The tour of Hangzhou was very enlightening and full of new experiences.
As I mentioned in the first part of this journey, we attended 12 lectures. But it wasn’t just about lectures. We also had field visits. Each visit showed us something new and unique, sometimes opening doors to new opportunities.
We made 12 field visits, and each one was impressive. But some visits left a lasting mark on us.
One memorable visit was to the Jiufeng Waste Incineration Plant in Nanfeng Village, Yuhang District, Hangzhou.
It was quite an eye-opener.
We observed waste utilization, high-level environmental protection, and smart operations working together in a way that felt almost unreal.
We watched in amazement.
The plant is seen as a global standard for tackling what is often called the “NIMBY” problem, Not In My Backyard. Instead of hiding a waste facility from the public, the plant is partly designed as a tourist attraction and education center, featuring a 3D cinema, a viewing corridor, and even a café with a view of the furnace.
We also learned that its emission standards are publicly displayed and designed to exceed strict European Union requirements.
But two things really stood out to me: the smart operations and the idea of turning waste into resources.
Here’s how the system works.
The bottom ash, the leftover grit from the burning process, is processed into eco-bricks and materials for construction.
Fly ash is stabilized with chelating agents and safely disposed of or used in cement production.
Heat produced from incineration is turned into electricity, which powers thousands of homes, while excess steam is sent to nearby factories for industrial use.
In the end, only a tiny amount of inert residue goes to landfill.
This is a circular economy in action.
From our viewing area, we couldn’t see the final products, like the bricks, during the tour. But we learned about the digital monitoring system that keeps the whole process in check.
For me, that was the real brain of the operation.
The plant has a centralized DCS, Distributed Control System, a big wall of screens showing real-time data all day long.
The system watches and manages nearly every part of the operation.
Combustion optimization: AI-assisted systems adjust oxygen levels, temperature, and waste feed to keep incineration stable and efficient.
Emissions tracking: Continuous monitoring systems track pollutants like dioxins, sulfur dioxide, and particulates. The data goes to local environmental authorities, creating a level of transparency that makes manipulation much harder.
Crane automation: Operators work from a control room, while automated systems help determine the best mixing of waste from different pits to ensure efficient and even burning.
The cranes themselves mostly run on autopilot. A human operator could monitor cranes from a quiet control room and step in when needed, like when the waste composition changed a lot.
I found this particularly interesting.
It reminded me that what we call “smart city” technology isn’t just about fancy gadgets or amazing buildings. Sometimes, it’s simply about tackling everyday urban problems using data, engineering, automation, and good management.
Naturally, Lagos popped into my mind.
I started to think about what a facility like this could mean for Lagos, Abuja, and other big Nigerian cities that produce a lot of waste daily but struggle with collection, disposal, and recycling.
Imagine if some of that waste could be turned into electricity, building materials, and industrial inputs.
Imagine if waste management became a serious industry instead of just a sanitation issue.
It could create jobs. It could generate energy. It could ease the environmental burden on our cities. It could build new businesses around recycling and resource recovery. And maybe, most importantly, it could change how people see waste.
The lesson I took from Jiufeng was not that Nigeria should just copy China.
Countries have different situations, institutions, and capabilities.
The bigger lesson is that problems that seem permanent can sometimes be changed when technology meets institutional capacity, investment, and political will.
Waste doesn’t have to stay waste.
Sometimes, it’s a resource just waiting for a smart system to recognize it.
And that might be one of the exciting parts of experiencing the Chinese “smart life”, you start to view common problems through a new lens.
The Wonder of Yiwu
Next, we traveled to Yiwu, where we spent four days.
If the Jiufeng plant shows Hangzhou’s talent for “turning waste into treasure,” Yiwu takes the idea of “creating something out of nothing” to a whole new level. Its most impressive sight isn’t mountains or rivers, but the world’s largest distribution center for small goods. Known as the “World’s Supermarket” by many, but officially called Yiwu International Trade City, it’s a “magic city” where you can “see the whole world in a single day.”
Its size is mind-blowing:
The market has about 75,000 booths, offering over 2.1 million types of small goods, from Christmas decorations to World Cup merchandise.
