Thoughts(1)

Thoughts: What Hainan Taught Me About Family- “A Household, Not a House.”

I moved to Haikou a year ago carrying the usual bundle of an academic’s ambitions: publications to chase, projects to build, a business to grow. What I did not expect was that the island itself would quietly rearrange my sense of what a good life actually requires. Living here, with my wife, my son, and my mother under one roof, I have come to believe that Hainan’s family culture is not a backdrop to daily life but one of its most valuable, underexamined exports; the kind of “soft infrastructure” that free trade port planners rarely put in a policy paper, yet that shapes whether a place is truly livable.

In much of the world I have worked and studied, the trend runs toward smaller households, nuclear families scattered across cities, grandparents visited on holidays, childcare outsourced to whoever can be afforded. Hainan, and Haikou in particular, still holds onto something older and, I would argue, healthier: the multigenerational household as a working unit rather than a sentimental ideal.

My mother is present as an added helping hand for my son’s wellbeing; hence the family can take a late meeting or an unexpected trip without the logistical scramble that defines so much of modern parenting elsewhere. This is not simply convenience. It is a daily, lived redistribution of care that reduces the isolation so common in nuclear-family arrangements, and it does so without anyone having to theorize about it. The family simply absorbs the shock of a hard week the way a well-built structure absorbs wind, by distributing the load rather than letting any single person carry it alone.

This renders Psychological Health as an Ambient Condition. As someone who studies governance and public administration for a living, I am trained to look for policy levers, the things a government can build, fund, or legislate to improve wellbeing. But some of the most protective conditions for mental health are not policies at all; they are cultural habits. In Hainan, there is an unhurried rhythm to family time that I have not experienced in the same way elsewhere: shared evening meals that are not rushed, weekends that still belong to relatives rather than errands, an assumption that showing up for family matters more than optimizing your calendar.

I do not want to romanticize this. Balancing research deadlines, running a business, and being present as a husband, father, and son is genuinely difficult, and no culture solves that tension for you. But Hainan’s family-first rhythm gives me a structural advantage that many professionals elsewhere are not afforded: a community and household that treat time with family as legitimate, not indulgent. That legitimacy matters more than it sounds. It is the difference between guilt and grace when you close your laptop to eat dinner with your son.

As Hainan pushes forward with its free trade port ambitions, there is a real and understandable temptation to import the fastest, most efficient version of “development”, the version built for global capital, international talent pipelines, and metrics that show up in investment reports. I support that ambition. I have staked part of my own career and business on Hainan’s growth.

But I would ask policymakers and planners to resist treating family culture as a quaint feature to be preserved in folklore museums while the “real” development happens elsewhere in glass towers and free trade zones. The multigenerational, unhurried family rhythm I have described is not incompatible with economic dynamism; it is, if anything, a competitive advantage. Talented people with families do not only ask where the jobs and tax incentives are; they ask where their children will be safe, where their parents can age with dignity nearby, and where a working week will not quietly consume every family dinner. Hainan can answer those questions in ways that many faster, more transactional cities cannot.

Again, I would be dishonest if I painted island life as friction-free. My one genuine frustration living here has been the lack of urgency in the local repairs and maintenance culture, the small infrastructural things that, in a nuclear-family household with no one home during the day, become larger burdens than they should be. It is a minor irritation against the larger picture, but it is worth naming, because a free trade port that wants to attract and keep families should treat responsiveness- fixing what breaks promptly- as part of the same “livability” package as the family culture I have praised here. The two are not separate conversations. Both are about whether a place, day to day, actually works for the people raising children and caring for parents inside it.

Hainan gave my family something I did not know to ask for when we arrived: a rhythm of life where care is shared rather than shouldered alone, and where family is treated as central rather than peripheral. As the island grows, I hope it holds onto that as tightly as it pursues everything else.

Thoughts: A Free Trade Port, Seen Through My Lenses

Policy documents describe the Hainan Free Trade Port in the language of frameworks and phases. I experience it differently - as the business owner filling out new paperwork, the researcher tracking how the reforms play out against the theory, and the resident watching the island change shape in real time. That triple vantage point is, I think, the most honest way to evaluate what island-wide customs closure has actually meant since it took effect in December 2025.

For those outside China, “customs closure” sounds like the opposite of what it is. It does not mean Hainan sealed itself off - it means the island now operates as a distinct customs territory, open to the world at its outer border while keeping tighter checks on the flow of goods into the Chinese mainland. In practice, that has translated into a “dual 15%” tax structure: a flat 15% corporate income tax for qualifying industries, and the same capped rate on personal income for the skilled professionals the province is trying to attract. Thousands of commodity categories now move in and out of the island duty-free, and the customs system has shifted from a positive list, where only named goods qualified for relief, to a negative list, where everything not explicitly restricted is presumed open.

As a business owner, the shift from positive-list to negative-list thinking is more than a technical footnote. It represents a philosophy: rather than governments enumerating what is permitted, the default posture becomes permission, with exceptions carved out narrowly. That is a meaningfully different relationship between the state and the entrepreneur than what most of us grew up expecting, and it is one I have felt directly in how much easier certain transactions have become since the closure took effect.

As an educator, the part of this transformation I watch most closely is talent. Tax incentives can pull people to an island. They cannot, by themselves, make people stay. Hainan’s ambition to become a genuine gateway comparable to Singapore or Hong Kong depends less on the tax code than on whether the province can build an ecosystem where researchers, engineers, and skilled professionals see a durable career, not just a favorable filing status.

