8th GUANXI INTERVENTIONAL CHINA ASEAN SUMMIT. NANNING 5-6th Nov 2011

I spend Saturday in Nanning, Guanxi province, China to participate at the 8th Guanxi Interventional China-Asean Summit. This meeting was organised by Dr Li of Nanning University and 1st People Hospital. It was indeed an honour to be invited. I went to deliver a talk on "Bifurcation PCI" with case examples. I suppose I was representing the Malaysian cardiologcal community. The meeting dealt with interventional topics, cine cases as well as general cardiology topics. There were speakers from Indonesia, Singapore and of course cardiologists from Beijing as well.










It was indeed an eye opener. I learned that Guanxi province is a province with a population of 40 million people, with 50 interventional centers to cater to the cardiac needs of the province. I met students from Nanning University. There were more then 5 universities in Guanxi province, and they had many students from Asean countries. I was introduced to a Mauritius student and another Indonesian students, both of whom spoke fluent Madarin ( Pu Tong Hwa ).
Nanning is quite a beautiful city full of flowers. I suppose they have just held the China-Asean Trade Expo. They call Nanning the "green City". As usual, like Beijing, traffic jams ( not as bad as Beijing ) was common place. Even 10 pm at night, there was traffic jams ( they took me to the city, after dinner ). I am not sure of the working hour traffic as I was at conference hall ( Wharton Hotel ). I am sure there were jams as well.
Pollution was obvious and I could see wide spread construction. nanning airport and Guanzhou airport was a bee-hive of activity, at 7 am. with long queques, shouting and Q cutting ( typical of China ).
It looks like we have much to catch up with, as Chinese cardiology has grown by hips and bounds, since I visited Beijing in 1993 to work with Dr Gao Ru-Lin at Fu Wai Hospital when we were both trying to get our respective stent program started. There are 35 or more Provinces in China. Can you imagine how many interventional cardiac centers there are, and how many interventional cardiologist. No wonder they are doing 100,000-200,000 PCIs a year.
I had a weekend of eye opener at Nanning. Guanxi. I was educated.