Arrival in Beijing

I arrived in Beijing on a grey Sunday afternoon in December following a 13-hour flight from San Francisco. I'm taking this trip to talk to people throughout China about their visions, missions, and progress with enterprise IT software initiatives.

A 6,000-mile flight really seems too long, you know?

But I made it. Winter is closing in on this northern capital, the trees were bare, and the air quality was quite poor. Nothing unique about these observations to be sure.

There was a formidable looking taxi line outside the lower level of the gleaming new terminal at Beijing Capital airport, but a squadron of of drivers made the wait quite bearable.

I rode in a tired old VW Jetta to my hotel in the central city in about half an hour, with a fare of 90-yuan ($15US given the extortionist exchange rate I got at SFO). There were some exciting moments during the ride, but I've had hairier rides in San Francisco, and Belgian taxis are still the craziest in the world in my book.

To say Beijing has been transformed in the 30 years ago since Deng Xiaoping first touted capitalism is to say that Cher or Michael Jackson have been transformed during these years as well. The statement is factual, but hardly captures the enormity of it all.

Beijing's facelifts, tucks, peels, and implants have been beneficial, however, at least to the capitalist American eye. It's as if city planners visited New York, Paris, and Dallas, then decided to create long Paris-style boulevards with a New York skyline, populated by buildings of a scale that would make Texans jealous.

So this is how China is using all the money Americans spend on products from the Middle Kingdom. The basic style here is massive and modern. The good news is that I could be sitting in any great city of the world. After a long flight and debilitating time change, I'll admit it's OK to be in nice, familiar surroundings. Keeps the nerves from getting too jangled.

Ate at the hotel restaurant last night, a place called "Made in China" that had the ambiance, clientele, and pricing of many places in Palo Alto or Santana Row in San Jose. A western business traveler--particularly one from the very Asian San Francisco Bay Area--can visit Beijing and feel right at home. So maybe the bad news is that modern-day, central Beijing is not a place to seek the uniqueness of ancient Chinese culture. Does that mean that what's really going beneath the surface here will be obscured to me?

But I'm hardly an architecture critic or social commentator; to me what this means is there must be a lot of modern IT infrastructure lurking underneath all this planning, building, business, and development. With luck, this trip will uncover many stories on this topic.