In the past 6 years I have traveled to China 14 times. I visited the "Asian giant" regularly about every 5 months, stays between 10 and 15 days each time. The experience of traveling to China, (and also Australia, Japan, Bangladesh, etc) has helped me so I can realize how far we are, far and away. Asia has nothing to do with Europe, culturally or in any other way, at least for now.
Many of us, educated in the West, with virtually unlimited access to information channels and regular travellers, we believe we have a global view of the world. It may be true, but so is that it is a distorted view.
Referring to China, it is virtually impossible to get an idea of what is really meant by the term "Asian giant" without having travelled through its "highways", visited their "industrial estates" or seen the ports of Hong Kong, Shanghai, Ningbo, Qingdao, Guangzhou, ... any of them ridicule any Spanish ports or even Louisiana (one of the largest in USA). Only Rotterdam and Singapore handled a similar traffic and that is because the former is a distribution centre for Europe and the second is hub for routes from China/Asia. We can see the figures, we can read hundreds of articles, see photos and videos and we will believe to have a clear idea of the dimension we are talking about, but surely if you visit these ports, these cities you will be amazed at its vastness, at its contrasts, and they are just samples of China´s vastness.
All this has been reminded to me by a documentary on the vision that astronauts have of Earth from space. Piers Sellers, a NASA astronaut, says that after studying the climate and atmosphere for over 20 years, he believed he had a clear idea of its operation and was sure that their models were fairly accurate. He had all the data, but only from space was he really aware of how thin our atmosphere was in relation to the size of the planet and he explains how much this fact impressed him as made him conscious of the fact of how easy it is to damage a layer so thin that is the only thing keeping life on earth.
In China's case is similar to me, but reversed. It is so great that anything that affects them will affect others. Can be simplified to say that they are our main client and our main supplier at the same time.
This is the first chapter of my history of China ...
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