Thursday April 13 (from Wuhan and Chengdu)
Dear parents and friends of Beijing Seminar students,
As I start this letter I am sitting on the deck of a boat on the Yangzi River. Just this morning we have passed through some of the most spectacular scenery of my experience. All of us--36 students, 60 Carleton alums, 2 faculty families--sat on the boat deck, drank hot coffee or tea, and were overwhelmed at the scenery we saw.
We are on our long eleven-day trip through central China. This letter will be a bit choppy, as I will probably write a few paragraphs each day, chronicling our journey.
Our trip began in Wuhan in Central China. The students and Penny's family took the train--a 12-hour trip from Beijing to one of China's most historic inland ports and industrial centers. It was here that Marco Polo was said to have observed the great manufacturing centers that became the famous iron works--a development that occurred far earlier than in Europe. Wuhan was also one of China's most famous inland ports during the era of "gunboat diplomacy" and you can still see remnants of the old American, British, French and Japanese legation areas. (One of my favorite novels about this period is Richard McKenna's "The Sand Pebbles." The book contains some fascinating depictions of foreign/China relationships during the 1920's and, as well, it is a tremendous adventure tale.)
I met the students at the Wuhan rail station. (I had flown to Wuhan the day before. As you have probably sensed, Penny and I take turns hop scotching across China, one step ahead of the main group, trying to make certain that our arrangements are firm.)
We stayed in the Tianan Hotel right in the middle of downtown Wuhan. The hotel was a couple of grades above our usual level of accommodation. A general deflation has spread across Asia and prices have fallen dramatically in many travel locations--especially at joint venture hotels that focus on cash flow.
The students had been traveling all day and food is a bit scarce on Chinese trains, so I had arranged a buffet dinner at our hotel. After checking in, we all trooped to the revolving 27th floor restaurant that gave us a view of the entire city. I am not certain that the Chinese restaurant manager had ever seen 36 ravenous students attack a buffet. But he knew that we were coming and the food was abundant and good. We ate and ate--probably everyone consumed enough calories to last a normal traveler 3 or 4 days.
The next day we wandered around Wuhan. This is an enormous city with a population of 6-7 million people. Unlike Beijing, there are few foreigners here; I believe that we saw only one or two non-Chinese folks during our day and a half. Penny and I had wanted the students to wander around town, look at the shops, judge the quality of goods, and look for foreign imports. We also hoped they would get a feel for some of the problems involved in economic transition. Since there are so many large old state-owned firms in and around this city, and since some of the requirements for China's economic reform and WTO entry are pushing these firms into some form of change, we wanted to get a sense of how this change is progressing, how deep real and disguised unemployment are, and whether there is a growing sense of labor unease--as there is in the United States. The people on the streets were wonderfully friendly and we had some nice experiences as we wandered individually around town.
That evening we took a three-hour bus ride to Shashi, the small port city where we boarded our boat for the trip up the Yangzi. We are on the Victoria Blue Whale, a really elegant ship with wonderful staterooms and marvelous meeting areas. Again, we felt that we were traveling much beyond our normal style.
Rachel Core (Carleton '98) is the cruise director on this ship. Rachel was a member of this seminar in 1997 and after graduation returned here to work. She directs a staff of 134 Chinese and foreign workers on the ship. It was wonderful to be welcomed on board by a former student, and she (and her staff) made us feel like visiting dignitaries.
Soon the Carleton alumni group joined us. Altogether, there are about 110 young and old Carls on the ship. Since capacity on the ship is about 134, we are like a floating Carleton campus-away-from-home. Lyman VanSlyke (Carleton '51) will lecture and Burt, Penny, John, and I will organize some panel discussions.
We pulled away from the pier a little before midnight. I must confess that even after all my time in China I, too, was quite excited. As Mary Lewis and I stood in the middle of our stateroom, I remember saying something like, "M.L….we are in the very middle of China, on the Yangzi River. And we have more than 100 Carls with us. Can you believe it?"
