Chongqing

I arrived in Chongqing at 6:45am and despite the rain opted to walk to the city centre through the faceless plethora of identikit skyscrapers to the tree lined avenue along the murky banks of the Yangtze, strolling past the early morning tai-chi practitioners all getting their daily fix of escapism from the relentless churn of the megacity, albeit a psychological escape.

Unlike the other large cities I’ve been to, my first impressions of Chongqing were exactly how I expected it to be. It’s a true megalopolis, it’s gritty, it is grey and it smells. People who travel are usually in constant pursuit of beauty, but what’s beautiful isn’t necessarily very interesting.  It may not be pretty but I find Chongqing a fascinating place. It’s the fastest growing city in the world. This time next year it will have 800,000 more inhabitants than it does now, the majority of which will be unskilled peasants who can’t resist the lure of the big city, a story that’s being told throughout China and the developing world in general. If I had grown up all my life in rural China hearing stories about the great quality of life in the city, I’d maybe feel a sense of betrayal once I arrived. The majority of the rural population in China have much larger homes than city dwellers; they have better air quality, fresher food, serenity, a sense of community, respite from the constant hooting of car horns and more time on their hands. The average wealth may be far higher in Chongqing than the surrounding countryside but I’m sceptical that this equates to a better quality of life.

The initial population boom in Chongqing occurred with the construction of the 3 Gorges Dam downstream from Chongqing. The dam is one of the largest in the world. The flooded area caused by the dam is said to be the length of England. I’m dubious of any statement made in China that involves figures. The flooded area doesn’t look big on Google Earth and the woman who insists that Chongqing has a population of 50 million just doesn’t have a clue. Regardless of how big the flooded area is, whole towns and villages were taken off the map and many of the 1.3 million displaced people were rehoused in Chongqing. The central government have since invested huge amounts of money in the infrastructure of Chongqing and it’s continued to grow at a phenomenal rate.

I imagine Chongqing now to be very similar to New York 100 years ago with huge amounts of people migrating in search of a better life resulting in the skyline mushrooming vertically, and a sense of eternal optimism for the future which blinds them of the present grime and squalor. Like Manhattan, Chongqing is limited in its outward expansion. Whereas Manhattan is limited by water, Chongqing has two rows of parallel mountains running along the whole length of the city. Only Dubai can rival Chongqing for the sheer volume of skyscraper construction. But whereas the construction in Chongqing is fuelled by a demand in the here and now, the demand for tall buildings in Dubai is fuelled merely by the speculation of international investors who have no sense of connection to the city and wealthy Arab Sheiks who are essentially just a bunch of Peter Pans, playing a sort of game of Lego for grown up, spoilt, rich boys. I know what I prefer, Chongqing is messy, but it’s real.

Chongqing is known as one of the 3 furnaces of China alongside Wuhan and Hangzhou. I was in Hangzhou in mid-September and that truly was a furnace. In early November Chongqing feels like Scotland in May or June. It’s very hilly and has lots of alleyways with steep steps. Not one street runs in a straight line. It makes it very difficult to get from A to B without a map. Streets often do horseshoe turns then go under or over the street you just walked along. Navigating using common logic takes you round in circles.

It is said that the Chongqing hotpot is the spiciest dish in the world. It is basically a big bowl of chilli broth that gets roasted at your table and you put in whatever ingredients you want. It is a dish that is to be shared. I met a group of Swedish guys and asked them if they wanted to share a hot pot. We went to KFC instead and they even made sure they didn’t get anything spicy from there. They did have an all-day train journey the following day starting at 6am, I can understand why they would not want hotpot. They said I’m turning into a Chinese person. I guess it’s a fair conclusion to come to when I light up a cigarette in a fast food restaurant, stub it out on the floor, spit on the street and have a complete disregard for traffic laws but it’s just a phase, I’ll snap out of it as soon as I leave. I would have liked to have tried a hot pot but I won’t feel my journey through China is incomplete until I’ve had what locals claim to be the spiciest dish in the world. I’m sure there are many regions of the world that claim this accolade. I was flicking through a Chongqing photo book that had some captions and the occasional paragraph or two. I was reading that one of Chongqing’s streets recently received the National Award for “Model Demonstration Street in the National Campaign against Fake Commodities”. Whether or not Chongqing has the spiciest dish is irrelevant, there is an accolade Chongqingers can be rightly proud of. Go Chongqing. You show them how it’s done.

