It is probably worth mentioning that my month of travelling ended in true style with a 16 hour bus voyage through Hubei, Anhui and Zhejiang; an odyssey in itself. Bomb-cratered highways, loud peasants,endless Hong Kong gangster movies, two police checkpoints, 132040 toll gates, and a 4am arrival in Hangzhou to an ice cold downpour- what more could a tired traveller ask for? Hey, it sounded like a good idea when we got on in Yichang.
In all, the trip was a rousing success. My sister, for a brief two weeks, got to experience some of the things I’ve been blabbering on about for over a year and a half now, not to mention stunning Yunnan. I got to check out Sichuan, Chonqging and a small chunk of central China. And all my time on buses and trains gave me ample time to do one of my favourite things: look out the window and think.
More and more I’m seeing two realities, one built on top of the other. You have the huge cities, interconnected by an increasing number of expressways. They are relatively modern, affluent (or at least deliberately affluent looking), energetic and lively, offering all the latest creature comforts one could imagine in this day and age (well, except for cheap coffee). This is the ‘new’, confident China. But outside this ‘modern grid’ sprawls an endless landscape of poor countryside, hailing from another era. The urban economic boom seems almost as foreign to this scene as I do: this is still a world of dirt paths, wooden carts and roaming livestock. This is the Third World, full frontal. Here the villagers aren’t sure who to stare at more, the foreigners or the wealthy urbanites, as we are both from another world.
Sometimes I think I need to get out of the cities more. I (like most other foreigners here, I’m sure) spend almost all my time on the coast, in a large city or travelling ‘the grid’ to another large city. Looking back on my travels, I admittedly spent a large majority of my time in major metropolitan areas.
Travelling between these citadels, however, provides ample opportunity to see the other side of things. Looking out the windows of buses and trains, I am forcefully reminded that a large portion of Chinese have probably never even heard of Starbucks. I am reminded that something like 800 million (!) Chinese are still farmers, and a good number of them are pretty poor. It is easy quite easy to forget that living in Hangzhou. The scale of this country is so overwhelming that it is often easier just to not think about it at all.
You are in a Korean-made luxury bus bombing down a highway, accompanied on the road by SUVs, VWs and a variety of black luxury sedans. You are probably watching some slick movie (VCD or DVD) on a drop down screen (buses in Canada don’t even have that!). You have just left some big, bustling, glittery metropolis, and you are mostly likely on your way to another similar place. Meanwhile, outside the window, some guy is knee-high in mud fighting to get his oxen to plow the field, and his wife is fetching water in a pail from a green stagnant pond. The scariest part? How normal it now feels to see this sort of scene. But I wonder what it looks like from the other side: what I look like to the farmer as I fly by in some shiny bus.
In the end, one of China’s biggest challenges will be to somehow better integrate these two worlds. Because right now it seems that one is leaving the other in the proverbial (and literal) dust.