Shenzhen & Chengdu

It was with some sorrow that we left the Viking Yi Dun cruise ship.  We were only on the ship for nine days, compared with our four-month world cruise in 2022.  But one of the main inducements to book this tour was the addition of Tibet in their schedule, a first for Viking. 

Chairman Mao Zedong is the founder of the modern Chinese government, following the disintegration of the last dynasty, the Qing dynasty (pronounced Ching).  He’s revered like we Americans revere George Washington.  Mao organized and rallied “the power of the peasants,” the power of the huge population of poor Chinese farmers and villagers.  But China did not become a modern state under Mao.  His “Great Leap Forward” was an attempt to convert peasants into small industry manufacturers.  It failed. 

Then he initiated the “Cultural Revolution” 1966-77 which was even more damaging. The number of deaths is a Chinese “state secret” but is known to number in the millions.  Young Red Guard members sought to erase China’s history, by destroying temples and historic sites, and humiliating “upper class” people such as teachers or local government leaders who were forced to go work in the collective farms, though they had never done this type of labor.  Many “counter-revolutionaries” were executed.  Musical instruments were destroyed.  The terrible events of the Cultural Revolution were copied by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Taliban in Afghanistan. 

Deng Xiaoping emerged as China’s paramount leader shortly after Mao’s death in 1976. He recognized that the Chinese people had always been great entrepreneurs prior to the closing of Communist China under Mao.  Deng opened China to foreign businesses and encouraged China’s entrepreneurs to produce goods for international markets.  Thus he presided over the unprecedented growth and development that resulted in China currently being the world’s largest manufacturer by far. 

Shenzhen

We spent only one night in Shenzhen (our last night on the Yi Dun docked in the busy harbor).  China’s development from a poor country into a modern nation is phenomenal.  We had several great history lectures on the ship by fantastic historians.  Forty years ago (1980’s) Shenzhen was a small village, across the bay from prosperous British-managed Hong Kong.  A mere forty years later, Shenzhen is a booming city of twenty-one million inhabitants.  There are hundreds of high-rise office and apartment buildings.  The port is larger than the port of Los Angeles (San Pedro)!  Shenzhen is a railroad hub for distribution of goods to China’s interior.  In the meantime, Hong Kong reverted back to China, marking the end of Great Britain’s colonial empire.

We attended a Chinese opera in the evening.  It was an amazing spectacle featuring elaborate staging and costumes, an ensemble of eight musicians, and around fifteen dancers.  The stars were the singers, whose stylings are an “acquired taste” just like European opera singers.  In other words, I enjoyed the performance but I wouldn’t be inclined to attend many future performances.  As much as I like all kinds of music, I feel almost the same way about Western operas. 

Chengdu Pandas

We flew two hours north from Shenzhen to Chengdu, the fifth largest city in China and the largest city in western China.  We were housed on the 29^th floor of a Ritz Carlton hotel, with an impressive view of the Chengdu inner city.  I’ve enjoyed many buffet dinners in my life.  But Susan and I agreed that the Ritz-Carlton dinner buffet was the most extravagant of our lives!  European and American dishes were available.  But the variety of Chinese dishes, from seafood, to noodles, to stir-fries, to hot-pots (for which Chengdu is famous, to exotic fruits, a full sushi selection, beers, wines, and a variety of cocktails being made constantly.  “Try them all” the mixologist said.  (Room and meals were included in our cruise package.)

Great pandas are found only in China.  They look like huge black and white teddy bears.  Smaller red pandas are found from China into Tibet, Bhutan, and Nepal.  Pandas are so cute and peaceful that they are very popular around the world.  China uses pandas to symbolize China’s peaceful intentions by lending pandas to zoos around the world, including the US.  Pandas are always among the most popular animals creating goodwill for China.

Great pandas are an endangered species.  Their diet is almost exclusively tender bamboo shoots (though they will eat small animals if bamboo is scarce).  Pandas are a type of bear.  They are generally placid and non-aggressive except mother pandas protecting their babies and male pandas who feel their territory is being violated. 

Female pandas only go into estrus (reproductive heat) once a year and perhaps only for a few hours.  They typically give birth to only a single baby panda.  Male pandas are very inexperienced.  We were told that the panda caregivers have even shown male pandas videos of sexual activity so that they will learn what to do.  Panda porn!  However, these efforts are not enough, leading scientists to resort to artificial insemination to increase the number of births.  There are estimated to be only fewer than two thousand pandas surviving throughout the world, some of them in zoos around the world, the rest in China.

Photo below--Full moon over Shenzhen