It trades with over 230 countries and regions, attracting nearly 600,000 foreign buyers each year, with over 15,000 foreign merchants from about 100 countries living in the city.
In 2025, its total foreign trade value reached 836.5 billion RMB (or US$124.5 billion); its export volume ranks first among all counties in China; and it produces about 80 percent of the world’s Christmas decorations.
From Trading Chicken Feathers for Sugar to a Digital Brain
Yiwu’s success story is a real tale of “creating something from nothing.” It started with poor farmers trading chicken feathers for sugar as a barter trade.
Today, it has transformed into a “Digital Brain.” The Yiwu Global Digital Trade Centre (GDTC), an RMB8.2 billion (US$1.22 billion) investment, combines AI, blockchain, and other advanced technologies. About 30,000 merchants use AI daily to create multilingual promotional videos and make global payments through “Yiwu Pay.”
We were taken to Zone 6 of the Trade City to see digital strategies for promoting small goods and how they could apply to marketing agricultural products and crafts in Nigeria. We also had the chance to explore the market as much as we could.
The Yiwu Night Market
Then it was time for the Yiwu Night Market.
We went in small groups at first. A few people went out and returned with stories about what they had seen, what they had bought, and the sheer size and energy of the place. Their tales were contagious. Before we knew it, almost everyone in our group had made the trip to the night market.
The energy was infectious. The excitement was incredible.
There was something captivating about seeing the place come alive at night. The lights, the movement, the shops, the colors, and the endless flow of people created an atmosphere that was hard to explain.
For many of us, it wasn’t just shopping. It was an experience.
Yiwu seemed to show another side of the Chinese story, business at an extraordinary scale, linked to daily life. What struck me was how the ordinary and the sophisticated coexisted. Small traders, shoppers, and visitors moved through a commercial system supported by a much larger network of manufacturing, logistics, technology, and distribution.
And, of course, we shopped.
Some looked for specific items and came back with much more than they planned to buy. Others just wanted to browse and somehow became buyers.
The night market turned into one of those shared experiences that brought our group closer outside the classroom and field trips.
After lectures, presentations, and technical tours, here we were, laughing, bargaining, browsing, and discovering another side of China.
It was a perfect reminder that behind all the talk about artificial intelligence, smart cities, digital villages, and advanced infrastructure are everyday people who want to eat, shop, socialize, have fun, and enjoy life.
Yiwu gave us a taste of that smart life in a completely different way.
The Smartphone Became the Interpreter
Speaking of shopping, nowhere else showed the Chinese “smart life” more clearly than in the Yiwu Night Market.
Most of the traders don’t speak English. But that didn’t pose much of a problem.
The smartphone did the talking.
Android phones and iPhones acted as interpreters, calculators, and negotiation tools.
If you picked up an item and wanted to know the price, the trader would type the number into the calculator app and show you the screen.
You would take the phone, enter your price, and hand it back.
The negotiation continued this way, one number after another, until both sides agreed on a price.
No common language was needed.
But it didn’t stop there.
If you had a question, you could speak into a translation app. Your words would translate into Chinese and show or play back for the seller. The seller would reply in Chinese. The app would translate the response back into English and play it for you.
And just like that, a deal was done.
It was fascinating to see.
What struck me was the simplicity of it. There was no flashy infrastructure, no giant screen announcing artificial intelligence, no complicated demonstration of high-tech.
Just a smartphone.
But that little device was doing something amazing: it was breaking down a barrier between two people who didn’t share a language.
A Nigerian visitor could enter a shop in Yiwu, talk to a Chinese trader, negotiate a price, and finalize a deal without either speaking the other’s language.
To me, that’s what makes technology truly smart.
Technology isn’t smart just because it’s advanced. It becomes smart when it makes life easier.
At the Yiwu Night Market, the smartphone was not a luxury or just a gadget. It was essential.
It acted as the calculator. It was the interpreter.
It was the negotiation table. And, in the end, it was the bridge between the buyer and the seller.
What Nigeria Can Learn from Yiwu
The Yiwu experience made me reflect on Nigeria. Not because Nigeria needs to copy Yiwu. We don’t.
But because Yiwu shows what can happen when small businesses, markets, infrastructure, technology, and government policy work together.
