Yang Hao Completes 134-Day Offline China Journey, Documenting 68 Stops in New Book
Updated
Updated · Sixth Tone · Jun 23
Yang Hao Completes 134-Day Offline China Journey, Documenting 68 Stops in New Book
1 articles · Updated · Sixth Tone · Jun 23
Summary
134 days after leaving Taiyuan in November 2023, artist and Ph.D. graduate Yang Hao finished a solo, internet-free trip across 68 places in China and later turned it into a documentary and a May book.
1.12 billion internet users—80.1% of China’s population—formed the backdrop for his experiment, which tested whether travel could still work in a country where booking hotels, buying tickets, banking and public services largely run through phones.
6 yuan was all Yang had at one point in Xinjiang after struggling to find cash access without digital payments; elsewhere he was denied a hotel room that required online booking and accused of being a spy for not using a phone.
About 20 people he met asked to reconnect after the trip, underscoring that while the journey exposed friction in highly digitalized daily life, it also revealed curiosity and kindness from strangers.
Yang says the trip was not a call to quit the internet but a critique of tech platforms he sees as monopolizing attention, and he now lives with home Wi-Fi but no mobile data.