heya, cheers for all the responses!
um, in terms of where i went, we pretty much covered all of the Tibetan Plateau, and loads of the little towns and villages in Sichuan Province, plus we did all the usual big cities and sights as well
so that's why i got to be nude a lot, cos we spent most of our time either up mountains or in the countryside! I watched the opening ceremony naked in a sauna in a Tibetan cafe of all places
you can't really beat that!
Dario, yeah i agree with you on the human rights issues, i'm a member of the Campaign for Tibet and Human Rights In China, and i was always against the Olympics being held there. but being inside the country while all the preparations were going on, and for the start of the games has changed my opinions slightly.
First, all this stuff about the Chinese government being completely open with foreign journalists is, frankly, simple lies. I saw literally hundreds of cases of oppression while i was there, cos we travelled to pretty much all the disputed areas in the country. The Three Gorges Dam Project along the Yangtze is destroying far more lives than has been documented; the Chinese government has created an unmistakable smokescreen around Tibet, and they are blocking any news from entering or leaving the region during the games (or certainly during the time i was there).
Also, despite all this talk of politics not entering into the Olympics, the Chinese government is definitely using the Olympics in a shocking way to forward its politics. Every villager we talked to had stories about how the government had "re-claimed" at least a part of their profits or land (every Chinese person only "loans" his/her land from the government, which effectively means that it's theirs until China decides it wants it back, then they can't do anything), but most of them were completely brain-washed into believing that the government had done it for the right reasons, even if it had forced them into poverty as a result.
But on the whole, politics is surprisingly open in China, meaning that people will normally happily talk to you about issues one-on-one, even though they would never dream of voicing their opinions out loud. The Olympics has definitely helped the Chinese people in some ways, it's certainly created literally millions of jobs and all the services and amenities in China are top-notch, but you can see it having repercussions for many people further down the line.
Overall, the main thing i learnt in China is that 90% of the population are genuinely happy - the political system doesn't really affect their lives and the government leaves them alone. It's just with that 10% that you see what the government can really be like.
herooftime - i know a lot of Chinese people that would be very pissed off with that quote
thanks for all the replies, guys!
