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Sham Chum
PEOPLES REPUBLIC OF CHINA
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Population of the PRC is 1.2 billion people now and is projected to`(reach 2.5 billion in 10 years. A one-child policy since 1978 mandates forced abortion for second pregnancy. It's illegal to marry before 25(male)/23(female). Young couples must show marriage certificate to get a hotel room together.
We stop in a high-rise (6-10 stories) residential area, and are proudly shown a kindergarten. Typical kids, minimum 3-years old, maximum 6. We would call it pre-school. Bright, modern, and staffed by young teachers who obviously enjoyed working with young children. The HK$600/month cost to the parents includes field trips, and frequent examinations of the children by doctors.
Outside the apartments, two people staff a table-as-desk with 2 telephones and phone wires strung through the trees -- the PRC version of a public phone booth.
Our guide takes us to visit a typical farming village, but its not a rural area. The farmers live in town, not out with their fields and paddies. The streets are lined with open sewers. Facilities are very primitive.
Inside a house considered "modern housing", the bare cement floors and walls were uncovered -- no paint, tile, or wallpaper. The occupants were described as "very lucky" to live in the sparsely-furnished house.
At an electrical shop, one man spends much time repairing an electric motor that looked like it had already outlived its usefulness by twenty years. His workbench was the stone steps that led to a dirt floor in the shop. Nothing in the shop appeared newer than ten years and many had the appearance of the types of USA appliances from the late 1940's. The electrical cords are cloth-covered, and everything in the place is dirty and grime-covered.
A pharmacy/chemist shop has a mixture of typical Chinese herbal medicines and packaged over-the-counter drugs. The boxes of the latter, however, are dirty and the colors faded. They looked like they surely had outlived their use-by dates by many years.
In the dirt and cobblestone streets, there's a stench from the open sewers. One strange boxlike structure -- a sheltered urinal for men -- straddles the open sewer. The guide says there is no such public structure for women to use.
At a nearby town, lunch is at an upscale (for here) Chinese restaurant. The place is bright, clean, and has pretty standard fare for a Chinese restaurant as we have come to know them, but it includes something new: steamed bread with sweetened condensed milk for a sauce. The dirt parking lot is packed with Mercedes, but the surroundings are very poor.
 | Population: 1.5 million in the city;
construction everywhere; many cars, scooters, bikes, and pedestrians. |
| Food vendors hawk wares by winding through
the long queues of cars and trucks waiting at a tollgate. |
| Lots of bannanas for sale; thus lots of
bannana peels on the ground tossed out of car windows by people who buy and
eat the bannana while waiting in traffic. |
| Buildings are a mixture of high-rise
apartments and matchbox houses a hundred years old. |
| The concrete roadbed is little better than
packed dirt because it is so wavy and uneven. |
| Three people on a motorbike is common
sight. |
| Half-finished construction, piles of sand,
slag, paving stones everywhere. |
| Low two-story concrete-block buildings
with shallow storefront/shops covered by roll-front garage doors that close
at night. Housing above the shops. |
Guangzhou (Canton)This city of 2.5million people is the commercial center for the fertile Pearl River delta area. It's much less modern than other areas we've seen so far. The buildings are considerably older. No bright colors - everything muddy/dirty. Grime covers the walls and rooftops of many buildings. Lots of cement construction, not much paint to cover it.
We visited the Six Banyan Tree Buddhist Temple, but the trees for which it is named were destroyed in a war thousands of years ago. The temple is now a typical tourist attraction. What shows as bright red paint on a postcard picture of the temple has actually faded to a dull maroon. Our tour guides make sure we have plenty of time to visit Chinese arts and crafts shops that sell many of the same tourist items that we can purchase for less in Hong Kong. Even when we flee the bright, modern tourist traps and stroll through narrow shop-lined alley ways, we find the same cheap souvenirs for sale. In front of one shop, a modernly-dressed mother holds the hand of her equally-well-dressed 5-year-old child as he urinates on the footpath, and then they nonchalantly proceed to the next shop.
While walking around on the crowded footpaths of the city, three distinct times a different Chinese man looked at us and very pleasantly said "Hello" in passing. By the time we recognized the greeting and turned around to reply, the speaker was lost in the crowd. We suspect they were trying out their learned-but-little-used English.