First, Nigeria must view small goods as a real economic sector.
We often connect economic change with big factories, oil, mining, or major infrastructure projects.
Yiwu tells a different tale.
Millions of everyday products, made and traded by countless small businesses, can become a powerful economic force when the system around them is well-organized.
Nigeria has millions of artisans, traders, farmers, designers, and small manufacturers producing goods that rarely move beyond local markets.
The chance is to bring them together.
Second, production must link to markets. A striking feature of Yiwu is that the market isn’t just an isolated spot. It connects manufacturers, wholesalers, logistics providers, digital platforms, and international buyers.
Nigeria has the goods.
What we need is a stronger system to take those goods from producer to market to consumer, locally, continentally, and globally.
Third, Nigeria should stop seeing digitalization as just putting businesses online. The smartphone transaction I saw at the night market highlighted this.
Digital technology becomes transformative when it solves real problems.
For Nigerian farmers and artisans, this could mean finding buyers, translating product details, negotiating prices, receiving payments, arranging logistics, getting market insights, and reaching customers beyond their local areas.
Nigeria has begun to test digital agricultural marketplaces, but the challenge is to link these efforts to a larger system of production, finance, logistics, standards, and export markets.
Fourth, Nigeria needs commercial clusters.
Instead of spreading thousands of small producers across disconnected places, we should think about clusters focused on products and skills.
Imagine a well-planned Nigerian commercial system for:
- leather goods;
- textiles and fashion accessories;
- furniture;
- ceramics and crafts;
- processed agricultural products;
- shea products;
- cocoa derivatives;
- spices;
- food processing;
- beauty and personal-care products;
- cultural and creative products.
Fifth, Africa is Nigeria’s first major market opportunity.
This might be the biggest takeaway.
A Nigerian producer doesn’t always need to think first about sending products to Europe, America, or Asia. There are more than 50 African markets, and the African Continental Free Trade Area offers a framework for building a much larger continental market.
Nigeria already has significant non-oil export activity. The Nigerian Export Promotion Council reported that non-oil exports hit a record US$6.1 billion in 2025, with 281 different products exported.
The question now is no longer whether Nigeria can produce.
It is whether we can organize production for scale, quality, market access, and consistency.
Sixth, the government should enable rather than try to do everything.
There’s an important point in the Yiwu story.
Yiwu’s growth wasn’t just a government project from above. That’s an important lesson for Nigeria.
The government can provide roads, electricity, internet, standards, export help, market information, security, funding options, and effective customs.
But entrepreneurs must be free to experiment, compete, fail, innovate, and grow.
Seventh, value addition is where the real opportunity lies.
Nigeria has historically exported too many raw materials that capture very little of the final value. The chance is to shift from exporting raw goods to exporting finished or semi-finished products.
Instead of raw agricultural products, why not packaged, processed, and branded foods?
Instead of exporting cultural creativity informally, why not build globally competitive Nigerian fashion, crafts, design, and lifestyle brands?
This is where the Yiwu lesson meets Nigeria’s own vast productive and creative abilities.
Finally, think of the ecosystem, not miracles.
Yiwu didn’t become Yiwu overnight.
Its change involved market growth, industrialization, urbanization, internationalization, and later, digitalization. That is perhaps the most crucial lesson of all.
Economic miracles are usually not miracles. They are systems built over time.
What I saw in Yiwu was not just a huge market selling millions of products.
I saw a system that had learned to link a small trader to a manufacturer, a manufacturer to a market, a market to logistics, logistics to a foreign buyer, and technology to nearly every step of the process.
And I couldn’t stop thinking about Nigeria. What will it take to build a system that allows our own millions of small producers to compete globally?
Mukhtar Muhammad Sadiq, who spoke for the Nigerian team at the closing ceremony of the program back in Hangzhou, echoed those thoughts. “This seminar was, in truth, an invitation, an invitation to learn from China’s journey, and an offer of partnership for Nigeria’s development and the mutual benefit of both our nations.
“As we return home, we carry with us not only knowledge but responsibility, the responsibility to be the engineers of our own ecosystem of success, gradually, systematically, and in a manner true to who we are as Nigerians,” Sadiq said.
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