We are riding a vehicle belonging to the Eternal East Bus Co, and we're en route from Hong Kong to Xiamen in Mainland China.

We cross the border in the early morning, having left Hong Kong's darkened streets at an hour when newspapers were being laid out on pavements still warm from the presses.

It's so strange being back. My god, we're back in China.

Everything is changed, different, moved on, from what it was just three years ago. It all seems cleaner, brighter (well, the walkways and the building facades, at least - certainly not the sky, which is a puffy, pallid, hangover-grey) and more modern.

Suddenly, everywhere has the appearance of being a Special Economic Zone, even when it's not. Despite the fact that I know this is likely just an East Coast phenomenon, I'm still shocked at the rapidity and the extent of the change.

The streets are wide, neatly paved and utterly immaculate. When we arrive in Shantou (which is an SEZ), the whole place feels orderly, organised and upbeat.

It's a little like watching your next-door neighbours demolish their house and put in place the most sweeping renovations the street has ever seen. Only, in China's case, substitute the word 'street' with the word 'world', and you start to get a feel for the pace and scale of changes here.

There are still blue-and-white bedecked schoolchildren riding bicyles and paddies filled with bright green veg in market-garden neat rows, but these sights are sprinkled only sparsely amongst the plethora of things that are far less pleasant to the casual visitor's eye: tower after tower of white tiled concrete monstrosities, endless ring roads, mobile phone towers, and depressing residential developments with cell-block-like aesthetics; all bars and concrete cancer.

Like the bastard child of some anti-aesthete and an extreme utilitarian, this vision of modernity is the ultimate triumph of function over form.

We pass amazing things, too. I see a body of water all choked with chunks of styrofoam; they litter its surface, and lie in huge white drifts. Then, with a jolt, I realise I'm looking at scores of ducks, each so outrageously white and improbably fat, they resemble bobbing polystyrene pieces.

Blossom is blooming like fairyfloss. The dirt-coloured, stalky branches of low trees are becoming nubbled with the most perfect tufts of marshmallow white and pink. It's springtime.

The freeway we're on is an expression of largesse. Bill points out that there are barely any private vehicles sharing it with us. It's predominantly buses and trucks, with the occasional ute or minivan - but not much traffic at all, really. It's a Big Road built for moving Big Things. Yet amazingly, this behemoth runs right past stolid little stone-hewn villages that wouldn't look out of place in a Zhang Yimou film.

The juxtaposition reminds me of how I was thinking, as we approached Shantou, that the looping, insolent curves of the raised freeways looked like they'd been lifted straight from a work by Edward Hopper. That same vacant moodiness, that same disquieting modernity. Like Hopper's solemn, lonesome figures, dwarfed by their surrounds, this new China offers up a lone, flimsy shanty dwelling, built from palm fronds and leaning askew under the loom of an overpass bridge.

As though no one checked with its occupants before preceding to rewrite society.

It's mind-defying to witness.