[October, 1995.] There is something alluring about China. Something that gives China its luster. Something that makes us intrigued by this home to such a large proportion of humanity. For those of us who have studied about that mysterious land it continues to pull us back no matter how hard we try to extract ourselves from its grasp. China was the home of a great civilization that had as much influence in Northeast Asia as Greece and Rome have had on the Western World. Hanzi, or Chinese characters, are used to some degree in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. The thought of Kong Fuzi, or Confucius, has had a tremendous influence on all these countries even to this day. The Buddhism that is practiced in these countries is also a variant that was carried first through China. It is because of this élan that we are always poised to see something be reborn from the ashes of that once great place. It is with extreme difficulty that we would ever realistically consider the fact that China's greatness was at its pinnacle a millennium ago. That during the period known as the Tang Dynasty, China was greater than it has ever since been. That since this great dynasty, China has been ruled more by outsiders from Mongolia and Manchuria than it has by Chinese. This century began with hope for a new China that could possibly recreate the splendors that history heralded. For the Chinese, both inside and outside of China, China is a place that is held together by a history that is so rich, so impressive. Yet this history also binds China to the dark ages thwarting valiant attempts to democratize and modernize the country, and usher in a new era that would otherwise eclipse the annals of Chinese history.

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The several months before I travelled to China with my wife, Karen, relations between the U.S. and China had plummeted - beginning sometime around the visit of Taiwan's leader, Lee Teng-hui, to the U.S. relations were strained but were on the mend when we arrived. China has unusual rules for granting visas and we were able to obtain a dual entry visa that we eventually learned meant we were only able to stay in China for sixty days: thirty days after which we were required to exit the country for some time before we were allowed to return for an additional thirty days. Our initial destination was to Shanghai the contemporary magnet for foreign investment and the home to a distant relation who had offered us a place to stay. When we arrived, we learned that this relation was fearful of the Public Security Bureau should they learn that foreigners were staying at her house without official permission and so she had prudently withdrew her invitation. Discouraged that our stay in China would be much briefer out of financial necessity, Karen agreed with me to spend a month travelling through the country before our first visa expired, and so we began our journey to Nanjing, Zhengjiang, Yangzhou, Tai'an, Qufu, and Beijing.

Shanghai

Despite China's ancient historical legacy, Shanghai like Hong Kong became a great city only after the Western powers took it and exploited it for their own use. It is because of the history of that city in the several decades before the communist regime came to power that the advanced industrialized nations are once again focusing investment on this city.

Trying to be nonchalant as I peered in windows while I walked down Yang Chang lu (street) in the direction of the Bund, I saw a traditional China that appeared to have changed little in centuries bestride signs of a country entering the technological age of the 20th Century. In one household I saw a child using a computer as the small family looked on, and as I walked further along I saw other households with computers, but no apparent signs of a different sort of luxury, electric fans. Homes extended out onto the curbs of the streets either because their dining rooms were just on the other side of an open window or door that was only a few feet from the street or because the curb is their only real front yard. The Shanghainese sat on foot-high stools, talked, attended to kitchen chores, or had a bite to eat on these sidewalks as if this area was the natural extension of their home, impervious to pedestrians walking by them.

The most distinguishable Chinese fashion that we observed in Shanghai was stocking wear. The sheer stockings which women, and not a few men, wore were a yellowish color that couldn't have been more unattractive except for the fact that the nylons had typically fallen down one of the legs of the women who were visibly wearing these "knee-highs". Had I grown up in impoverished China, it probably would not have seen so bizarre to me that men could be seen wearing these nylons with tennis shoes and women wearing men's style silk socks.

As I turned a corner to walk through a market area, I was surprised to see the vendors typically used hand operated scales to determine prices for produce and meat. At a busy intersections policemen were practicing a conservation of sorts. They had emblems still in the store-bought protective plastic pinned to their right shoulder. Later, on a rainy day, I surmised that these were portable patches the policemen put on the shoulder of rain gear or jackets whenever such protective gear is needed. I turned another corner to see an illustration and the Chinese characters for a public telephone just above an outdoor cement countertop where five phones rested. An attendant looked over the phones while people talked on them without the partitions providing privacy most non-Chinese are so used to. A few feet away the scene took on a sharp contrast where a man was talking on a cellular phone.

Even in this once most foreign of Chinese cities most people stared at me, some eager to smile if I did, others looking with suspicion and wonderment. I thought of an autobiography I had read once of an ordinary Chinese women who had seen the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. She explained how the first time she had seen a Caucasian she screamed and ran because the pale white skin, long nose, and sunken eyes had looked so frightening to her. Luckily for me, it wasn't the first time the people I encountered had seen a Caucasian, but I was an oddity nevertheless. A lot of people would say "hello" just to hear my response. Everybody seemed surprised at anything I took pictures of just as Americans used to be when Japanese businessmen toured through the U.S. in the 1970s taking pictures of what looked to us as the most mundane objects. On a couple occasions someone would alert a small group playing cards or looking at something for sale that I had stopped to observe the activity they were engaged in. I was lucky that these people didn't react as if I was intruding, but I'm sure this is only because that were a little bit intrigued by a large-nosed, blond foreigner.

Looking for protection from the rain at one point we walked through a small, covered "wet-market" where we saw dried fish, live turtles in buckets, heaps of frogs in another relatively small bucket, fish, crabs, prawns of different sizes (some were at least five inches long and fat), slugs, large black plastic jars filled with some sort of sea life (we couldn't tell if it was meat or vegetables), and buckets with both live and long dead eels. It was a rather typical "wet market" of East Asia but seemed dirtier to me. In contrast to this market and the areas in Hong Kong where we saw animals being butchered, the butchers in Shanghai that were visible from the sidewalks seemed to have at least a semblance of concern with sanitation in their work. They often worked behind glass encased store fronts, and wore white clothing, including head coverings which were sometimes accompanied with masks.

The highlight of our day was when a man, probably a minority from a mountainous region of Western China, showed us a tiger paw that had tendons sticking out from where it had been cut-off. He asked us if we wanted to buy it. I said "no," but motioned that I would like to take a picture of him with it for 2 Yuan. He declined.

