>>295420It's me again. Somehow the Chinese foreign office had some kind of collective psychotic break and actually approved our visas. China is…interesting. It reminds me a little bit of Vietnam, but while Vietnam's society is like a wild jungle plant outgrowing its pot to spill dead leaves and twisting vines with beautiful flowers, China is a plant potted in a far too large ornate vase with under-developed bulbs sloppily painted in vibrant colours and ugly mesh screens around it to hide the decaying plant matter beneath. Everything about it, even in the countryside, is manufactured and you can feel the tension of the strained facade in most interactions.
After one of our group was detained by police and held for 18 hours with no charges, explanation, legal representation or communication, I asked our fixer how police were viewed and he just said "Oh, very well. If you don't bother them, they won't bother you". Even in countries where they allow police to beat people with sticks at their own discretion, I never felt so vaguely threatened. They are perfectly nice individually, always happy to give directions and offer help, but I came to a realisation: In rural Africa, if some border cop decides to seize your vehicle and deny your papers, they're physically there in front of you and can be reasoned with. You can demand they talk to the capital office, offer a bribe, explain the situation to a government liason etc. and deal personally with whoever it is holding you. There might not be any real rule of law, but whatever they do to you, they have to do it under their own power. I realised that in China, at any moment I could just be snatched up and tossed into the meatgrinder of a massive, faceless, silent bureaucracy, which only weeks of careful diplomatic negotiation could untangle. They could simply arrest me and hold me until it became more expedient to let me go. The only rule of law is what the Party allows, and it can suspend it at-will for any reason; and the Party is so vast that it can spare some small iota of attention to cast its gigantic panopticon eye on you for just long enough to strip you of all civil liberties under spurious terrorism/espionage charges.
China isn't a bad place, but it's authoritarianism on a scale I've never comprehended before, and it makes me genuinely uncomfortable to think about. I don't think I'll be going ba
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