On the same jaunt, we pass several queues of people on the footpath along the side of a bank. As we get closer we can see the people at the head of the line reach out to take money, seemingly from out of the wall, and put it in their pockets. Aha! That's a familiar sight -- people getting money from an automated teller machine. Eager to see what an ATM look like in the PRC, we're startled to discover that the "ATM" is really a slit in the wall and the cash is dispensed by human tellers inside the bank.
Guangzhou is a busy city - people jam the streets and footpaths, most of them in a hurry to get someplace. The streets are filled -- as usual. Many are narrow, with little room for parking. Traffic control devices are frequent - but sometimes primitive. The air is filled with diesel fumes and the peculiar smell of petrol-with-oil mixture used by the two-cycle engines of the motor scooters and motor bikes. Women carry heavy loads balanced on the ends of poles across their shoulders.
In the PRC, we traveled in a comfortable small bus similar in size to those used by US car rental companies to ferry customers. Most of the roads we travelled on were concrete, with very new appearance (less than 2 years old) but with inadequate preparation of the roadbed, so that the concrete was wavy and bumpy. This somewhat restricted the maximum speed we could obtain comfortably to 65 kph (40mph), but the bigger restriction on speed was the constant mixing of vehicle types: large trucks, buses, and automobile competing with slow-moving motorbikes, scooters, and the ubiquitous bicycles.
The return from Guangzhou to Kowloon was on the last train for the day. The station was jammed with all types of travelers: Anglo-Saxon businessmen, tourists, commuters, and peasants. The fare is unbelievably cheap: first class was HK$200 (US$27) for a trip that departed at 6PM and arrived in Hong Kong some 3.5 hours later. The first-class coach was reasonably clean and comfortable, and it had a television set at each end that showed a cartoon-style Chinese comedy program and a few commercials during the trip. A food/tea cart service offered inexpensive food. The ride was fairly good on reasonable track and the electric train was able to travel quite swiftly.
The formalities for entering the PRC were minimal. The Hong Kong officials stamped our passports to show that we had left Hong Kong, but there didn't appear to be too much formality required to enter the PRC. However, both guides caution us about needless conversation or jokes with the immigration agents who -- we are told -- are serious about their jobs and will not hesitate to detain anyone. They also tell us to be very careful about keeping track of our passports, since anyone unfortunate enough to try to return from the PRC without one would be detained for the 1- to 2-months it would take to have a request for a new passport processed and forwarded to the US authorities.
On the return trip, we had a minimum of hassle because we were travelling on a group visa and our guide saw to it that we were smoothly processed through both PRC and Hong Kong immigration and customs. Although not required, we could have had our passports stamped by a friendly PRC immigration officer, but we chose not to. We'd been advised by co-workers that such a stamp could later cause difficulties when we tried to enter some other Asian countries, especially Taiwan. However, a close examination of our passports would show that we departed and re-entered Hong Kong on the same day without any record of entering or leaving any other country.
Author:
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Susan
was able to go poking about Hong Kong, using the Star Ferry to cross the
harbor from the Hong Kong side to the Kowloon side. At the same time, she was
able to check out the China tours, and we finally selected one from the
unusually-named "Able & Promotion Tours" company.
One
of our guides for this one-day sojourn into Red China -- officially The
Peoples Republic of China (PRC) -- meets us at our hotel on Hong Kong Island
at 06:50, and we spend the next half-hour picking up a few other adventuresome
souls at other hotels.
The
hotels on this side of the harbor appear to be more grandiose, more
tourist-oriented than the business-oriented hotels on the island side. And we
pick up a mixed bag of fellow travelers (sputnik, in Russian) - a French
quartet who - at times - speak another more guttural language that none of us
recognize, a pair of Germans, a lone male Filipino, and the rest Americans.
Fortunately, no "ugly Americans" in the bunch. We have to change to
the second of four buses that we will use this day and head out of Hong Kong
through the New Territories area.
New
Territories
The
guide points out that Hong Kong traffic drives on the left, while in mainland
China, it's on the right. However, they were afraid that when the lease with
Britain runs out in 1997 and HKG reverts to PRC, they will be forced to
convert. Later another guide tells us the difference actually helped PRC
police (the feared Go An) spot stolen Mercedes that showed up in China. So now
the thieves have switched to stealing left-hand-drive luxury cars from Florida
and southern California in the USA for smuggling into the PRC.
Shenzhen
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