China: a dense, striving organism

Death was much on our minds after we returned home. While our contact with China and its people was modest, we felt deeply saddened by the toll and devastation of the quake, experiencing it on a far more personal level than we would have before our trip. We thought particularly of the children who greeted and entertained us at an elementary school in the rural village of Yueyang. These children were safe from the quake, but up to 10,000 others were killed when their school buildings collapsed.

We could not hope to gain deep insight into the character, hopes, and concerns of the Chinese people in so short a stay, but the relatively few we met were unfailingly friendly and seemed both confident and energetic in the midst of the country's booming economy.

Our tour began in Shanghai, China's most populous city with some 20 million people in the metropolitan area. Shanghai is so modern and sophisticated that it instantly wiped out any preconceptions we may have had of a backward China.

Our guide, a Communist Party member, reminded us that China is still a developing country, explaining that some 70 percent of the population is involved in agriculture. But a move toward urbanization and its higher wages is filling the cities, among other things creating forests of high-rise apartment buildings.

"We like to say that the Chinese national bird is the crane - the construction crane," our guide said, and indeed they filled the skylines of the cities we visited.