I arrived in Wuxi knowing what everyone knows: China is technologically advanced. I left understanding that knowing something and standing inside it are completely different things.
The first hint wasn't in a lab. It was a delivery robot sharing the lift with me at the hotel, waiting its turn, getting out on its floor. Downstairs, a tap of my card and the lift already knew where I was staying. Small things. Unremarkable to anyone who lives there. No one was demonstrating them to me. They were just how the building worked.
That turned out to be the pattern.
I was in Wuxi as part of the Honey Peach SG-CN Tech Immersion Trip, hosted by Transfong, alongside founders from Singapore and around the world. In a few short days, we moved through the Wuxi National High-tech District. We visited the Wuxi-Singapore Science and Technology Innovation City, a life science campus, a robotics institute, and an agricultural park. I build technology for learning and assessment, so I spend a lot of time thinking about how people become competent. That's the lens I brought, and Wuxi gave it plenty to work with.
The author Tania Hamad (middle) poses for a photo with two fellow guests. [Photo provided to en.wuxi.gov.cn]
What struck me most wasn't any single facility, impressive as they were. It was that all of it pointed in the same direction.
Coming from Sydney, I'm used to innovation precincts that are, in practice, a building. Maybe a campus. Wuxi has districts. The Wuxi-Singapore Science and Technology Innovation City covers 43 square kilometers, with decisions already made about which industries live there and why, and housing, transport, and research built around them. What struck me is that it didn't come from nowhere. It grew out of the Wuxi-Singapore Industrial Park, a partnership that dates back to 1993 and has spent three decades earning the right to expand into something this ambitious. It isn't a collection of good ideas that happened to land in the same postcode. It's a plan with a timeline measured in decades.
The technology is genuinely world-class. What makes it remarkable is that none of it is accidental.
The agricultural park was where that really landed for me. It's enormous, and the sophistication of what's happening there, sensing, water quality monitoring, traceability, an entire technology stack, is nothing I've encountered before, certainly not in Sydney. And all of it is in service of growing fruit.
Huishan Modern Agricultural Industrial Park in Huishan district, Wuxi. [Photo provided to en.wuxi.gov.cn]
That fruit is the Yangshan honey peach, which the Wall Street Journal once called the best peach on Earth. Having eaten one, I'm not inclined to argue. It's genuinely like nothing else.
I loved that. Not because a peach is trivial, but because it isn't. Wuxi has taken something ordinary and treated it as seriously as its semiconductors. That tells you more about a place than any showcase facility could.
A local television channel also interviewed me while I was there, which took me completely by surprise. It was unexpectedly nostalgic, too. Before founding Looping, I spent 20 years at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, including time presenting for the bank's internal staff broadcast. I hadn't been in front of a camera since. Standing in Wuxi, talking about my impressions of the city, two very different chapters of my working life collided in a way I hadn't seen coming.
Then there was Huishan Ancient Town.
We went in the evening, after a full day, and it was beautiful. What I keep coming back to is how naturally it sits alongside everything else. Wuxi is so far ahead in some respects, and yet centuries of history are right there at your fingertips, in the same city, on the same day. You don't experience them as separate things. The ancient town isn't a heritage exhibit parked next to the modern city. It's all just Wuxi, the old and the new, making up one place.
Tania Hamad tours Huishan Ancient Town with the delegation. [Photo provided to en.wuxi.gov.cn]
I should say something about the hospitality, because it was the thing I was least prepared for.
Transfong set the tone from the first morning, and what struck me was how far it extended. Lunches were hosted across the city, each one presented as a banquet, an act of hospitality on a scale I've never encountered anywhere else. What I noticed most, though, was harder to point to. Everyone I met, at every level, was welcoming and accommodating, and nothing was ever too much trouble. By the end of my time in Wuxi, it was clear that this spirit of generosity and professionalism was simply the character of Wuxi and its people.
Somewhere between the robotics institute and the peach orchard, I stopped taking notes as a visitor and started thinking about what it would mean to have a presence there.
What I build is a new approach to how people learn and how that learning is measured, and new approaches need places that are looking forward rather than back. Wuxi is unmistakably one of them. That combination of ambition and direction is rare, and it's the kind of place where something new can grow.
There's plenty I didn't get to see. The seasonal cherry blossoms, for one, which I've since been told are extraordinary. A proper look at Taihu Lake. The parts of a city you only find when you're not on a schedule. I don't say that with any regret. I say it because it's the reason I'll be back.
I came home with a recalibrated sense of what's possible when a place decides on a direction and commits to it for decades.
And a much higher standard for peaches.
Tania Hamad is an Australian technology founder based in Sydney and the creator of Looping, an immersive learning and assessment platform. She visited Wuxi in July 2026.
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