The headline of this post comes from a man who’s family has lived in the same house for hundreds of years, and he is being forcibly removed to make room for progress. China’s rapid growth, forced and centrally planned, is brutalizing the very people whose parents brought the Communists to power. We have experienced a few thousand miles of China at 12 miles per hour on a tandem bicycle. We have seen the decimated villages where the young have all gone to the eastern cities to seek riches. The government dams the rivers that provided the fish for those left behind, poisons the rice paddies, and the very air, that are their life blood, and ends a way of life thousands of years old.
The hutongs of Beijing are being torn down. They are thousands of years old. The people are left to find their own way in a world they do not understand. Thousands grow rich at the expense of the millions. Does this mesh with your idea of a Communist state?
Our world is becoming complicated. Cold War ways of thinking about Asia in particular are useless, damaging to our foreign policy. I wish more Americans would use their wealth to see, really see, our World, and understand that it is not as we were taught in school. Go and experience for yourselves, the lives of people, who except for accident of birth, are not that much different from you. Remember that; not that much different from you.
Claire Rogers writes on cross-cultural adventure drawn from her travels across the Silk Road from Beijing to Istanbul, around Australia and of course, through Iceland–all by bike.
She’s currently traveling by tandem with her husband Bob, through southwest China, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. Check out NewBohemians.net for more information on their travels.
