My Homepage

I work and lived for >25 years in China. I like this country very much and enjoy the kindness of the people. China, you can believe me 100 %, is the safest pleace on earth to stay and to live. Nowhere, beside my hometown,and i have visited a lot of places and countries in my life, I felt as safe as I do in China.
China is considered a "Communist" country but people here have in some areas more freedom than we experience in our extreme regulated western countries. Chinese are free to do business, free to travel, free to talk and to enjoy life as they like. There are some limits, which place has none, but beside them life is good to the chinese people and to us "laowei". For the clever guys, I don't miss porn on the web but on all other sites of interrest I never have experienced any denial of service.
When you think about China, always think about the size of this country. Think about, can your goverment handle a population of >1,3 billion people? When you stayed as long as I did and you too would have seen all the developemet and upgrade of living standard, then you understand that this goverment works hard and is doing a very good job. I hope they continue on this road with same success and attitude as they did the past 30 years.

My first trip to China was in 1984. Since that time I have seen this country changing a lot. Here I only can express my view as a foreigner and as I have seen and experienced.
China at that time, was as we the foreigner expected China to be. China was poor and a real undeveloped country.
The cloths people wearing were only available in 3 colors. They were either grey, blue or green. All girls had 2 pigtails, were skinny and all looked very much alike. At that time it was hard for a foreigner to see any difference.
We as foreign guest had to use FEC (Foreign exchange certificate) and were not allowed to use Reminbi. These FEC only were good at the (better) Hotels and the Friendship stores. FEC at beginning times couldn't be used in the street markets. Later a black market started out of nowhere and you could exchange FEC to Reminbi on almost every street corner.

Taxis could only be booked in one of the Hotels allowed to foreigner. There were none in the street. Whenever you got one, you better kept it the whole day. Most places, except the big cities, only had guest houses. Food was served only at specific times only. Hot water was only available for 2 hours at evening. Out of that time you couldn't get anything.