Click on the player below to listen to the podcast talk or read City Weekend's live blog reporting with Rob Gifford: China Road: "A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power".

Click here to save the mp3 to your computer. Audio courtesy of the Glamour Bar. Sound recording by Tom Lee Pettersen at Meta Music Media.

12:22 | It's the Industrial Revolution "In so many ways China is going through what the West went through in the Industrial Revolution," says Gifford, but they're also going through the technological revolution at the same time. For a journalist, he recommends, "Don't go report in a developed country once you've lived in a developing one." Reporting on citizens who are upset at the inefficiency of their FREE medical care pales in comparison when weighed against the face that 900 million Chinese live every day without medical care at all.

12:17 | No Women In a discussion of the one child policy, Gifford points out that the cohort that was most affected by the abortion of female fetuses in the early 1980s are now reaching marriageable age and there are many implications. Says Gifford, he's met women from North Korea and Burma and other neighboring nations that had been kidnapped and smuggled into the nation to be wives for rural men. "It's been the most successful family planning effort in history, but like the woman I sat to on the bus who performed abortions in the third trimester, the human cost of that [is very high]," he says.

12:12 | 9/11 China was viewed as the post-Cold War enemy of the U.S. but when 9/11 happened and the enemy was revealed, and it wasn't China, that took a huge amount of pressure and tension off of China, explains Gifford. There had been a lot of rising tension and there still is tension, "but it would be a lot worse had that not occurred," says Gifford.

12:05 | On T*bet "I'd better keep my voice down," says Gifford with a touch of humorous sincerity as he fields another question on the relations between China and Tibet. He draws a parallel to the colonial history of Britain and its over past relations with its nearest neighbors, Ireland and Scotland. "Do the Scottish love the British? No. In case you didn't know." In some respects, "Notions of identity are sometimes stronger than progress." He continues, "the culture of Tibet is very different than that of China and it's not surprising that they don't want to have Chinese culture forced upon them any more than the Scots or the Irish wanted British culture forced on them."

12:00 | Information Access "How informed are people out in the rural areas?" asks one audience member. "There's a TV in every village," replies Gifford. Internet access may not be open to everyone, and information is censored and filtered and restricted, but information is available. "Compared to what? Compared to the U.S. or some other Western nations, sure, it's restricted, but compared to what it was in China before, it's greatly improved. And this growing access to information is a force for change."

11:53 | Something's Gotta Give "They know that the only thing more dangerous than not reforming, is to reform," says Gifford. Gifford feels that the government is keeping a lit on rural unrest and other pertinent issues until the Olympics--"Just wait until the Olympics are over"--and then will need to begin to address their most pressing internal concerns. "Something's got to give," he says, though he seems to feel optimistic that the government is aware of this and will move toward some sort of reform. They're not blind to the need for reform. We suppose one might say that the true characteristic of any incarnation of a one-party government is the desire to maintain power, and this is one thing the Chinese Communist Party has done very well and will continue to do so for a time, even if it means reform.

11:51 | Will it Rise? Gifford feels that the communist party will stay in power, but says, "There seems too much talk about the inevitability of China's rise but I don't see it as being that inevitable. You have a 21st century economy and a 1950s government." Domestically, Gifford feels China still has many problems to resolve and the nation has been struggling with its own identity crisis. The reality is that is must reconcile its own internal contradictions before it can rise.

11:48 | Stability "The fabric of society is being really stretched and really strained. The question of stability, everything is about stability, of course, for a communist government. But when you see the people in the countryside and the problems they're having, I had to ask myself, when does the insistence on stability lead to more instability?" The government has addressed some issues, but "the problems are still there. It's more fragile than it seems in Shanghai." He encourages people to get out into the countryside and see rural China.

11:41 | Scorched Earth "I think we're starting to see some of the blow-back from 30 years of scorched earth, double digit growth," says Gifford. There are oasis of prosperity but then you dive back down and see the fault lines, the realities around you. "You just have to go to rural areas to see that it [China] is just not Shanghai. And that will be crucial over the next years, whether they can raise the living standards of those at the bottom." But, he says, give credit where credit is due. China has been able to lift more people out of poverty than any other nation, nearly the entire population of South America but the contradictions are creating tension.

11:38 | Change and Choice Through his book and his experiences with people, Gifford tries to tackle some of the bigger questions people have about China, drawing conclusions and making interesting observations along the way. "The structure of the family is changing." Horizontal relationships, rather than vertical Confucian relationships, seem to be coming more and more to the fore as young people, rather than old, begin to take more of a prominent place in society. This is a huge shift from Confucian times, Gifford says. Having choice is something relatively new.

11:35 | Endure Another of the people Gifford encounters, a cafe owner, tells him that what they do in the countryside is what they always have done and always will do--"endure." Gifford goes on to reflect on how, dynasty after dynasty, corrupt officials after corrupt officials, revolution or revolution, this is what hundreds of thousands of Chinese in the poorer rural areas of the nation have continued to do for hundreds of years. Endure.

11:28 | You too Gifford is a skilled reader. He shares a passage of his book about an Amway meeting in the Gobi Dessert that he fell upon. While in a remote area of the Gobi, surrounded by Mr & Mrs Smith posters (following the release of the film), he was approached by two Chinese men who invite him to an Amway meeting. At the meeting, Teacher Hu encourages the Chinese present to seek the Chinese dream saying, "You too can travel, you too can, you too, you too." At the end of the meeting the teacher thanks everyone for coming and thanks Mr. Smith. "I looked around too see if there was another foreigner behind me called Mr. Smith but I realized they meant me. So either they think all foreigners are named Mr. Smith or, even in the Gobi, people are mistaking me for Brad Pitt," he says. Nevertheless, Gifford is touched by the determination and passion of the people at this meeting, and their passion for living--"live, we want to live, right now we're just existing," they say. Gifford wishes them luck.

11:22 | They Have Cars Gifford says that when his sister arrived, she stepped off he plane and said, "wow, they have cars." The crowd laughs. Obviously, she should have done her homework, he says, "but perhaps we as journalists aren't quite doing our job," says Gifford. Hence he decided to write a book about all the people and experiences he's had while traveling next to China, to paint a portrait of the realities of the nation. "They are not just statistics or faceless images of China."

11:20 | Shanghai is not China The turnout for Rob Gifford is quite impressive for 11am on a Saturday morning. Gifford begins by explaining a bit about his book, prefacing this by saying that he's cut a substantial portion of the book that was about Shanghai. "But Shanghai is not China any more than Manhattan is America," he says. "And what can you say about Shanghai that someone else hasn't said before?"