From the Bund we took a bus home for 1 Yuan each (about 12 cents). We rode on two busses this day, one was an articulated bus with hard, individual wood seats on each side and more than twice as much space for people to stand which, when crowded with people, gave it the impression of a cattle car. The floor was wooden, and in addition to the driver there were two seated conductors-one in the front and one in the back who sold tickets, operated the doors, and signalled for the driver to start up. The second bus was smaller and had padded seats with bamboo (or some similar material) slat coverings, and a wooden floor. In the newly built up areas there were busses with coin collection boxes next to the driver instead of conductors just as in Western countries.

Nanjing

Nanjing, the "Southern Capital" and site of the infamous "Nanjing Massacre" during World War II, is commercially dwarfed by Shanghai. Nanjing was the capital of China for a brief time when the Ming Dynasty was first established and much of the impressive walls surrounding the city which date from this period can still be seen.

One of the most important and impressive Chinese monuments of this century is that which honors Sun Yatsen in Nanjing. Perhaps it is fitting that this monument is to the man most widely respected for his achievements on behalf of the Chinese people this century. Where other countries may have had greater resources to build a more lavish monument, the design of the Sun Yatsen monument in Nanjing could not have achieved more. Taking advantage of the terrain of the area, the monument is built on a hill top. A visitor enters a large gate before ascending hundreds of stairs that requires enough physical exertion to allow for little else than for you to focus on the goal of your hike, a mausoleum complex at the top of the stairs. Inside the first chamber of the mausoleum there is a prostrate, larger than life-white statue of Sun Yatsen which appears to gaze out over the picturesque valley below. Indeed there should be a sign at the bottom of the hill advising visitors not to look back until they have ascended the stairs to the top, to the mausoleum. The simple, but somehow ideal, domed chamber of the inner chamber lies at the furthest point from the gate down below and houses a white, reclining statue of the hero which is suppose to rest atop the tomb of Sun Yatsen. It is suspected that the tomb itself is empty, that his body was taken to Taiwan by the Guomindang long ago.

Zhengjiang, Yangzhou, & the Chang Jiang

A Student's Voice

I had the opportunity to speak with a young Chinese woman in Zhenjiang only because she could speak English very well. She was studying art at a local college, but said she wasn't doing too well because she spent too much time studying English. Her teachers were all Chinese who had learned English in China. These teachers had explained to her that British English was "gentler" than American English, but gave the reason that American English was more widely used internationally for their preference to teach it instead of the Queen's English. She practiced her English by listening to the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) on the radio.

She asked me if I thought Taiwan and China were one country. She believed they were and said it would be a very bad thing if there was a war between the two because they each had relatives in the other place. I asked her about Tibet and she said "of course it's part of China." When I asked her if she was concerned about what might happen when Deng Xiaoping died, she said that she was concerned because she didn't want anything bad to happen. She didn't like Li Peng, but couldn't really say why other than "he hasn't done anything;" she thought Jiang Zemin was better than Li Peng, but thought there was someone better than him, Zhu Rongji, whom she believed would be the best leader for China. She thought that Zhou Enlai was the most admirable Chinese public figure in China's recent history and that Mao Zedong was a "great man" because he had risen from being a peasant to the leader of China even if he had made some "small" mistakes. I asked her if the Cultural Revolution was a "small mistake" to which she replied "no" and admitted that it was not a "small" mistake.

Chang Jiang Ferry

No matter what the guidebooks might say, there is nothing quite so memorable as riding a ferry across the Chang Jiang (Yangzi River) at dusk in a bus full of Chinese businessmen. Close your eyes and imagine the sensory experience: the air is thick outside, but not so thick as the air inside the bus where many of the businessmen are smoking; the smells are of fuel and the smoke being blown in your face; and the sound is of the ferry engine and talk between the businessmen interrupted intermittently by the sound of the men spitting on the ground between their knees. Alas everything wouldn't be so bad were it not for the thought of the ferry sinking in the muck of the river and the panic which would insue as you were burned by several cigarettes which probably wouldn't matter anyway since you're sitting in a temporary, fold-down seat in the center aisle and would probably be drowned by the others trying to escape through which ever window is furthest.

We saw lots of wheat fields on this bus ride as well as boats covered with wheat at the port of Zhenjiang on the Chang Jiang which were being unloaded.

Tai'an & Qufu

The two most striking differences to me between the provinces of Jiangsu and Shandong were the change in crops we saw and the wider use of beasts of burden in Shandong. As we road the train north, it was common to see corn on the roofs of the farmers in Shandong and fields being plowed by a pair of two animals, often a donkey and a cow together. Wheat was more common in Jiangsu Province and corn could be seen alongside the train as it journeyed through Shandong either on rooftops or laid out as farmers tended to a harvest.

When in Tai'an and nearby Qufu both of which are in Shandong, we were reminded of a story that Marcel, a tourist from America, had told us about travelling in Yunnan. He had visited a particular Buddhist temple and the monk there told him that he had to come back later in the day to see something very special. Marcel did and he was treated to a statue of Buddha adorned with Christmas lights. Christmas-type lights are very popular in the parts of China we visited also probably because they are a cheap alternative to the attraction provided by neon lighting fixtures. We saw numerous stores especially in Tai'an and Qufu which used this effect commercially. This same phenomenon existed in Beijing, but less so and was conspicuously absent in the eastern part of the city where several large international hotels were there was enough neon lighting to remind one of Las Vegas.

Wutang Qiao

Qufu is famous for being the birth place of Kong Fuzi (Confucius) as well as Mao Zedong's most notorious wife, Jiang Qing. The buildings associated with Confucius and his descendants are a tourist attraction for Chinese, but it does not hold the reverence that Confucianism itself, Buddhism or Shintoism do in the neighboring countries.

While sightseeing, we have relied somewhat blindly on our guidebook which stated that we could get a bus from Qufu back to Tai'an as late as 11:00 p.m. We went back to the bus station at 6:00 p.m. for the trip back to Tai'an and learned that there were no more busses. We walked around in panic and even tried to ask the taxis lined up across the street for help, but they were merely amused by our predicament. Then some elderly ladies came up to us and told us to take a taxi to a neighboring place from where we could take a long-distance bus. My comprehension of Chinese was so poor that it took me several minutes to understand what they were saying. When I tried to repeat to different group of taxi drivers what the women had said, they either didn't understand what I was saying or couldn't pass up the opportunity. We finally decided to pay Y200 for a taxi ride back to Tai'an, about a two hour long drive (our hotel room, a "dorm-room", consisted of three beds for Y50 each which we bought up for privacy since no double rooms where available at a cost of Y150).

