A cancelled meeting gave me the morning off from our MIT Sloan group to walk from the Peace Hotel down Nanjing Road - a major shopping street and tourist attraction - and then over to the Shanghai Museum.  I wasn’t impressed with Nanjing Road; it is crowded and chaotic, with cars and bicycles and motor scooters competing for space on the narrow street, and a crush of pedestrians competing for space on the narrow sidewalks.  Construction on new shopping centers only adds to the traffic problems.  The shops, which seemed run down, hold nothing special, making me wonder why this place is such an attraction for foreigners.  If the reason is the low prices, then think of Nanjing Road as one huge row of stores like TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and Filene’s Basement.

The Shanghai Museum, pictured above, made up for the disappointment.  Only two years old, its unusual architecture is based on the design of an ancient Chinese ding bronze vessel.  Impressive from the outside, it’s even more so inside; the layout is very clean, organized and functional, and the artwork is presented in an intelligent and engaging way.  Specialized lighting in the sculpture exhibition casts just enough shadow on the artwork to bring out the full detail.  The lighting in the painting and calligraphy galleries is set up to remain very dim but then brighten as you approach each particular work, an excellent way to preserve the artwork as well as invite the viewer to look closer.  The museum gift shops are collectively the best I have ever seen: the selection of high quality porcelain and hanging scrolls was stunning enough, but the book store was truly overwhelming with its thousands of art books.  I left with my hands full and my wallet empty.  The Shanghai Museum is truly world class.

The evening saw the launch of the MIT Sloan China Club, which involved a big dinner and speeches by the president of GM China and the dean of Fudan University’s business school.  It all took place at a hotel in Pudong, the new part of Shanghai on the east side of the Huangpu River.  Ten years ago, the above photograph of Pudong would have shown nothing but a field of vegetables; soon, the economic output of Puxi - old Shanghai, on the west side of the Huangpu - will be surpassed by Pudong.  The growth here is stunning.

Day seven of our trip was a series of company visits and presentations.  Our group started out very early this morning on a trip to Baosteel, an iron and steel mill in the north of Shanghai on the Yangtze River that covers an area larger than the city of Macao.  This is one of Baosteel’s many loading docks on the Yangtze.

This photograph of our group in hardhats was all that was allowed inside the mill - unfortunate, since red-hot slabs of metal flying down conveyor belts to be rolled is quite a sight.  But I did get to see the mill’s high-tech process control center, which was quite a step up from the one at Geneva Steel in the US where I interned long ago.  Baosteel goes out of its way to promote their environmental consciousness; they have a small zoo on property, an amazing amount of landscaping, and they boast that the pollution levels around the plant are lower than in downtown Shanghai.  Our tour of the mill was followed by a good talk and lunch with a vice commander of Baosteel, who spoke of the challenges Baosteel faces from the Asian financial crisis as well as its recent mergers with formerly state-owned steel mills.

From Baosteel it was on to Kodak for a tour of its camera manufacturing operations and a presentation by its regional president.  We learned that it’s still cheaper to have lines of people put the cameras together, as shown above, due to lower labor costs and rapid changes to camera models, but it’s now cheaper to have machines mold some of the plastic components for the cameras.  Training and retaining Chinese workers, particularly management, is a big problem for Kodak as it is for many other companies we’ve visited.

Dinner back at the Peace Hotel brought another presentation, from an American long involved in the entertainment industry in China - a presentation I helped arrange, as I am working on a Sloan project with him.  Unlike other Chinese industries, media is still heavily controlled by the government, and business is currently at a very low point.  Despite that, China is expected to have the second largest entertainment industry in the world within the next decade or so.  Just don’t expect foreigners to play much of a role in that.

That was our last night in Shanghai, a city that impressed me only with its excellent museum and its vast amount of ongoing construction.  Beijing far exceeded my expectations; Shanghai fell far short of them.  On this eighth day of our China trip, some of our group stayed in Shanghai to shop and the rest took a tour to nearby Suzhou, the “Venice of the East.”  Rather than with our group, I went to Suzhou with Chinese friends, on the train shown here.  For once on this trip, not a tourist was in sight.

Suzhou is famous for its gardens.  Though we visited a number of them, the best by far on this early spring day was the Humble Administrator’s Garden, where this and the following photographs were taken.  Here, birdcages holding songbirds are hung on trees within the garden for some fresh air.

Flowers in the Humble Administrator’s Garden in Suzhou.

The Humble Administrator’s Garden.

Blossom in the Humble Administrator’s Garden, wet with dew on this misty day.

Rocks and flowers in the Humble Administrator’s Garden.

In the afternoon, flaming tulips in a flower show at Tiger Hill in Suzhou.

High above the flower show, the Yunyan Pagoda on Tiger Hill.

Suzhou rooftops.

