When we took the bus out of Wuhan City and into the countryside to get to the Yangtze, it felt like we were going back in time. Somewhere around fifty miles outside of Wuhan, the construction trailed off and was replaced by farmland. I didn't see many farming machines, mostly water buffalo pulling plows. They say that China is moving fast toward modernity, and it is. But this change seems only to be happening in the cities and business centers in the country. Subsistence farming wasn't too far outside the busy cities. If China ever fully develops to the point that the United States and other countries are at, where farming is mostly a money-making profession and big business controls the government, it will be by far the most powerful nation in the world. Who knows when that will happen though, it could be hundreds of years before the majority of the minority groups are assimilated into Han society. I'm not sure if it's more important to the Communists that these groups join the main demographic of people in China or preserve their ways of life and continue their unique traditions.

I've been wondering what will happen to the Chinese government as more and more people reach the middle class and become educated. Life is moving so fast over there that they are bound to run into the problems that the United States government is facing now: old politicians stuck in their ways impeding the progress of the nation because they can't keep up with today's fast-paced world.

I wish I had been awake when the boat passed the Three Gorges Dam, but the cruise was still a great experience. The sharp contrast in everyday life between people in the cities and people out in the country showed me that China still has a long way to go before most people are above the poverty line. I wonder if people out in the country even know about life in the cities or about life outside of rural China.