Somewhere Between Tai'an and Beijing

On our train ride to Beijing, we met a Chinese man who was returning home after conducting research somewhere on the train line about an hour's journey before Tai'an. He was an geo-physicist who spoke much better English than I could speak Chinese so we communicated, not always effectively in English. I asked him about the China he knew and he seemed to give me fairly forthright answers within the context of a society where the people "aren't very much interested in politics" (or maybe more accurately people are sensitive to the repercussions of having any interest in politics which may be contrary to government policies). I asked him if China favored a relationship with Japan or the United States to the other. He said the government wanted to make friends with as many other countries as possible and did not seem to prefer one over the other, but then he spoke softer and his mood became more somber as he added that the people preferred the United States to Japan. When I asked him why he slowly came to the point that he had seen "some things in Yangzhou (Jiangsu Province)" when he was very young that the Japanese had done. He did not elaborate, but the fact that his mood changed drastically from the point of his mentioning this fact until the end of our journey (more than two hours later) was indicative of a profound period in his life. When I asked him about the Chinese people's relationship with religion, he told me that the older Chinese understood and practiced religion, but the young were oblivious to it. With the anti-intellectual sentiment that characterized the Maoist period of China in mind, I asked him if intellectuals were respected. He said that they were by the people's mouths, but not by their hearts. I also asked him about economic progress in China. He has travelled much in the eastern part of China and said that progress was very slow but perceptible. He added that the farmers near the city in particular had benefited within recent years.

Beijing

Despite our frustrations in Beijing and China as a whole, we thought that the people we dealt with in Beijing were often the nicest people we had ever met anywhere. This precludes government business workers who were annoyed whenever they were interrupted from their daydreaming or newspaper reading. In spite of this friendly nature, China can appear to be a very rude place at times as well.

We went to a McDonald's restaurant that was very busy at 5:00 p.m. with at least ten registers open and people waiting to have their order taken. What was unique about this experience was that nobody was standing in line despite the size of the crowd. A couple of young, fit German men who sat down their trays of food and perspiration running down their faces intimating that they were as surprised as us to learn that ordering food could be so chaotic as to require a strategic battle plan. When you ordered food at this restaurant you literally had to wedge yourself strategically behind one of the persons ordering in front of you and fight to maintain your position with your weight and elbows. The cashiers take orders, randomly I guess, from the three or more people that can fit in the space between his or her register and the next register.

In general, we haven't had too much of a problem with people pushing us, but Chinese people love to cut into line and you often have to be nearly laying against the person in front of you so that someone won't move in front of you. While trying to purchase tickets at a train station in Tai'an where there was a long line of people who had been waiting for a ticket window to open for over a half hour, there were people who cut into line. The only rules of the game that I could perceive were that you needed to be able to physically do it without hurting someone, but outside of this restriction it is something that appeared to be expected and allowed. At the same train station, we were amazed when the train station staff of about five made the crowd stay in line from the gate which they opened until the passengers reached the door leading outside which was about thirty feet away. What was so amazing about this is that there is often a mad rush to the platform alongside the train. On another occasion, I was peering into one of the buildings at the Forbidden City which you aren't allowed into but can look into from one of the wide doorways. A woman, at least seventy pounds lighter than myself, tried to shove me aside so she could have a better look. I was so annoyed I shoved her away and yet she made no comment with her eyes or mouth as if the entire event was as natural as anything could be.

One night, we went out for dinner and sightseeing to a portion of one street on the West side of Beijing where our guidebook had mentioned there was a Uigur community which had transplanted itself from the Muslim province of Xinjiang in Northwestern China. We had seen some Arabic writing on the top of one door-frame when we were wondering through a hutong once, but this place was special. The people looked more European than they did Asian, they dressed differently than the Han Chinese we were used to seeing, there was Arabic music in the air, and signs were often in the roman alphabet, Arabic, and Chinese. Men and boys would try and talk us into coming into their restaurants, they would touch my hand or my arm, and one man even pulled me while another said "wo ai ni" (I love you) a couple of times as if this would get me to enter his restaurant. There were also more police men in this small area than any other similarly small space we had been in China, but we had no reason to feel threatened by the people. There weren't any touristy shops in the area, just restaurants which sold, amongst other culinary delights, a round, delicious unleavened sesame seed bread, and various forms of cooked lamb.

Around the edges of the inner part of the capital of China it is not uncommon to see horse-led wagons, but the most common vehicle for transporting goods in Beijing seems to be a three-wheeled bicycle with a bamboo wagon bed directly behind the driver. I don't think I have ever seen such a tool as widely utilized as these bikes in Beijing. They hauled people, food, charcoal, trash, just about any other product you could imagine, and where also widely used as portable food stalls or mini-eateries disguised by advertising boards of sorts placed on the front, back, and side when in a stationary position.

Antiquity in China

It seems that both ancient Greek and Chinese antiquities are better seen outside of these countries than at the historical sights or museums in the land of their creation, with one exception. The thriving antique shop business that exists in China breaks the rule. The Greek people, in contrast to Chinese, are either less dishonest, less enterprising or lesser artisans when it comes to making fakes because the amount of antique shops in China that at least claim to have dynastic antiquities tucked into small cubed spaces and in drawers of the ubiquitous cabinet in the back of their small shops is unfathomable. You enter one of these small shops that are crammed with symbols of China's once greatness and are shown items from the "Qing", "Ming", and even "Tang Dynasties" (it's interesting that the less famous dynastic periods in between the Ming and Tang Dynasties are never mentioned). All the evidence you need is a bit of dirt here or signs of wear and tear there before you hand over the large amounts of cash the antique seller expects for such dubiously valuable items.

Post-Mao Egalitarianism in China

Coolies and 'Beijing Jeeps'

We found ourselves arguing with a map vendor over the price we had agreed upon for her map. She had agreed to sell it for Y2 (US$.25), but later tried to demand Y3 (US$.37). I started to walk away and she stopped her arguments with a mischievous grin. Then she complained about the condition of one of the bills we gave her. Sometimes it's difficult to try and adapt to an environment and still be rational!

