Welcome to 'Dalifornia', an oasis for Chinese wanderers and dreamers
To find the dance circle in the bed-and-breakfast's courtyard, drive north from the sheet factory-turned-crafts market, toward the vegan canteen that encourages guests to “walk barefoot through the ground and bathe in the sun'. If you see the unmanned craft beer bar where customers pay based on the honor system, you've gone too far.
Welcome to the Chinese mountain town of Dali, also known as Dalifornia, an oasis for dissatisfied, wandering or simply curious Chinese.
The city's nickname pays tribute to California and the easy-going, tree-hugging, sun-drenched stereotypes the city conjures up. It's also a nod to the influx of technology workers who have flocked there since the rise of remote work during the pandemic, to code amid the picturesque setting, nestled among snow-capped 10,000-foot peaks in southwestern China , on the shores of China. the glittering Erhai Lake.
The area has long been a magnet for backpackers and artists, lured by cheap rents and the idyllic Old Town, where ancient city gates and white-walled courtyard houses hark back to the history of the Bai ethnic minority, who live there has lived for thousands of years. of years.
But lately, Dali has been filled with a different class of wandering souls: young people from China's megacities, fleeing the intense lifestyle so many of them once aspired to. Exhausted by the high cost of living, cutthroat competition, record youth unemployment and an increasingly stifling political climate, they have turned Dali into the Chinese destination of the moment.
“Young people who don't fit into the mainstream can only look for a city on the margins,” said 28-year-old Zhou Xiaoming, who moved from Shanghai three years ago.
Always a free spirit, Mr. Zhou had worked in Shanghai as a teacher at an alternative school. But he found life there too expensive and wanted to explore even more non-regular teaching methods. Dali had many to try: an experimental kindergarten where students learned to walk, another that focused on crafts, and a lot of homeschooling. Mr. Zhou now teaches one student privately, in a village nestled among tea fields on the outskirts of the city.
“Dali is remote, quite tolerant and very flexible, and all kinds of people live there. And most of those people are weird,” Mr. Zhou said.
Depending on your point of view, Dali, with 560,000 inhabitants, can feel like a paradise or a parody.
On a recent Wednesday, a Chinese fire dancer twirled to the drone of a didgeridoo, a native Australian instrument, in the courtyard of an Israeli musician's home. A few kilometers away, throngs of young people lined the streets of the old city offering cheap fortune-telling, while pulsating music poured from nearby bars. In a 24-hour bookstore, a reading group spread out on floor cushions discussed Shen Congwen, a prominent 20th-century writer.
A seemingly inescapable buzzword in Dali is healing. Healing yoga, healing camping trips, even healing coffee shops. Last Tuesday, about twenty people listened to a presentation about combating loneliness in a co-working space. In the dance circle of the bed-and-breakfast, participants were encouraged to rediscover their inner child.
The therapeutic atmosphere was particularly intense at Veggie Ark, a sprawling complex north of the old town that houses the vegan canteen, yoga studios, gong classes and a paint studio. Eventually, it would also include a “self-sufficiency laboratory” that Tang Guanhua, 34, was building in the courtyard: a wooden dome, built by hand, that when completed would be powered by solar energy and serve as an exhibition space for handicrafts made with local materials.
Mr Tang wanted the laboratory to encourage visitors to try out a more sustainable lifestyle. When he had done that pioneered back to nature When he lived in China more than a decade ago, brewing homemade vinegar and generating his own electricity, many thought he was strange. Now eight people had paid to participate in the construction of the dome.
“Everything used to go well, everyone went to work. Now so many things are wrong,” he said during a dinner of vegan hotpot. “People think about what to do with themselves.”
Some newcomers say they want to stay forever; others recognize that they just want to try an alternative lifestyle before returning to the city grind.
Yet even the most cynical observer would admit that the city feels palpably more open and relaxed than most other places in China.
“People here won't deliberately try to label you. You can just be yourself and be seen,” said Joey Chen, a 22-year-old freelance writer who had dropped out of college and moved to Dali from Jiangxi province a month earlier.
Ms. Chen was lounging in the attic reading nook of a bookstore, reading Simone de Beauvoir's novel “All Men Are Mortal.” Downstairs, the walls were decorated with photos of Kafka and Che Guevara.
The openness also extends to potentially sensitive topics. In another coffee shop, a rainbow flag was hidden in the rafters. Another bookstore offered books on religious topics such as Native American shamanism, Christianity and the history of Tibet.
The question is how long Dali can remain such a refuge.
Tourists and influencers have flocked to Dali, brandishing selfie sticks and posing in bright pink cars that companies rent out for photo shoots. Throughout the old town, kitschy souvenir shops have replaced craft stalls and bookstores. The lakeshore is teeming with sleekly designed bed-and-breakfasts that wouldn't look out of place in Shanghai or Beijing, often run by wealthy people from those places.
Rents have soared, pushing longtime residents out of the old city to more remote villages.
And nowhere in China is truly immune to the tightening political climate — as Lucia Zhao, the owner of the bookstore where Ms. Chen Beauvoir was reading, recently discovered.
Ms Zhao, 33, moved to Dali from Chengdu in 2022 after being laid off from a technology company. She opened her bookstore, which focuses on art, feminism and philosophy, because she wanted to create a space where people could learn to think critically again, she said.
But in August, officials suddenly seized all her books, on the grounds that Ms. Zhao had only applied for a regular business license, and not a license specifically for selling publications. She shut herself down for several months while she applied for the license and rebuilt her inventory.
She was now more careful in her choice of books. Local officials occasionally stopped by to inspect the store and had recently scrutinized a display of anti-war books she had published.
“You definitely have more room to maneuver in Dali than in cities like Beijing and Chengdu,” Ms. Zhao said. “But compared to when I came here last year, the space is getting smaller and smaller.”
Yet for many people in Dali, politics seems to be one of the last things on their minds. And that may be less out of fear than the fact that they came to Dali precisely to avoid those kinds of worldly worries.
In the kitchen of a co-living space popular with programmers and entrepreneurs, Li Bo, a 30-year-old programmer, recalled his own experience with the limits of Dali's tolerance. He had moved to Dali in October after growing tired of his office job in Beijing and quickly became friends with the other residents of the youth area. During the day they worked together on the roof terrace; At night they hit the road, with their laptops in tow.
Not long after arriving, on Halloween, he had dressed up as a Covid testing worker, the hazmat-suited figures that came to symbolize China's three years of tough restrictions. It was a joke, he insisted, not a political act, but he was briefly detained by police.
But amid the bonfire parties, walks and open mics the city had to offer, Mr. Li had better things to do than dwell on the negative. Like his latest project: developing an AI fortune-telling bot, which he wanted to offer to fellow bar patrons the next evening for 70 cents per reading.
Li you research contributed.