May you live in interesting times

Wuzhen local time Monday 8:58pm

Greetings from the People’s Republic of China where my parents and I doing a seven day tour. We took off from Hong Kong Sunday morning, flew to Hangzhou and spent the night at the city that was once the capital of China 800 years ago. This morning we left Hangzhou for Wuzhen. The following is some video footage of the countryside on part of the drive to Wuzhen, where I am writing this blog post from tonight.

I once heard that an ancient Chinese expression is “may you live in interesting times.” And this is interesting times indeed for China. There are certain things I see here that remind me of America in the 1920s. The country is in the midst of a major economic boom. Hangzhou is a city that has only become a big city in the past ten years or so. Yet there are other things that make me wonder if maybe China is still in the stone ages. I bought a China Mobile pre-paid SIM card for my GSM phone. China Mobile was the subject of an article in Fortune Magazine recently. It is the largest mobile phone company in China, with a larger cellular customer base than AT&T, and is owned partly by the communist government. When I bought the SIM card, the woman I bought it from did not speak a word of English and I had to use my tour guide as a translator. She told me the card cost $100 (RMB) and came with $50 of pre-paid call time. The packaging had a holographic seal of authenticity and the name China Mobile. But there was no other information as to how many minutes it had, what the rates were, or even if $100 was the correct price for the product. The woman had a chart that explained the product’s rate structure but it was completely in Chinese. At the hotel, I brought it to the front desk and asked the people there to call China Mobile. After at least 10 minutes of calling multiple numbers, the hotel clerk told me I would receive $100 of value but it would take about 24 hours for my account to be credited. Over the next 12 hours, I received multiple SMS text messages, all in Chinese, from China Mobile - one suggesting that I recharge my card because it had less than $10 of value and another telling me $50 had been added onto my card. At this point I am pretty sure I have at least $50 of phone interview time on my card but I don’t know what numbers I have to dial to access the IDD service to call the United States. I contrast this to how easy it was for me to purchase and set up a pre-paid SIM card from PCCW when I was in Hong Kong last week, which I will hopefully blog about later when I do a post about the everyday technologies in Hong Kong.

In addition to the technological inconveniences youwould expect from a developing country, there are other inconveniences that are symptomatic of a government that purposely chooses to restrict the people’s access to information. Certain web sites such as Wikipedia are blocked. When I type in CNN.com on my web browser, I am redirected to its international edition. But many of these frustrations were melted away when I went to WABC’s web site and heard part of Don Imus’ first radio show since being fired. Anytime someone equates Hillary Clinton to Satan on a major media outlet and gets away with it is a victory for freedom for everyone.