The complexity of our credit card systems of billing and records are so elaborate that we might shudder at the thought of making everything work together. We now carry several cards with expiration dates of 00 and 01, and that is scant cause for complacency. Repeatedly, banks assure us that date-sensitivity will not be a problem, and they may be correct, within the realm they can control. A noncompliant system can effect a compliant one. Everybody is in the worst part of the world.
China has other concerns too.
The Russian government has relied more heavily on PCs and midrange computers than larger mainframes, so its repairs of Y2K will be decentralized. Here in the United States, industry trainers are preparing people to fix Y2K coding. Their students may have never seen code before, and the trainers have to expand their short courses to introduce the multitude of problems that appear in existing, or legacy, code. Students need to learn such techniques as data expansion, year compression, full date compression, and conversion to binary dates. Some programs are being sent to other countries such as India to have the corrections made.