My six-hour high-speed train ride from Beijing to Shanghai one afternoon last week felt like a WeWork on wheels. In a packed, second-class train car of about 90 people, many were working on laptops and chatting on business phone calls. When I arrived in Shanghai around 8 p.m., there was a line with a 15-minute wait for taxis. And when I finally got to the hotel on the city outskirts an hour later, many people were just checking in.
"The ability for the average individual Chinese to persevere and find a way is amazing. I mean people scramble. People figure it out. They know how to be industrious. They don't just sit back and Netflix and chill, whatever they do in the U.S.," said Peter Alexander, Shanghai-based founder of fund consultancy Z-Ben Advisors, who has been in China since 1996.