Lest we slip into thinking everything in China is just the joy of wantons and donkey burgers, here are a few current issues to ponder.

1.  As one headline puts it, "China has world’s most skewed sex ratio at birth – again."

On the mainland, a traditional preference for boys has encouraged selective abortions that resulted in 115 boys born for every 100 girls from 1994.

And this matters:

In terms of gender equality, the nation ranked 99 out of 144 countries, down from 91 last year, the report said. A wide gap also exists in education levels of men and women on the mainland. China was 119 in terms of secondary school attainment, behind countries including Singapore, South Korea and Ghana.

On a different level, this also disrupts the future of families, dating and marriage in China:    

Like India, most of China is patrilocal: in theory, at least, a married woman moves into her husband’s home and looks after his parents. Also like India, China has a deep cultural preference for boys. But whereas India has dowries, China has bride prices. The groom’s parents, not the bride’s, are expected to pay for the wedding and give money and property to the couple. These bride prices have shot up, bending the country’s society and economy out of shape.

and, 

 It is a buyer’s market, complains Qiang Lizhi, a newly married man who runs a café nearby. A 47-year-old man, Deng Xinling, says that men are now considered shopworn if they are unmarried at 25. By contrast, no woman is thought too old to marry; even widows have no difficulty in finding husbands.

One curious new institution seems to be courtship and dating schools for men...time to be sensitive and polite...
                     https://www.economist.com/node/21526350 

2.  The air in Beijing still isn't great.  One sample report, this from the NYTimes in 2013, "Life in a Toxic City."  
                                       (this from 2013)
The Chinese government is unhappy about this, and perhaps a bit sensitive.  It may be rude of me to inhale when I step off the plane and simply collapse.  I'll try to avoid that, but hey, heads up, I have trouble driving into St. Louis with the windows down.
                                        (this from 2015)
Is the air quality improving?  Maybe.  Maybe sometimes,  but not so much other times, depending on weather conditions, like during this recent sandstorm, when the hazard alerts were high.

Well, click here for a real time index of air quality.  We could use more of these!

Sometime, we should talk about solar and wind efforts in China.  Real, though coal is still...emperor.  

3.  And recent disturbing news, which Brian probably knows more about, politics and all--the "indoctrination camps" (I suppose it would be rude to call them concentration camps) for Chinese Muslims over in a western province.  Here's one Washington Post take on the camps:  "Chinese mass-indoctrination camps evoke Cultural Revolution." 

Since last spring, Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslim Chinese — and even foreign citizens — in mass internment camps. This detention campaign has swept across Xinjiang, a territory half the area of India, leading to what a U.S. commission on China last month said is “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”

and, 

The internment program aims to rewire the political thinking of detainees, erase their Islamic beliefs and reshape their very identities. The camps have expanded rapidly over the past year, with almost no judicial process or legal paperwork. Detainees who most vigorously criticize the people and things they love are rewarded, and those who refuse to do so are punished with solitary confinement, beatings and food deprivation.

Probably not something our guide will talk about.

Now on with our innocent trip to China!

later, bob