill 800T

Rice Farm

As part of the trip, we visited a rice farm in the outskirts of JiangSu. This farm is known for their sustainable practices, with their rice husks being stored and fermented to be used as food for sheep and goats. While we where here we were invited to listen to traditional music of the region as well as witness a traditional tea ceremony of tea from the region. The evening ended with us making dumplings (vegetarian and other) which where cooked by the man pictured below. Everyone was in good spirits being able to try and learn about the sustainability of rice paddies that we were shown.

Chinon CM1 | 28mm & 50mm | Cinestill 800T

Talking Politics

One of the most interesting aspects of the trip was meeting and talking to the recent grads from Chinese Universities that where attending the trip as well. This of course piqued my interest in how citizens of China view American politics as well as about conspiracies and memes. As it turns out, many of them are aware of the Winney The Pooh memes, and gladly chatted with us about it, most, if not all, had VPN's and were regularly up to date with global news. They where also cautiously critical of president Xi and vaguely aware of Tienanmen square, although not of the historical or political context. By far the funniest was the conspiracies; with their COVID conspiracies blaming the U.S. for starting and spreading the virus.

Of the other Americans part of the program, most of them had been living in China for close to a year, working on an AI startup company while the others had been teaching English. From their assessment China and especially big cities like Beijing are just as similar to any other large city across the world in terms of the types of people and culture you will find. Nor did they find that they where being monitored or their actions restricted. It really felt like a lot of those viewpoints came from an anti-CCP view that America holds and teaches, when the average citizen is just as similar to any citizen of any country.