Again, I am sorry that I am a week behind on my blog... Enjoy!
April 24, 2011
Today is Easter and I just got back from Qingdao, so I have a lot to fill you in on! The big conference China Entrepreneur Club has been planning these past few weeks turned out pretty well. I hope all the participants thought so as well. Everyone at CEC has worked tirelessly, and so I am pretty exhausted myself. I think all the hard work paid off though.
The 2011 Annual Summit of China Green Companies was held at the Shangri La Hotel in Qingdao, Shandong Province. It is an event which brings together some of the most elite scholars and business leaders in the world to present different viewpoints and ideas about how to solve some of the big problems China is facing in regards to being environmentally and socially responsible. This year’s theme was “Responsibility and Innovation in a Shifting World—Our Solution.” (See agenda here: http://www.daonong.com/green2011/news/2011yichengE.html) I got to meet people from The Nature Conservancy, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), UN Global Compact, AmCham-China, China Greentech Initiative, the Go Green Initiative, and various other organizations who wanted to be pioneers of new business culture in their respective industries. I even got to meet Will Bowen who started the campaign for a "complaint-free world." Not surprisingly, he was a very encouraging person to meet.
The first day we left the China South Train Station at 8:30 in the morning for a five hour trip to Qingdao. The ride wasn’t so bad. The seats on this train lay back way further than airplane seats, so that was nice. When we got to our hotel (北海宾馆), Claire and I dropped all our stuff off in the room and headed over to Shangri La for some last minute preparation. I printed out all the bios of the foreign guests with the hope of trying to keep them all straight when we welcomed them the next day. That went alright except for I mixed up the British Ambassador to China with a guy from PricewaterhouseCoopers. Oops. That was a little embarrassing, but oh well. Not a big deal. The second day I got to go with some of the business leaders to tour some of Qingdao’s local enterprises. We saw a train factory called the CSR Qingdao Sifang Co., Ltd., as well as the Qingdao National High-tech Industrial Development Zone, and Jiaozhou Bay New Industrial Zone. I met a really nice lady named Jill Buck from California who is the founder of the Go Green Initiative. I think she’d be a great person to come speak at PLU sometime. I gave her the Chinese name Bai Yuli 白玉丽 which mean “beautiful white jade.” I was quite proud of myself! I am slowly becoming Chinese, haha! And something really funny happened during lunch that day. Everyone was toasting to each other when this Chinese lady, quite animatedly proposing a toast, accidentally spilled her glass of wine all over this French delegate. He played it off cool, but it got all over is hair, forehead, and left a huge stain on his shirt! It was so hilarious. Everyone was laughing so hard. I wish I had got it on video. It was a good day.
I didn’t actually get to participate in much of the actual summit itself because I was busy running around doing random errands and assignments. The most interesting workshop I had the chance to participate in was a forum discussion with Alibaba founder, Jack Ma. The title of the panel was “A Lesson from Alibaba: Upholding Values in the Face of Conflict.” It appeared on the news a couple months ago that Alibaba’s CEO and some other senior management stepped down for a gold fraud that occurred with some of their traders on their website. This was very impressive because even though they did not directly instigate the fraud, they still felt that it was the most morally upright thing to do to take responsibility for their employees’ actions. If only the Wall Street bankers that threw America and the rest of the world into economic turmoil would do the same…A good quote from Jack Ma that I read in an article lately had him saying,
“For successful business leaders, if their goal is to be rich, they can become very rich. But then what's the point of having all that money? When you have 100 million U.S. dollars, I think that's more than enough for you and your children. Once your net worth exceeds a certain point, that's not your money anymore. It is society's money. It is the money society has given to you, and you should take responsibility to allocate the money in a good way.”
All in all, it was great to be a part of such a high profile event, though. I brought my stack of business cards and got rid of them all. This was a great networking opportunity. The last night of the summit we got to go to see an amazing violin performance by a world renowned artist named Lu Siqing. And Qingdao is known for its seafood, so that was quite a treat!
Easter at Haidian Church was a lot of fun! I helped out with Sunday School with my friend and CEC colleague, Celina. It was pretty funny because when I first started working, she invited me to come to her church, unaware that we already went to the same church. It has taken this long for us to actually see each other on a Sunday! We handed out colored hard-boiled eggs in little baskets to people on the street and to those coming out of church. I was actually surprised that people were shouting through a bullhorn “Jesus is risen!” But, no one seemed to object or get into any trouble. The church has speakers that project the sermon into the street. And this is a legal Three-Self church, so it seems that China is more open in some respects that I thought. However, there have been some recent crackdowns on the largest home church in China known as the Shouwang Church (see the story here: http://www.christianpost.com/news/police-block-chinese-house-churchs-easter-worship-49967/). Apparently, unable to meet in their regular place, they planned to meet in a park. Police were there to meet them and arrested and blocked many from participating (and continuing to participate) in this illegal church. So, Christians still must be very careful. But anyways, after handing out eggs, I went to the media room and wrote a blog about the Easter service and then just hung out with the other volunteers for the rest of the day. It was very relaxing and fun after such a crazy business trip to Qingdao.
Chinese Word of the Day
Fu huo 复活： "resurrect, bring back to life"
Verse of the Day
Luke 12:47 "The servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows."
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