Any big city exhibits aspects of William Gibson’s famous line that the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed – but few take it as far as Beijing.

(Yes, folks, this is an example of that fine journalistic tradition: the “What I did on my summer vacation” column. I just got back from visiting in-laws in Beijing and a couple of other places in China.)

Parts of China’s monstrous capital, roughly the population of greater New York City, would be familiar to my father, who was stationed there after Japan surrendered in WWII. That includes workers carrying large loads balanced at each end of a bamboo pole or pulling heavy wooden wagons behind them as they trudged along the streets. And the sewage system is surprisingly backward; even locals can’t drink the tap water and you mustn’t flush your toilet paper but have to toss it in the trash can.

Yet there is much there that made my wife say “I’ve seen the 21st century and it’s China.”

Part of this comes from national mobile payment systems seamlessly integrated with communication and banking operations that make Apple Pay look like a manual cash register. These are used universally; even old ladies selling piles of fruit on the sidewalk will gesture to their QR code for payment. I don’t know how you can exist in China if you don’t have a mobile phone.

But the thing that got me was the electric vehicles.

China’s world-beating push into this industry means Beijing probably has the highest percentage of EVs of any megacity (sorry, Oslo, you’re not mega). I’m talking about e-bicycles; electric scooters both private and shared; three-wheelers including the developed world’s favorite transportation option of the tuk-tuk; private cars from smaller-than-Smart-Car to big-as-a-Hummer; and vans and small trucks. Only big trucks and the fast-diminishing number of foreign-branded cars still use gas or diesel.

EVs fill the streets in all directions, and when I saw they fill the streets I mean it. No staying-in-your-lane for Chinese drivers, or pedestrians for that matter.

Two things surprised me about this. One is noise.

Beijing is surprisingly quiet. It’s not silent, of course, but even major thoroughfares are less noisy than Concord’s North Main Street during rush hour.

I came to realize how much of the din in cities comes from vehicle engines. In American cities, all those tiny explosions in all those piston chambers in all those people-carriers really adds up. Replace most of them with silent electric motors and the difference is delightful. In Beijing when an internal-combustion car or big truck went by it was startling, and annoying.

As a side note, Beijing’s air was clean. That’s not entirely due to a shortage of smoke-spewing tailpipes: The communist government forcibly moved a lot of polluting industry out of the city for the 2008 Olympics, merely shifting the dirty skies elsewhere. But EVs definitely help.

The other surprising thing was the absence of public charging stations. I saw only a few of them in my two weeks there.

I asked some people where Beijing’s electric vehicles get their power from and got vague answers about banks of chargers at parking lots or public areas, but this was unsatisfying. Most of the city lives in apartment buildings and uses on-street or on-sidewalk parking. In the U.S. we’re told it’s almost impossible to provide such people with convenient charging yet somehow Beijing does it.

But then again, China is way ahead of the world in all aspects of electric vehicles. America’s Big Three is starting to look like Britain’s automobile industry in the 1950s, desperately trying to catch up with the global leader (back then, the leader was us) even as the leader keeps moving ahead.

We’re told that governments shouldn’t choose technologies but China sure chose well with electric vehicles and the related case of renewable energy. The Biden Administration has done a yeoman’s job working to close the gap but we have a long way to go. If backward-looking Republicans get more power in Washington this November, we’re sunk.