Wonderful Wuhan

June 22nd, 2010 : Wuhan, China
If Beijing revived my deeply hidden fear of skyscrapers, Wuhan bumped it up a couple of notches. The city looked every bit as big as Beijing, with insanely tall skyscrapers everywhere.

Courtesy of the late flight from Beijing, we reached there pretty late. Checked into Ramada , they upgraded me to a suite room. Very luxurious. But alas, they had to do this when my time spent in the  hotel was going to < 10 hours :-((

In the morning we ran into couple of Delhi-ites in the hotel lobby. They were from an Indian firm supplying plastic fuel tanks to variety of car manufacturers. They do manufacturing in China. Indian company, manufacturing in China, supplying parts to German and US companies. World is so small …….

The place was called optics valley, I am told that there are like zillions for optics and laser manufacturers in that area.  The “optics valley” comes from Wuhan National Lab for optoelectronics, one of the five national laboratories in China. The Laboratory is managed by Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), which has about 50,000 students !! A more comprehensive look at this impressive university is found on the following Wikipedia article. Among others, it also house the National Center for High Magnetic fields, another impressive feat of planning and Engineering. When fully commissioned, it can do pulsed fields of up to 80 Tesla, possibly the largest capability in the world

This is another thing that I notice about China, there is no chest thumping or boasting. People are quietly building up world class research, science and engineering facilities. Very focused vision, with loads of government support. There are surely lessons to be learnt from them.

To crisply summarize Wuhan – World class !!

The only downside being the Smog that hangs over the city at all times. You get an acidic sort of smell in your nose all the time too :( Massive urbanization does have its de-merits in terms of air quality.

Left in the evening from Wuhan to Nanjing, my mental image of China as a low cost manufacturing hub has rapidly altered in the past couple of days.

Let us see what Nanjing has in store