Allen Ginsberg visited China in 1984, first as part of an American delegation of writers and then as a private traveler. He visited many cities over a period of several months and spent time lecturing on American poetry. He found China oppressive and, in many ways, disappointing, and also he suffered many health problems owing to the pollution there; but nonetheless his time in China was a creatively fertile period for him, resulting in a number of important poems. This chapter details his travels around China, focusing on a sense of paranoia that plagued him because he was in a totalitarian state where he was constantly observed. It also looks at the poems that emerged from his trip, examining the various influences his inquiries into Chinese poetry had on his own work.