August 2010:

From burial grounds in the middle of Bogor city to white rhino and bizarre pop art.

July 25, 2010 – August 12, 2010

Three weeks of traveling with Yuan Sheng - one of my best friends and one of the greatest Chinese concert pianists. We covered almost 4.500km by driving, taking bullet trains, Maglev, tiny river boars, hiking. China is magnificent. Each visit to this enormous nation is endlessly enriching and eye-opening. What you see with your own eyes is not what you read in the mainstream Western media - obsessed with digging out dirt and half-truth about this successful Communist state, determined to prove that ‘China is not Communist, anymore’. Certainly, to admit that China is Communist would be to accept that the West and particularly its capitalist/imperialist system are actually losing the grip on global power. So what do you see? Tremendous determination with which are Chinese people building their nation. Real optimism and zeal lost almost everywhere else in the world. Thousands of kilometers of tracks designed for the fastest bullet trains in the world, new theatres and public parks. Housing complexes with kindergartens, schools and medical posts as well as free exercise machines for the public are all over the country – those are symbols of great epic of planned socialist development which in recent years elevated hundreds of millions of people out of poverty! You can see subsidized public transportation (including high-tech metro in dozens of Chinese cities), as well as incredible tradition and culture going back thousands of years.

(See Photo Reportage on China on this website)