But of course it did get better. We are sailing upstream past all of the big and little villages. The juxtaposition of water, mountains, and small villages is truly breathtaking. When we are not listening to Van talk about the history of the river, we are out on the open deck watching (mainly with open-mouthed awe) the rugged and inspiring terrain on either side of the river.
We stopped at the construction site of the Three Gorges Dam and toured the area. The scope of the project is stupendous--supposedly the largest construction site in human history. All of us mourned a bit when we thought of the flooded lake that will grow behind the dam and submerge much of this beautiful scenery. The lake will be about 400 miles long and about 170 meters deep. One of our guides said that so much water will accumulate that it will cause the earth's rotation to slow by one second each year. (One of our students--a physics major--is working her way through that calculation.)
This morning we went through the beautiful Wu Gorge just at sunrise. The crew had prepared us coffee and we sat on the deck of the boat watching the sun break through the haze around the mountain tops. Few of us spoke as we watched the sunrise. The time, the place, and the company bring this near the top of my special memories.
Each day there were some choices to be made: stay on the ship at anchor or take a side trip. Even the side trips had opportunities for side trips. During a sampan ride into the "little gorges" some of our students hopped out and hiked up into a tiny village, rejoining the sampan on the return trip. On the day that part of the group explored Fengdu, the supposed resting stop for Chinese ghosts, others walked the narrow streets of the town, exploring the markets and looking at street vendors and small stores.
Mary Lewis describes one of these stops in her journal entry:
"At mid-morning we left the ship to board little sampans, dividing up into three or four smaller groups. The little boats took us up the 'the little gorges'--in much shallower water that sometimes required the boatmen to use their long bamboo poles with sharp narrow tips just to push us out of the rocks. The little gorges were more intimate, the sides not as high or as steep, but awesome in their own way. Lots of farming along the shores--again making us wonder how long the families would try to hold on before evacuating.
"We landed at a very rocky beach (so that the sampans could turn around and take us back to the ship) where we were immediately besieged by small boys trying to sell rocks, (probably fake) fossils, etc. A very earnest little boy of perhaps seven or eight, wearing blue undershorts and nothing else, approached me and asked me to buy a bright green stone which I imagined to be fake--it looked like a glass marble almost. Van (Lyman VanSlyke) later told me it was almost certainly agate.
"Because I had imagined that the sampans would be quite wet, I'd left my backpack (and wallet) in our room on board so I had to tell the little boy that I didn't have any money. He then, quite insistently, held the stone out anyway and said, 'wo gei ni'-I want to give it to you. I demurred a number of times, saying I couldn't accept it, but he was so insistent that I decided that it would be insulting not to take it. Then he asked if I had a ballpoint pen, which I did, and then gave him. After walking around a little, fending off other vendors, I came back to my little friend and asked someone to take a picture of me with him. He stood so straight and tall and looked so serious and proud--had a real dignity, I thought. …"
Back on board the ship, we had a series of formal presentations and discussions that included both young and older Carls. Lyman VanSlyke continued his lectures on the history of the area and we listened as this preeminent historian filled in gaps in our knowledge about this region's development. On another afternoon I moderated a panel discussion that included Penny, John, Van and Burt. For almost 2 hours the panel fielded questions about economic development, politics, and foreign policy. Imagine…..a large group of Carls and a group of strong China analysts, talking about world events as we steamed past the beautiful Yangzi river scenery.
From my perspective, one of the most rewarding benefits of our trip was the opportunity for our group of Carleton students to spend several days with the alums. I had dreamed of this possibility several years ago when I began to work on the itineraries for both this seminar and the alumni trip. I saw Carleton students and alums eating together at mealtimes, talking away many a night on deck and in the lounge areas. The alums were charmed by this energetic group of young people and they often expressed their appreciation for the opportunity to be traveling and sharing perspectives with the students.
On the fifth day we reached Chongqing--our final destination on the river. Our group said goodbye to Rachel and her wonderful staff, and to the alums who went off on the rest their trip following a different itinerary.
