Ah, another joyous 13 hours on a 747!
About halfway through the flight to N.Y., a number of us from our tour grew bored and gathered in an open area near one of the plane's tourist class galleys and killed time shooting the breeze about our trip and experiences in China. At one point a gent in a business suit wandered over and joined in the conversation. He was a really interesting guy.
Now back in the 20's and 30's a Westerner who had spent a long time in China and was familiar with the country and its people was known as "an Old China Hand". This fellow was the modern day version of that.
He spent some thirty years in China working as an investment banker assisting the Chinese government in privatization efforts and creation of new enterprises. As such he had a lot of experience with the creation of the "New" China which we had just dashed through.
His basic take on the Chinese was that they were ambitious, intelligent, willing to learn and were rushing into the future. Thirty years ago, when he started in his business, the Chinese had the brains but not the money, now they have both and there's no stopping them. All in all, he had great respect and regard for the Chinese people.
He acknowledged that the Chinese did have some major problems (e.g. the heavy air pollution and their lack of major petroleum reserves) but he was confident that they will find solutions to them. For example, he told us of a pilot project in China to convert their abundant coal reserves into liquid fuel. Anyway, he was a very interesting guy and listening to his stories and anecdotes helped pass the time on the seemingly endless flight.
Well, we finally made a landing in JFK airport and our China odyssey was over.
In parting, I have a few observations.
While superficially China gave all the appearance of a gung-ho, all-out capitalist society, and it certainly was from an economic and business viewpoint, there was still the underlying structure of an authoritarian and somewhat rigid Communist society strictly controlled by the government. As it happens, Alex and Monica grew up in Romania in the 50's under a rigid Communist government and it was interesting to hear their take on this. They often saw subtle signs that the rest of us missed.
Another telling thing was that while the all the hotels in which we stayed carried CNN in English on TV, whenever anything was being reported about the unrest in Tibet, it was blacked out.
Then, of course, there was the way Mr. Chen, our tourguide, followed the Party line about non-discussion of politics, the official excuse for Beijing's air pollution and so on.
Hopefully, with the internet, and the coming of age of educated and tech-savvy young people this will all change.
Another thing I have been sort of negative about has been the meals we were served in China. With some exceptions (especially the Shanghai seafood we got on our own) the meals were poor to mediocre and were honestly not as good as what I have eaten in N.Y. Chinatown. In fairness, I think this was a function of the trip and the tour company. ABC tours did a good job overall, but this was something of a bargain trip and I suppose one could not expect gourmet food to be served at the tour operator's expense. Gourmet food can be had in China, but you would need to spend a lot more money (e.g. take a Tauk tour). All things considered, I'll head for Mott Street when I want Chinese gourmet.
So that was China. I'll leave you with one last picture:
A Home Depot truck in Xi'an - Not sure if Emperor Qin used Sakcrete (TM) to make his terra cotta soldiers but, hey, you never know.
See ya.
1 comment:
Very interesting summary of comments. I would like to hear more about the "subtle signs of communism."
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