China (was Mike Hawash)

[Bill Stewart]

At 11:02 AM 05/01/2003 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote:
>Sunder wrote...
>
>"Not that I've been there, but the last I heard, China was still an 
>almosttotalitarian communist state and free travel in China is not possible."
>Your information is almost staggeringly out of date. Even in the late 
>1980s when I lived in China it was easy to move about freely (well, easy 
>isn't quite the right word when you couldn't book any rail tickets 
>remotely or in advance!).

Interesting.  I've recently been reading a book by a guy who spent
much of the mid-90s illegally tramping around the ethnic areas of
western China (particularly the Tibet/Burma borders with Sichuan and Yunnan)
trying not to get thrown out of the country too often.

He was a broke trekker crewing for a crazy French photographer who
wanted to document some of the minority cultures that
Westerners had never seen before the Han government and Western television
homogenized them into history, so perhaps that didn't make things easier;
sometimes they were able to get permits for some of the areas
(though not usually where they really wanted to go...)
and sometimes they were able to bribe officials into ignoring them,
but they kept getting caught and jailed and kicked out,
because foreigners weren't  allowed there.