China Travel Photo

Welcome to China, 2007! Here is a photo from “The City of Eternal Spring,” one of China’s top travel destinations.

I have lived in China for a number of years, and have witnessed many a neighborhood being demolished to make way for something new. This one takes the cake. Imagine an urban area larger than several city blocks being demolished at once. It staggers the imagination. This particular demolition project has been going on for about four months now. Granted, in China they are able to build things quickly, but I have no doubt that it will be several years before they can completely replace this sprawling brick wasteland with anything useful. Would it really be too difficult to do things in smaller stages? For the next several years, any tourists that end up in this part of town are going to see acre after acre of vacant, wasted land in the middle of a city of 5 million people.

On a humorous and annoying, unrelated side-note, this week all of the photos on the Flickr website are blocked in China (or at least in Kunming). Every page on the site loads, and so do all the graphics. But not a single photo can be viewed, whether in thumbnail or full size. I have a bunch more photos like the above, but can’t be bothered to upload them if I can’t even look at them online myself.

Update: Reuters reports on the disappearance of the Flickr photos in Users rage against China’s ‘Great Firewall’. By linking to that I probably won’t be able to see my own site when I get back to China. (I’m in Hanoi).