Additional Information

·         Apart from the KFC I can’t remember when I last ate meat. Were it not for Powder Milk in my coffee I’d have been living a vegan lifestyle for the past month or so.

·         I eat a kilo of tangerines a day. I buy two Jin a day. I think that’s one kilo.

·         Most estimates put the population of Chongqing as between 5 and 35 million. I’d say it’s closer to 5.

·         I haven’t lost a pair of glasses since I was in Shanghai.

·         I haven’t cut my hair in 14 months. It normally looks quite short due to my curls but when I get out of the shower I look like Ace Ventura, quality.

·         I look like a cross between Jimi Hendrix and Where’s Wally the rest of the time.

·         I can almost sit in full lotus position.

·         Life is good.

·         I got the population of Yangshuo wrong. The county as a whole has 300,000. I don’t know the population of the town.

I know I said the Terracotta Warriors were not worth seeing but I really wanted to visit Jiuzhaigou and I didn’t want to go to there and backtrack the same way I came to Chengdu so I opted to go to Xi’an instead. The only roads from Jiuzhaigou through Western Sichuan and into Yunnan that don’t go via Chengdu cut through Tibet and foreigners aren’t allowed to travel independently in Tibet. I’m not paying for a Tibetan permit anyway. The money from the permit goes towards the heavy handed policing of Tibet. Besides, the masses of tourists all seem to have left China months ago so I predicted crowds to being not that bad in Xi’an. I’m a bit nervous about Jiuzhaigou and Western Sichuan. It’s going to be mid-November by the time I get there and the average height in the area is 4000m. I only have one jumper, no warm jacket and my sleeping bag has a comfort level of +15degrees.  I want to get through it and have time to see Yunnan province but because I am going from 200m above sea level to an average height of 4000m I can’t afford to rush up to the Tibetan Plateau too quick or else a heavy dose of altitude sickness is on the cards. 

Guiyang

I arrived in Guiyang at night and tried all the run down budget hotels that align the streets surrounding the train station. None of them accepted foreigners.  The CCP have a really annoying system. Every time you check in somewhere the hostel has to scan your passport and fill out a form that gets sent to the government so that the Public Security Bureau can keep a log of everywhere a foreigner stayed during their visit to China. Theoretically I should phone up the PSB every time I camp to let them know where I am; theoretically the system is for my own security. Only a small percentage of hotels and hostels have a license to fill out the necessary forms. They do pointless security checks even on journeys from tiny villages to other tiny villages just in case someone wants to blow up the bus. The paranoia of the CCP is beginning to get on my nerves, whether it is bag scanning at bus stops, snooping on where I stay or the government hijacking of the internet. I can’t imagine how it must be in Xingjiang or Tibet, two regions where there has been a lot of unrest and consequently a huge volume of resources poured into police surveillance. If I lived here in China I reckon I’d be filled with revolutionary zeal. Speaking of which, I personally sense absolutely no revolutionary zeal in China. China is changing so rapidly that if anything, people here crave a sense of stability and continuity. The recent uprisings in the Middle East took place in countries heavily affected by the downturn in the global economy. Chinas economy dropped from 9.5% annual growth to 9.3% (or something trivial like that). As long as there is continued economic growth I feel the Chinese people will see no reason to rise up against their government. In China I sense a feeling of indifference to political issues. Like westerners, they seem more interested in their equivalent of X-Factor or American Idol than political issues. Mainstream Chinese society is as docile as mainstream Western society and without a free media, I feel it’s unlikely that the masses will generate an interest in political issues, let alone have the ability to mobilise grassroots socio-political change. Then again, I commented on how wonderfully harmonious Brixton was back in August, 3 weeks later there were riots and looting galore. If you have any wisdom whatsoever, then you’ll not take any of my sociological analysis too seriously. Despite moaning about the CCP I admire the ecological implications of the government’s 5 year economic plan and if all their plans come to fruition, China will significantly help the world in becoming more sustainable and less dependent on fossil fuels. Besides, drilling for oil is a form of grave robbery. Oil may have been from plankton and other single cell life forms but they were still life forms nevertheless and deserve to rest in peace. R.I.P my photo and phyto-planktonic friends. Gone but not forgotten. Anyway, the one advantage of a one party government is that they get things done without the hassles that a pluralistic society naturally brings. All their previous 5 year plans have been effective and as far as dictatorships go, China is by no means the worst and so long as the populace continue to be so docile regarding their lack of freedoms the government will continue to be a long way from being the worst. If there were widespread protests in China like we’ve seen in the Middle East I don’t know how far the government would go to hold onto their power, I like to think not as badly as Syria. Who knows….Political rant over.,,,,