There is an enormous range in levels of prosperity from one person to the next and from one neighborhood to the next in Socialist China. In the train stations you can see whole farm families with a few small bags that were certainly all their worldly possessions as they look to migrate to the city. One dirty farm boy from Jiangsu Province was so excited to see a "long nose" that he just had to hug me a couple of times before dancing with excitement. We saw a man pushing a cart which had a tree trunk. This was no ordinary small at least twenty feet long and three feet in diameter. At the other end of the spectrum are the more affluent Chinese women dress in sexily-short skirts that would make them look at home among the more affluent of many of the world's major cities. Then there are the Jeep Cherokees (we saw six of these parked in one block in Beijing) and Audis being driven past tens of people who can't afford more than a Chinese-made bicycle.

Some older, crowded neighborhoods that were accessed by alleyways were flooded after a day's rain. In sharp contrast to these "ancient neighborhoods" were sky-rises and international-quality shop lined streets. One of these old neighborhoods, called a hutong, had been leveled and the area served as a buffer zone separating more hutongs from the already standing sky-rises. Many of the sky-rises had large stylized golden Chinese characters to identifying them rather than Western names or even the Romanization for the Chinese names.

The Forbidden Cities

In Beijing, west of the old Forbidden City and Zhongshan Park is Zhongnanhai, the former residence of Chairman Mao Zedong and now the residence of China's current political elite. Zhongnanhai also seems to spill over into a strip of land between Beihai Park and Jingshan Park. On the western side of the red-walled new Forbidden City is a hutong community, which not unlike other hutongs in Beijing is old, dilapidated, dirty and crowded, giving one the impression like that of the White House being across the street from a ghetto like Harlem, less the fear of crime, at its worst. Going south from the walled complex that bears the same color as the former emperors' residence there is also what appears to be army barracks should the important residents ever fear the wrath of their "constituents".

Pollution, Garbage, Sanitation, and Bathrooms

I measure the extent of industrial development in China by the amount of smoke stacks pumping various shades of gray-to-black and orangeish smoke into the air. The heavy reliance in China on coal is visible in the sky, in the numerous three-wheel bicycles and carts laden with the cylindrical blocks led by young men still strong enough to pull such a load; and in the common sight at the entrance to a hutong of a fresh stack of these coal blocks are piled high (note that this picture was apparently taken just before a new delivery!).

One of the first things a waiguo ren (foreigner) is bound to notice when walking through a Chinese street is that there are vast sums more adults riding bicycles than there are riding either motorized bicycles, motorcycles, or cars. The question that comes to mind is "how much more development can China sustain?" What would China's already unhealthy air be like if those riding bikes today got into cars tomorrow? Trash is another problem in China that is growing proportionately with development because as Chinese consumers purchase more non-biodegradable goods and goods in non-biodegradable packaging, these and related items are tossed into the streets and rivers.

Bicycles in Nanjing

Walking through Shanghai's main train station, Karen noticed the Chinese equivalent of those cigarette extinguishing/trash cans topped with sand that are popular in American hotels. In the more simple Chinese fashion, there was a large metal bowl nearly filled with water that had gobs of spit and extinguished cigarette butts floating on top. Using the bathroom at the train station was fascinating from a voyeuristic standpoint, unfortunately I was one of its patrons as well. The foyer as it were led me to wonder if it wasn't like the old opium dens but in this case the wild intoxicant of old was replaced by a milder intoxicant, nicotine, whose use was prohibited elsewhere in the terminus. This is were the wash basins for both the women and men are located and the bathrooms are entered only after passing through this area. A seated man and a seated woman collected the admittance fee at the respective bathroom door where after entering you can't help but wonder if a high concentration of methane gas and ammonia could kill a man. Each stall is a cube about 4'x4'x4' and I uncomfortably towered above the rest of the men as I was not used to squatting when urinating which is done into a ditch that runs along the floor roughly through the center of the cubed stalls which are on either side of the room. Public bathrooms are fairly common in Shanghai and Nanjing but laying in the ditches are often the colorful variety left behind by previous visitors because the ditches, which are flushed manually, are flushed infrequently (I couldn't help but remember a Japanese story from the 1920's where in it was revealed that excrement of city residents was prized by the farmers as nutrient for their crops and wonder if these ditches were not really "flushed" at all). Residents of the poorer neighborhoods in the cities we visited use ornate chamber pots that I saw one man dump into a small manhole-like covered sewer that was perhaps twelve inches in diameter. Judging from the stench that filled the air for a few minutes afterwards it was used exclusively for dumping chamber pots. A few feet away was the small, walled-in neighborhood garbage dump which was merely an extension to the rest of the neighborhood dwellings though it was located on a corner.

Small Chinese children generally have slits in the crotch of their pants so they can defecate anywhere without the parents having to worry about the chore of cleaning or changing diapers as is the case in most other places. The only thing as bad as letting children defecate just about anywhere would be the parents spreading the problem by attempting to clean the waste in a land that has no facilities for doing such a thing and has nearly equally inadequate waste disposal. It was one thing when, as a child, I had seen a small boy stand at a street corner and urinate into the street; it was quite another when in Zhengjiang I saw a girl, perhaps five-years old squatting near a curb with her ass pointing towards store fronts expelling large quantities of excrement while a few feet away there were two young women who were picking up vegetables off the sidewalk to wash them(had the girl been taught the benefits of turning the other way, she would have at least been defecating into the gutter of the street).

Given the bathroom situation and the general drainage problem in China's cities and countryside, it is surprising that there aren't more health concerns in the country where meat is delivered uncovered on the backs of bike carts, and butchered on tables in the open-air just off the streets. Many of the foods are prepared just off the street and left uncovered awaiting consumers.

In addition to these policy-making concerns for China's future leaders there is the cultural problem of personal hygiene. Personal hygiene in China is the worst we have seen in any country we have visited, including the one country that had a very similar trash problem, the Philippines. Spitting appeared to be a national pastime for Chinese men and women alike despite government efforts to reduce its incidence with bilingual signs in tourist areas.

In Tai'an we ate at a restaurant where we were given cups to drink tea from that were sticky with dirt. A smarter person than myself would have left the restaurant the minute a man working at the restaurant approached us to either take our order or check the order we gave to someone else because he was absolutely filthy. We were praying that he wasn't going to be involved in the preparation of our food, but it was bad enough that he delivered it when it was ready. In the same town, we purchased a small bag of rolls and the bag was sticky with filth.

As we sat in one restaurant, I noticed how a woman was littering the floor at the side of her table with ashes from her cigarette. Then Karen pointed out that a restaurant worker swept the floor after the patrons left their table because there was so much garbage, like the bone from a piece of chicken that one woman had spit out, left on the ground.

