The river forms a green gauze belt, the mountains are like jade hairpins. (漓江像一条绿色的丝带，山峰似一根根玉簪) Han Yu, written sometime between 768 and 824 (when it wasn’t as smoggy).

Yangshoe has been a tourist destination, of sorts, for a thousand years. Now – well, in 2009, really – the town was full of tourists. Mostly Chinese tourists, many of them staying at big, expensive-looking hotels with BMW X5s and Mercedes in front, and the handsomest store in town is a wedding arranger.

On our second day, we wandered out of Yangshou into a rural landscape. Still, walking around the farming area by Yangshuo, everything seemed familiar. The sights, the smells, the quiet, the slow pace of the people, the water buffalo. At first, I thought my mind was making it feel familiar so I would feel safe, then I realized Michele and I have been walking through these areas for as long as we’ve been married.

But China is very different. In other countries we’ve been to, the children would come up and ask for pens or candy; in China, they take pictures of us on their cell phones. We bought water at a small store, and the salesgirl – and the salespeople are almost always young girls, that hasn’t changed – scanned the bottles! 

We chatted with the only tourist we saw all day, a White woman from South Africa, who we saw on the trail, which in China, is a paved road! – and she said “It’s like China skipped a stage”. Here, in the good ol’ USA, we are told almost daily how poor China is, and it is, compared to us, but not compared to what it was. China’s transformation is a story of skipping a stage, as the woman on the trail observed. It began in 1978 with the shift from a centralized planned economy to a decentralized market economy. This series of moves created a manufacturing powerhouse, integrating China into the global economy and pulling over 800 million people out of poverty. China has become a vast, modern economy, now evolving toward high-tech innovation.

The country’s economic muscle is undeniable, but the change has also brought complexity. It’s no longer just the world’s factory; it’s now a global player in tech and value-added industries. Yes, our internal propaganda still talks about how poor China is, but compared to its past, it’s a radically different, modernized place, in the cities, at least. Traveling through China’s cities is fascinating, but the countryside is probably not very different today from what it was in, say, 1975, or from Korea in the 60s, or rural Guatemala and Morocco. In the countryside, the rapid ascent – from quiet, familiar rural scenes to an undeniable technological leader – is not as noticeable.

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