Guiyang is the capital of the poorest province in China. It is said that Guizhou is missing 3 important things, 3km of flat land, 3 days of good weather per year and 3 Kuai in anyone’s pocket. I definitely agree with the flat land bit. The only flat land I saw in the rural areas was either flooded rice paddies or fields of newly planted crops. It’s a nightmare finding somewhere to camp. If accommodation hadn’t been so cheap it would have really irritated me. I got amazing luck regarding my weather in Guizhou. I saw patches of blue sky in Zhaoxing one afternoon and had one of the 3 annual days of proper sunshine whilst in Guiyang. The city has many homeless people, comparable to European numbers. A significantly high proportion of the older men wear Mao suits and the little blue caps. China is a country of great contrasts and it should come as no surprise that the appeal of communally owned wealth appeals more in China’s poorest province. I don’t think I saw one Mao suit in Shanghai. It’s not all doom and gloom. There are some modern gleaming buildings (gleaming but very kitsch) being built in between the shabby ones but even the centre of Guiyang has the rundown feel of a small provincial town but without the small town levels of traffic. Despite its lack of development in comparison to the rest of China I still felt a sense of optimism amongst its inhabitants and I bet that even the homeless people had 3 kuai to burn. Maybe the aforementioned saying is just a saying. Guiyang’s worth a day’s visit if you’re passing through anyway. I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it.

Back on the Job hunt

On the advice of fellow nomads I left Basha for Zhaoxing where I was told there’d be Dong construction a plenty. I no longer have an alarm clock as my phone broke in Fenghuang and I slept in for the only direct bus. Instead I walked and hitch hiked back to Congjiang then boarded a bus for Luoxiang through a windy valley with potholes galore. Luoxiang is the biggest cesspit I’ve been to in China. There are no paved roads and open sewers. The edge of the town has all been dug up and is full of large piles of grit and red soil which have been dumped on the edge of town for the huge freeway that’s getting built at the top of the valley. It had been raining and the water flowing through the town had a rich red hue as a consequence of all that digging. I got lunch at the market in the centre of town then decided to walk to Zhaoxing as it was only 6 or 7km. the best thing about this place was seeing a middle aged woman walking alongside me who was on her way home from the market wearing high heels, a short skirt and suspenders. It looked so surreal seeing her dressed up so well, dodging the potholes, huge red puddles and dog pooh as she made her way home past grubby old concrete houses and rusty 3 wheeled Lorries.

I came to Zhaoxing just in time. Once the highway gets completed I can imagine it will become just like Fenghuang; lacking in authenticity, full of loud karaoke bars, aggressive salesmen in shops selling identical tacky tourist products and loud and obnoxious Han tourists with little respect for local Dong culture. At the moment the vast majority of shops in Zhaoxing are aimed at locals, the markets sell food instead of fake antiques and wooden frogs. Although lots of shops and restaurants have made English signs and menus, by and large it is a Dong village. The Drum Towers have far more old men whiling away time and children playing than tourists taking photos. There is a fair amount of construction going on at the edge of the village. Unfortunately the construction is largely done with concrete, wood is added to the exterior to make it look old and traditional. Although I’m disappointed in this, at least they are making the new builds blend in with their surroundings which is a lot better than what is going on in a lot of other places with historical architecture, (such as Fenghuang, have you gathered that I don’t like that place)? 

I had a walk up to a cluster of villages at the top of the valley looking for some casual labour. There were a lot of half constructed buildings en route but no work going on at the time. The wood in most of them had lost its fresh tone of beige so I’m assuming they’d been lying there unfinished for some time. The houses that were being worked on were all nearing completion. I feel lucky just to have seen a frame going up. Given that they go up in a day I can’t imagine that happens on a regular basis. I made two children cry on my wanders around the villages. One was about four and the other was about two. Poor wee things, maybe it’s time for another shave. The wee two year old was howling and banging on his door so that his mother would let him in. I don’t feel I’m ‘off the beaten track’ but the kids obviously haven’t seen many stray waiguoren walking about their village.

