China: for by Stuart Wolfendale

You aren't poor or a dissident or a foreign businessman being swindled. You are a tourist and over the last 10 years, life has been improving speedily for you in the PRC. Bathrooms still raise the occasional eyebrow, but hotel facilities are now more firmly clamped to international standards. Food is excellent and unreplicable overseas. Arrangements, prudently made, work out and airlines are far less fatal. Old folk have stopped falling like flies off The Great Wall.

In fact, China works, where India frequently doesn't. A California couple - lawyers, experienced travellers, picky and no pushovers have just returned from the Yangtse, Shanghai and Xian. Archeological sights were “unsurpassed”, Shanghai was “incredible”. In Xian people were “dancing in the streets!” Everywhere was “very clean” and arrangements “near flawless”.

The Mainland has its own vast atmosphere. If you want to breath it in, surrogates like Taiwan, Singapore, other people's Chinatowns - even Hong Kong - just won't do.