China

As many of you know, the theme of this voyage is "China at the Center: Then and Now," so all of us arrived in Hong Kong with great anticipation. We had been building up to arrival here in my Global Studies class since the start of the voyage, discussing China's growing involvement in Latin America and Africa and emerging competition with India for access to energy. This visit was a chance to see both the great sites of Beijing, which testified to the earlier grandeur of China, as well as the new skylines of Hong Kong (pictured here), Beijing, and Shanghai, which were signs of how quickly China was resuming its prior position of wealth and power.

Those of you bored with the blog format may want to check out the audio slideshow about our trip to Beijing prepared by Brittany App, our SAS photographer. It features some great photography with commentary from me and some students about our impressions of the visit.

We had the pleasure of having along with us, from Vietnam to Hong Kong, my old friend Al Reyes from Oxford days. Al served as an interport lecturer for my class and did a great job sharing with the students the many ways in which China is working to reassure its neighbors and the world that it is committed to a "peaceful rise." When we arrived in Hong Kong, Al served as our guide the first morning, taking us to a delicious dim sum place in the City Hall building, of all places!

Then we went to the Peak where we had excellent views of the Hong Kong skyline. That evening, I had an opportunity to dine on the ship with members of several of Hong Kong's leading tycoon families, including CH Tung. Mr. Tung has long-standing ties to the Semester at Sea since his father was the founder of the Institute for Shipboard Education and supplied the program with ships, but he is probably best known as the man Beijing turned to in 1997 to serve as chief executive of Hong Kong after the handover from Britain. It was great to learn of Mr. Tung's continuing support for our program and of his latest efforts to work for good China-US relations.

As some of you know, that evening in Hong Kong our voyage had its most tragic loss. One of our students, Kurt Leswing, was struck by a drunk driver and killed. The ISE website has more details. By the time the administrative team learned about this accident, I was in Beijing leading a trip there, but Jack Van de Water, Cindy Zomchek and others worked tirelessly in the next few days working with the Hong Kong authorities, the US consulate, the ISE office, Kurt's parents, and others to help everyone get through this difficult time. Students organized a wonderful tribute ceremony to Kurt's memory two nights ago on the Pacific Crossing, but his loss will certainly be one of the sharpest memories of this trip.

I shared the Beijing trip over the next four days with Melina but not Gabrielle and Isabelle since we'd decided before the voyage to take two side-trips in smaller groups: G&I went on a safari in South Africa; M&L went to Beijing. It was a great chance to share some time with Melina on a voyage where she's been spending more and more time with her peers. That's her in this photo taken our first night in Beijing, at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), which served as our host. At this evening gathering, our students had a chance to talk with a large group of fluent-English speaking students from UIBE. The kids had a great time realizing they watched some of the same TV shows and enjoyed some of the same music. By the end of the night, the UIBE students were leading ours in line dancing to mostly-American music.

The next day, we headed out to the Great Wall. It was crisp up there in the mountains where the wall runs along the ridge line for thousands of miles, a remnant of an era when this wall helped protect Chinese civilization from invading nomadic warriors from the North (most of the time). It turned out to be a great time to visit, without the crowds that no doubt filled every inch of space during the summer olympics and with the fall foliage flanking the wall on all sides.

After visiting the Wall, we headed back into town for lunch and then a trip to the Silk Market. I don't have any pictures of this shoppers' paradise, but if you ask Melina, she will certainly tell you it was one of the highlights of the trip. The place is known for having excellent imitation goods and a large number of shopkeepers who are happy to bargain. Melina really got into the sport and came away with a large number of items: two designer handbags; two pairs of True Religion jeans (the girls know this brand, I don't); a new dressy coat; earrings; and more. Even I got into it by buying a suit for $80 and a brandname jacket for $30.

The third day, we visited the Forbidden City in the morning. You can see from this photo that this was by far our most-crowded expedition yet. I couldn't believe the number of tourists, most of them Chinese, who came to this place and to Mao's mausoleum across Tiananmen Square. Still, it was fun to get a peak at the screen behind which the Empress Dowager ruled on behalf of her child emperors in the final years of the Qing Dynasty, and all of the grand gates and buildings, most of them restored to their original bright colors.

That afternoon we visited the Temple of Heaven near sunset, and the colors and shapes of that temple were even more spectacular at that hour. Here's Melina, posing in front of the temple with one of her new purses. The crowds of tourists and shops full of goods were just two of the many changes I saw in Beijing relative to the last time I had been there: in 1985 when I was just 23. Then, the streets were full of bikes and jam-packed buses, but there was virtually no traffic. Now there the city is crossed by mega-highways full of cars.

Then there was only one new hotel, the Great Wall Hotel, and the rest were dingy and run-down. The housing was low-rise and basic. Today there are so many hotels and spanking new high rises apartment blocks and businesses that the skyscrapers go on for miles. There are still soldiers in the streets, but at least some of them are smiling and enjoying themselves. I wished I could take my students back in time to see what it was like then so that they would fully appreciate how much had changed in just over 20 years.



Of course, my personal memory of China only goes back to 1984, so I can only begin to relate to how much change a middle-aged Chinese person has lived through. In class, we've talked about the famine that killed 20 million during the Great Leap Forward and the deprivations of the Cultural Revolution and how that only began to change in 1978. This picture captures for me the change that has taken place over this generation: the young son or son-in-law taking the picture is tall and well-dressed and (perhaps) urban, the parents weathered from a rough life on the farm and many years of living without, posing in front of the image that captures China's arrival as a modern, great power: the olympic Bird's Nest and Water Cube.


I wonder how much China will have changed by the time Melina and the rest of the Semester at Sea kids come back to Beijing, maybe 20 years from now, or most likely sooner. Here she is on the boat across the lake at the Summer Palace, a place that was invaded and looted by foreign troops in 1900 after the Boxer Rebellion. I can't imagine anything like that happening to the new self-confident China.