When I first visited Shanghai, China in 1990, I was full of my anticipation and curiosity to know what's behind their intellectuals' minds more so than anything else.
I was accompanied to visit the then Bell Shanghai, the epitome of their telecoms research activities in that area. It was in cold November. A few young and scholarly elder engineers met us in their most spartan room with skeletal wooden chair.
They served us Chinese tea in tiny porcelain teacups to keep us warm, as there was no heating facility in that room. We survived unscathed. They were just so keen to know what modern digital chips we had to introduce to them.
As we began to explain the functions and features of not just the chips but the whole tech pathways of things to come, I noticed their eyes were so unmoved so glued to every word we uttered, in Mandarin of course, save those highly technical terms in English.
They asked profusely questions since these were the rare opportunities for them to have technology before their eyes in their home ground. By applications engineer said to me thereafter, these people knew more than what he expected, and demanded exhaustively the last drop of knowledge about the digital chips we came armed with.
Later, we traveled to Xian and Wuhan to visit a small set up called Huawei Telecoms, which had another rejuvenating series of stories. When we came out of China, we had no doubt that the tech influence of China
would impact the world.
We were not wrong.
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