Navigating in China & Some Hotel Experiences

We had arrived in the afternoon of October 2, the second day of the four-day "National Day" holiday which commemorates the founding of the Peoples' Republic of China (or the Communist government) on October 1, 1949. We could not get hold of our contact for housing so we decided to find a hotel for at least one night. The first hotel I called that was listed in our guidebook was no longer available to foreigners I was told by a Chinese woman in perfect English. The receptionist I called at the second hotel I inquired at told me the rate was more than twice as much as the one listed in our guidebook (the edition of our guidebook was just one year old). We hired a taxi to take us to the hotel, but the driver didn't really know where the street we were looking for was located. I thought that I had communicated with him fairly well with my rudimentary Mandarin language skills, but our map did not show us how to get to the street where the hotel was, and he couldn't find the street on his map. He would say, "Chang Yang Fangdian?" and I would say "dui" (correct). Five minutes later he was lost. We hired taxis two other times and they took circuitous routes that may have saved on time but also increased the fair significantly.

It cost us about $12 to get from the airport to our Shanghai hotel and it probably would have only cost us $8 to get to the hotel if our driver took us directly to the hotel. In the end, we were just glad to get there. Our hotel was apparently the only place for foreigners to stay within a few miles because I saw more foreigners there than anywhere else except the airport. The hotel has floor attendants immediately as you get out of the elevator to the floor where you are staying. Our floor attendant had a blue uniform like the rest of the hotel staff and I couldn't exactly figure out her duties except that she kept tabs on the guests and was there to help out with such room comforts as providing a new roll of toilet paper.

Shanghai will always be known to me as the place where things stop working. Aside from my laptop computer whose problems may have resulted from trying to load a pirated CD ROM in Hong Kong, everything else seemed to have broken down. The light in our bathroom stopped working as did the light above one of the beds. Karen turned off the light I was using to read with because it was above where she was trying to sleep. After she learned that the light closest to me, at the adjoining bed was not working. She tried to turn the light above her head on. It didn't work nor did anything else on the radio-like console built into our night table that operated various lights and a television. The day before I had plugged my American surge protector into the wall before plugging a current converter in and with a loud "pop" the surge protector was rendered useless. Perhaps my subconscious was trying to make me fit in.

After our fairly comfortable but slow train ride Y100 (for the both of us) from Shanghai to Nanjing we looked for a phone to call for a hotel room vacancy. I used one of the public telephone stands like we had seen in Shanghai. After I dialed the first two numbers I heard some tone repeated so I told the attendant what was happening by telling her the two numbers and then making the noise my self. She told me to dial "66" first and I did so but the number was either busy or didn't work. I never found out if the number worked because she took the phone from me and asked where I was calling. I told her the name in Chinese and she said something that intimated that the hotel didn't exist. She motioned for me to enter a building next to the phone stand and go up the stairs where I met three uniformed women. First I asked them if they had any vacancies and then I told them the names of the hotels I was looking for. They told me "bu renshi" (they had never heard of the places) and tried to help me but I couldn't understand what they were saying. I went back downstairs, but in order to get back to the phone I had to either rudely ignore the woman who had attempted to help me or try to explain "tamen [they] bu renshi." Rather than giving up, she continued to try and convey something to me until Karen and I finally realized that she knew of a hotel that we could go to for Y180 a night within five minutes walking distance of our location. Karen suggested that we should continue to call the hotels listed in our guidebook because the guidebooks were generally reliable when it came to a decent place to stay the night and they listed a couple of places in the center of town rather than some distance out of the center where we had been instructed to see how we could refuse the woman's help after she had tried so hard seemingly with nothing to gain.

After walking past four dead rats and twice as many more scurrying around on the side of the sidewalk and around some bushes that lined it, we reached the hotel. As we were walking into the hotel lobby, which made the hotel look more expensive than we were willing to pay, I saw a young American backpacker and asked him if he was looking for a place to spend the night too. He acknowledged that he was and we attempted to communicate with the front desk together. We eventually learned that the rooms on the upper floors of the hotel were less expensive than the ones on the lower floors and the backpacker, Marcel, speculated that it was probably because they didn't have an elevator. Marcel looked at their price sheet and discovered that triple rooms were less expensive than doubles in the upper rooms so we asked to see a triple. An attendant took us to a triple room (three beds) and it looked very nice so I said that Karen and I would take it.

After we paid for a few nights in advance, we were given a receipt instead of a key. We went back to the room that I was shown earlier, but I noticed the number didn't match the number on my ticket. After finding an attendant, we learned that our room was on the sixth floor, and yes there were no elevators. The number of the room we saw initially was in the 3100 range and the number listed on our receipt was 2605 broken down first by what building, "3" or "2", and then by floor "1" or "6" in our case. After we got to our room we realized that we had been shown a model room because the carpet on the floor of our room was filthy, the toilet seat was worn so bad in places that the wood, or particle board, underneath the finish was showing, and brown water came out of the sink when you turned it on. It was after Marcel saw our room which was across the hall from his that he mentioned that I might pay for a room one-night at a time in the future to which Karen reminded me that she had repeatedly told me the same thing before. Later we learned that the hotel was right next to train tracks and when trains went by rooms on the higher floors shook! Let this be a lesson to all assertive men.

Marcel is an Astro-physics student at Cal Tech (his father and grandfather are physicists) and he had been traveling around China for nearly two months with a grant he was awarded. The grant was primarily for travel in China but he had also had to present an area of study that he wanted to accomplish while here. It didn't have to be academic oriented he said, and gave us examples of a man interested in beer brewing and a women interested in flowers who also had been awarded this grant. He wanted to learn about ancient Chinese astronomy which was inseparable from ancient Chinese astrology, but interested him because it showed that they were observing and mapping the skies long before many in the West had realized. Like me, his Chinese ability was rudimentary though perhaps strengthened by his two months stay and he said that the travelling by himself had been difficult at times because he had no one to express his frustrations to as he went. On the other hand, it seems he met a few people both Chinese and foreign tourists that he may not have met if he were travelling with someone.

Water & Tea

A visit to China would remind any American how much our filtered water is taken for granted. A jar of tea is probably the most ubiquitous sight in China. It is a Chinese person's drinking water, Coke, or any of the other myriad drinks available to Americans all in one and is drunk either warm or cold.

