2015 China

16 March, Taxia to Yushan
Train K1210 & Pengfa Hotel 90CNY

Three buses, three taxis and one train brought us from yonder to here. We boarded our first bus in Taxia at 06h40 and checked into our hotel in Yushan at 03h15, a major miscommunication having turned our day endless. We had wanted to ride China’s trains as an alternative to her buses and today seemed a good day on which to do so. However, we understood the arrival time in Yushan to be around 2.30pm when in fact it was 2.30am. Having read that China’s trains tend to run on time, by 17h30, with still no sign of Yushan, we had begun to worry. It was then, having spent SIX hours on the train (more or less the time it would have taken a bus to reach Yushan), we discovered that we still had another NINE hours to go before reaching our destination. A FIFTEEN hour train journey covering just a few hundred kms. Not a mistake we will make again! In Taxia we met a young lawyer who spoke of the tremendous strides China has made, and agreed on three major areas of reform still required, but a long way off. On the plus side: massive economic growth, considerably more openness, much-improved legal institutions (ten years ago winning a case required knowing the judge; this is no longer the case), vastly improved infrastructure (just a few years ago a trip from his hometown to Beijing would take 16 hours; it now takes 5 hours by high-speed train); a softening of China’s one-child policy with fewer horror stories... Still needed: a multi-party democracy, a free press and a handle on endemic corruption.