I'm taking a Geography of the Pearl River Delta class which includes a couple of field trips. This was our trip to mainland.
We went to a small part of the city of Dongguan, a town called Tangxia. We got on a bus in Shenzhen and so we drove through both cities and the countryside in between. It looked much more like China than I was expecting. We took the subway to Shenzhen and already it was a world apart from Hong Kong. It seemed almost impossible that it could change so drastically, so quickly.
Anyway, the buildings were prematurely aged (because they must keep both building and maintenance costs extraordinarily low), unmarked roads, things burning on the sidewalk, and piles of rubbish in the streets.
But when we arrived in Tangxia we pulled up to a huge, lavish town hall. It was shocking. This grandiose building in the middle of nothing. Just the same wide, relatively empty streets, fields of dirt, piles of rocks in the road. We were ushered inside (the building was empty, save our class) and greeted with great fanfare. They treated us like UN delegates-it was insane. Microphones for everyone, our own interpreter, a camera crew following us. They showed us a film of straight propaganda (it was in full mandarin and I still knew it was propaganda without the interpreter). It was all about how Tangxia has revolutionized industry and boasts a world-renowned golf course. We had a chance to ask questions after and someone asked about how the "financial tsunami" had effected industries in Tangxia. The mayor answered that Tangxia had escaped the ravages of the world-wide financial crisis and only experienced fluctuations which would be considered normal (but they still were required to close down a number of local factories..). Next, they brought us through a new housing plan and showed us the newly constructed housing complexes. They had evicted an entire village to build these lavish town homes (they claim that all those people were able to move into those apartments with government subsidy but I have a hard time believing that..). They toured us around and claimed that all had already been sold off (but somehow we never saw a single person there during the entirety of our tour). In fact, we didn't see a soul until we were driving to the factory. We finally saw local people-and they were living in the rundown neighborhoods we passed, not the fancy (unoccupied) villas.
They brought us to a huge, lavish museum documenting the world-renowned wonders of Tangxia and China. How "green" (as in having a lot of nature around..) and advanced and how vacationers flocked by the droves to visit. It was 4 floors of nonsense. They bragged about the large numbers of visitors who came but for some reason we were the only ones there (as always). So empty was it that they turned the lights off after we had traveled through each room..
Forgive the poor quality- I had to take them out of the bus window..
Next we went to a factory making parts for photocopiers. Tangxia is now trying to make the switch to production of electronic equipment. Everywhere we went a factory official walked next to us, occasionally stopping to leer at a worker (standing nearly on top of them). They refused to show us the worker's lodgings and we were not allowed to speak to any of the workers themselves. Though, afterwords company officials gave us a briefing about what high wages they pay their workers, including: generous vacation days, factory sports competitions, and education. But their math didn't add up-They claimed to have 2, 8 hour shifts but then claimed to have the factory producing the parts for all 24 hours, for example. 