Food

Some people say that communication and transportation have made the world smaller. I would illustrate this by positing that American mass culture and Chinese food can be found almost anywhere in the world. We have visited places where t-shirts are printed with American commercial slogans or sports team names where it is also very, very difficult to find that same country's national language on t-shirts. American music and television are also found most any place with a television set and a radio. In the same way, any country that has even a rare "foreign food" restaurant is likely to have a Chinese food restaurant though this is likely to be the limit of many peoples' exposure to anything resembling Chinese culture. Here are a few of our scattered experiences with Chinese food in China:

During that sightseeing stroll in Shanghai I talked about earlier, I saw several markets where among the items for sale were multiple varieties of tea, live fowl, including pigeons presumably for sale as food, skewers of meat being cooked from the back of customized bicycles that had either a frying pan mounted to the bike or a small barbecue. One morning, Karen and I stopped at an alleyway along a main street and had two bowls of seasoned noodles and a bowl of wonton noodle soup for Y6 ($.75) for our breakfast. It was an unappetizing setting, but the noodles were excellent and we were too full to eat all the soup. What's especially nice about the noodles we've eaten in Shanghai and Nanjing is that you can watch them being made from scratch-even though this may also mean you're often seeing them make the noodles in the not-especially sanitary conditions, a table located on the side of the street. In Beijing we were treated to another form of breakfast. First batter was poured and spread onto a hot plate just as a crepe is. A couple of eggs are broken and scrambled on top of the cooking batter. A chili pepper paste, some kind of brown sauce, onions and a herb are added before a light square, fried bread finishes the creation and the entire meal is folded several times before given to you. Again it was a delicious meal for Y1.50 to which I added a canned soda for Y4.

Breakfast Preparation, Beijing

Chinese people seem to revere eggs somewhat more than other cultures. When we were in Hong Kong I noticed that McDonald's stopped selling breakfast in the late morning just as any McDonald's does anywhere in the world, but they continued selling Egg McMuffins throughout the day. We went to a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Shanghai where they deviated from the menu served in America in two noticeable ways: they didn't serve corn and they sold brown eggs as part of some meals. While in Nanjing we began to suspect another aspect of Chinese culinary culture which we first noticed in Hong Kong. We observed that principal dishes of meat or vegetables are often present one at a time with the soup and rice being set on the table at the end.

Lunch & Dinner

For dinner one evening we had three dishes of food, meat and vegetable dishes, four bowls of rice (small Chinese style bowls), a bowl of vegetable soup that could have fed at least six people by itself, all the tea we could drink, and two Cokes for Y70 (US$8.64). This would have been a feat in itself, but this was the second such meal we had in Nanjing and they both compared with the best Chinese meals we've ever had in the U.S. and in Europe. In Beijing we were attracted to a storefront sign that had some English stating "CLEAN ENGLISH MENU" so we gave it a try and were pleasantly rewarded with a menu that offered the variety of a restaurant ten-times its size and was delicious as well. We've had our share of poor tasting Chinese meals in the brief time we were in China as well. One day we went to a restaurant for lunch that looked nice and had pictures of dishes so we could just point. Our meal didn't look much like the picture, we were given glasses of tea that were only refilled once, and the service was terrible. The meat portion of our dishes was so bad that when we saw a glass case with several snakes in it we speculated that we might have eaten snake even if it was unlikely.

In Beijing we saw street vendors selling barbecued skewers of fried sparrows but didn't work up the courage to try them. We ate at a restaurant that was affiliated with the hotel we were staying at which "specialized in Cantonese cuisine" and was the "only designated restaurant approved by Beijing wild Animals Conservation Association." I had difficulty ordering from a menu which consisted generally of such items as these: roasted piglets, stewed tortoise, spiced pigeon, mini-special dog meat dish, pigfoot [sic] in bean sauce, three snaker [snake] stewed with tortoise, spiwach [sic] with bragrant [sic] snake slice, roasted rat meat, roasted cat meat, cuntry [sic] chicken, snake head ball in oil, snake head ball with gree [sic] vegetable, snail , and razor. In all fairness though we had some delicious fried rice and soy bean curd, and the service was very good.

Beijing Duck or Trainstop Duck?

When in Beijing you might as well eat Beijing Duck right? We tried this culinary experience at "one of the oldest restaurants in the capital, dating back to 1864." It is served boneless and sliced with crepes, plum sauce, and onions just as mushu pork is at any restaurant in the United States. We also got a bowl of soup that we could only guess was melted duck fat. The duck meal itself was okay, but probably due to my own ignorance I thought Beijing Duck was prepared so that air was pumped in between the skin and meat so that when it was cooked the fat would melt and help flavor the duck. Not so at the "Big Duck" (nickname for the establishment we visited) because half of the slices of duck we were given were mostly duck fat still attached to the skin.

Before we had arrived in Beijing, our companion in a train car advised us that a stop we were at somewhere in Shandong was the location for a town that had a reputation for their chicken. I got off the train with him and bought a vacuum packed, precooked chicken for Y15. Before I opened the bag, I thought I saw a duck's bill in the package and assumed that our companion just got the English words mixed up. Karen and I ate the bird from the bag and it was absolutely delicious just as our friend had said, he was saving his until he got home. I lost my appetite though when I saw the bird's claws and realized that I might start picking parts of the bird out of the package that I wasn't used to eating.

Chinese Eyes

Sometimes we were uncomfortable eating at restaurants in China because the employees would stare at us and seem so concerned with our welfare that we felt obliged to leave a good impression so that they will save face. We were sure that this extra attention derived from the fact that I was an unusual sight in China having blond hair and blue eyes.

Karen and I were having a disagreement at our table at a restaurant and a group of men at the table next to us kept staring. I was annoyed by the intrusion even though I was in a public place and loosing my patience said, "lai, lai" (come, come[join us]). They motioned that they were going to stay at their table and the extent of their staring subsided. After a short while you learn, or think you do, which sort of people think of you as an oddity because you are a foreigner. On another occasion I got frustrated with a man staring because he wouldn't stop even if I stared back for several seconds. Finally I said, "ni yao shenme?" ("what do you want?"). He hadn't been embarrassed in the slightest way until I said this, but after I spoke up he muttered something to the extent that he didn't want anything and looked away. Although people would often run away when they saw me take out a camera or our video camera a few times people would take pictures of me surreptitiously. One time a soldier asked me to take a picture with him and a couple of other Chinese people joined in the picture so that there were three or four cameras clicking at once. In this way it was a quite a surreal experience.

