Day 85 (30 August): Disposable Income in the City

This morning we stayed in the Mt. Emei area and saw the Myriad Years Monastary after taking a bus ride up the mountain followed by an ariel cable car ride. After taking the bus down we head to Leshan where we saw the Giant Leshan Buddha--the world's largest Buddha carved into a sandstone cliff by a river.

Following that we returned to Chengdu where we walked through an old street that had been revitalized into an 'Old Town Chengdu' type neighborhood. While in that neighborhood we went to a 'tea house' performance of Sichuan Opera which included puppet shows, fire breathing dancers, and the like.

Observations:
1) Farm subsidies. According to our guide (reliability somewhat questionable) starting next year there will be subsides for all farmers in China which she says make up 90% of the population. If this is true, this is big news. Perhaps the government in Beijing is trying to keep down protests about how people in cities are making more money. This also seems to have implications for WTO and other types of trade agreements as if China begins subsidizing farmers directly then they can't complain as much about other countries doing the same. Of course this could also be done in some more round-about type of way, such as not taxing farmers rather than actively subsidizing them.
2) Cars! There seem to be a lot of nice cars around now, much nicer ones than I remember seeing when I was in China 3 years ago. The VW Passat always labeled here as the Shanghai Volkswagon Passat seems to be the most common car on the road and these are new models now, not the 15-year old models labeled as 'Red Lion Santana's that were on the streets several years ago. There are also a number of Audi A6 and Audi A8s on the road along with the Porsche Cheyene SUV and larger BMWs. There even seemed to be some pretty nice cars out near Mt. Emei which was a several hour drive from Chengdu.
3) Road quality. This has also improved a lot versus several years ago and there seems to be a movement towards well-paved six-or-more lane tollways.
4) New buildings. In Chengdu, from our hotel room, it was obvious that several older buildings had been raized and that plans for new ones going in there place were in the works.
5) Protecting the environment. This topic was brought up several times by our guide and now seems to be on the minds of common people in China when it probably wasn't several years back.
6) Disposable income. In Chengdu at least there actually seems to be a decent amount of it. There were big shopping malls and brand name stores around with the likes of Gucci, Bally, Prada, etc. People actually seemed to be buying things in the stores and they didn't look like knock-offs as they seemed to be properly branded.
7) Preserving history. There also seems to be some sort of movement to preserve history by restoring older 'Chinese' style buildings rather than tearing them down as was done in the 'Old Town' area of China. Several years ago, I would imagine that many of the old buildings were just being torn down.