Our trip to China is hard to describe in words, so I'll save that for later.

The amount of construction going on in the cities in China is impressive. The rows of apartment buildings were the most interesting to me. I heard that some of them were completely empty, I think Steve Wilmarth said that, and that people would invest in the buildings like they would the stock market and never end up living in them. Steve also said that China was a “debt-free country.” This was really interesting as well because our country basically runs on borrowed money these days, from the people all the way up to the government. I was watching the news on CCTV, the only Chinese television station broadcast in English, and it was reported that the top twenty percent of people in China were in possession of eighty percent of the nation's wealth. I'm not sure whether or not the reason for this is capitalism. I would like to see some statistics about how many people move into the cities each year. There seems to be enough room in the cities for more people, but probably not many more large vehicles.

The traffic was crazy. I couldn't figure out if there were traffic laws or not, but there appeared to be none except stopping at red lights. I would have loved to go driving in and around Wuhan (it wasn't as exciting in Beijing), where people weaved in and out of traffic and dodged each other and people on the streets, just to see how well I'd do. It wasn't that the people were bad drivers, it was more that they were driving in such an open system that ability to stay in a lane was almost irrelevant. I was surprised that we didn't see any accidents happen on the road.