Alvin Poh’s Blog

Over December, I toured China for a month and saw some pretty interesting things there. And if there’s one thing that I’m thankful for, it’s a travel pillow because the time it takes to fly there can KILL (or land you with a very sore neck). The normal neck pillows don’t cut it too – get a better one that’s also inflatable, like this one featured here.

In China, I was pretty surprised and delighted by some of the things that I saw. Some ideas that were taken for granted in China were just pure brilliant and should be implemented elsewhere in the world. If you’re ever on the fence about visiting China, don’t hesitate anymore. You need to visit this country and see what’s happening for your own eyes.

For me, what I took away was how interesting it was to see how things were done differently in the country than what I was experienced to. Within the country of China, you see such a wide range of development – on one end you have areas like Yunnan, where history and tourism is very rich and integral in daily life, and where technology hasn’t as yet caught up with. On the other end, you have metropolitan cities such as Shanghai and Beijing where neon lights, skyscrapers, and the latest in technology appear and are taken for granted as part of everyday life.

I think America and other developed/developing countries can learn from China in many ways. One seemingly mundane way is the way the Chinese travel on coach buses – it’s such a trivial thing, but absolutely brilliant by my standards. They call it “wo pu”, which describes overnight coach buses that have bunk beds instead of seats. Now that’s smart thinking. I would get on in one city, fall asleep in my bed, and wake up the next morning in another city. I vote it more comfortable than an airplane.

What I didn’t understand though, was how sites like Youtube, Blogspot, Facebook, and more, were banned in China — you simply cannot access them anywhere in the country. What you could do is to use a proxy or a VPN to get you a non-China IP address, but that’s such a hassle. Still, it shows that a simple ban wouldn’t stop a determined person, so the question is, why bother ban it in the first place? I feel that the value that the Chinese could get from these services and the knowledge/information contained within such sites would far outweigh any advantages that could be had by banning the sites – but that’s just me.

Anyway, if you ask me, after having personally seen what China is currently, I’m itching to see how China develops over the next few years and how its role in the world plays out.

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