People Mountain People Sea
I took these pictures with my cellphone a few days ago while swimming at a beach called Dameisha in Shenzhen.There is a famous Chinese expression; 人山人海 / renshan, renhai; it means people mountain, people sea, or in other words; a lot of people! I remember when swimming in the lake at Dingshan new Shanghai in the 1980s being struck how people used to take inflated inner car ties in to the water. These days you can buy an inflatable rubber ring for just 10 yuan. But I couldn't help thinking, after the government spent 44 billion on the Olympic Games, and beat the United States in the gold-medal tally, many Chinese still don't know how to swim. Perhaps the money would have been better spent on encouraging sport at the grass roots. Which reminds me about the Chinese national soccer team which didn't get a single goal in its last World Cup appearance in 2002...
When I first went to China in the 1980s China had 300 million less people but it felt more crowded. The buses were so crowded then that you couldn't get off unless you started manoeuvring yourself three stops in advance. Housing is also far less overcrowded these days; after the recent housing boom the average floor space per Chinese citizen has doubled to over 30 mē! In those days long queues and shortages of everything were the norm. This scene at the beach the other day reminded me of those times. The water was literally so full it felt more like a swimming pool than the sea. A part of the beach was also cordoned off for use by boats, and speedboats aggressively circling this territory to stop swimmers encroaching which they nevertheless did.
. On birth control in China, it was only after I had talked to people who told me directly about forced late term abortions and I began to believe it...
This photo was taken on 2011-07-07 at Hong Kong,China
