Daniel Dumbrill
Our next stop was Altay, way up in the north of Xinjiang. This was the first place on the trip where we really slowed down and stayed for several nights. Our favourite thing to do was simply explore the nature in and around the city. Altay itself has a very relaxed atmosphere. In the evenings, lots of locals gather in the big sports park and hang out late into the night — the sun doesn’t go down until after 10 pm. While we were there I also explored the ski mountains on our scooter. It looks like they have excellent skiing in winter, but I could easily see myself coming back in summer just to slow down and relax here.
Daniel Dumbrill
This summer one of my favourite parts of the 13,000 km road trip wasn’t the big destinations. It was the random stops in between. Little towns and cities we’d never specifically plan a trip around. Parking the RV in some ordinary lot next to other travellers, sitting down for a drink and chat. One conversation that stayed with me... A fellow RVer asked why I’d leave Canada for China. “Canada’s such a good country,” he said. I told him China is a really great country too. Then I mentioned something I’d noticed the last time I went back to Canada compared to seven years earlier: a lot more Chinese people, especially older ones, really want to find a way to return. But it’s hard once they’ve cancelled their Chinese nationality. Getting something like the permanent resident card I hold isn’t straightforward. He nodded and said something that made me laugh. “If you leave China and cancel your Chinese passport, we have a rule. We don’t need you back.” Then he asked if I knew how much the fee is to cancel Chinese citizenship. I didn’t. “250,” he said. In Chinese, of course, 250 is another way of calling someone stupid. I’m not sure the 250 fee story is literally true, but the way he told it was perfect. From there the talk turned to how hard the United States has tried to contain China over the past several years, and how those efforts have largely failed. He brought up Huawei specifically, which made sense given my country’s involvement in, and complacency with, the US attempts to bring Huawei down. “Look how hard they tried to bring Huawei down,” he said. “And now they’re still signing agreements, still moving forward, still one of China’s strongest companies.” He’s not wrong. You keep seeing these quiet signals. Huawei recently signed a multi-year global patent cross-licensing deal with HP that includes their Wi-Fi patents - Chinese technology going into a major Western brand’s products, not the other way around. HP is now paying to use Huawei’s patents. They’re also founding members in several patent pools, making their standard-essential patents available under clear terms. They even published a Wi-Fi 7 royalty rate at half a dollar per unit and kept it the same as Wi-Fi 6. Billions of devices already run on their cellular and Wi-Fi patents. Huawei holds roughly 165,000 active patents and has signed more than 260 licensing agreements worldwide. The same shift is visible elsewhere. DJI has built the most widely used civilian drone platform in the world. Their patents and core technologies sit inside operations, filming, and industrial applications far beyond China, even after years of attempts to restrict them. CATL has become the backbone of the global EV battery supply chain. Their manufacturing scale and battery innovations mean major carmakers in the West and Asia are now depending on, and in some cases licensing, Chinese battery technology rather than the other way around. The old assumption that serious technology and intellectual property only flowed in one direction is quietly breaking down. That RVer’s casual comment stuck with me because it lines up with what you keep seeing on the ground. The pressure was real. The results so far have not matched the intention. The technology keeps moving, the licensing deals keep getting signed, and the centre of gravity is shifting whether people want to acknowledge it or not.
