Miles ahead: impressions of a China visit

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: A visit to China is always an experience. My second visit, it was far more rewarding than the first one, as I was not only able to visit five cities, but also travel on the amazing Chinese expressways and view the countryside. More important, the meetings scheduled for the Ficci biotechnology delegation I travelled with gave some idea about the determined effort China is making to leapfrog into hi-tech industries and dominate the global market for knowledge products.

The visual impact of their cities and the sheer scale of economic activity and construction are mind-boggling. Beijing seems to have more high-rise buildings than entire India and the infrastructure and facilities seem as good as any in advanced countries. While the Delhi government struggles to complete building one ring road as a freeway, Beijing has already finished five ring roads with no-stops for vehicular movement and the sixth one is almost complete. It has a huge airport that can service many thousand passengers simultaneously and, unlike Delhi, has a modern cab service to transport them in comfort to their destinations, at very reasonable fare.

Shanghai is even more impressive. Hundreds (or thousands) of high-rise buildings glowing amidst a huge web of four to five-storey roads that make the city seem like a readymade studio for Star Wars. This urban universe makes India and Indians look puny. The twin city of Pudong and its special economic zone are superior to the new cities of California, such as Santa Clara or Irvine.

We drove 350 km west of Shanghai to Nanjing, and the notion that outside China’s big cities one would encounter under-development and dirt of the kind one is used to in India was quickly dispelled. Every single km on either side of the expressway was dotted by huge cranes that showed the rapid spread of new economic activity on a gigantic scale. Hundreds of villages along the expressway looked much cleaner and picturesque and with better amenities than Indian villages. Large-scale construction and spread of new settlements and factories are diversifying the economies of these villages, that are also benefiting from huge urban markets, such as Shanghai and Nanjing.