China Trip Nov. 2006: 2

Now I have attended a very well – almost perfectly — organized conference, spent some time as a tourist, and been to a University.

China is definitely very clean and well organized.  It does compare well to most countries that I have been to.  Traffic is disciplined, trash is taken care of, even in very crowded places peole are well behaved.  Tourist attractions are extremely well managed.  Hangzhou is a city for tourists and most of them are Chinese tourists in this season.  So I saw that Chinese people are very well behaved in these places.

The restaurants that I visited were also very impressive.  Of course these were one of the better ones and were carefully selected to impress — and that worked.

The most impressive visit for me was to the University.  Zhejiang is considered in the top 10 universities in the country.  I went to their West Lake campus.  The university is physically very impressive — nice very well maintained buildings.  But the more impressive part was the departments.  The computer science department is extremely well equipped.  Modern facilities.  Some labs are sponsored by companies like Microsoft.  Demos that I was shown compare to those that I will be shown in any advanced country.  That is not surprising considering the research output in International places that one sees from China.

A big surprise to me was the number of doctoral students.  Prof. Yueting Zhuang has more than 20 in his group more than any in US I know.  And I was told that it is not very uncommon.  Discussions with some of them showed that they are doing high quality work. 

So far it has been an amazing experience.  I will be remiss if I did not mention that people are really good host.  They are making me feel very important — I just hope that it does get out of my head before I board plane to get back home.