Forget what you think you know from your local "Chinese" takeaway. Unless you've spent several years living in mainland China, it's unlikely you have even a clue about Chinese cuisine. The variety is mind-boggling and almost certainly unrivalled in any other country. Expatriates in China will all tell you that every day they are still trying new dishes, even after living there for years. (And since we're on the topic of mythbusting, sorry to be politically incorrect, but actually you can find dog meat restaurants everywhere in southern China and people really enjoy eating it in the winter. On the other hand, in case you are getting a bit worried now, dog is a pricey speciality so it's impossible that you will ever receive a meat dish which is dog meat unless you explicitly ordered it!!)

Modern Chinese people in the cities also eat pizza, burgers, spaghetti, sandwiches, chocolate, and all sorts of real international cuisines, not only junk food. Visitors to China who can't use chopsticks, or have a phobia of rice, will have absolutely no problem feeding themselves! (But if you visit China, please be a little more imaginative than to go straight to one of the hundreds of Starbucks springing up in every city.)

Misconception 4. *China is a communist country.*

Politically, China is still a one-party state and the Chinese people do not elect their leaders. How much does this matter? For a start, China was never the same style of 'communist' government that we associate with Soviet Russia. And the days of Mao are loooong gone!

Government in China nowadays is actually much less centralised than in most other countries, with an amazing amount of power in the hands of provincial or city-level governing bodies. These local governments are increasingly competing with each other to improve and enrich their domains, and the effect is a lot more positive than controversy-hunting western journalists' usual portrayals.

Are the Chinese people oppressed? Hardly! Chinese society is, any observer would be forced to admit, remarkably free and progressive. In point of fact, most Chinese people couldn't be described as particularly agitated about "freedom" or political change, being more concerned about getting a piece of the GDP pie and improving their lives and their children's lives. The political sentiment which most Chinese people share is a desire for stability, safety, and prosperity - and basically anyone would have to admit the government in Beijing is currently doing a really good job at that regardless of any abstract criticisms of their "communist" political identity.

Economically, what is China? People always laugh at the phrase "capitalism with Chinese characteristics" but it's true it's hard to find any description or comparative model for the Chinese system these days. In many ways the Chinese are more capitalist at the moment than anyone else, perhaps because the system has lagged behind in regulating and taxing the explosion of private commerce in the last twenty years. The name "The Wild East" has a certain truth about it at the moment, but things are getting more standardised, the RMB (Chinese Yuan - the currency) is now open to trading, and of course China is in the WTO now. Expect the China pages of your newspaper to get ever more prominent as businesses and governments wake up more to the economic power of the Chinese market.

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