Journeys

China sort of met England today; the buses were on strike all day and like, well, everyone at the university like knows and there is me walking past the bus stop and there are like twelve Chinese students standing there. Now, of course, they might all have been unaware of the strike but my tendency is to think that the whole concept was outside of their thought processes. Anyway, off I went, walkie walkies, down to Uxbridge tube station, onto the metropolitian line and chug, chug, rumble, rumble into the big smoke a procedure that took longer than I expected because on arriving at Baker Street, or was it the stop before Baker Street, anyway, it doesn't matter because before getting to my destination, there was me sitting in the train and it doubled back and started going north again, so off I got at the next stop, changed trains onto the district line and started going south again.
The trip to London is always worth it though; the Beijing dumplings in my favourite little Chinese restaurant, the coffee in the 'Bar Italia', the bookshops and the city continues to atone for the hot air, huff, puff and bluff, the spin and ineffeciency that are all a part of the 'Blighty' package. The tube trip is an experience even after the slightly better "S-Bahn" and considerably better "U-Bahn" back home in Germany and when compared to the "D" trains and modern undergrounds in China ..... well there is just no comparison. We are, of course, reminded that the London underground is over a hundred years old and they are but is there not even here a suggestion that the future belongs to China?
My reading is not telling me anything new and if the suggestion above has some truth in it, there are, nevertheless, still factors, which indicate that it is not all going to be plain sailing; urban discontent can be controlled but what will happen when the 900 million or so peasants decide that enough is enough? Of course, the CCP has already made tentative efforts to tackle this problem and there was the much publicised doing away with certain taxes a couple of years ago and the promise to send all the little kiddies to school who couldn't afford to go. However, promises made in Beijing might not always reflect the reality outside the cities and with little buerocrats and party officials in the wee towns and villages, police and the like, all looking for ways to get back their lost income, a law won't be implemented or a new tax will be invented or there will be fines for this, that and the next thing; we might still get our revolution in the countryside and then there is the environment and, with the last vestiges of dirt leaving my lungs after my eighteen months, this might be a whooping great problem not only for China but for all of us. "que serra, serra, whatever will be, will be....." and the future is, indeed, not ours to see!