What they did not know is that many Japanese goods are produced in the mainland. And there are close corporate relations. Last year a group from one of the mainland's largest electricity and gas companies visited Japan, trying to find buyers for 27 subsidiary companies. Trade between the two countries has reached a staggering US$160 billion a year.

Thinking that boycotting Japanese goods is a display of nationalism is foolish. It would only bring economic instability. Japan is a land with few resources, and China is one of the first places that Japanese look to create symbiotic relationships. Due to the close business ties, it is essential that China tread carefully.

ALEX FAN, Kwun Tong

Helicopter buzz

I refer to the letter 'Kadoorie should clean up the air' (Sunday Morning Post, May 1), by Grace Hong.

What good will it do to tell Michael Kadoorie to clean up the environment? There are other helicopter companies around and, furthermore, the pollution we are getting is from the mainland. Furthermore, I doubt very much that helicopter services create such a harmful environment in Hong Kong. On the contrary, they make a huge impact for the tourist trade and business.

By the way, Mr Kadoorie's helicopter is an MD500 Notar, which does not have a tail rotor. Instead it uses jet propulsion, which creates flight that is smoother and much quieter than that of the helicopters of the Government Flying Service. It does not harm animals and birds at Kadoorie Farm.

The Civil Aviation Department carefully monitors helicopters to prevent noise pollution in Hong Kong. If the department approves of a heliport site, then the noise level is acceptable. So please do not jump the gun with assumptions.

PAUL LEIGH, Hunghom

MTR hygiene woes

Correspondent Paul Surtees, who complained about people eating on the MTR (April 30), should prepare himself for a further decline in hygiene standards on the rail network.

The marked increase in the number of retail outlets in stations, especially convenience stores and cake shops, has resulted in an increase in litter on platforms and in trains, and is encouraging more and more commuters to snack while in transit.

Also, cooked food outlets are appearing inside stations. Look at Admiralty MTR. When you enter this station now you are assailed by cooking smells from takeaway food and grease stains on the floor. Of course the MTR will say that the presence of so many shops helps to keep fares down. However, there should be a limit to this kind of operation.

In a sudden panic it would not be conducive to a quick and orderly evacuation of a station if some commuters are carrying takeaway food that ends up on the floor. Does the Transport Department have any policy or guidelines on this issue?

CANDY TAM, Wan Chai

Pray for mainland

I recently read the international best-seller China, Inc., which discusses the imminent rise of China to superpower and possibly world domineering status. This book has shocked and inspired fear in some, and although I felt it was well researched and engagingly written, it omitted any distractions to this theme.

I have spent the past four years in the mainland teaching and doing business. China a great nation? The system is corrupt at every level and completely opaque. At one point, I almost began to believe that any woman would sell sex for money (in fact, there is a flimsy connection between sex and morality, a result of atheism). Ninety per cent of married men visit hookers regularly and it is common for college girls to spend weekends with businessmen to finance their appetite for fashion. If Mother Teresa was right that abortion represents the death of a woman's soul, what could it mean for China when most women have several abortions?

When I wanted to have prototypes of a furniture sample made at four major furniture factories and not one could follow a blueprint or basic design instructions, I gave up. The 'boom' cities are an illusion, with 80 per cent unoccupancy rates in quickly erected buildings that will be condemned in 15 years. Glitzy government shopping malls and boutiques abound, but other than tourists, and shoppers from Hong Kong and Macau in Zhuhai and Shenzhen, no one ever buys anything. It is all for show. Most car production is procured through government purchasing schemes using loans from an insolvent banking system.

If you drink water from any lake, river or well in the mainland it will kill you immediately; water from the tap takes a little longer. And the polluted air is like toxic soup. Owing to the one-child policy and a strong cultural preference for baby boys, up to 100 million men may never find a wife and start a family. Millions of children grow up as pampered 'little emperors'. Walk down any street in any of the 'miracle' cities and you will see the burgeoning hordes of unemployed. You can sense the rage as they seethe at the fat cats driving luxury cars with beautiful women inside dripping expensive jewellery.

Not one person I spoke with openly expressed a view that deviated from the government line. The death penalty is doled out for practically any reason. The glue that holds society together comprises empty promises, fear instilled in people in overt and covert ways, and the aggressive promotion of a blind ultra-nationalism apparently plagiarised from Peronist fascists.

China's recent past has been saturated with misery: foreign exploitation and mass drug addiction, instability and social insecurity, wars, civil wars, foreign invasion, disastrous social experiments leading to epic famines, collective insanity, and now disillusionment as communist ideology is replaced with wealth mania and the cruellest form of capitalism. China is a messed-up country lacking a soul whose Godforsaken masses are being exploited by avaricious western and Japanese business interests and its own pathologically insecure, prestige- and power-hungry aristocratic elite. Don't fear China. Pray for it.

LAYNE ZEILER, Tsim Sha Tsui

Religion's poor record

People are expecting many good things from Pope Benedict XVI, but he has said that he has a huge task ahead of him because the world is filled with war, poverty and corruption. If this is still the situation after 2,000 years in which countries and empires have been run according to Christian principles, doesn't it tell us something about the efficacy of religion? The world today is incomparably better than 'before'. And most progress has been made by countries that have become more secular, while many of the hot spots have conflicts rooted in religion: the Middle East, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Sudan, Indonesia and the Philippines. People don't need religion to tell them the difference between good and bad. What they need are secular, truly democratic systems that allow the goodness that is inherent in people to be translated into their society.

ROY PROUSE, Stanley