Soldiers

I've seen either soldiers or uniformed policemen cleaning trash from alongside the train tracks near Shanghai's main train station and shoveling mud and dirt at Nanjing's main train station. The latter was a group of some thirty men who labored in dress uniforms with matching dress caps, it was an odd site. Police of some sorts, including the gong an, zhi an, and bao an seem to be everywhere. Economic police can be seen at state monuments apparently making sure that the state gets its entrance fees from the patrons. The traffic police aid the traffic lights in directing traffic. Traffic police are also assisted at heavy intersections by elderly people who stop bicyclists at the stop lights from proceeding by throwing down a red flag and looking sternly at the anxious bicyclists. We've felt safe travelling throughout China, even on dark alleys at night. One time when we were at the Shanghai train station, Karen noticed a couple of boys who seemed to examining the crowd and luggage for easy prey. They sat near us, attempting to be nondescript as they eyed our things, but we let them know we knew what they were up to and they went in search of other would-be victims. I saw a similar couple of boys in a crowded market area in Beijing as well. Although we constantly felt like taxi drivers were trying to fleece us, the three times we got upset with taxi drivers and a pedicab they either didn't take the fare or tried to return it even though they had taken us some distance each time.

Law of the Road

Official China's approach to traffic can be unique. At busy intersections in Nanjing there are large, digital time clocks counting down the time until the light turns red or green. Despite all the resource spent on traffic, it's still a mess. The law of the road follows this order of dominance: street lights; busses, trucks and cars; "turtles" and other motorized bikes; bikes like the ever popular Phoenix, Forever, Fiverams and Giant(a Taiwanese company!) brand bicycles; and at the bottom-pedestrians but everyone seems to be uncomfortable with the status quo. Busses, taxis, tricycles, and "turtles" (three-wheeled motor cycles or scooters that look like small cars), and motor bikes honk their horns at each other as well as bicyclists and pedestrians even if they are no where near them. Some people seem to honk their horn as if its an expression of their social status. The problem is complex though because many of the bicyclists do get in the way and pedestrians don't seem to respect traffic signals much suggesting that the Chinese are still not comfortably past the era when bicycles reigned supreme.

Taxis, Pedicabs, and Busses

Our experiences with taxi cabs and one particular pedicab are responsible for a large proportion of our complaints with China. Taxi drivers typically told us they knew where a hotel was even if they didn't. Naturally it wasn't a big concern to them because they were driving with a meter and would get paid by the distance they drover rather than the efficiency with which they got us to a particular location. Several times our taxi driver took us in the most roundabout path to get to a location imaginable. Other times they seemed to get lost, but would never admit it-sometimes until we were further from our goal than when we had entered the taxi.

Sometimes we entered taxis where there are no meters and had to either see if there was a taxi with a meter nearby or bargain with the driver. In Zhengjiang we had to take a taxi ride to a bus station to go on to Yangzhou. The first taxi driver I approached didn't have a meter and he told me he would take us for Y80. When I started to walk away he lowered the price to Y60. The next taxi driver I approached said he would take us for Y40. I got him to agree to take us for Y10 which reflects less my skills as a haggler than the typical taxi driver's thirst for a maximum profit. We arrived a the bus station a few minutes away and then purchased our bus ticket to Yangzhou for Y6. The bus ride was one and a half hours away and included a ferry trip.

After two consecutive frustrating taxi rides in Beijing we hailed a pedicab whose driver took us to a second and third hotel after our first choice was full. Mistakenly believing that this pedicab driver's help may be typical of other experiences with pedicabs and that it was against their interest to take us to the wrong place because the fare is agreed on in advance, we hired another pedicab. We told him where we wanted to go and he said he was familiar with the place. When I began suspecting he was taking us in the wrong direction I tried to tell him and one time even showed him a map which was in Chinese to explain. Each time he laughed as if I was a silly tourist and said "wo zhi dao" (I know [where it is]). When he finally arrived at where he thought we should be going it was about an equal distance in the opposite direction from where we had started to where we needed to go.

On yet another occasion in Beijing, we were taken to a restaurant for which I only had the name in Chinese characters. After the taxi driver dropped us off in the drive-port in front of a building, I looked at the characters on the wall above the glass doors. The characters weren't the same and a taxi driver (from one of the tourist type taxis) approached and I showed him the characters for what we were looking for. He told me he would take me to the place for Y30 explaining that it was very far away, and another driver said he would take me to the place for Y20. An American approached after hearing the discussion and seeing that I was perplexed and informed me that I was where I wanted to be already.

We complained to a Beijing resident about taxi drivers having such creativity with the routes they took and he related that even Chinese people were fleeced when they traveled in parts of China unfamiliar to them. Sometimes our frustration was the result of our misunderstanding the taxi system in Beijing. After a few days in the capitol, we realized that small red taxis and yellow mini-van taxis charged lower fares than the foreign made taxis which were parked in front of tourist motels: yellow mini-vans rates were Y1, red compacts Y1.60, and foreign made 4-doors Y2.

I made a cynical remark above about the cost of a taxi ride for a few minutes relative to a bus ride that was over an hour, but I left out the experience of the bus ride which must be known. No matter what the guidebooks say, there is nothing quite so memorable as riding a ferry across the Chang Jiang (Yangzi River) at dusk in a bus full of Chinese businessmen. Close your eyes and imagine the sensory experience: The air is thick outside, but not so thick as the air inside the bus where many of the businessmen are smoking; the smells that fill this same air are of the smoke being blown in your face and the ferry engine's fuel; and the sound that shares this already cluttered environment is of the ferry engine with talk between the businessmen interrupted intermittently by the sound of the men spitting on the ground between their legs. Alas everything wouldn't be so bad were it not for the thought of the river and the panic which would ensue while you were burned by several cigarettes which probably wouldn't matter since you are sitting in a temporary seat in the center aisle and would probably be drowned by the others trying to escape through the window furthest from them.

Trains

Traffic within a city may seem chaotic, but between cities it can be nearly impossible. The standard phrase for a foreign visitor to China is "bu yao" (I don't want [anything]) because pedicab drivers and vendors of souvenirs are constantly approaching, even chasing, tourists with "hello, hello" and persist until they hear "bu yao" a couple of times. On the other hand, when a foreigner tries to approach a ticket office for something other than a jam-packed, filthy-hard seat on a train the standard response is "mei you" ([we] don't have [any]). Every city along a train's route are allocated a specific number of tickets for hard sleepers, soft seats and soft sleepers. There is no communication between the train stations to allocate available seats to the stations that have sold all of theirs, so it may be fairly easy to purchase a ticket in Beijing or Shanghai but next to impossible to do the same in between. Therefore a passenger has to purchase a hard-seat ticket and try to "bu piao" or upgrade once on the train. This can be a pretty scary proposition if you are planning on taking a nine-hour trip and have know idea if there are any hard or soft sleepers available.

