Dan's China diary - day 20

In May 2006, silicon.com senior reporter Dan Ilett travelled to China, seeking to get behind some of today's most interesting tech and business stories. This is his warts-and-all diary, which appears daily this month. For in-depth coverage of this fact-finding trip inside China, including analysis and exclusive stories, click here.

Thursday 25 May, Hong Kong

This morning I stumble across Hong Kong's ID card registration building. silicon.com has been covering the UK's ID cards debate for some time now so I decide to take a peek at what's going on.

People have had ID cards in Hong Kong for 40 years now. The government is currently in the process of switching over from paper cards to new, biometrically chipped ID cards.

The place looks almost identical to the UK passport office. There's a bit of kerfuffle at reception at first because no one knows why I'm there but after a while a uniformed official comes over and explains the process. They're using double-thumb print and facial recognition but no iris technology.

He shows me a glimpse of the additional services you can add onto your card, such as e-certificates - for safer web surfing, he says - and library cards. He is about to go on when he asks if I'm a UK government official. "Er, no, a journalist," I say. It's obviously time to leave. He doesn't let me take his photo.

Later I meet Macquarie Securities chief technology analyst Kishore Suratkal, who says there will be growth in the technology market across China but not at the rapid rate people expect. This is because infrastructure largely underpins the rollout of new technology - so the key is to invest in infrastructure first and technology second.

With 400 million mobile phone subscriptions and 110 million internet users, he says the rapid phase of technology adoption is largely over - some places are already saturated so it will be a drip feed process from now on.

Interesting comments, which contradict a lot of the excitement about markets I've heard on the mainland.

My last big interview of the trip is with one of China's best-known internet companies, Alibaba - a business-to-business online auction that has really taken off in Asia.

The company owns Yahoo! China and Alipay - the answer to PayPal in this part of the world. Porter Erisman, an Alibaba VP, talks about censorship but says the benefits of providing internet services in China outweigh the negatives of having to conform. You either play by the rules or don't do business here, is pretty much the gist.

Today is also my last chance to look at the Octopus card - Hong Kong's more advanced version of London's Oyster card. And it's true - here you really can walk into a shop and buy things with it after using it for travel. I get some very strange comments from shop owners as I take photos of me using the card to pay for things. I don't even try to explain.

Once Alibaba is done I feel I can breathe a sigh of relief - that's all the interviews over now. I can't believe three weeks have gone by so fast. Only one more day to go...

Tomorrow: catch the final instalment of Dan's diary, as he looks back at his weeks in China and tries to imagine some of the things he's missed.