The drum towers in those villages are centuries old and have flaking depictions of what local life would have been like painted on the sides of them.  The majority of pictures are of ceremonies, farming and romantic scenes of men seducing women by reciting poetry or playing their bamboo flutes. Having heard these flutes being played on numerous occasions I would say it’s less seduction, more wearing her down. One of the drum towers depicted Tigers, Pandas, Elephants, Crocodiles, Peacocks, some type of Deer rutting, and elegant species of birds that are nothing like anything I’ve seen so far in China. One was like a Toucan and another looked like a bird of Paradise, a species found only in New Guinea. It’s quite sad that this is how things used to be not so far in the distant past. Tigers are pretty much extinct in Southern China, There are some in the far north, wild Elephants are now restricted to a small pocket of forest in Yunnan by the Burmese and Laos border and Pandas are found merely in isolated patches of bamboo forest in Sichuan. It’s sad that the Chinese have lost such great biodiversity in such a short period of time but as a European who am I to criticise. We got rid of all our large wild mammals when Neanderthals were still part of the equation. We got rid of them too, allegedly, although when I’ve seen a group of neds out drunk on a Saturday night, symbolically beating their hairy chests I have pondered the thought that they are carrying some interbred Neanderthal genes. Maybe I’m being unjustifiably prejudiced about Neanderthal intelligence.

 The bye bye kids. That's the only English they know.

 One of the two kids I made cry.

 Pigs in China are fattened up in cages all their lives and are unable to walk when ready for market.

Because I don’t like going back the same way I came I opted to go north to Liping and then southwest to Rongjiang rather than take the logical route via a return trip to Congjiang. This would not be a recommended route for those who suffer from travel sickness. It’s only 64km to Liping and took three and a half hours. I’d have been almost as quick by bike. The majority of people who go to minority villages in Guizhou do so in and around Kaili and I’ve been told they are nice but extremely overly touristy, probably like Fenghuang (did I tell you I didn’t like that place)? I don’t think I’ll regret giving them a miss.

 Liping Bus station

The following day I flew through Southern Guizhou via Kaili until I reached the capital, Guiyang. It was another long slog out of Southern Guizhou. Roads continued to be terrible for much of the way. With all the highways being built, this will be irrelevant in a year, possibly less. Coming to think of it, pretty much everything I’ve written about China will become dated very soon. Travel Books need to get updated every couple of months. In a way this makes travelling through China feel more special. Although I would have far preferred to have come here 10 years ago, before domestic tourism really kicked off, whenever you visit China, you are witnessing a nation in transition.

Hippy loggers

I got a meal of tofu and rice with some veg and lots of chillies for about the eight day in a row then headed to Basha. Basha is a strange village. The people are of Miao ethnicity and still live as the rest of the Miao people would have lived hundreds of years ago despite being just a few miles up the hill from the grotty and thoroughly modern town of Congjiang; it is like a scene out of a Jackie Chan movie. The men wear baggy ¾ length trousers with traditional green and black shoes and loose navy collarless shirts. They have embroidered tassels that hang down their backs and carry knives everywhere they go. Basha is the only place in China where guns are legalised. In the government’s attempt to preserve historical culture, the men are permitted to carry muskets for hunting small mammals that they find in the forest. Their heads are shaved leaving just a little tut at the top. They shave their heads with big curvy meat cleavers with no water or cream. The children, boys and girls have long hair that doesn't get cut until they become young adults. The women wear brightly coloured Miao clothing even when in the rice fields (not just for the cameras). The Basha believe that trees are gods and worship their ancestors using trees as a medium.

Although it's really nice that there are still villages in China that haven;t become homogenised, one of the reasons this one hasn't modernised is because they are a bit suspicious (and indifferent) of outsiders. At times I felt a bit uncomfortable wandering around their village. the women often made themselves busy as I passed so not to make eye contact. When I did make eye contact with people as I made my way around their winding muddy paths the onus was on me to say hello. This is often the case in China but usually people's faces light up when you say 'Ni hao' and they reply back with real enthusiasm. In Basha I'd get a reluctant and unenthusiastic response, from some older people, they'd just stare at me gormlessly. I felt like I was under surveillance. Sometimes I'd turn around and see a head quickly pop back in the doorway to hide. When things like that happen, you become aware of the sound of the air even if there is no breeze, you become aware of just how loud your footsteps are and the rustling of your clothes as you move. I felt more in tune with the myriads of ducks, chickens and dogs that would roam around freely than with the people. The Basha are by no means hostile, but at times it felt eerie and I was glad to leave the village and wander aimlessly around the surrounding countryside even in the drizzle just to pass the time. The landscape is top class even in poor weather. There are rice terraces in the lower parts of the valley, while the upper part is forested with the wooden houses condensed into tight clusters at the top. I followed a muddy path around several valleys. For a tribe that believe trees are gods they do seem to participate in a substantial amount of commercial logging. I guess even in the remote, archaic communities, nothing is more holy than money. Occasionally I'd think I was alone in the forest then I'd hear a local gather up some phlegm from the depths of their lungs. China banned spitting in the run up to the Beijing Olympics and even though this failed to eradicate the habit, spitting is not as common as I'd anticipated. My Irish friend Willie visited China some years ago and told me that the Chinese just permanently howk up greeners, any time, any place. True, I've seen some people spitting on the floors of restaurants and in public transport but it's not the norm. In Northern Guangxi and Guizhou I've often seen people who spit more or less constantly. It doesn't bother me. Although I'm no longer smoking the cheapest (and therefore coarsest) cigarettes available, I do find myself howking as well from time to time. My ones are pitiful. There is a skill to howking. I;d compare my one to a quiet pussy cat miao in comparison to a lions roar from the locals. I've always wanted to make the world a greener place but this isn't how I envisioned it.

