We were there because China is in desperate need of help for its problems and it needs the world to know this. Millions of people live in the type of windowless brick house that Pearl Buck wrote about in the '20s. I'm reading The Good Earth again and, for some people, things haven't changed all that much except that the horrible famines no longer are part of their experience. Of course, at least in the cities, there is more equality of the sexes and people on the streets are generally very well and fashionably dressed. In the distant rural areas things are, perhaps, quite different from what we saw.
Unemployment is extremely high even though most work is still being done by hand with no machinery.
China is being rebuilt and it's an astonishing sight. Highways are being built with rows of trees planted along them but there is no heavy highway equipment to be seen. Buildings are going up but one sees few building cranes. What is really disturbing is the thought that if they begin using the equipment we use there will be many millions more thrown out of work. The Chinese continue to be the same creative and hard working people they have been for a thousand years and many are becoming entrepreneurs but the country will have to find a path between our technological system and their traditional feudal system.