Port of Qingdao Is No Longer China’s ‘Sin City’

Jim Mann’s article (Oct. 31), “China ‘Sin City’ ” seems to wistfully recall the good old days of Qingdao, when violence, black marketeering, and prostitution were rife. American sailors looking for “livelier Asian locales” in the 1980s are directed to Subic Bay, where they can find “wine, women and song.”

Mann implies that the dull tranquility of modern Qingdao, with little poverty or unemployment, is somehow inferior to those exciting days of old when “any Chinese who came into the barracks, we’d pull out a gun and count ‘One . . . two . . . three.’ ”

This is not to suggest that Subic Bay isn’t “lively.” A town where girls as young as 13 must sell their bodies to improve the lot of their hungry families may certainly be livelier for American servicemen.

Still, for the vast majority of the local population, aren’t employment and health, not to mention human dignity, more important than “excitement”?

NICO ISRAEL

Los Angeles