Just arrived back in the States and sitting at OHare Airport. Sorry for not making entries during the trip but I was reminded when I arrived that Facebook and Twitter dont work in China and that turned out to be very true. Below is the rundown of what I did and our upcoming action steps: In Wuhan I attended the inaugural meeting of the Yanghze River International Chamber of Commerce, including the signing ceremony for reciprocal membership with partner chambers. One of them included the Midwest US - China Chamber of Commerce based in Overland Park. This links us to the 108 businesses that are part of the YRICC in Wuhan, a city of 10.5 million people. While there I got to speak to city officials about their massive multi-block Finance City project. This is a multi billion dollar project meant to position that city as a financial hub, including the construction of what will be the third tallest building in the world. Their first phase has been designed with a second phase planned. This seemed to be an excellent opportunity for our architectural community to be involved as an American Architectural firm did the main design for the 1st phase. They expressed a willingness for our local architectural firms to talk to them about the later phase of the project so we will begin that conversation. They are very interested in bringing regional headquarters to their area, but in a public meeting I reminded one of the citys vice-mayors as to the importance of helping build up companies so that they would require a regional headquarters. He agreed and expressed a willingness to work with our Midwest US - China Chamber to help Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) enter the Wuhan market. In our Sister City, Xian, we participated in their East-West and Sister City Forum. This brought together many of the countries of Marco Polos Silk Road, which began in Xian a thousand years ago. This modern version brings together a number of Central Asian countries, extending to Europe including Spain and Italy. I was able to co-preside a meeting with one of the Citys Vice Mayors and was one of the special guests for the signing of agreements for a variety of projects between Xian and other cities. There were some great takeaways though, including a conversation we will have with the Spanish delegate there about some educational exchanges for his part of Spain, conversations with the Kazakhstan Foreign Investment Office (that countrys investors spent $8.7 billion outside its borders last year), and a conversation with a investment group that represents 62 Chinese investors. Typically those investments have gone to Silicon Valley startups but enough interest was peaked because of Google and the recent Cisco announcement that he is willing to entertain some information on our start up community in Kansas City. He is also working on establishing a High Tech Incubator in Xian and we briefly discussed how our efforts could potentially work together. Finally, we will be working with the city to see how we can be a part of the creation of three special business districts that are planned on the north side of the city. While in Xian we had a chance to meet with the Mayor and Executive Deputy Mayor of Yanan, our other Sister City in Shannxi Province. From our conversation, a continuation of our previous ones, we seem to be heading in a direction as far as the type of projects we will be working on and what business types may have an opportunity to do business with the city. Those include Animal Health, Architecture/Urban Planning, and Education. We are currently working on a trip to Yanan with UMKC in the fall to get that ball rolling. Theres a couple of other business items that we are going to work on that relate to specific Kansas City businesses but Ill need to wait until its appropriate to mention them. Otherwise it was quite a productive visit, but Im looking forward to getting home.
Posted on: Mon, 26 May 2014 00:41:41 +0000
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