By the way, where did you go? What did you learn?
(to everyone else reading this post, sorry it's offtopic. If you're not interested, just skip it.)
I went to China to teach English. I have a friend who believes it's important to make human connections between the US and China so we're not just folks on the TV to one another. There's really no substitute for talking to people in the flesh and working with them. I learned a lot, especially since it was my first time actually living overseas for any prolonged period of time.
If you ever go, stay away from Beijing. The people are too used to making money off of tourists, it's polluted, and rather snobbish. I lived in Nanjing and the people were very friendly to me. ( I was considered a 'guest,' and China has rules about treating guests that the US has gotten rid of somehow). Nanjing was much more modern than you'd expect, too. Internet Cafes were everywhere in Nanjing and the school I was with let me borrow a laptop and an ethernet connection (connectivity was intermittant, though). Skyscrapers were shooting up like grass, and all looked like they'd fall apart in 15-20 years or so. I also went to some of the more rural parts, where I was the only live American some folks had seen.
China is horribly, horribly polluted. You have to wash the pesticides off your fruit or you'll get seriously ill. You have to rinse shrimp in several changes of water because the seawater it comes in isn't clean. I didn't go running while in Nanjing because the air was so bad that I felt like it couldn't be healthy to do any more breathing than I had to. And Nanjing is one of the better large cities, polutionwise. Nobody told me this before I went.
Chinese people had an interesting view of America. I went to a 'hard weapons museum' expecting to see huge displays of patriotism. Instead, they had a bunch of posters on American technology, including skylab, the space shuttle, foam used to incapacitate rioters (one of my Chinese friends commented that Americans seemed to have a pretty high regard for life) and all kinds of millitary hardware.
My favorite scene was walking by a Chinese millitary base and seeing the guard standing watch under a Coca-cola umbrella.
Everything in China is for sale now, and everything is negotiable. The country is closer to fascism than communism now. A few insanely rich people. Lots of poor people. You need family connections if you really want to do business, but there are tons of tiny shops and street vendors. They just legalized private real estate, and are trying to set up some kind of credit rating system so folks can get a loan. Right now, many people are excluded in this regard. A tour guide in Beijing was startled to find that my family actually owned their house and could sell it if they wanted to.
China is also amazingly fragmented. It seemed like one big nation, but Chinese nationalism is really a pretty recent invention, comparitivly speaking, and it shows. Regionalism is a very big thing there. People were very nice to me because I was a foreign 'guest' and a lot of folks wanted a chance to practice English so they'd buy lunch for the opportunity. But they could be terrible to each other. This included my Chinese friends, standing right in front of my face.
The folks in Nanjing were pretty honest. Almost every cab driver in Nanjing refused my offer of a tip, and I'm sure they were far from rich.
Got some nice handmade paintings that I'm trying to sell online now, along with some other handmade American art.
Well, this post is a bit overlong as it stands. Hope I haven't bored you.