Today was our second to last full day in China, and as much as I have enjoyed this country and all the cool adventures and lessons I have learnt and discovered, I’m getting to the point where I could use some American style R&R. The day started with our lesson on culture and Chinese economics. I find this area perhaps the most difficult to fully wrap my head around, and I find myself doubting much of what I learned because of previously held suspicions about the way the Chinese economy has developed. China does indeed have a robust economy indeed and something must be said for the amount of products that it exports and how attractive its business has become. We learned about the communist economy, which focused mostly on the ideas of increased productivity and a better harvest, but during the great leap forward suffered one of the worse famines on record, resulting from mismanagement, inflated production quotas and failure to acknowledge problems, which killed approximately 20 million. I did not find the fact that china only receives a small amount of the profit for many of its exports, and even less goes to the actual worker, very surprising. With unemployment at around 10% today, I can’t imagine that the growth of 9% in the Chinese economy is a true statistic. I don’t understand how a country so closely tied to the US and other foreign economies could have grown so much while the others have suffered. For this reason, I remain suspicious of the actual behavior of the Chinese economy, and wish that more solid and truthful data could be discovered.
After the lesson, we were given a brief period of rest before we headed off to our last company visit, which was Hanwon. We driven just down the road, and after about 15 minutes or so on the bus, we entered the company’s main building. We really didn’t get to see very much of what goes on in the company, which was slightly disappointing, but we did get to demo their new products, which included an Chinese e-reader, which allows the user to access many books and read them right from the device, very similar to the way a printed book works. The company has also developed advanced touch sensitive technology which is set to recognize well over a thousand different pressures of touch. Another development the company has made is in the way of security system technology. They have developed a system that recognizes the face of a given person and can allow them entrance to a given restricted area. All together the tour only took a short 45 minutes or so but was full of exciting new technology that is likely to help change the face of the way we use our current computers and associated devices. We then went back to the hotel, where we took a few hours rest before we headed out to a Karaoke restaurant where we were given a private room where we could sing songs and eat and play games. It was a good chance to relax, even though the place ran out of food the minute we got there, so we made a quick pit stop at the bakery on the way home.