It is 9am now in the morning and I am sitting myself in the transit area of Beijing, China, tapping away on my laptop. It has been two years since I last set foot on China.
While waiting for my transit flight to San Francisco, I took a tour of the Beijing airport’s transit lounge. It looked very bit like a transit lounge of international standard and then slightly more. It might not appear very impressive on first glance but if you just took the time dig some more below the surface of what is apparent and to give it more thoughts, the level of technological sophistication should soon impressive itself upon you.
Public phone with built in video telephony, all in good working condition. Imagine the logistics involved. While not engaged, these phones show advertising another source of revenue for the operator. Two purposes for the space of one, ingenious!
Automatic issuance of internet login via scanning of passport details. A simple and really effective method to provide internet access control within the airport. We are still stuck with manual issuance of such details in Changi Terminal One. The broadband available here is way much faster than what we have with wireless.sg. Opps…
I always love travelling, just physically passing through a place once and one could get a feel of how the general state of things are.
Hmmm… sometimes when seeing what is happening in the world outside of our Singapore boundaries, I cannot help but feel that if the world does not eventually open up to allow for free flow of people to live & work and I am still stuck with a Singaporean passport, it is likely I will be the one that gets screwed and left behind in the long run. Though we are trying our utmost, we are progressing too slowly. There is only so much economies of scale available for a population of 5 million people. Thankfully though due to the advancement of communication technologies, technological break through in other territories could still diffuse into Singapore the territory. However if what the Boston Consulting Group postulates is true, then there will likely reach a certain stage in technological advancement where Singapore the country with its limited resources hit a wall and get left behind while the other nations with larger potential economies of scale penetrate through with ease. That is definitely not one of those times when I find a Singaporean passport a useful one. Nice pragmatism, isn’t it?
Prior to WWI the concept of a country and the concept of citizenship to a country has always been somewhat defined via blood relationship. The modern notion of nation and citizenship is a rather new one which came about post WWI which is based upon territorial boundaries. It is getting increasingly challenged as communication technology advances. Territorial boundaries in terms of social activities are slowly getting eroded, commerce is taking place across multiple time zones. Governments are finding it increasingly hard to enforce taxation on their people. Maybe it is time to rethink and redefine what it actually means to be a state and what it actually means to be a citizen of a state. Thinking to myself, I wonder what the next stage of nation and citizenship evolution would be like, that of global citizenship. I wonder if I will see it in this life time mine. I am feeling really curious…
Oh yeah… it is quite pathetic the Chinese Government actually attempts to ban sites such as Facebook and Google document. While I do know how to by pass it as I just did via my blog system, I am just feeling to lazy now to attempt at a reroute via a proxy server in another part of the world.