China Study Tour 2010

If I have on overriding feeling about the trip to China, it is that it would be a great place to live and work if it weren’t so horribly polluted. Living there is basically asking for respiratory problems at a minimum, and almost guaranteed cancer, not to mention the sheer amount of waste one would produce from all the bottled water to avoid the contaminated water there. But, the food was a amazing, the opportunities are amazing, and I find Chinese language, culture and history fascinating. It’s really too bad that they have failed to keep their natural environment sustainable for human life in the long-term – here’s to hoping they can actually turn that around.

There are a few places and things we saw in China that make me more hopeful for China’s future. Young people seem to be more concerned with sustainability and less waste, rather than embracing the insanity of Western consumer culture. Given the huge population and somewhat limited natural resources of China, they don’t have the time to waste before even more harm occurs than 30% of water being contaminated, or entire cities being evacuated due to chemical spill.

There is a lot to be worried about though. There are a lot of cars in China, and most of them are like ours, which is to say dirty polluters of both particulate matter and CO2. What’s worse is that to achieve the same percentage of GDP we do, China expends 10 times or so the energy. Every bit they grow, they exponentially increase their levels of pollution, fossil fuel usage, and resource usage. If the Earth had infinite resources, that would be just fine, but it doesn’t. So, I have to admit that China’s growth really worries me, because we can’t tell them they shouldn’t do what we did in good faith, especially since we’re not taking significant steps ourselves to reduce our own levels of pollution.

The key takeaways:

-There is a lot of opportunity in China at this moment in terms of growth and a consumer minded middle class

-China is incredibly polluted from trying to grow so fast and from having a growing consumer minded middle class of consumers

-It is really hard to be vegetarian in China

We all split up after taking the first few group shots, and made our way around the Expo. The lines were incredibly long at some of the pavilions, and we heard that you had to have reservations for the Taiwan exhibit. Some of us eventually made our way over to the Europe pavilions, as our resident architecture expert Juli told us they were worth seeing – and she was right. The UK exhibit was like a giant metal porcupine, and the Germany exhibit was a really neat angular thing. Definitely enjoyed viewing them, but the lines…. Not gonna happen.

I wanted to see the Austria exhibit, and Claudia wanted to see the Sweden exhibit, so we continued on through the Expo park after some of the others took off. Even the Austria exhibit had an hour long line. We finally felt like we hit pay dirt when we reached the shared European pavilion that contained San Marino, Liechtenstein, Cyprus, and a few other small European countries – no lines! It was like getting free candy, but better.

The final going away dinner was the best dinner we’d had in China, which is saying a lot. The food here has been really amazing. There was an orange fish that was so perfectly cut and prepared that you could just take the breaded and sauce covered chunk directly off of the fish, no bones. Highly impressive – but not as impressive as the house specialty, their roast pork. It was a slow roast pork that just about melted off of the rib that was dipped in sweet and sour sauce, then in panko bread crumbs, and then wrapped in a piece of lettuce and eaten like a spring roll. I cannot go into enough raptures about how amazing the flavors and textures of that particular dish were.

Our evening entertainment was a karaoke parlor, Chinese style. Normally, there’s a professional running the karaoke machine, and you just submit a piece of paper and sing awkwardly in front of strangers. This was a private booth type place, where you run the machine (which is in Chinese) yourself, and then sing awkwardly in front people you actually know. Much more awkward. But, I do love to sing, so it was fun. All in all, a great ending to a great trip.

Today is our “Seattle” day – both company visits today are to businesses headquartered in Seattle. Expeditors is a logistics solutions company, and PMI is a beverage solutions company. I find that this “solutions” term has become ubiquitous in business parlance of the past decade or two. In any case, I think these visits were the most interesting for us this trip.

The answers at Expeditors were frustratingly vague on the big questions we asked, although they were perfectly happy to answer detail questions about their operations. We were wondering if perhaps they were trying to put a perfect face on their operations. Regardless, it was very frustrating to keep asking the same questions over and over again and getting the same non-answers from the regional manager.

PMI makes the cups you see at Starbucks, in addition to other private label items. The visit to PMI was brilliant, and really my favorite company visit. We were lucky to have Qin Chen at our lunch table prior to the visit, and had a detailed discussion about the employment of expatriates in Chinese firms. He said that the kind of problem solving and managerial skills they needed when they first went to Shanghai simply didn’t exist in China in the numbers that they needed to be able to find local hires, since every other foreign company was looking for a person with the same sort of experience. He said that they’ve been able to build up a number of their employees internally, and so they have those skills now, but that it is still worthwhile to hire expatriates. This could be very concerning for a company, because that’s a huge amount of time and invested effort into these Chinese employees just to make them the kind of employee that can do the necessary work. Replacing someone would be quite difficult in those circumstances.