“This has to be done in China,” says Yang Hao. “There’s nowhere else on earth quite like it — every corner of people’s lives has been digitalized.”

Yang, a 34-year-old artist and Ph.D. graduate at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, speaks from grueling firsthand experience. In November 2023, he embarked on a solo trip in China — 68 places, 134 days — without once touching the internet. He documented the journey in his book “Disconnected: A Happy Excursion Against the Digital Leviathan,” published in May.

According to the latest data from the National Data Administration, China has more than 1.12 billion internet users, representing 80.1% of its total population. This widespread connectivity has fueled a massive digital transformation. Virtually everything in modern China runs through a screen: public services, transit, shopping, banking, restaurant orders, and even hotel check-ins.

Seeing the trip as an experiment, Yang wanted to know how far life could go without the internet, and if an old-school trip could still work in modern China.

Packing light, thinking heavy

Into Yang’s backpack went several books, two cameras, his ID card, a few changes of clothes, two paper maps, some cash and bank cards, a notebook and a pen, and — in a deliberate nod to the analog world he was about to reenter — several Chinese writing brushes, ink, and xuan paper for writing letters. No phone. No data.

First things first, Yang had to face questions from his skeptical parents: “What’s the point of the trip?” In a modern society where digitalization is ubiquitous, his effort to ditch it seemed like a “joke” to them. But Yang had been thinking about it for a long time. He never cares if there’s a “point,” he says, adding that much like how American writer Susan Sontag lays out in her essay “Against Interpretation,” analyzing the definite meaning of an experience is not something that fascinates him. The experience is the point.

What fascinates him instead is the idea of leaving digital life behind entirely. Yang has always felt that people’s lives revolve around their smartphones, and that they’re increasingly trapped in a digital world built around them.

He got his first taste of a phone-free trip back in late 2021, when he went to Tiantai Mountain in the eastern Zhejiang province for four days. It wasn’t an easy trip, but accomplishing it gave him the confidence he needed for a longer journey.

Two years later, he felt ready. He planned to be gone for six months and told everyone that he would be “disconnected” for some time. Then a doctoral student in the UK, he also finished his semester’s coursework before heading back to China.

On Nov. 29, 2023, in his hometown of Taiyuan, capital of the northern Shanxi province, his parents saw him off at the railway station — a first for the family.

He had doubts about whether he would be forced to abandon the effort partway through and start using a phone again if circumstances called for it, but he believed the challenges were also part of the experience. They helped him better understand just how deeply digitalization runs through modern Chinese society.

“All the possible obstacles and challenges are actually things I’d love to encounter voluntarily,” he says.

The unimaginable

Starting from Taiyuan, Yang had no set itinerary — only a rough instinct: follow the warmth south for the winter, and head back north when spring arrived. “It was like playing a game of Monopoly; I never knew where my next step would take me,” Yang says. He would simply show up at the railway station, pick his next destination straight off the physical timetable, and wait to see what happened.

Without a phone, small things got big fast.

One of the initial challenges was hotel reservations. At his first stop, a chain hotel in Linfen, another city in Shanxi, he couldn’t get a room in person because the hotel only accepted online bookings. The front desk staffer told Yang there was nothing he could do to help him check in, though kindly drew him a map to another location of the same chain that could accommodate walk-in guests.

Another issue was departure times, which Yang could not easily check without a phone. Whenever he wanted to leave a place, he would pack his things, head straight to the train or bus station, and simply buy a ticket for the next available departure.

This approach naturally caused some trouble. At Xichang railway station in the southwestern Sichuan province, Yang wanted to change his ticket to an earlier train. At the ticket office, he got into a minor argument with two middle-aged staff members. “It wasn’t a large railway station, and they weren’t used to doing that manually, since most people change tickets on their phones now,” Yang recalls. “Though they eventually helped me change it, it took a long time. They complained and felt like I was just making trouble for them.”

Inconvenient as it sounds, Yang actually enjoyed this spontaneity. “Like I said, when I did this experiment, it was like field research. So even though we had an unpleasant argument, I didn’t blame them. Instead, I tried to understand their behavior by analyzing the reasons behind what they did,” Yang says.

Yang visited some big or mid-sized cities at first, but later felt they shared the same vibe, so he turned to smaller cities and rural areas instead, hoping for “more authentic experiences and diverse landscapes.”