The highlight of my day in Basha was meeting a middle aged French woman who shared her coffee with me. We sat on the bench outside her hotel for a couple of hour's, sipped coffee, chain smoked and chatted whilst the dog permanently scratched it's ticks. She too felt the atmosphere in Basha was not as warm as in the rest of China and enjoyed her walk through the countryside more than being in the village, despite the rustic charms that Basha clearly has in abundance.

 Basha men thinking they're hard

 Basha girls doing some sewing. Apparently old women spend years putting elaborate stitching on their funeral dresses.

 Chillies left out to dry.

Job hunting

My first port of call after leaving Guilin was Ping’an, a small village situated on the Longji rice terraces. The terraces are a mile from top to bottom on a steep mountain side and are aptly named the dragon backbone terraces. I’ve never seen a dragon’s back bone but presume that the vertebrae of a dragon look just like the silhouette of the terraces. The contours are pretty spectacular even if it’s not the best time of year to visit. They remind me of maps showing the elevation levels of land. I liked looking at a person working in the distance then looking at the vast terraces and reminding myself that those little specs in the distance, armed with only buckets and spades sculpted these mountainsides, mind boggling. I camped out above the village and got morning views all to myself before the drove of bus tours of day-trippers from Guilin arrived. By the time the masses swarmed the scene I had unsuccessfully been to two villages looking for ‘dagong’ (casual labour). Despite being surrounded by wooden houses I failed, possibly because the note specifies dong houses and not the wooden houses of the numerous other ethnic minorities that live in the area. At least I got a free breakfast of rice, garlic omelette, extremely chewy, lukewarm beef and fried grasshoppers from some guys. I had knocked on their door because they appeared to have a half constructed house next door, never mind. My note quite clearly said I didn’t want money for work and the guys said several times that they didn’t want money for the meal they gave me. It’s quite refreshing to be amongst Chinese who do not try and make every situation into a business opportunity. The grasshoppers were very well cooked. If all Chinese meats were as thoroughly cooked as those grasshoppers, I’d probably have visited the bathroom one third of what I have done in the past 2 months and those occasional visits to the lavatories would have been far less traumatic.

 Hmmm...... Difficult decision

I’ve noticed myself getting a bit hacked off lately, I don’t think I was getting a cultural superiority complex like so many of the expats I’ve met (despite coming from a culture that has an infinitely better alphabet than them), I was just getting a bit disenfranchised with the Chinese and preferring to hang about with westerners than make the effort to learn about the locals. Being properly in Rural China (Yangshuo doesn’t count) has reinvigorated my enthusiasm for Chinese culture. Stories such as Auras aforementioned shield spear one has also reignited my sense of curiosity in what is the oldest continual civilisation in the world.

I went from Ping’an to Sanjiang which I heard was near many Dong villages. Sanjiang’s a dive, I only walked 10 metres out the bus station then jumped into a mini bus and escaped to a cluster of Dong villages. I really like the villages. Some locals dress in traditional clothing even when they aren’t trying to sell things to tourists. The women wear brightly coloured towels on their head. The bridges here are really nice. They call them wind and rain bridges, presumably because they protect from the wind and rain.

