Experiencing China

About the Book

If you are planning to enter the burgeoning Chinese economy, may he be a person with just an interest in this fourth largest country in the world and a population of 1.3 billion people. I went to China to discover facts of Chinese life, its fantastic progress, to see if I could make new friends and above all, to separate fact from fiction in my mind.

In ten months' stay of travel, acting as a foreign expert, I had the opportunity to meet Chinese from every walk of life. Those heads of high technology plants to simple students from Tibet, to the ancient farmer having lived through the dark ages of the Mao period, a period that is not talked about and is best forgotten.

The adage that "East and West shall never meet" I would now firmly discard as one of the fictions adhered to in the West. For when one delves below the superficiality one will find, regardless if in the West or the East, humanity has the same wants, feels the same pains as well as joys.

About the Author

The writer was born in Germany. Too young to be drafted he experienced W.W.II as a boy, never missing any air raids just outside Berlin. By the time of the Allied victory, he and his capitalist family found themselves in what was to become the "Democratic Republic" from which they all escaped in 1947. A colourful career develops, ranging from mining, railroading, oceanography and university studies to teaching, farming and logging. These phases are interrupted by a three year stint as an educational advisor in Africa, travels in Mexico, Belize and two Atlantic crossings in his own boat. Off and on he visits Berlin, where he finishes his teaching career as an exchangee. He now lives with his wife and family in Victoria, B.C., Canada.