Pre-conceived notions of China were dispelled during my 2006 trip.

CHINA: IMPRESSIONS

HUGE

Like most people, I had pre-conceived notions of what to expect on my trip to China, April 12 to 24, 2006. Judging from articles and photos, I assumed there’d be droves of bicycle riders, many people carrying products in baskets suspended from the ends of shoulder-supported poles, horrible-smelling public toilets, and huge pictures of Chairman Mao Big Brothering us from walls everywhere. The only thing that held true to those expectations was the word “huge.”
China does “huge” very well. The International Airport in Beijing is huge. Droves of people, huge droves, gathered their bags and filed out to waiting taxis and buses. Our “Air and Sea Travel Center” tour group, flying from Honolulu, numbered only 39, a mere dot on the huge landscape of international and Chinese travelers rushing to their sightseeing or business or political appointments.

CHANGING HABITS

This was my first trip to China. I’d been to Hong Kong many times while traveling to posts in the Orient, and also had visited Taiwan a couple of times, but this was my first trip to what we used to call “Red China.”
It’s not so red any more. When socialist (read “communist”) leaders decided to allow some private ownership and capitalist enterprise beginning in Guangdong and spreading northeastward, they were simply letting the Chinese people do what comes naturally—start businesses and make money. Later, they opened eastern China to foreign development, albeit with strict control and joint ownership between foreign companies and Chinese investment. The Chinese government is still leery of the motives of foreigners and rightly so. Our involvement with China starting with the Opium War has not been benign in the past.

TOILETS

I’d been warned about the public toilets and faucet water: a friend of mine has been genuinely worried about the Olympics being held in 2008 in Beijing. “On our trip, the men couldn’t even shave in the water without their face breaking out. And the toilets! Horrible!” However, according to our local guide, the Olympics committee stipulated in their agreement that this would have to change.
An advantage of a dictatorship is that no focus groups or neighborhood discussions are held. It decides what has to be done and issues a decree. With millions of Chinese (Beijing alone has 17 million) to draw from; projects move quickly. All of the public toilets in museums, historic sights, department stores, etc., had flush toilets, usually some western style (sit down) and some Chinese style (squat), All of them flushed. Some even had toilet paper! As to the smell, they weren’t pristine pure. Each stall had a basket for used toilet paper and that in itself created a smell. But most of them had attendants with mops who kept the general cleanliness at an acceptable level.

LINES, SOMETIMES OF FARMERS

On my previous trips to Hong Kong, I’d been frustrated by the lack of queues. At ticket counters and turnstiles, hordes of Chinese glommed en masse, pushing their way through. Timid me, I kept finding myself further away from the goal. Now I was delighted to find them actually lining up!
Most heartening, it being a slack season for farming, many of those lines were made up of excited farmers dressed in their best cheap black suits, their faces and hands weather beaten, but queuing up for tickets and security checks at airports. It used to be that Chinese could not leave their province without a special permit from the government, and those were issued only when the person could show cause. It used to be that Chinese spent their income on food and bare necessities.
Now, they are free to travel within China, and they have discretionary income. Just like Americans and Europeans, they want to see what’s out there. Heart warming.
Next: Beijing.