Another famous garden, the Garden for Lingering In, in Suzhou.  Because the plants and trees were just starting to bud, with no blossoms to view, this garden was more notable for its rock formations.  With the many gardens as well as a number of pagodas and temples here, a single day is definitely not enough to see all that Suzhou has to offer; a few days in April, with the gardens in full bloom, would probably be ideal.

On our bus ride from Suzhou back to Shanghai we passed mostly rural areas, with mile after mile of farm fields surrounding little groups of run-down state-supplied housing.  This little field was fully developed...

...while this one still had some way to go.  Later, as we approached Shanghai, traffic jams almost prevented me from getting to the airport on time, but I made it out with the rest of our group on the flight to Hong Kong in the evening.

A number of random thoughts here.  No one else on this trip owns a digital camera - many have never even seen one before - so I am asked a lot about mine.  They think it is quite cool that I can see the results of my photos right away on the back of the camera and can simply download them to my computer every night.  Even as I write this, I know that years from now, those last two sentences are going to seem funny - because just as Pixar’s animated movies are going to overtake those of my colleagues back at Disney, digital cameras are going to overtake film cameras like those back at Kodak.  This flight will be landing at Hong Kong’s new airport on Lantau Island, out where Disney will supposedly be building their new theme park.  The airports in Beijing and Shanghai are old, but new ones will open before October.  And like the flight from Beijing to Shanghai, this flight to Hong Kong on a Chinese airline is excellent; both flights beat anything I’ve flown in the US for years.

After landing at Hong Kong’s magnificent airport, our group loaded onto a bus for Kowloon and our accommodations at the Marco Polo.  The ride was long, but the lights of the city were dazzling, especially after a week in mainland China.  A number of our trip participants who live here gave a running commentary on the nighttime scenery and helpfully suggested places to visit during our stay once we have some free time.  This is the view of Hong Kong Island across Victoria Harbor from Kowloon, the southern tip of the mainland.

Day nine of our trip was all business.  The good thing about today’s company visits was their location, just two subway stops away from our hotel.  The bad thing was the high heat and humidity, like Orlando in late spring, as we were all in dark suits.  I should mention the wonderful subway system: stations are large, well marked, and clean; and while tickets are fairly expensive crossing Victoria Harbor - more than a Boston subway ticket - most other tickets are cheap, and the trains are very fast and convenient.  Train cars are modern and wide, quiet and clean, and even have a wind tunnel effect when the train is moving to keep cool.  That’s the Hong Kong Convention Center through the haze in the distance.

Residences on Hong Kong Island.  Apartments in Hong Kong tend to be small; just 600 square feet (55 square meters) on average.  Because of that, some of our trip participants who live in Hong Kong could not stay with family: no room!

Our first visit was to the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the equivalent of the US Federal Reserve, for a summary of the basic workings of the monetary exchange system and the Hong Kong dollar’s linkage to the American dollar.  The presenters mentioned the speculative attack on Hong Kong’s currency last August and made clear that while they believe in extremely free markets, they also will act to prevent collusion and attempts to undermine the system.

It was then on to a presentation by McKinsey Greater China on a recent project of theirs.  Interestingly, when asked their opinion on devaluing the Chinese currency - a hot topic in western political circles these days - the consultant’s answer nearly quoted the one by the China Development Bank a week earlier in Beijing: the economic fundamentals of China do not warrant a devaluation.

From McKinsey we headed back to Kowloon for a presentation on trade and Hong Kong’s future by Henry Tang, who heads the Federation of Hong Kong Industries and holds a number of other important titles in the city.  And with that, our official business on this trip came to an end.

Day ten was our last full day in Hong Kong.  In the morning two classmates and I took a city bus to Stanley, on the south side of Hong Kong Island, where a large sort-of-indoor, sort-of-outdoor market is located; one of the long alleyways through the market is shown above.  It’s touristy, but a few decent bargains on clothes can be had.  We then headed to City Hall back on the north side of the island - not for a government meeting, but for an excellent dim sum lunch in a restaurant there recommended by one of the Hong Kong natives on our trip.

For the rest of the day, like any tourist, I ran around shopping for gifts, from the electronics stores on Apliu Street (the hot item in Hong Kong is cell phones; every shop sells them) to the CD and video stores (especially HMV in southern Kowloon).  A great find was the Chinese Arts and Crafts store, just across from the ferry terminal in Kowloon: everything our trip participants wanted but could not find back in mainland China - jade, porcelain, teapots, silk, paintings, traditional clothes - could be found here, at prices ranging from twenty to twenty thousand US dollars.  It’s the perfect place for last-minute gift shopping.

A final photograph of Hong Kong: Nathan Road in Kowloon, near its southern end looking north.  Late in the morning of the eleventh day of our trip, our group took the long bus ride out to Hong Kong’s airport to catch our flight back to Boston and MIT, bringing to an end our working trip to China.  I’m already looking for ways to come back over here soon.