China road

Last year I traveled the Silk Road, the ancient road that cuts through China. This year, it's my opportunity to travel down China Road, Route 312, a new superhighway through modern China. Modern China, I have found, is a mass of dangerous contradictions. For one, China is an economic superpower that continues to be ruled by a despotism that severely limits individual freedom but turns a blind eye to industrial pollution and the basic human rights of workers. The Chinese people are unhappy with this situation but nothing is done. The Chinese character seems built on acceptance of the world as unjust place; on fortitude, plugging on as best one can; on putting on a polite face, ignoring problems and speaking banal platitudes about life. A second enormous contradiction is that communism requires strict compliance to the rules imposed on the society and a citizenry kept ignorant but the modern world, especially the modern world market, necessitates an educated citizenry. These contradictions cannot continue. This cannot go on, the author writes, and yet it must, for the sake of a strong global economy.

And China has other, terrible problems the world knows little about. Because of the one-child policy, thousands of baby girls were aborted or killed, leaving a stark shortage of wives for the baby boys who were allowed to live and grow up. Pollution of both water and air is a terrible threat to China's immediate future. Rural poverty is slowly creating an enormous sense of injustice in the people living in the country. Many centuries of totalitarian government both from the inside and the outside have left China far behind the world, especially in technology.

The trip down China Road was no getaway vacation for me.