Our group went immediately to Chengdu, the capital of Siquan province. Siquan is an immense agricultural province with a population of about 100 million people, and Chengdu is an old and gracious city that sits right at its heart. The city is famed for its spicy cuisine, its friendly people, and its lovely tea houses. We stayed at the Minshan Hotel--arranged by Rachel Core who had worked there for a year before taking the job on the cruise line. Again, our special connections brought us a several-level upgrade. The location was great--right at the center of the city, and immediately on the river that cuts through the city. As usual, the students were out and about almost as soon as we checked into our rooms. Many of them quickly found their way to the many tea garden places that dot the river only a half block away from our hotel. Taking tea on the river is one of ML's and my favorite things in this city, as you sit around tables, sip the spicy Siquan tea, and watch urban Chengdu go by.
In Chengdu, as in all of our stops, we tried to look at the economic change and direction of reform as it affects different parts of China. The day on which we planned a trip to the countryside to get a glimpse of changes in Sicuan farm life, our guides could not find the farm we had arranged to see. So we simply stopped our bus at what looked like an interesting village and asked if we could walk around. Everyone in the village was especially welcoming, and our group piled off the bus and walked off in a dozen different directions. We met a village entrepreneur who become a substantial supplier of ornamental shrubbery. Across the lane, a farm woman graciously stopped her work (preparing dinner) and invited us all in to see her house. She led us around the various rooms (carrying her paring knife and the vegetables she had been cutting) allowing us to extrapolate the probable standard of living for those living in the village. Some of our students found an elementary school and took pictures of some of the children. Others went into a village shop to take tea, and a couple joined some old men sitting at an outside café where they joined in a mahjong game. As we should have learned by now, the spontaneous and unscripted parts of a trip often turn out to be the best.
Back in Chengdu, we visited Chris Wurzel at the American Consulate. Chris is the economic officer, and he spent several hours providing a context for some of the economic and social phenomena we had been seeing.
For the last part of our trip, the group wanted to climb Mt. Emei. This is one of the sacred Buddhist mountains and the idea is to see the sun break through the mist and the clouds from the top of the mountain. We had planned to arrive at the mountain area at mid-morning, spend the day going up the mountain, send the night at the top, and then be "in position" to see the sunrise. But the best laid plans turned into more of an adventure than we had planned. The bus arrived late at Emei (3:30 p.m. instead of 10:30 a.m.). Of course it changed all of the hiking schedules. But the students were undeterred. Some of the students went directly to the top in a cable car. Others decided to hike after all. Of course they got caught by nightfall and, instead of staying in the reserved rooms at the small hotel at the top, found lodging instead at some of the small monasteries that dot the hills. For those who made it to the top in time, the sunrise was spectacular, as their pictures show. For those who stayed in the monasteries, the adventure, though different, was at least a challenge they met well.
Tomorrow we fly from Chengdu back to Beijing. We begin the most difficult part of the course during this next three week period. It is during these next few weeks that we do a lot of reading and try to interpret our travels and site visits in terms of the literature on economic and political development. As well, we will compress visits to a number of factories and development areas into these weeks. Finally, we will get ready for the students' Spring trip when, individually or in small groups, they move around China on their own.
I will write again from Beijing.
Roy
p.s. I am including, as before, some new pictures for the website. Many of the pictures are mine, even more are from the students. I have heard from many of you that some of the pictures don't download too well, or take a great deal of time to see. I have tried to reduce and compress the pictures as much as possible so that they download more easily. Some of the student pictures are quite spectacular----if your home computer takes too much time to download, it might be worth your while to use a fast machine in an office or copy store to see them.
pps. Sorry that this letter is so late. I have had trouble with my Hotmail account in China---messages going off to some sort of computer oblivion-without my realizing they were going astray. Have switched to a Yahoo account; hope this works better.
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Last updated May 1, 2000 by Tricia Peterson