Summer is usually a time for students to leave campus. For this group of young people from China and the UK, it has become a chance to step into a different classroom: Chinese cities.

Starting on Monday, the inaugural Yinghua Fellowship-Youth Dialogue program brought students from universities including Oxford, Cambridge and Tsinghua to major cities in China for a journey through technology, culture and urban life. One of their first stops was a smart factory in Guangzhou, capital of southern China's Guangdong Province. There, flying cars, humanoid robots and autonomous driving technologies turned the idea of "future cities" into something they could see up close.

"I didn't realize flying cars were beyond the concept stage," said Sophie Collingham from the University of Cambridge. "It's already in action, which was insane to me." 

For Sara El Khamlichi, also from Cambridge, the visit confirmed what she had been told before arriving, that China's technology would feel much further ahead than what she was used to seeing at home.

Lam Chen Jun, a Malaysian law student at Cambridge whose family roots trace back to Guangzhou, was equally impressed. "Those flying cars, I thought they only exist in movies, and then it's really nice to see them in person." 

The surprise quickly led to bigger questions. Students talked about how automation may change the rhythm of city life, how artificial intelligence should be governed and what role people should still play in increasingly intelligent urban spaces. 

"I think that there will be more automation in the future, and then for me what I'm interested in is probably the governance of those technology, like how should we protect the people, or how should we protect these technologies like for example copyrights, patents and everything," Lam said. 

Over the coming weeks, the students will continue traveling across China, meeting entrepreneurs, researchers and engineers. The future cities they are discussing may one day be powered by AI, autonomous vehicles and intelligent machines. But for now, they are being shaped through something quieter: young people asking what kind of future they actually want.