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We stayed at the guesthouse of the famous Fudong University. That evening we had the first of our many discussions with our Chinese counterparts. Our hosts were mostly history professors. One of them, [name please], knew Sanskrit fluently. He had studied it from German Indologists. We found that in China there were very few academic programmes on India. The discussions were very meaningful. The whole Indian group spoke of their impressions of China in response to the Chinese friends. An important question that came up was what is the use of freedom if it does not guarantee economic security? We answered this question in our own way over the next few days, but in the process gave our Chinese counterparts the whole history of modern India.

The next morning, before leaving for Beijing, I(Makarand) went to a net café. The connection was very good and cheap. This was in a back street away from the university. People ate breakfast on the street from cheap handcarts. There is a kind of friend bread that is very popular apart from soups and cereals. Some of these streets were quite filthy. There were poorer people sitting on the pavements with signs in front of them saying that they were available for hire. I also saw a man urinating in the corner of a street, just like in India! This reassured me that in some respects the two great countries are alike. But, again, in China what I saw is probably an exception while it is a regular feature in India.

When we left the next day, we crossed Shanghai’s impressive suspension bridge across the river Huang Pu. This is a huddled city, with millions living cramped into tiny flats and quarters, like Bombay, but with much better infrastructure. There are few slums of the sort you see in Bombay. One of the most impressive features of the new Shanghai is the expressway to the airport that rides over the routine city traffic. This special ramp-highway has no traffic lights in it at all and gives the impression of gliding over the city.

Beijing is a vast, crowded city, with streets clogged with traffic. When we went shopping in the afternoon, we found ourselves caught in the traffic jam. I followed the ladies, led by Zhang Jing, Neeru, and Sudha. We went to an upmarket mall called the Hua Lim Departmental Store. It had several floors of shopping and nothing was really cheap. When we returned from our efforts in the evening, we found that the men, led by Gustavo were better shoppers! They had no inhibitions about the class of the store they went to. Gustavo got an excellent jacket for half the price that I picked up mine and while Neeru paid 600 yuan for an expensive suitcase, others had got smaller ones for as low as 100 yuan!

I noticed that everyone in Beijing seemed to have mobile phones. There were other signs of affluence too. Swanky new cars, smart clothes, and a general air of affluence. We saw comparative fewer bicycles. Gustavo and I went looking for an internet café, only to make a circle in vain. We entered a hotel where the Guest Relations manager really tried to help us despite the language barriers. It was hopeless, though. When we finally found the café late in the evening after lots of walking, the connectivity was extremely poor, unlike Shanghai. I still haven’t understood why the Internet doesn’t seem to work very well in the capital city.

The next day, we went to the Great Wall. The portion that we saw, outside Beijing, has been converted to a tourist spot. The foreign tourists frequent it. Here the old wall has been completely rebuilt or repaired. There is something quite perplexing about the Great Wall, even as the views that you can get from the top are invigorating and breathtaking. How could they have built this huge wall which stretches for 4000 kilometers? It seems such an extravagance, and yet an astounding feat of human effort and engineering. From the top of this portion of the wall, you can see it crawling in both directions for miles and miles until it disappears into the landscape.

Aesthetically, the wall isn’t very special. It is, no doubt, broad, rugged, and strong, but that’s about it. I think its symbolic significance is immense, though. It shows the Chinese people as very practical. They built it not for beauty or pleasure but for security and protection. It shows China’s self-sufficiency and insularity, but also its insecurities and fears. The wall, as we know, couldn’t really keep out intruders. Yet it served to remind whoever came into China of the greatness of the country and its people.

That afternoon, we visited the Ming Tombs. Again, we experienced a sense of the largeness and grandeur of the imperial project. Yifeng explained how the emperor buried there wasn’t really great and that this was evident from the description on his tomb. In the galleries on either side, we saw artifacts found during the excavation of the tombs. These included solid gold caskets and a large number of ornaments, suggestive of a very prosperous society. In the crypts below, there were thousands of notes strewn about as offerings. Real money, our Chinese friends told us. Again, I was surprised at how no one seemed interested in stealing it!

