Communism

China was the first communist country I have ever been too. At first it didn’t seem too different, but I started noticing little things along the way.

The most obvious was the military presence. In Tiananmen Square, there were soldiers marching all over the place. They flipped out when I started to point my camera at them, so I had to shoot a few sneak shots from the hip. Inevitably, a trip to Tiananmen Square will bring up questions about the 1989 massacre. The students that we were with from Peking University would not even acknowledge any of these questions. Anyone asked would just pretend like you hadn’t said anything. The government keeps that under tight wraps, and people just don’t talk about those kinds of things.

If you pay attention, you will start to notice that there are cameras everywhere. Mao is watching you!

One of the things that initially turned me on about China was the lack of pop culture being in your face all the time. This was in excess in Japan, and really wore me out. At first I figured that it was just because there wasn’t a whole lot of money to be spent. But as the trip went on, I started realizing that the government really controls the media. The newspapers really tipped me off to this. The big front page stories that I saw were about a boy who got injured by a needle that was left in his pants pocket, and the other was about a man who jumped into a cage at the zoo and bit a panda bear. No doubt these are very important stories, but when I got back to Hong Kong and read the paper, I was kind of wondering why there hadn’t been a front page story about the military coup that took place in Thailand the day before. I didn’t get to investigate too much, but the society does seem quite censored by the government.