Kunming
Ever heard of Kunming? No? Well, it is a modern metropolis with 7 million inhabitants and is the capital of Yunnan. Yunnan is a mountainous province in south China which itself is bigger than Germany.
Kunming is not one of those third world mega cities with endlessly sprawled out slums in the suburbs whose city center look much much smaller than one would expect it considering the size of the city. Rather, Kunming reassured my first impression of China (or rather Yunnan) how modern, civilized, clean and rich it looks.
One thing I noticed is that in the bigger cities in Yunnan, most motorcycles, transporter motor-rickshaws and city-cars have an electro motor. The difference in noisiness and air pollution within the cities is noticeable.
A reason we Europeans are so ignorant of China might be that in our heads we classify it as one country (think of certain statistics about e.g. pollution produced). But by area, population, history and culture, it should rather be looked at as a cultural zone in the same class of the whole of South East Asia or Europe. China is about as big as Europe – only unified under one rule.
