1. An amazing experience! I have just returned from a week in 🇨🇳 visiting Lanzhou (Gansu Province) and Yangling (Shaanxi Province) Link👇explains what the trip was about This🧵describes my, admittedly anecdotal, observations
2. Infrastructure. The scale and general quality of the infrastructure was quite incredible. Whether that be roads, urban development, airports and rail, there has, and continues to be a huge investment in infrastructure of all kinds, that is quite remarkable.
3. I was surprised by the type of vehicles we saw. A full range of cars common in Australia (including Land Cruisers), electric vehicles (quite common) and a many others I am not familiar with. The EV recharging infrastructure is better than what I have seen here at home.
4. Security. Yes, there was CCTV everywhere and many unarmed security guards. But the only police I saw were on the roads attending incidents. I walked each day, a total of around 50 km (mostly on my own), in the early morning, late at night and during the day.
4. I felt safe at all times. Despite being the lone 'white' person (apart from my travel companions). Actually, I think in all that walking I only saw only one other person of Anglo-Saxon heritage. As an 🇦🇺 citizen the process through customs/immigration etc was very smooth.
5. People. The people we met were great! Not speaking Mandarin meant that communication was not always easy, but many of those we met spoke English to a good or better standard (my inability to learn more than a token few words in Mandarin quickly became apparent ☹️).
6. Our hosts were polite, very friendly, extremely hardworking and genuinely interesting people to speak with.
7. Economy. Judging by the amount of construction going on concerns about a slowing 🇨🇳 economy don't seem to have reached the two cities we visited. The vibe from the street also seemed upbeat. People were out and about, eating, socializing and getting on with their lives.
8. The one conversation we did have about the economy focused on the price of housing, cars etc (no difference to 🇦🇺) The key difference being that the average 🇨🇳 person saves before purchasing big items, rather than going into debt.
9. Politics We didn't have any political discussions of consequence. But what surprised me was that I can't recall seeing any pictures or images of President Xi, Mao etc in public. There were plenty of 🇨🇳 flags out (the 🇨🇳National Day is 1 October)
10. Telecommunications I used roaming on my phone throughout the visit. Internet coverage and speed was excellent. Interestingly I could access Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc which surprised me. We used WeChat which was easy and convenient to use. And I used Alipay for
11. for payments. All very easy once you worked out how it works. I took cash but didn't use any until the last day.
12. Geopolitics. 🇨🇳 is clearly investing heavily in supporting the SCO and Belt and Road. There were a number of international conferences/meetings taking place in Yangling during our visit, & significant facilities whose purpose was to support these initiatives
13. The universities also had many post-graduate students, and some post-Doctoral researchers from countries from the global south.
14. The Director General of the Foreign Affairs Office of Gansu Province gave a speech at the opening of the Forum. He spoke of 'mutual respect' and 'mutual benefit' as being core🇨🇳 principles with the aim of realising 'win-win' benefits for all countries.
15. This aligned with the language of the President of Lanzhou University who spoke of 'common prosperity' and 'humanity.' Personally, I believe that 🇨🇳 believes in these principles, they are not just platitudes.
16. This was my first trip to 🇨🇳. To say that I was impressed, & thoroughly enjoyed it, is a massive understatement. The #auspol initiative which funded our trip is to be commended. 👏 Hopefully I was able to play a small part in improving 🇦🇺 -🇨🇳 relations!
17. Before my visit I thought that 🇦🇺 has so much to gain from improving our relations with 🇨🇳 That view has only been reinforced It's time to build a #positivepeace with not only 🇨🇳 but the region as a whole #AUKUS & the 🇺🇸 alliance are unhelpful impediments at this point.