Amazon.com: Like most video tours of China, In the Middle Kingdom: China will take viewers to the 2,000-year-old Great Wall, along the silty-brown Yangtze River, and into the densely populated metropolis of Hong Kong. But it also spends time ruminating on the rapid changes the Chinese face: the tremendous influx of motor vehicles into Beijing in the 1990s and the plans for the Three Gorges Dam, which will flood many existing cities in exchange for hydroelectric power. Combining travelogue, cultural overview, and historical perspective, this program takes care to enlighten viewers while still enchanting them with the fantastic sights of the world's most populous country. Eschewing experts, this 52-minute video relies instead on the camera, narration by Roy Conrad, and interviews with a series of unidentified American tourists. Interestingly, the tourists offer unexpectedly useful insights on subjects ranging from developmentally caused pollution to the City of Ghosts, which takes an amusement park approach to the concept of Hell. --Kimberly Heinrichs