That evening, we had a grand dinner and a wonderful interaction with a group of Chinese intellectuals called the Yan Jing group. The conversation had many interesting ideas and asides from Neeru, Rajib, Sudha, Siddalingaiah, Makarand, and from our Chinese friends there. We drank chrysanthemum tea and talked late into the night.

The next morning, we visited the Forbidden City. It was a cold, windy day and all of us reeled under the chilly gusts. The huge gates of the city worked like wind tunnels, almost blowing us off our feet. How huge this place was, a complex of more than 9000 rooms. Certainly, it was much bigger than the Red Fort or any other palace complex that I’d seen in India or anywhere else. The Chinese sense of space is much vaster and more expansive than that of most civilizations. The Forbidden City dwarfs comparable complexes like the Chateau de Versailles or Buckingham Palace. It’s numberless pavilions hide a history that is as rich as it is complex. What we see today is in many instances restored because the main palaces were set on fire many, many times. Yet, the treasures in the various galleries are fabulous. We went to the jewelry museum and the clock museum, for instance. After much wanderings through the cypress gardens, the quarters of the concubines, the various courts and chambers, we finally reached the well in which the concubine of one of the last emperors was murdered by drowning. She was in favour of liberalizing the monarchy. She lost in the intrigue; the Dowager Princess had her killed. If the reforms had actually taken place, who know but that China might actually have been a constitutional monarchy!

I knew that such wishful thinking would take us nowhere when we came out into the open into the Tiananmen Square. Here, massive, squat, and gigantic Soviet style buildings suggested the solidity and stability of the Communist regime. Though virtually invisible, it was all-powerful. We walked past the place of the student protests to a restaurant. Again, plentiful and economical food.

As a vegetarian, I bit into meat three times all because of unintended misinformation. I would keep the prohibited dish aside and go on. Luckily, Neeru escaped from this, partly because she made me taste the food before her. Yifeng’s prediction that I would be a changed man after China was proven untrue. I guess people often underestimate the depth of a conscientious vegetarian’s seriousness of intent. Gustavo and I had a wonderful chat about this where, walking down the great wall, he accused me of hierarchizing nature. Tomatoes have feelings too, you know, he said, half seriously. I told him, that’s true, but I think the goat is closer to me than a tomato. While I share Gustavo’s notion of the sacredness of all life, I cannot subscribe to the idea that a cockroach has as much of a right to life as I do. But the really funny part of our escapade on the wall was that half of us couldn’t climb it at all. Rajib, Neeru, and Siddalingaiah refrained from the strenuous exertions and spent the time shopping instead.

That evening, our last in Beijing, we walked to a nearby mall to check our email. On the way back, with the two ladies between us, I asked Gustavo a very important question, lobbing it over the head of our companions who were speaking of more mundane things. “What is the purpose of life?” Gustavo instantly replied, “To have fun.” I shot back, “But how can one have fun?” Gustavo said, “By being naïve, by remaining innocent and full of wonder.” What a wonderful little nugget of wisdom to receive from a Chilean brother, settled in France, and walking with us with Indian and Chinese friends in Beijing.

After Beijing we flew to Changchun City, the home of our hosts, in the North Eastern part of China. On the way, we crossed the famous Yellow River, now tamed by technology, no longer the sorrow of China. We arrived late at night. The snow on the streets was not yet melted and was a dirty gray. We could easily see that we were in a less privileged part of China. The buildings and the streets were drab and shabby. There was monotony unrelieved by gardens or monuments.

Yet, we felt very much at home because of the warmth and hospitality of the people. The dinner that awaited us was truly magnificent, though some of us were too tired and full to eat. Personally, I found Changchun the best place, mostly because I was so close to the university. The sight of the academic buildings and of the young people more than compensated for the cold.

