As a DAAD scholar, I'm not only studying Chinese here, I'm also supposed to build a network in the local business community. The goal of the program, after all, is that I find an appropriate internship after the two semesters at BFSU. For this reason, there's a side-program that offers company tours and invitations to meet-ups and events. Many of the contacts are well-established German companies with branches in China and knowledge about the DAAD and its work here, but sometimes we do receive unusual propositions too. So when we were asked whether we'd be interested in a two day conference about low-energy consumption houses 120km from Beijing, I wasn't really sure if this would be relevant or useful to me.
After some pondering I decided to go for it anyways, along with three more persons from my program. Even if the technical details of thermal insulation for windows aren't really my area of expertise, I really wanted to experience the business lifestyle in China and see if it would be any different from what I used to know. This proved to be one of my better decisions.
From the very beginning we were spoilt by the organizers to a degree that made me blush, given that except for one architect, none of us could actually provide anything technically substantial. We were picked up in Beijing by a German-speaking assistant from the international department of the hosting company "Windoor City" and then driven directly to the hotel in Gaobeidian (高碑店). The city lies in the Hebei Province that surrounds Beijing and reveals ugliness and ambition at the same time. With merely 600 000 inhabitants, it can be considered small by Chinese standards. It is shaped by the odd patchy mix of farms and grasslands next to mega appartment highrise building projects and 10-lane streets with few cars on them. Many restrictions on stock trading and international capital flows make investment into property option for Chinese and the results can be witnessed in satellite towns around major hubs all over the country.
We were then taken to a ridiculously opulent hotel that was monolithically rammed into the scenery.
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| Ridiculously opulent lobby |
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| Happy scholars with our assistent and the KFC dinner she arranged for us |
Each one of us got their own room and after a quick dinner from KFC that we didn't really ask for but nonetheless appreciated, we went to our rooms wondering why we were here.
The next morning shed some light on our most pressing questions. We were chartered to Xiongan (雄安) where the actual conference was going to take place. Xiongan will be - at least at the will of the Chinese central government - the next Shenzhen or Shanghai, a High Tech city planned from scratch to attract investment and take the domestic industry to a new level. So far, it's a pilot project with a few houses, an information center, a conference center and a couple cool gimmicks. These feature delivery robots and supermarkets without counters that use cameras and other technology to check what you took out and recognize your face - which is linked to your WeChat Pay account (imagine the data privacy riots in Germany). I tried it myself and I'm honestly impressed, but back to the conference. It was held in Chinese with live interpretation, which unfortunately didn't help in making the topic more interesting. There were a few speeches about city-planning and architecture that caught my attention, but most of the contributions were really nothing you could attentively listen to after five hours of sleep.
The more interesting parts of the event were the breaks, filled with buffets as opulent as the monolithic hotel. We got into conversations with other participants fairly quick, maybe due to the lack of a language barrier. Indeed, everyone who wasn't Chinese seemed to be German, Austrian or Swiss. We slowly put the pieces of information together and they made a pretty story about China's rise, Germany's prestige and intercultural friendship.
The founder of Windoor City is a self-made man who started by manually carving frames for windows in his hometown. Arduously working his way up, about 15 years ago he made the momentous decision to buy German machinery for his production facilities. Along with it came Thomas Moser, owner of the eponymous family business from Baden-Wuerttemberg, to help setting it up. The two became and remain close friends despite not having a single language to converse in. With "Made in Germany", Moser GmbH lent its prestige to the Chinese company, winning a partner in one of the worlds most important markets in return. And thus, the conference was a mixture of Chinese representatives and the German Mittelstand. We had the chance to talk to many people who were doing business in China for decades already and the general impression that I got from it was that Germany's biggest advantage is its reputation for great, reliable engineering (that often translates into incredible price premiums for German products). In terms of technology, China is close or has already caught up in many industries.
The next morning, after a dinner buffet so lavish it could've made it into "Crazy Rich Asians", we were invited to a ground-breaking ceremony for yet another big development project in Gaobeidian that included seven different facilities. Still not knowing why we were invited at all, we watched the ceremony slightly baffled from the front rows where all non-Chinese people were seated.
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| A botanical garden in the company's headquarters, cause why not? |
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| Ground-breaking ceremony |
One more buffet, this time in a big hall with lots of marble, and we were were on our way back to our unspectacular university life with a handful of business cards, a glimpse at Beijing's ambitions for the years to come and a fascinating small chapter of Sino-German business relations.
PS: The evening of our return, the German embassy in Beijing hosted its annual event for the German reunification day (3rd of October is during the Chinese public holiday season, therefore the event is antedated). Most importantly, this included another huge buffet, this time with Döner and sausages. Buffets should be the common way of consuming food.
