Chris Arnade on China, Wall Street, and Walking Around the World
"I walked the entire length of the New York subway system above ground. I've always been into walking," says the author of the Chris Arnade Walks the World newsletter.
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Chris Arnade is a photojournalist and the author of the Substack newsletter Chris Arnade Walks the World. He spent a decade walking through American landscapes and documenting what he saw. Now he has expanded his project to include cities around the globe, whether they're large or small, and whether they're easily walkable or not. His newsletter documents his mileslong walks off the tourist-beaten paths, showcasing real people everywhere from the Faroe Islands to Albany, New York; from Phoenix to Nairobi, Kenya.
Arnade holds a Ph.D. in particle physics from Johns Hopkins University and spent years as a Wall Street bond trader. In 2011 he left finance to document the lives of lower-income Americans, a project that culminated in his 2019 book Dignity. Along the way, he developed what he calls the "McDonald's test"—the idea that people's attitudes toward the fast-food chain reveals their level of privilege.
In February, Arnade recorded an episode of the podcast Conversations with Tyler with host Tyler Cowen, the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and the chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center. Cowen, himself an avid traveler, asked Arnade about what makes a city walkable, the "totalitarian anarchy" in China, and what he prefers when in other countries: McDonald's or KFC?
Cowen: If you had to live in either Beijing or Shanghai for 10 full years, which one would you pick and why?
Arnade: Beijing ultimately, because there was just more there. The reason I liked Shanghai more initially was because I had a good location. I was right next to People's Park, and I had a good four or five days. Beijing grew on me with time, though.
If you had to explain the fundamental difference between the residents of the two places, how would you explain it to an outsider?
I don't have a good answer to that one, because I don't feel like I know either of them well enough. How would you do it?
In Shanghai, status is money and conspicuous consumption. In Beijing, status is power. In a funny way, that intersects with making the city more intellectual—having better bookstores and having ties to more of China. Shanghai is more tied to the outside world, which is maybe better for the city, but for me, makes it less interesting.
I felt the overwhelming feature, and what frustrated me in some ways, was how similar Shanghai and Beijing were. They were inscrutable to me at the level I do things. A lot of that may be the way I approach learning, which is simply [to] walk 15 miles, and they're not particularly walkable cities. I walk to learn, but [in] some places that's not the right approach.
I walked 15 miles in Beijing, 15 miles in Shanghai. I kept on saying that it felt like I was in one of those cheap cartoons where the background kept repeating. I didn't feel like I got a sense of either place at the granular level like I usually do. I don't know if that was intentional.
Parts of Beijing are designed to discourage protests and demonstrations, and that correlates with being hard to walk in.
I was thinking in particular of that approach. I've been reading James C. Scott, who writes a lot about the idea of top-down regulation as control. That's certainly the case in Beijing. Gone are the winding dens of small neighborhoods, because those are hard to control. They're much easier if you replace them [with] 50-story towers with a mall and surveillance.
What struck me when I was in Beijing [was] how top-down regulation is often designed very intentionally for control. Beijing in particular feels that way. That's what frustrated me initially. I landed and I said, "Oh, I'll just walk to Tiananmen Square." Well, I just can't do that.
I got there. I went through five security checks, and I was supposed to have had a QR code where I'd signed up, and I didn't. I just walked by. I wrote about there being what I call a totalitarian anarchy. I think they intend to be control-y, but they're just too incompetent to pull it off.
Some of that's a bit deliberate, though. I think they feel that if people have a sense of partial freedom, they can control them better along the dimensions they want to and they're probably correct.
That's what I thought about with the firewall, which is, everybody has a VPN and everybody knows everybody has a VPN, so there really isn't a firewall, but it's the idea that you regulate people by making sure that the people who can't get enough together to figure out how to get around it, don't get around it.
The VPN is also a way to monitor them, right?
Yes, exactly.
You can't actually trust the VPN supplier.