There are two other notable distinctions of Chinese train travel: slowness and filth. The trains travel at a very slow speed compared with international standards which is extremely important in China given the fact that rail transport is the principal form of long distance travel in China-planes are notoriously unsafe, they say that even modern imported planes use faulty Chinese reverse engineered, spare parts. Sanitation in China is the worst we have seen in any country. The floor of hard-seat cars are notorious for the trash and spit that accumulates on a journey. The state of the train bathrooms are among the worst we have seen in China. Even the bathrooms at the end of the relatively exclusive soft sleeper, and cleaner, cars look as if they haven't been cleaned for all eternity.

Language

When I had traveled with my wife to the place where she grew up, the Philippines, I anticipated the day when we would go to China where I believed I would be able to communicate and she would be as frustrated with her lack of linguistic ability relative to me as I was with her when she wouldn't explain whole conversations that she was having with her friends. When we traveled to Thailand, South Korea, Tokyo, and through Europe I often thought of what I would say in Chinese if I was in one of the difficult language positions we encountered and thought fairly confidently that I'd survive without too much difficulty. When we arrived in Hong Kong where Cantonese is dominant, I couldn't wait until we got to China where I thought I'd be able to communicate with the Chinese who spoke putong hua. When we arrived in Shanghai I quickly realized that my one-year of Mandarin studies left me with little more than remedial skills. Added to this disappointment was the problem I faced that apparently south of the Chang Jiang, Chinese speakers of putong hua pronounce words different than the way I was taught. They drop the "h" from words with "sh", "zh", and "ch" in pinyin. It was a little easier for me to communicate in Beijing than elsewhere, but as a rule throughout China people would try to draw a character using their forefinger on the palm of the other hand or with a pen and paper to improve our communication. Certainly this habit comes from the experience of Chinese dealing with other Chinese from different regions where the written language is identical, but the spoken language may vary drastically.

Temples

It was uncommon to see the sort of shrines which are a common sight in Chinese restaurants around the world in restaurants within China and this as well as the lack of religious practice throughout China due to the state's antagonism to religion.

In Nanjing we visited a Confucian temple and a Buddhist temple. The main room of the Confucian temple was preserved as a diorama of sorts but not of any particular Confucian tradition, instead there were two female figures holding music instruments. The rest of the temple grounds were used as a colorful pebble museum and for shops which sold tourist goods. Atop a hill just inside a portion of the centuries old wall that still surround much of Nanjing was the Jiming Buddhist temple. This temple looked like it had been newly built and I saw a screen depicting the temple grounds with the date of 1991 painted on it. Unlike other temples in Thailand, Korea and Japan, there were very few monks (they were all women so nuns may be the more appropriate term). There were also very few visitors though they did go through ritual practices of lighting candles and incense, as well as bowing before the statue of Buddha with hands together. We were instructed not to take pictures of the Buddhist statues as a point of reverence and we saw hints of a post-Cultural Revolution re-flowering of Buddhism in China. Some parents were instructing their children how to perform ritualistic practices and a couple of young adults seemed to mimic what they had seen others do without fully understanding the significance behind their actions.

Outdoor Living in China

We walked along a portion of the Second Ring Road in Beijing one evening and were surprised by the amount of activity going on even though it was already dark (when we visited China darkness fell shortly after 5:00). There was a man singing in Chinese operatic tradition to the accompaniment of another playing the erhu; there were a couple of dozen women parading-dancing with orange scarves as three simple instruments were being played; there were numerous couples dancing in ballroom style to a certain kind of modern music complete with a multi-colored lighted disco-type ball that rotated in the air; there was a small group performing taiqi; small families going on evening walks; young couples exploring each other; portable bicycle repair shops (from bicycles themselves) at an odd corner; staple and prepared food markets; a group playing badminton; small groups of men playing cards or Chinese checkers; and ubiquitous bicycle riders which always outnumber the cars on the street.

Nature and Society in China & Japan

The way the Chinese treat nature is similar to the way the Japanese do yet there is a clear distinction between the two. Both societies seem to have a respect for the beauty of nature that I don't believe I have ever seen anywhere else. The distinction is the degree to which nature is manipulated. In China, nature and natural scenes depicted in art are less manicured than they are in Japan. Whether it be the yellowish-gray haze that casts a certain look to the mountain or river scenes, or the twisted ancient cypress trees in places like Qufu, the Chinese respect for an untamed nature reflects something about the society. Some say that Chinese society can only be kept together by a strong, centralized government such as has existed for over a millennium under the emperors of dynastic China or during the Communist era, but this is only so because the Chinese seem intrinsically unruly or resistant to control. In Japan, the woodblock print is a perfect example of restricting or confining one's view of nature within specific parameters which can then be replicated over and over just as Japanese society is characterized by intense social conformity. Japan is a place where the rules of social behavior are strictly defined and imprinted throughout society.

Conclusion

I was mostly disillusioned by what I saw in China. It was so dirty, poor, and lacking in equitable living conditions that I lost all hope for a place I had spent much time studying about. China's influence, primarily through its enormous populace will always be influential, but the capital infusion needed to improve the country to the standards of countries in the West or Japan seems to me unfathomable. Sure portions of places like Shanghai, Beijing, Guandong, and Fujian may come close, even reach the level of Taiwan or Hong Kong, but these are relatively small parts of China. China is still grappling with many of the same questions and fears it had over a century and a half ago. I cringe whenever I recall the monologue of an American hua qiao, or overseas Chinese, who had returned to China and apparently dedicated himself to the country's future. He boasted of the potential of China and claimed that the country could reach or surpass the United States in thirty years. He made no comment about the lack of political reform in China which, I believe, is primarily responsible for the gross inequities that seem more apparent in a nominally socialist China than anywhere else in the world. At the time (October, 1995), when Deng Xiaoping was still believed to be keeping the conflicting principles of the ruling elite in check, China's polity was relatively stable. We must wait and see how long stability is maintained in his absence.

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