Eric's Beijing Diary

I'm in the dining car again--this time on the train from Chengdu to Kunming--except I'm not going to Kunming. I'm going to get off at Panzhihua (on the border between Sichuan and Yunnan) and take the bus over the mountains to Lijiang. I was talking with a photographer from Ireland this evening who is on his way to Burma. He was asking me about the people in the countryside. He was amazed by how hard the Chinese people work, even those who were very poor, and seem to have very little hope of improving their lot. He made the observation that people in the poorer parts of India seem to have given up. He said, "I'm not a religious man, but I think it's Hinduism." I agreed with him, but I said, "I think it is specifically the concept of reincarnation. The Bible says, 'It is appointed unto man once to die, and after this, the judgment.'" No matter how difficult our lot in life is, we can never just throw up our hands and conclude that this life is a wash. This really is something I have noticed about the Chinese people. Not having been here before 1949, I have no personal basis for comparison. But it does seem that China has been purged of the kind of religious thinking that allows one to "write off" this life because one has concluded that there is no chance of reaching a desirable level of life this time around. What will eventually replace this kind of thinking in the minds of the people is an open question.

Labels: Summer 2004