A U.S. arts delegation of more than 10 senior practitioners visited Guangzhou from October 25 to November 1 for the U.S.-China Arts Education and Cultural Industry Innovation Exchange, jointly organized by Sun Yat-sen University and the Lingnan Foundation of the United States.
During the visit, Rick Stein, a member of the California Arts Council, toured sites including the Chen Clan Academy, Yongqing Fang and the Bai'etan Greater Bay Area Art Center. What he saw in the city's revived waterfronts and Cantonese opera spaces points to a lesson for both countries: innovation grows from exchange and fusion, not from piling on technology.
Preservation that still breathes
"That was a beautiful district," Stein said of Lychee Bay in an interview with South during the visit. In the restored alleys of Yongqing Fang in Xiguan and along the Lychee Bay waterway, Stein saw an approach that treats heritage as infrastructure for daily life rather than as scenery for tourists.
"It's wonderful that it has been preserved," he said. "But it's even better that it isn't just preserved—it's active with people of all ages using the space, enjoying the space."
The same could be said of the Cantonese Opera Art Museum, where elderly residents do morning exercises and sing Cantonese opera in the adjacent open space.
That distinction—between preservation as a museum piece and preservation as a living practice—runs through much of what Stein argues about culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Real innovation, he suggests, does not come from piling on more technology. It comes from the messy, human exchange between different cultures.
This matters because digital access is not the same as experience. "It's possible to experience some of this online these days because the internet has an abundance of information," Stein said. "But there's nothing like experiencing it, live and in person, whether it's bringing it to California or it's for people to come and visit Guangzhou and have the experience themselves."
A tossed salad, not a single culture
Stein resists the idea that the U.S. has a single, unified culture." American culture is one that we often talk about as either a melting pot, or sometimes they call it a tossed salad of different cultures where we all learn from one another," he said. "But the greater culture is not this unified, single culture. It's one that takes the best elements of all the different cultures and creates something new."
He noted that San Francisco's Chinatown was built by Chinese laborers, many of whom helped construct the American Transcontinental Railroad. Today, he said, Southern California, and Orange County in particular, is a major center of Asian American and Asian immigrant life, with a large Chinese community. That mix of new arrivals and long-rooted communities creates "a natural affinity" for what Asian American culture brings.
That is the core of his argument for the AI age. Innovation does not emerge from technology alone. It emerges from pluralism—from institutions and cities willing to fund the human spaces where different traditions collide, borrow from, and remake one another. California voters backed that idea a few years ago, Stein said, when they approved a major increase in investment in arts and music education. They recognized its importance not only to success and economic growth but also to "a healthy and happy life."
For Guangdong and California alike, the next wave of innovation will not come from the cities that install the most screens. It will come from those that keep their cultural spaces alive, open and shared.
Reporter | Dong Han
Script | Dong Han
Filming & photos | Guo Hongda
Video editor & poster | Guo Hongda