This is where I think the free trade port narrative sometimes gets ahead of itself. Zero tariffs and a capped income tax rate are real, tangible advantages. But the professionals Hainan is competing for are also weighing school quality for their children, hospital quality for their parents, and whether a promising research career here will still look promising in a decade. Those are not customs questions. They are questions about the depth and maturity of local institutions: universities, hospitals, professional networks, and Hainan is still, honestly, in the early stages of building that depth relative to the coastal giants it is being compared against.

Here is where I will offer the same honest caveat I try to bring to all of my writing about this island: bold, top-down policy design in Hainan has consistently outpaced the everyday follow-through that businesses and residents actually experience. The customs closure itself was executed with genuine precision and coordination. But the surrounding administrative culture, the pace at which routine issues get resolved, the responsiveness of everyday services - has not always kept up with the ambition of the headline policies. A free trade port competing for global capital and global talent is, ultimately, judged by entrepreneurs and families on both registers at once: the grandeur of the policy framework, and the mundane reliability of daily execution. Hainan has invested heavily in the former. It still has real work to do on the latter, and I say that as someone whose business and family both depend on the island succeeding at both.

None of this is a case against the free trade port - it is a case for taking its success seriously enough to be honest about the gap between design and delivery. The fundamentals are genuinely strong: a natural gateway position toward Southeast Asia, a tax structure now competitive with the region’s established hubs, and a government clearly willing to move fast on structural reform. Hainan is already projecting a meaningful expansion of direct shipping connections to ASEAN markets in the coming year, and the momentum since the December closure has been real, not merely rhetorical.

I built a business here because I believed, and still believe, that this island is positioning itself to matter far beyond its size. But belief is not the same as complacency. The next phase of Hainan’s development will be won or lost not in the customs regulations, which are now genuinely world-class, but in whether the province can make daily life for the talent it is recruiting feel as modern and reliable as the trade policy on paper. That is the free trade port story that does not make it into the press releases, and it is the one I will keep writing about from here on the ground in Haikou.

Thoughts: Hainan’s Real Education Test Isn’t the Policy, It’s the Classroom

I read Comparative Higher Education Studies and Policy for my postdoctoral research, and I also long to drop my son off at pre-school most mornings. But those two vantage points do not always agree with each other, and that disagreement is, I think, exactly where Hainan’s education story becomes interesting.

On paper, what Hainan has done in education over the past few years is remarkable. Foreign universities can now establish independent schools inside the Free Trade Port without a mainland Chinese partner institution, a real departure from the joint-venture model that has governed Sino-foreign higher education cooperation for two decades. The scope is deliberately narrow, focused on science, engineering, agriculture, and medicine, but the principle behind it is broad: Hainan is trying to import institutional quality directly, rather than waiting for it to develop domestically over a generation. Vocational education is being pushed through a similar internationalization push, and Hainan has begun hosting major global education gatherings, including UNESCO’s associated-schools network, positioning the island as a genuine node in international education dialogue rather than a regional afterthought.

As a researcher who studies public administration and digital governance, I find this genuinely significant. Most jurisdictions liberalize education policy cautiously, in small pilot programs, hedged by endless committee review. Hainan has moved with a speed that looks more like its trade and tax reforms than like typical education policymaking, which tells you something about how central education is to the province’s broader free trade port ambitions. You cannot recruit the “core talent” that qualifies for those preferential tax rates if their children have nowhere excellent to go to school.

Here is where my other vantage point matters. None of the reforms I have just described touch the schools most local and expatriate families actually use day to day, the ordinary public and private K-12 schools where children like my son and many others like him may spend their childhoods. The independent foreign university campuses are a genuine achievement, but they are also narrow: a handful of institutions, in a handful of fields, mostly serving adult students. They do very little, directly, for the quality of primary and secondary education across the island right now.

As a parent, the question I actually have to answer is not “will Hainan eventually host a world-class STEM university,” which I believe it will. It is “will the ordinary school in my neighborhood, this year, prepare my son well?” Those are different timelines, and conflating them is, I think, the single most common mistake in how Hainan’s education progress gets discussed, including, occasionally, by people writing exactly this kind of column.

I raised in an earlier piece the idea that talent does not stay in a place for tax incentives alone. Education is where that argument gets tested most directly. A researcher or entrepreneur relocating to Haikou is not just asking whether their own career prospects look good. They are asking whether their children will be genuinely well-served here, for the full span of a childhood, not just eventually, once the flagship international campuses have matured. Free trade port policy can move fast because it largely governs institutions and capital. Educational quality moves slowly because it depends on teachers, curricula, and school culture built up over years, and no customs regulation can accelerate that directly.

I do not say this to diminish what Hainan has accomplished. The independent foreign university provisions are a genuinely bold piece of policy, and hosting international education forums signals real ambition rather than empty branding. But bold signals at the top of the system and lived reality in ordinary classrooms are two different things, and I want to be honest, as both a researcher and a parent, about which one my family actually will experience most days.

If Hainan wants its education strategy to match the ambition of its trade and tax reforms, the next phase needs to reach further down the system, into teacher training, curriculum modernization, and the everyday public and private schools that most families, local and international alike, actually rely on. The flagship foreign campuses matter as proof of concept and as magnets for a certain kind of specialized talent. But they are not, by themselves, an education strategy for an island trying to become a genuine global hub. That strategy has to be built classroom by classroom, and it will take patience that policy announcements, by their nature, do not convey.

I remain genuinely optimistic about where this is heading. Few places move as quickly as Hainan has on education liberalization once it decides to act. My hope, as someone raising a child here, is that the same urgency now applied to attracting foreign universities gets applied, just as deliberately, to the ordinary schools where the island’s future is actually being built, one classroom at a time.