I feel a bit sad as we leave Beijing today for a one hour flight to Jinan, the Capital of Shandong Province.
As a Chinese American, I feel that my sense of historical identity has just been stretched back from the 1850's or so, now some 5000 years. Especially, after walking through the imperial palace and learning about the old china but also the 'New China' that was awakened by the revolution in 1949. The awesome monuments to the people's heroes here and the scale of the Tiananmen Square area can't be described in words. As Bruce Lee says, you have to just 'feel it!'
The modernization though is clearly wiping away older housing, and hutongs, neighborhoods. I feel unforcomfortable about the displacement of the poor here, but we haven't even seen yet the rural areas and how the globalization is pulling the working age population from there to the cities like Beijing, Shanghai and so many of the growing metropolitan areas.
Off to Jinan...