Visiting China for the first time a few months ago was a revelation. People had told me, repeatedly, that I would be astonished. I tried to keep an open mind, but my pre-conceived notions from previous visits to former communist cities like Moscow and Bucharest had not prepared me for the dynamo that China has become. Those former cities in the late 1990s and early 2000s were still cold, forbidding places

for those who visited without knowing friends. Language barriers, and years of being spied on by the state had made people deeply suspicious of outsiders. China today, after

decades of Communist rule, an occasion that was being celebrated by a week of holidays and festivities when I was in town, is, in its metropolitan cities, no longer that injured animal that is licking its wounds; it is a behemoth that is waiting to reveal itself to the world.

If this isn’t news to you, but you have never visited China, trust me when I say that you are in for a shock culturally, and in many other ways. China has poured state money into infrastructure, which means that roads, bridges, buildings, airports, trains, train stations, stadiums (I could go on, but you get the pictures), are all gleaming new. There are public toilets everywhere, regularly serviced. There are bicycle lanes for bikers, scooter lanes for scooties. There are public parks and beautifully tended patches of green everywhere. Beijing, a city of almost 22 million people, has rose gardens next to its six ring roads; not token rose gardens, but proper gardens that are landscaped with love and care by someone who loves to tend these blossoms. Later, during my research, I discovered that the China Rose is the flower for Beijing City.

The architecture of these new buildings, instead of being garish, is, for the most part, minimal, disciplined, light-filled, and seem to be truly of the future. The bullet train from Tianjin to Jinan was so beautiful and so new and clean that we could have eaten off its floors, even as we gawked out of the floor to ceiling windows when we weren’t busy ogling our plush fully reclining seats.

Jinan, Tianjin, and Beijing, are, in order of mention, big bustling cities that have a great deal to offer, with seemingly perfect urban planning, great attention to detail, and the will to take the best from the West and adapt it, make it better, even, for Chinese needs.

New York’s Lincoln Centre is a glorious paean to the arts. Tianjin’s Cultural Centre is 20 times the size of the Lincoln Centre, and is boggling to the mind and to the eye with its graceful lines, cathedral-like ceilings, and huge body of water, which is programmed with automated fountains for the most stunning light shows.

China is not a democratic country, but it has, over the years, brought more people out of poverty than any other by sheer force of state will, with massive investment (whatever anyone may say) in their human resources.

Which brings me to Chinese contemporary art, an area that is often neglected when economic growth is the primary concern. From an outside perspective, all we know is the Ai Wei Wei controversy, that is until one visits and sees the massive scale of Beijing’s now famous 798 Art Zone that houses street after street of museums and galleries, with every important name from Pace to the Gagosian having a space in this now vibrant, funky district that will give you pause: you could be in any artsy part of London, New York, Paris, Delhi, or Sydney.

798’s history is riveting: it started off as an industrial complex, a joint venture between China and East Germany in the early 1950s. The factories were built in the Bauhaus style, with form following function, to suit the spare communist aesthetics of the time. Over the years, the space became defunct as the state retracted funding and slowly, as with Chelsea in New York, these huge factory spaces, filled with light that was initially intended to increase the productivity of the workers, became an ideal place to showcase art.

The 640,000 square metre area in Dashanzi, close to the centre of Beijing, is now a humming hot-bed of edgy boutiques and chic restaurants that are populated by the bourgeois-bohemians (a term that is also unfortunately often shortened to “Bo-bo”) who frequent the neighbourhood—hanging around looking laid back and cool, just like any self-respecting hipster would in London, New York, or Berlin.

The art itself, with Chinese contemporary art as a booming industry, is an interesting hodgepodge of pop, with tips of the hat to rich Chinese traditions such as calligraphy, and often just as hit or miss as any gallery district you might wander around elsewhere in the world.

While Ai Wei Wei’s (he has a “self-built” house near the 798 Art District) name may be the one that rings in your head due to his dissent, and his overtly political art, China has a plethora of well-known, highly respected artists. Walking around China, or 798, you will realise, that no matter what you thought you expected from China, your expectations will be confounded. The country is full of richness, and contradictions, in the culture, in the society, and in the architecture and art all around, making for one of the most fascinating trips I have ever taken. Whatever you thought you knew, forget it, and visit with an open mind.