: China: Surprise, Surveillance, Sights #IndiaNEWS #News By Satyajit Banerjee Like almost everyone else in India, I thought I had a sense of China.   Like almost everyone, I believed that apart from

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China: Surprise, Surveillance, Sights #IndiaNEWS #News
By Satyajit Banerjee
Like almost everyone else in India, I thought I had a sense of China.   Like almost everyone, I believed that apart from the glitzy large cities much of the hinterland was backward and shared the standard Indian clichés of a nation of largely unhappy, repressed people. So when I got an offer to work there in January 2016, I was ambivalent about leaving my comfortable university job.   Besides, I was barraged by the scepticism of my friends and family: Gosh why China, you have to be careful, you can’t trust them.   I declined the offer despite my curiosity for exploring the country further. A year later, when the offer resurfaced, I thought perhaps this was destiny and took the plunge.
My four years in China were a revelation.   Every prejudice I had turned on its head. The first obvious thing that strikes you is the physical infrastructure. Yes, the big metros have nice airports in India today but an obscure city like Kunming, my first point of entry, had an impressive airport.   My 2-hour road trip from Shanghai to Wuxi, a town 130 km away, seemed like snaking through an urban megalopolis, with corporate parks, malls, housing complexes interspersed with parks and gardens, briefly crossing open countryside before zipping through neat urban areas again. Impressive 8-lane highways crisscrossed my path.
Wuxi Calling
Wuxi (pronounced Wushi, since X is sh in Chinese), with a population of 6. 5 million, is a sprawling city with six lane-roads all across, and an additional lane on either side for electric scooters and bicycles (Wuxi has no gasoline-run scooters or motorcycles).   In many ways, it is typical of cities in large swathes of China, with landscaped parks and gardens and waterways, teeming with recreational facilities. It is developed in all directions with no such thing as an affluent part and a poorer part of the town.
As in all the urban renewal blitzkrieg of the last three decades, much of the interesting older parts of the towns were razed making way for a spanking new city. Luckily, sections of the old town have been preserved and make for a fun outing on weekends.
Public transportation is cheap and super comfortable.   Air-conditioned electric buses cost only 2 RMB while the extensive and modern metro system connects the sprawling city with three different interconnected lines and costs between 4 RMB and 8 RMB for a trip (1 RMB = Rs 10 approx). Enormous railway stations connect Wuxi with high-speed trains across the country.   A trip to Shanghai costs under 40 RMB and transports you there in 38 minutes, with speed reaching over 300 kmph.   There are long-distance modern bus stations attached to the train stations.

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