So much has happened, so little time allocated to tell you about it. The China 20 tour keeps moving at a pace that makes it extremely difficult on the considerable number of Web 2.0 companies we have visited in Beijing and Shanghai. I have decided to table reporting on the companies we have seen and business people we have met until I get back home. Hopefully, you can get little teaspoonfuls of some of them from the China 20 Twitter stream.
I have skipped a morning and now an afternoon session to share at least some of the travel-tourist observations, particularly The Forbidden City, where we spent a couple of hours walking around including a private visit to the IBM virtual Forbidden City facility, which is quite remarkable. Located inside the 600+ years old real City, IBM spent three years photographing every detail of the real city and meticulously replicating it into an extremely educational virtual tour, which is used in China and Worldwide for education visits. You can get an avatar and actually tour the city yourself from the comfort of wherever you are. Called "Beyond Space and Time," Mike Butcher, head of UK TechCrunch has written a good report on what we saw.
As good as the virtual tour is, it is simply dwarfed by the real thing. We spent much less time than any of us wanted walking around a small slice of this vast and ancient place. The Forbidden City is entered at one end of Tienanmen Square. It is a complex of 8707 buildings on 861,000 square yards of land. Construction began in 1406 and was completed two years before Columbus set sail for America. If the emperor chose to sleep in one "bay" each night, it would take him 24 years to sleep in every bedroom reserved for him.
The Forbidden City survived damage during the Cultural Revolution because the country's revered prime minister, the late Zhou Enlai send an army battalion to protect it from the Red Guard.
We looked through arches and protective windows to see on throne room where, the sign says "officials came to kowtow to the Emperor, showing that lobbyist have been around for a very long time. I wandered around a bit with Ernst Jan Plouth who seemed to be particularly adept at communicating with some of the locals.
Even without Ernst's charms, I have found the Chinese in both Beijing and Shanghai to be friendly and polite in conversation. Whenever I pointed a camera at someone he or she smiled and posed. When we posed for this shot in front of the Mao poster, quite a few smiling Chinese took pictures of us, then smiled as we whipped out our cameras and took pictures of them.
The politeness seems to disappear in crowds and places where Westerners line up or self organize. Buses, bicycles, cars and pedestrians seem to me to be playing this deadly game of chicken with each other. At pedestrian crossing people physically push you aside. On the sidewalk, people do not keep to one side. When we queued up at Beijing train station for our overnight jaunt to Shanghai, a short, squarely built Chines woman tried to bulldoze her way past us.
Janet Carmosky, co-founder of the The China Business Network, co-founder of this China 2.0 event lived in China for 17 years. She observed that in this manner, "the Chinese are the most anarchist people on Earth." She explained, "When Westerners line up, there's the expectation is there will be something at the front of the line when they get there. Until pretty recently, this was not often the case in China."
