Today we had one of those typical working days; spending most of the morning working on research and creating presentation with a level-set meeting in between.

In the afternoon my sub-team headed for the office of the local IBM branch – mainly for connectivity reasons (the bandwidth in the hotel is shared … so during the weekend it was acceptable, while now it is not reliable at all). On top of that most things outside the Great Firewall come in slowly (independent on where one connects … hotel, office or Starbucks) with unpredictable blocking occurring (e.g. yesterday I could not access ibm.com from the hotel; facebook remains a 50:50 joker, some also have issues with wikipedia and google).

So we decided to use our connections (or guānxì / 关系 as the locals say) to get into the IBM office to at least do our research without excessive waiting times … we were still behind the Firewall though …

In the late afternoon we had a meeting with the local IBM management to get an introduction to IBM [Central] China and the situation of the region.

After the meeting we had dinner before heading back to the hotel.