I bumped into Aura for the third time (we bumped into each other briefly for the second time in Guilin) then went looking for Dong construction sites. I found a house being erected in the village of Pingpu. There were about 30 people working on it and about another 30 (mainly old men) watching. The whole community gets involved. The women cook meals for the workers and there is a big rice basket in the middle of where they cut the wood full of cigarettes for anyone to help themselves whenever they please. The whole framework of a 4 story building was completed in about 6 hours. I would have loved to have helped but with so many people moving around all knowing exactly what was going on I would have just got in the way. The different components are slotted in place in synchrony so by the time I’d have worked out what I was being told to do I’d have held up everyone else. I learned a lot from watching and there are definitely elements of Dong houses that I’d like to incorporate into my own future home. I won’t bore you with pictures of mortises and roof trusses or 29 minutes of construction videos but here is a picture or 2 of the construction site.

I spent the evenings making a 3D model of a dong house. If I choose to build my own one I can adjust the size of the model then I’ll have all the measurements for the various bits of timber. I could have done a bit of labouring in houses that are nearing completion but the aesthetics of Dong houses are not what appeals to me, it’s there frames constructed entirely of wood with no nails used that intrigues me. From watching them to do it, I reckon I have a fairly good idea of how it’s done. I could always build a hut in this style before building anything that’s a major investment just to get a bit of practice. This is China, labour is plentiful and I guess I was a bit naïve in hoping that they would love the help from an outsider even if communication would be painfully slow and the outsider didn’t have a clue how to build anything. 

I continued on my journey west to the town of Congjiang in Guizhou Province. It looks close on the map but with the winding path, innumerable potholes, the amount of construction vehicles and piles of cement and various other minerals placed precariously on the roadside meant that the journey was long but as always, not dull. I had mixed feelings about this area. While the mountainous scenery with its forests, rivers and terraced fields are very striking, the amount of forestry and mining is staggering. Whole hillsides are disappearing to feed the greatest mass migration in human history, the migration of hundreds of millions of Chinese from rural to urban life. If they were building utopian cities I wouldn’t mind. They’re not. I hope the ducks found the trip as interesting as I did. They were in potato sacks strapped on the roof with holes cut in the sacks for them to enjoy the view. The Chinese are very conscientious in that way, every duck deserves a good view.

I passed one small town that I’d guess had a population of only a few thousand. The biggest building in the town was a Family Planning Clinic. It was a big concrete building that stood out like a sore thumb amongst the surrounding wooden ones. I started counting the amount of girls in comparison to boys as the children walked home from school. When I passed a crowd of kids in Congjiang I reckon it was close to two boys for every girl. Maybe the girls were just hiding from the scary ‘waiguoren’ with the big afro. I had tried to guess how many young boys there were in comparison to girls when I first arrived in China but lost interest when I could not see any comparable difference. The Chinese love kids, they are revered as much as old people and I have got the impression that they have just as much adoration for girls as they do for boys. I guess that my analogy is right but it only applies to the families who chose not to abort their females. It’s surprised me that there would be a significant difference in male to female ratio in Congjiang. The one child policy only applies to Han Chinese. Ethnic minorities can still have multiple children and Han Chinese in rural China can have a second child if their first one is a girl so that they’ll have help on the farm (not that many kids male or female stay in the villages once they are old enough to leave) (and not that the females on the farms don’t put in their fair share of hard labour). Maybe my observations were coincidental, but it got me wondering.

I’ve been told that there are 25 million boys in China who will never get married. This has resulted in boys becoming very vain and slightly effeminate in their quest to being attractive to the young ladies who can afford to be choosy regardless of their own luck in the gene pool. The guys take as much care with their hair and skin as even the most superficial of Hollywood girls. It is a paradox that there are more boys than girls because boys are seen as more valuable. As a result girls in many ways have more power than males, they can behave however they want and their boyfriends will still grovel with their heads bowed and their tails between their legs because they need to take whatever opportunity they can get. There is no government pension scheme in China therefore bearing children and having grandchildren is hugely important. The chances of a Chinese couple yielding grandchildren are significantly higher if they have a girl. Surely girls are now more valuable than boys. Although some of the consequences of the one child policy disgust me, I believe that at some point in our future, humanity as a whole will either be faced with the choice of having a population at high risk of famine or living in a society that places control over birth rates. Even in the most chauvinistic of countries, equilibrium would eventually sort itself out. Even in Saudi Arabia families would eventually groan in despair at the sight of yet another boy who has little to no chance of sowing his seeds. The higher the percentage of parents aborting girls in favour of boys will result in the decrease of value in boys.  If I was Chinese I’d abort a boy just to save money on hairspray and facial cleanser alone. Many young Chinese guys remind me of Paris Hilton, no cleavage, and not much interest in any non-trivial subject either.