Reply #14: I've been to China, but by 1990 when I went, it was really only

[Lydia Leftcoast]

semi-Communist.

A lot of people were still working for state enterprises and organized into work units, but there were also private entrepreneurs and foreign-financed businesses. In the neighborhood in Beijing where we stayed for two weeks, you could buy stuff either at a barn-like general store that was state-owned or in privately run street markets.

It was just a year after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and people were unwilling to say much about it. We'd ask, and people would mumble and say, "It's too early to talk about it."

The place we stayed was the campus of a college that trained foreign language teachers. The students spent their whole day studying their major language (with excellent results), and the only other required course was Marxism. The students thought the Marxism classes were a joke, and they mostly slept or wrote letters during them. Even the professors who taught them admitted to not believing in what they were teaching.

In Beijing, Xian, Shanghai, and Chongqing, we were free to wander around at will and talk to anyone.

Oddly enough, it was in Wenzhou, which was one of the new economic zones, that we felt the heavy hand of the government most strongly. At the welcome party, we met the president, vice-president, and other officers of the college where we stayed, and each academic executive had a Communist Party official to "assist" him. These officials did not want us mingling with the students or professors without supervision, and they tried to prevent us from meeting a couple of students who were interested in studying in the States. When we wanted to explore the shopping area, we were told that it was "unsafe" to do so without a guide, and no guides were available.

In other respects, we were treated with the utmost consideration, wined and dined, taken on trips in the countryside, and presented with a photograph album of our visit at the farewell dinner. It really felt like "the iron hand in the velvet glove."

A group from my church has set up an exchange program with the Episcopal Diocese of Cuba, and they have gone on two trips this year. I would have loved to have gone, but the finance angels did not smile upon me, and the church's travel permit expires soon. :-(