A pang of guilt

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My mind is mostly made up by now. I like China. The people are nice, the food is great and there's a nice energy to the place. But with this comes a bit of guilt, and this is something which I've also heard from other travellers as well.

To use a perhaps not so great analogy, it's like going to the circus, admiring the animal show and leaving with the feeling that everything was great. When you do this you ignore the fact that the animals are sometimes mistreated. In the case of China, loving the place is one thing, but in the back of your mind there is always the issue of politics.

When speaking to any Chinese, one generally avoids any controversial issues. But it is there. In the back of your mind, you keep thinking "what do these people really think about their condition?". It's one of the things I would really really like to know．

The reason I bring this up is that today I got a reminder of just that issue. The area I'm travelling through is formally Sichuan. However, this used to be part of Tibet. The people here still adhere to his holiness the you-know-who. They were very keen on letting me know this and you can see his pictures in many a back room.

Maybe it's a bit paranoid, but I think it better not to explicitly write his name. I'm still writing on a computer in China and everything here passes through firewalls and filters. You can see it when you try to access certain foreign web sites. The reason I'm writing on this website is that the place where most people keep their blogs and where I intended to write in the first place - blogspot - is firewalled by the Chinese.

So when I get back home and everyone asks "How did you like China?", there will be some ambivalence in the answer.

Food for thought...

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