If you are attempting to compare voyages on deep water vessels like the Star Clipper with trips like the Viking China tour you are comparing apples with oranges. The Viking tours in China, depending upon the itinerary, are more like a land tour with a river cruise included than an ocean voyage. The land portion is quite intense with most of your day well planned to cover all of the important sites. The river portion may be as little as 3 days or as many as 9 days and also has many stops along the way. While the ship is probably one of the nicest on the river it is nothing like an ocean going vessel. River cruising throughout the world is vastly different than ocean cruising.
If a large ship with lots of amenities and activities is what you seek then you might be more satisfied with one of the major ocean cruise lines that have port calls at Shanghai and Beijing with extensive land tours available.
Also, I would recommend that you search the forum at
http://boards.cruisecritic.com/forumdisplay.php?f=191 for posts about China river cruises as they have a lot more information than you will find on this Board.
I posted a journal of our trip in 2005 at
http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/cmthomas/ that you may find interesting.
Clarence
