For someone from the California suburbs China can certainly feel like another planet. There's the language, the traffic, the air, the smells, the food, the culture, the profusion of yappy little dogs in Beijing and more. A thousand things to overwhelm the senses and challenge the mind.

Part of the problem is that there is no "one" China. China may exist as a political entity, but by any other yardstick it's more like several completely different countries within the same border. From Tianjin on the east coast to Kashgar on the Central Asian border, from Harbin's famous ice lanterns in the sub-Siberian north to the mysterious Yunnan-Burma border in the sub-tropical south, there are dozens of distinct cultures and dialects.

And, of course, there is the income gap.

From my point of view, this is really the most interesting variation. For a technologist there are two completely different Chinas. One can be found in the increasingly wealthy cities, especially the big three of Beijing, Shanghai (pictured at left) and Guangzhou. These mega-cities, and a few other at the leading-edge of China's development, are well on their way to becoming cosmopolitan metropolises intimately connected to the rest of the world. They are wired and, increasingly, wireless. They are home of many of the students and young professionals that account for the lion's share of China's more than 100 million Internet users, to virtually all of China's rising class of laptop-toting business people, and to the entrepreneurs creating the thousands of new companies driving China's urban technology boom.

But the hinterland starts just outside of these cities, and it has 800 million peasants, most of whom haven't directly experienced much of China's boom. For these people, laptop computers are unheard of, the Internet is an abstraction and even mobile phones can be a rare luxury. But they are as much a part of China as the glittering cities, and in some ways, the effect of even simple technology upon their lives can be profound. Here in Beijing, this part of China starts just 1 hour's drive north of the city as you enter the mountains. There the rambling suburbs of the capital give way to dusty villages that look drawn from 30 years in past. That's where the photograph below was taken.

In this blog, I hope to tell you something about how technology relates to both of these Chinas: The China of neon-lit skylines, booming online game companies, 3G telephony and Internet cafes, and the China of remote villages where a television can gather an immense crowd. Both are changing rapidly, and both have to co-exist.