I don't like to be conspiratorial, but I did notice my VPN clunked out at very odd moments. I was there during the [U.S.] election, and my VPN went out at very inopportune times when there was stuff going on. You think the loosey-goosey approach is actually intentional?
I'm not sure they have the option of cracking down entirely, but I think they have come to terms with the partial controls, and they found that it's still working. Until it starts not working, don't try too hard to fix it.
I'm going back again, because I find it so fascinating. I don't understand it to the degree I feel like I understand other places. Other places I come away with a pretty quick sense of describing a town in some ways. Maybe it's the scale, because again, they're not really smart places to walk.
I find [China is] like America in a number of ways: inward-looking, large, self-confident, business-oriented, pretty friendly, pragmatic. I think a lot of the [Communist Party] plan is improvised rather than planned. I think they're definitely afraid of disorder and civil war, given their history, in a way we are not. Did you find anything different?
To me, what's interesting about it is how explicit the top-down organization is at the built level as well as at the cultural level. Everything is micromanaged, again, with a loosey-goosey approach to give a little bit of wiggle room.
Asia has very rambunctious cities, and what I like about Asian cities is they have an organic street life, low regulatory organic street life. That is gone in China. That lack of organic street life is intentional. They say, "We don't like this."
There was this neighborhood I was walking through Shanghai where they had bought up the entire neighborhood and it was slated for development into a business park–style living. They had replaced stores with murals of store life. It's just too spot-on for what they're doing, which is removing actual organic street life and replacing it with cartoon images of it.
Which is your preference in a major Chinese city? A McDonald's or a KFC?
Everybody told me KFC, and I stuck with McDonald's. I have become, online, the McDonald's guy, because I wrote a lot about the role of McDonald's in the U.S. Whenever I go overseas, people expect me to use McDonald's, but I don't because people don't use them. There's alternatives. In Beijing, it was McDonald's.
It was interesting. It served the same role it does in the U.S. for very different reasons. In the U.S., McDonald's is the place people go because it's functional relative to the neighborhood. In Beijing, people go because it's dysfunctional relative to the neighborhood, in terms of regulatory rate. You can go and relax.
I went to a few KFCs to use the bathroom, but I don't like fried chicken. I don't like fried foods in general, so I didn't really spend time there. I just found myself spending a lot of time in the McDonald's in China. I find them to be really wonderful places.
My favorite McDonald's in the world is in Auckland, New Zealand, which is the world's largest Polynesian city. McDonald's there often serves as the center for Polynesian gatherings—not just Māori, but Cook Islands, Tongans, Fiji. If you're ever in Auckland, it's a phenomenal McDonald's.
The mixing that takes place in McDonald's is absolutely amazing.
Why is Seoul, South Korea, possibly your favorite city?
It's got a functional dysfunction. It's a little bit more dysfunctional, a little less uptight than in Tokyo, but it has a lot of the same positive qualities of Tokyo. It's very safe. It's very efficient. It's got amazing food. It's very active, but it's a bit quirkier than Tokyo, and it's a bit less known, and I enjoy that.
When I'm in a place, I like to get into a regular walk. I have a 10-mile walk [in Seoul] I absolutely love. I do it every day when I'm there.
What is it you think you learn least while traveling the way you do?
I used to be very top-down. I think I, in some sense, have thrown too much of that away. I could do a little bit more background reading in terms of the political strategy. One of the things I've learned from my project is: Most people don't talk about politics. I only talk about what other people want to talk about. No one talks about politics. Being in Beijing, Shanghai, maybe it's not the best example, because people would say, "There's a reason they don't want to talk about it." I don't think that's it.
No, I agree. Most of the world. Even Idaho.
Ninety-eight percent of people aren't political, and they don't talk about politics. I go to a lot of these countries [and] I don't know what's going on politically because people don't talk about it.
Putting aside issues of financial security, how many people do you think should do what you're doing?
It's logistically a hard lifestyle. You have to be a certain personality. I do not mind waking up in a different bedroom every night. I do not mind 16-hour flights. I look forward to them. I don't fly first class, I fly in economy.
