Observing a culture different from your own, even from a distance, is one of the pleasures of travel. Many find it particularly fascinating to observe a culture in transition, as this one clearly is. The Yangtze cruise gave us a taste of the natural riches of China. Of course, not all is well in China. The air quality in cities is very poor.
China is very very crowded and their population control measures are under fire.
A country in transition from a controlled economy to a more market-oriented economy goes through a period where people are laid off from failing businesses and need to be retrained and hired as workers elsewhere, and this is happening now in China. And finally, there is the question of human rights, which we will not touch upon here, but is on the minds of many of us and many of them. We were stared at, but as far as we could discern, most people were friendly. When we would smile and wave, we almost always received smiles and waves in return. Some of our guides spoke rather more freely with us than we might have thought considering what we hear about the possible dangers.