Smoggey China

[leon]

Hi Guys, this is no disrespect to any Chinese person or relatives thereof.
But how the hell dose anyone use a scope in china

Leon

[citivolus (Ric)]

About as easily as anyone in Melbourne

I've spent a few months in Beijing, and it does have its clear days.

Regards,
Eric

[gary]

I first went to Beijing in 1984. Except for the buses and some taxis,
it was essentially a city of millions of bicycles. There certainly were
no privately owned cars and the very few cars on the road were primarily
for officials. You couldn't hail a taxi in the street. You had to go to
a special taxi booking desk in a hotel and then wait around up to
half an hour before one of the drivers sitting next to you in the lobby
would feel motivated enough to get up and drive you. It was a relatively
quiet place except for the tinkling sound of millions and millions of bicycle bells.

As a foreigner, even in Tien Mien Square or the Forbidden City, you
were somewhat of a curiosity and now and then some people
would be so shocked at the sight of you as to give out a little startled scream.
It was if you were from Mars. Foreigners were thin enough on the ground that
they would usually acknowledge each other with a glance, a nod or a smile
if they passed each other.

This is long before China transformed itself into an industrial powerhouse.
The waiting list for a bicycle was several years. Nobody owned a camera.
If you were lucky, you had a black and white group portrait taken by a professional
using a Chinese Box Brownie look-alike large format camera called a "Seagull".
Travel by Chinese within China was somewhat controlled by the issuing of
food rationing coupons which could only be redeemed in the province in which
they were issued.

Yet Beijing was often atmospherically hazy even then. The yellow dust from the
Gobi desert which would get blown in from the north combined with other
meteorological conditions resulted in the sky transparency often being poor.

Today, the millions of cars and the output of coal fired power stations have
made Beijing far worse, as has been shown on the TV over the past few months.

However, it always seemed to me, even twenty-four years ago, that Beijing
would not be high on the list of places to go for clear skies. Therefore, when they
announced the Olympics to be held there several years ago, I foresaw that
that there would be complaints about the air quality long before the media
started to run with the story.

It certainly is a place that has undergone remarkable transformation in such
a relatively short space of time.

Best regards

Gary

[leon]

Thank You for that informative information Gary, I have learned something today.

Leon

[Kal (Andrew)]

Fascinating read Gary. How many times have you been back there, if any?

[GrahamL]

At the last ISWAN I sent out an email to many registered participants
from around the world... from russia ,south america,india and china
a lot replied..we are many and we DO share a common love of the
night sky !!!..no matter what we have to wade through to experiance it

[Louwai (Bryan)]

I know exactly what you mean Gary.
I lived with my family in a regional Chinese city for 2yrs.
This "regional" city had a population of 5 million, & when we were there this city had a foreign population of 52. Yep, 52.
You might say we had to learn Chinese pretty quick.

And yes, there wasn't a day go by in 2yrs that we didn,t meet a local who had never even seen a foreigner, let alone met one.

Was one of the best 2yrs of my life to date. I get back there every couple of yrs to visit friends & business.

Here's a pic of a local lady with our little one & a pic of my wife on the street shopping.

[UniPol]

I spent a couple of weeks in Beijing during the winter of 1999 and the only thing I saw in the sky was the sun and moon, even then the moon was the wrong way around.

[gary]

Originally Posted by Kal

Fascinating read Gary. How many times have you been back there, if any?

Hi Andrew,

I returned to Beijing again around late '94. Already things were starting to change.
Whereas many of the young women were starting to wear colorful fashionable
clothing and were getting their hair styled, to the point that they wouldn't
look out of place in Singapore, the men just didn't get it. They were still
wearing the same dowdy blue and grey Mao suits and baggy pants.
It was pretty clear that the women had raised the personal appearance bar
and that the men didn't realize that they would be forced to soon follow.

The television showed a society in transition. There were the same
Party produced politically correct programs but now and then some
western programming, such as a Chinese dubbed version of Kingergarten
Cop with Arnold Schwarzenegger, punctuated with professionally made
ads for designer hair shampoo, complete with girls waving shiny long hair in
slow motion, then followed in juxtaposition by ads for pig food, complete with
men in dowdy blue baggy pants wading through mud in gum boots feeding
pigs.

In '94 compared to '84, people now owned their own cameras. Not just any cameras,
but *digital cameras*. Keep in mind that at that time in the West,
digital cameras were also around, but still somewhat a novelty and most of
us were still shooting on film. Meanwhile, the Chinese were making these
digital cameras by the millions and equivalent numbers of Chinese families were buying
them. That and their first television sets. It was just like the West in
the '50's and '60's when some of the first commodity luxuries families
would splurge on would be a camera to take family snapshots and
a television to entertain themselves.

The airport terminal had changed from the big shed it had been in the
80's, with its antiquated display cabinets showcasing the products and
supposed benefits of harvesting bears for their bile, to an airport as modern
as anywhere in the world, thankfully with those horrid display
cabinets now removed. Apparently that airport has in turn been replaced
by what someone who returned from there only a few weeks ago
described to me as "possibly the most architecturally impressive
building they had ever seen in the world'.

As I am often fond of saying, you can never really say you have been
to a place, only to a particular place at a particular point in time.
The march of time and historical events change places so that they become
different places.

Last year I stood looking the short distance across the river from Lao Cai,
in north-west Vietnam, to the town of Hekou, in Yunan Province, China.
It was immediately obvious from the number of modern buildings in
Hekou which of the two countries was the more economically prosperous.

Best Regards

Gary

[gary]

Originally Posted by Louwai

Was one of the best 2yrs of my life to date. I get back there every couple of yrs to visit friends & business.

Hi Louwai,

Sounds like it was a really fabulous opportunity in an interesting place
and great to hear you get the chance to get back to visit. It must be interesting
for you to be able to watch things change over time.

Thanks also for the snapshots.

Best regards

Gary