Spy, money launderer, British citizen

To some people, Yang’s choice to ditch electronic devices caused confusion — and occasionally, outright accusations.

At Chifeng bus station in the northern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, he tried to buy a bus ticket 100 kilometers south to Ningcheng County, but couldn’t pin down exactly which town he wanted to go to — hard to do without a quick search. A station worker accused him of being a spy because “only spies don’t use phones, since they are afraid of being tracked.”

“That was inconceivable, something totally out of my imagination,” Yang says. “On the one hand it was absurd; on the other, fun.”

He collected other identities along the way — an investigative journalist, thanks to the huge backpack and a camera hanging from his neck in the southwestern megacity of Chongqing; a British citizen, after using his UK student card to get a discount at the Kizil Caves in the northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; and even, at one point, a suspected money launderer. In Shache County, located in Xinjiang, he found himself with only 6 yuan ($0.85). Unable to find an ATM or a shop that accepted physical cards, he went from store to store, asking shopkeepers if they could give him cash using his bank card. His unusual request eventually prompted one skeptical local to ask if he was laundering money.

“For most of the unpleasant experiences and difficulties, I wouldn’t think it’s a single person’s problem. I’d reflect it in a broader lens, thinking about whether it’s a general problem of the era,” Yang says. “People’s reaction to a thing can well reflect their mindset, and the information they’ve been exposed to.”

For the most part, though, people were kind, and many of them were interested in his phone-free experiment. About 20 of them left their numbers to Yang, asking him to keep in touch when he finished the trip. When it ended, Yang tracked down almost all of them — only three or four slipped through the cracks.

During the trip, Yang finished about 40 books, mostly non-fiction, history, and travelogues. Whenever he sent a letter to his family, he’d include the books he’d finished reading. At some post offices, mailing had become so rare that staff seemed unsure how to handle it. Though Yang sent all the letters he wrote, some were lost along the way.

Against the “Digital Leviathan”

Yang returned to Taiyuan on April 9, 2024, 134 days after he’d left.

He began going through the materials he had collected — notes, photographs, diary entries — and has finished a documentary and a book about the trip.

The book’s English title, “A Happy Excursion Against the Digital Leviathan,” was his idea from the start.

The title says it all. The “Digital Leviathan” is a term for the concentrated power held by tech companies and algorithmic systems that increasingly govern how people spend their time and attention, which Yang wants to push back against.

“I think those tech monopolies lack a sense of corporate social responsibility,” he says. “They only want to extort people’s time, making people stay on their platform.”

He recalls two children he met at a small hair salon in the southwestern Yunnan province. The salon was run by their parents, and while they worked, the kids sat watching Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, on loop.

“The parents are not to blame. This is a systemic problem,” Yang says. “In rural areas, especially among disadvantaged groups, the influence of these platforms can be greater.”

In some villages, he noticed elderly people sitting in front of their houses, swiping their phones for hours on end.

For Yang, the trip is not a call to quit the internet, but an invitation to reflect on people’s relationship with it, and to consider what life might look like without it.

On his trip, Yang preferred traditional trains to high-speed trains to take in the view outside the window. He is aware of the privilege involved — not everyone could afford to travel on slow trains for the scenery, or spend 134 days on an experiment with so few obligations — but ultimately, he sees it as a matter of personal choice.

“When I stayed away from the internet, I might have enjoyed things I treasured, but there were also costs,” he reflects. “A slow train means beautiful scenery, but also low efficiency, and the trip might not bring economic benefits. But I’m chasing a life that I personally enjoy most.”

His favorite book is Russian-born American author and philosopher Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” and its protagonist, Howard Roark — an architect of his own destiny who lives strictly by his own standards and rules — has long been his ultimate role model.

“If I could live someone else’s life,” he says, “Roark’s might be my only choice.”

Today, Yang lives in Taiyuan. He has Wi-Fi at home but no mobile data — a deliberate choice that means he goes offline the moment he steps outside. It works well for him.

That said, Yang is not against modern technology. On the contrary, he embraces artificial intelligence, calling it a powerful new force that largely frees up human productivity and helps with trivial tasks.

“As long as the power helps rather than manipulates people, it’s a good thing,” he concludes, though he remains wary of its future.

Editor: Elise Mak; visuals: Ding Yining.

(Header image: Courtesy of Yang)