Chongqing: seeing China from the inside

Chongqing is a city most Australians probably know very little about, yet it provides a fascinating window into modern China.

The September visit was with our SAS China CEO, Victoria Q, who is originally from Chongqing. Having someone who grew up there gave a valuable insight into the city, its people and the extraordinary changes that have taken place.

Over the years, SAS China has assisted both state-owned and private Chinese companies investing in Australia, and this visit also explored opportunities to bring Chinese investment capital into Australian businesses and projects.

Chongqing is difficult to describe until you see it. A vast municipality of more than 30 million people, it is built through steep mountains and around the Yangtze and Jialing rivers. Extraordinary bridges, tunnels, skyscrapers and apartment towers are everywhere.

It is also a major manufacturing centre for cars, EVs, motorcycles and vans. On the roads, the sheer number and variety of electric vehicles is striking. Almost everything seems electric, with the familiar yellow taxis among the few noticeable exceptions. The incredible high-speed rail network and tunnels through the mountains underline the scale of the infrastructure.

But the visit was also about understanding a part of China relatively few Australians see, and how Chinese people view their own country.

There was virtually no visible crime during the visit, and walking around felt remarkably safe. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. China is a much more controlled society than Australia: stay within your lane and everyday life appears safe and orderly; step outside the boundaries set by the state and things can be very different.

China is vital to the Australian economy, buying enormous quantities of our iron ore, coal and gas. It remains our largest export market, taking 29 per cent of Australia’s goods and services exports in 2025.

There are around 1.4 billion people in China and around 1.4 million Australians of Chinese ancestry. The economic relationship, and these family and cultural connections, give us every reason to understand the country better.

Security, Taiwan, trade and human rights receive plenty of attention in Western media. These are important issues, but they are not the whole story of a country transformed economically and physically, and whose people can see its place in the world quite differently from us.

That doesn’t mean ignoring our differences. It means making the effort to better understand each other, rather than seeing China simply through the prism of the Western media.

For me, that was the value of Chongqing. It showed me a China we don’t often see, and one increasingly important for us to understand.