The Northeast Normal University is quite old by Chinese standards. It predates the PRC by a few years. Built during the Japanese occupation, many of its older buildings still retain that architectural style. Now, however, a ferocious rebuilding programme is turning it into a modern, fully equipped campus.

My talk the next afternoon had been well publicized. Posters had been put up all over. I spoke of contemporary India, of continuity and change. My talk was followed by presentations by Neeru and Sudha. Both of them spoke very well and very feelingly and I must say that all our presentations were well received. Several students wished to talk to us afterwards. One of them, a fresher studying English in the Foreign Languages Department, showed me around the university.

That morning, we went to the countryside and saw three rural dwellings. Compared to India’s villages, however, they were all modern and recently built, full of modern amenities. The old huts of mud and thatch have almost disappeared from China. What are termed village communities are thoroughly modernized and integrated into the new capitalistic order.

The villagers that we saw were all businessmen too, growing flower or expensive plants to augment their living. The homesteads were spacious and comfortable. The clay bed, which kept warm with the steam from the kitchen and was large enough the sleep the whole family, seemed like a wonderful, traditional technology. One of the places we visited that morning was a commercial farm, which grew and sold flowers. The profits were very high and represented a new level of rural prosperity.

I spent an extra day in Changchun with Yifeng. I sat in his office, staring at his guru’s picture while doing my email on his computer. I felt quite comfortable. He told me of his own struggle, how he came back to China after eleven years in Canada. Now, as a well-respected professor, he can do more here than in Canada. I saw in him a belief in and a commitment to the new China that was rising before our eyes. Later, I visited Yifeng’s apartment too. The building looked old and a bit run down, but the inside of the apartment was very well decorated, with a wooden floor, wallpaper, and attractive furniture.

The last day at Changchun was unforgettable for another reason. At night, Yifeng called me up to say that our friends had missed their flight from Hong Kong to Delhi. At last we failed to life up to Gustavo’s slogan for the trip, “We’re well on time; we must keep it up.” He had adopted and immortalized these lines from a stray remark of mine; but, at last, we tripped up and faltered. “We ran like dogs, Gustavo said to me when I rang him, but we couldn’t make it.”

What happened, in retrospect, was entirely avoidable and can be attributed mostly to the lack of correct information. Earlier, we’d been told that there was a direct flight from Changchun to Hong Kong. Later, we found out that there were not direct flights. So, the group decided to go to Shenzhen and then to change to Hong Kong. The flight from Changchun to Shenzhen was not direct. It reached much later than anticipated. Yifeng and I stayed up most of the night trying to resolve the crisis. We made some progress, but because I couldn’t contact our people in Hong Kong, neither of us could be very effective.

I left for Hong Kong the next morning, after bidding adieu to my friend Yifeng. We spent some precious moments together at the airport. For the first time during our stay in China, I found Yifeng totally relaxed. I completely empathized with his sense of relief after what had been a most unusual and stressful challenge.

I stayed back in Hong Kong for two nights. In a sense these were difficult days for us because our group missed their flight from Hong Kong to Delhi. Gustavo bravely shepherded them to alternate flights, but it was a harrowing time. While I was constantly in touch with our travel agent in Delhi making emergency plans, I could not get in touch with the group because the only contact we had was Gustavo’s cell phone, which for some reason, was not responding to our calls. Then Yifeng’s mobile died on him so we all lost contact. We found some irregularities at the Hong Kong airport, where the sub-agents of our airline gave our confirmed seats to others while we had to go through Singapore to reach Bombay and Bangalore. All’s well that ends well, though.

China is perhaps the only country in the world where a Communist regime has created private property. This has resulted in massive changes in every walk of life. We were witnesses to these changes. China and India constitute one third of the world population. They are both very large and diverse countries, and both are developing rapidly. The face similar challenges and problems and certainly have much to share and learn from one another. In our intercultural dialogue we felt that we had come very close to our Chinese counterparts. We had reached a luminous space where exchanges and interactions became meaningful and where the prospects for further growth seemed virtually limitless.