March 14, 2024

Tianjin, China is where many cruise travelers will disembark to visit Beijing, China. The appeal is obvious. Beijing is the home of The Great Wall, The Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. The difficulty is that it is a 3-hour bus ride each way (on a good day)

Now might be a good time to talk about the bureaucracy experienced and endured in China. Make no mistake about it, China is a communist country controlled by the communist government/party. No better place is this dynamic experienced than when trying to enter tourist attractions, especially those managed by the government. The Chinese authorities are notorious for checking travel documents especially if you are travelling with a US passport. I once believed that the bureaucracy in Puerto Rico was excessive where a visit to the DMV could turn into a whole day affair. Upon my first driver’s license registration, I did not realize that in Puerto Rico the DMV office closed for lunch and if you didn’t make it to the front of the line, you returned when they reopened and scrabbled all over again for a place in line. China is bureaucracy on steroids! Returning guests said that it took an hour and a half (in addition to travel time) to navigate the travel document examination process.

From experience, I know that as structured as the Chinese are they do not respect lines when visiting tourist attractions. They seem to line up width wise with everyone pushing forward in a funnel like format until you reach the entrance. God forbid you slow down, because if so, ten or twelve nimble Chinese will squeeze their way in front of you.

With that said, having seen many tourist attractions before, I choose not to visit until I am in Beijing again. I would recommend you do the same.

Tianjin is an industrial city. Upon arrival, I was greeted by the Chinese smog that I had heard about but was experiencing for the first time.

For the first time I am not going to have a lot of photos to show you unless you are interested in shipping containers. The city is not very attractive. What I did notice was rows and rows of tree saplings being planted supposedly in an attempt to combat the climate change dilemma caused by the ongoing pollution. Quite honestly, I do not think they are going to be very successful.

Another topic I think it is important to share with you is the mass surveillance in the People’s Republic of China. These networks of monitoring systems are used by the Chinese central government to monitor Chinese citizens. To give you an idea of the scope of this surveillance systems it is reported that the government employs 626 million cameras to watch Chinese citizens.

The Chinese government has also adopted facial recognition technology, surveillance drones, robot police, and big data collection targeting online social media platforms to monitor citizens.

At a traffic crossing in Tiajin I was keenly aware that I was being monitored. I thought of giving a smile and wave, but I thought that may not be wise.

I do want to see my children again.

Thanks for traveling with us…