While I’ve been in Kunming, I’ve been doing a bit of touristing at the weekends. The great thing is that most of the other people visiting attractions are Chinese. Unlike in SE Asia, the Chinese are both wealthy enough and keen enough to be domestic tourists. And, well, they don’t quite do it the same way as Europeans.

The first weekend I went to 大观 park (Daguan, Great View) which is on the edge of a lake just outside town. Local people rave about it. It was a decidedly clinical place, very formal and unnatural. Square is the best description. Nothing was left even slightly untamed to nature, with lots of walkways across parts of the lake, carefully controlled and cropped trees and grass. There was no flow in the outline of anything, except the old pagodas - all the new buildings selling snacks or providing toilets had sharp corners and flat roofs. Nevertheless it was pleasantly charming walking round it, with lots of happy Chinese folk mainly flying kites in the large but carefully demarked kite flying area.

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The Chinese class that I’ve been attending has an interesting diversity of people. Nearly everyone is here for six months or a year. People are mostly Thai and South Korean, with a few Westerners, one Vietnamese and one (I think) Japanese. Many of those from Thailand and Korea are young university students, often majoring in Chinese in their own university, and taking a sandwhich year here. Of the Westerners, two are already working or have been working in China (setting up an Irish pub, opening fitness centres), one is going to teach English for an NGO in the north-west of Yunnan province, and one is likely to work in China after the course.

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I finally found some more useful SARS information from the UK government other than the FCO’s China travel advice. Two places to go are Department of Health emerging travel advice and Public Health Laboratory Service (they handily protects the population from infection). These sources are all reassuringly calm, basically saying travel anywhere, but watch for symptoms even when you get back.

Of course, the World Health Organisation is the place for the latest news. With today’s press briefing you even get to practice a foreign language - one of the questions asks in French about regions of China other than Guangdong province. The reply is that the healthcare system is decentralised, that regions have been asked to report on SARS centrally, but that there are no results from that yet. They’re working on getting results. I’d feel safer in Vietnam…

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I love Chinese characters. They’re great fun, so much more interesting than rather dull alphabets. I know at first they seem like a really stupid idea - surely it is better to have a phonetic representation in writing, rather than arbitary and innumerable pictures? One way to look at it is that they are at a granularity inbetween the letter and the word. By this I mean that one character has slightly more meaning than one letter of the alphabet, but slightly less meaning than an English word. Similarly, there are very few letters (only 26), slightly more characters (about 3000 are needed to read a newspaper), and many more words. So you spend the effort to learn characters in the first place, but that makes learning words easier than in an alphabetic language.

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To go completely against my non-linking byline, and to fuel the misinformation fire, here’s some stuff about SARS. Here’s an article in a Japanese newspaper, describing how irresponsible the Chinese government has been in their handling of the case. This certainly fits with my suspicions the other day based on how WHO is having to tiptoe round them.

And then an interesting blog which has comments saying that local doctors say the disease has spread to other cities, which the Chinese government hasn’t admitted to yet. This could either be true, or it could be fear and hype based on some ordinary pneumonia cases.

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Today the Chinese government allowed a small expat anti-war protest in Beijing. Even the English language China Daily has reported on it, albeit it in an alternate reality way with regard to the stopped Chinese student protestors. Some delicate balancing going on here between the government criticising the US, stroking the US to make sure it doesn’t get upset, and not setting a precedent for local protests.

The World Health Organisation website worryingly vanished behind the Great Firewall yesterday. I’m hoping this is because of politicing about the status of Taiwan, rather than government covering something up. I think that the day before yesterday the SARS infection table listed Taiwan as a separate country, whereas now it is magically a province of China, but I’m not sure. Anyway, at least it’s back up today.

I’ve been in Kunming for three weeks now, and it’s a pleasant place to live. I’m studying at the Center of Chinese for Foreign Students Yunnan University. The university is very eminent for a place so remote from Beijing. This is because during the Cultural Revolution lots of academics either fled or were exiled here. I’m also staying in university accommodation, although I upgraded my room to one more like a hotel than a student room. The first two pictures are views from my window.

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I finally got round to finding a computer I can plug my digital camera into, so I’ve added a few photos. Go to the March archive page and scroll down. You can find a photo of the terraces at Bac Ha in Vietnam, and one of the pig on the back of a moto. By popular demand, there’s even a picture of me at Tam Coc.

With that provocative title, you might expect that the Chinese government have clamped down in a purge on me, or perhaps the Vietnamese secret police have chased me across electronic borders. Not quite, this is self-censorship. And, no, I don’t mean the unconscious “censor” from psychology, or the very conscious way that I select which things to talk about so publicly.

In Vietnam, I talked to a few other people who I haven’t mentioned in my accounts. I would like to write up what they said, although none of it is particularly surprising if you have read the literature about the Vietnamese government. Which you probably haven’t. Basically, the communist government are scared. They are as a group afraid of other sources of power, and as individual bureaucrats are trying to preserve their own position. They also try to gain advantage for themselves, whether manipulating perks and resources their way, or through outright corruption. This all leads to excessive, complex, and ever changing paperwork, which requires bribes to slice through it. Control-freakery due to fear.

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It’s slightly unnerving being in a foreign land when your country is going to war. There isn’t much fuss about the war here, it doesn’t affect China that much, only some potential economic damage relating to oil prices. A couple of people today talked to me about it. The main concern, presumably one that comes from the Chinese media, is not that the US/UK/Spain are acting in an immoral way, or that the US doesn’t have the right to exert its power to protect its interests. The fear here is that the war will spill out into a larger and more dangerous conflict across the Middle East.

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