Guangzhou

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The second day of our trip in Guangzhou was relatively low key, especially compared to our action packed days in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Macau. For breakfast we had one piece of bread, and one piece of cake. This was Guangzhou’s form of a western breakfast. The cake was different because it had dried pork on it, which gave the cake an interesting flavor.

Today’s lecture was on politics in China. The lecturer began with a joke which explained the interweaving of politics. The he continued by explaining the rulers, going into great detail about Mao and Deng. He gave a good lecture, but I would have appreciated more information about the current president Hu Jintao and how he differs from the former rulers, because I think China cooperates more on the world scene than ever before.

This afternoon we had a field trip to “work shops” near the Sun Yat-Sen campus. We saw cloth stores, small places to buy food, electronics, barber shops. It was an interesting arrangement of stores. We went through a back alley and saw workers sewing clothing and fixing electronics. Our guide from the University told us that most people that work and live there are migrant workers. Local people do not buy any of their good from the area. If a local person buys an apartment there, they normally rent it out to migrant workers. I have no pictures because we were advised not to take them to avoid attention that we did not want.

Tomorrow we will be hearing two lectures, one on the Pearl River delta and the other on the Economic and Social transformation of China. Something different that we are doing after lecture is that we are interacting with local media practitioners and migrant workers in the Xiaozhou Village. I am interested to hear about the media in mainland China especially with the heavy censorship.

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