Today, one week after a massive earthquake struck China, I was sitting in front of my laptop computer in central Beijing and contemplating my next column. Just a few hours before, I had landed safely in Beijing after a choppy 11-hour flight from San Francisco that left many of the passengers -- many of them young U.S. students coming for a China initiation -- nauseous.
It was my first China flight to arrive at Beijing's sparkling new international airport -- up and running just months before the Olympics. A high-tech train whisked travelers from the gates to the baggage claim areas and immigration officials efficiently cleared a plane-load of passengers.
Checking email on a Wi-Fi connection at my Beijing hotel the morning after my arrival, I suddenly heard the sounds of horns honking and shrill alarms going off. The noise lasted far longer than horns during a typical traffic jam here on the capital city's clogged streets.
Something was clearly going on -- were the horns an alarm signaling an after-shock from the quake, perhaps? But, no. I glanced at the nearby TV screen, switched to CNN. There, I saw images of rescue workers near the epicenter standing still, with their heads bowed. The hotel staff in the lobby were all lined up, too -- heads also lowered, hands clasped in front. I got out of my chair to investigate the scene from my 13th floor windows and saw that all the vehicles were frozen in place, suddenly stationary.
It didn't take me long to figure out what was going on. Not only Beijing, but the entire nation was holding three minutes of silence to mourn the victims of the earthquake.
Before the advent of the Internet and mobile communications, that an event like this could have been orchestrated would have been unimaginable. But today, mass populations can be mobilized in a moment's notice. And in China, home to the world's largest number of Internet and mobile phone users -- not to mention countless bloggers -- word does travel in a nano-second.
Even the relief effort reveals a lot about China's tech prowess. Groups of overseas Chinese -- many of them graduates from the 2,400-member strong Tsinhgua University alumni network -- are coordinating an email campaign to solicit donations for the Red Cross in China. Payment can be sent through online payment system PayPal, which is waiving its usual transaction fee. Tech titans Google, Yahoo, Qualcomm, eBay and Hewlett-Packard are matching the donations.
Certainly, thanks to the Internet and mobile communications, the images of the disaster and the relief teams that have poured into the earthquake zone have been broadcast out to the world. It has been hard to miss the videos of victims being rescued, of workers tirelessly digging through the rubble, of China's leading politicians inspecting the scene.
The whole experience can't help but remind me of how advanced China is becoming -- and how the country's open and swift response to the earthquake tragedy has lessons for the U.S. and its poor handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans.
Just this morning at breakfast at my Beijing hotel, one of my fellow passengers from the flight spotted me and stopped to chat. It was his first trip to China since 1949, when the Communists came into power and his family fled. He could not believe how modern China has become in such a short period. "It makes the U.S. look old. Everything is so new. The airports in the U.S. cannot compare," he said. "Everything is so clean, you could practically eat off the floor." I could not help but nod in agreement. Clearly, the Dragon has reawakened, heart and soul.