My limit is 13 hours. Past that, it wears thin on me.
Yes, but it's time to read. I know my airplanes, I know exactly where the stewardesses hang out, and I go back and I talk to people. I like talking to people.
What is it you learn from stewardesses?
In general, they're just interesting people. They tell you about where they grew up. They tell you where to go. I use the information in the way they wouldn't think I use the information. If they told me to go someplace, I may not go there because that sounds like it's going to be crowded, and I don't like crowds. I just like to hear the life stories, how they got into the career they got into, and what they want out of life.
Is Istanbul the world's most walkable city?
It is one of them. Tokyo wins the walkability award. Istanbul is one of the most walkable cities. If it wasn't for the motor scooter delivery guys….
It's got the weather, it's got the beauty, it's got the diversity. The biggest thing for walkability is what I call local distribution, meaning there's always a shop somewhere.
I just get over to the Asia side and get out of the tourist parts. It's a wonderful city. The thing I like about the history there is it hasn't frozen the city. On the European side is that famous wall—the northern defense wall. It's still there, remnants of it, and it's just used as a car park. There's this 13th-century wall that's just used as a car park, which I still think is pretty impressive. I like the way history is both there but also not relegated to a museumlike status.
Why do you like El Paso so much?
The optimism. The American dream is very much alive in the working-class Mexican-American community, and you see that in El Paso. When I was doing my project on addiction and poverty, El Paso was just fundamentally different. You don't have the despair that you have in places.
A low crime rate, too, right?
Yes. Extraordinarily, in some senses, Mexico acts as the roach motel. If you're going to do crime, go over to Juárez. Consequently, there's [low] crime in El Paso, but it's one of the most optimistic cities in the United States. It has amazing food, by the way.
I think it's walkable. I have walked a lot of it, but I can understand why some people might not see that. Colorful buildings, fantastic weather—by the way, high desert is always my favorite weather. Great weather.
What were the best things about working on Wall Street?
Smart people. The group of people that was the smartest, the people I still enjoy talking to most in terms of being able to talk about anything and not feel like you're going to offend somebody, were generally bankers. Not all of them. There is a hierarchy in banking. But in general, it was a great way to learn about the world at a very top-down approach.
What were the worst things about working there?
It was a very narrow view, which is why I'm doing what I'm doing now. It's fly-in. I stay away from certain neighborhoods, which are generally the wealthy neighborhoods. They're all the same. They're all variations on a theme. They're just not interesting. I used to say the entire investor base in the bond market of Turkey could fit into this restaurant, and they often do. They're all there every night, the same group of people. It's a very limiting perspective.
Do you use AI at all when you travel?
I started using it as a copy editor. What do you use it for, for traveling?
If I'm just arriving in the city, I will have guidebooks, but I'll ask GPT or Claude, "What should I see in the city?" and I'll tell it what I'm interested in. It's better than any guidebook.
Let's say you were going to Xi'an, what would you do?
I would say I'm interested in Chinese history, art, culture, and food.
You're a museum guy? The only museums I go to [are] military history museums.
Those are great, too.
They're histories of propaganda, which I love.
What do you think you'll do next?
I'm going to do this for another few years, and then I don't know. I didn't know I was going to do this.
How did it come about that you did this?
When life was stressful, I found I always walked. When I'm at home, I walk. I have a standard two-mile daily walk that I do, which is very different from my learning walk. It's therapeutic. When COVID happened, I looked at actuarial tables and I said, "Oh, I'm a little bit overweight. That's not good," and so I started walking 10 miles every day, and I really enjoyed it.
When I was in Brooklyn, I walked the entire length of the New York subway system above ground. I've always been into walking. I was looking at a table that [said] 1.5 billion people live in massive cities—these big sprawling Jakartas—I'm like, "I would like to see that." So I just started. I booked a trip to Jakarta and just started walking.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity. It has been adapted by permission of the Mercatus Center. Listen to the full episode on the Conversations with Tyler podcast.