Eric's Beijing Diary

Yesterday, I met with an official from Jiangsu Province. A friend of mine had been asked by her boss to find an American university professor, so she called me.

The official is hoping to find an American university that can provide training in the United States for a group of management level personnel from his province. He mentioned his interest in trying to find a bridge to an American university. I am supposed to be that bridge. Not sure I can help him, but he may have picked the right person, because the dean of the Software College where I teach is a tenured professor at an American university.

This problem of "creating a bridge" is something that has been an issue for mainland entities ever since the country began to open up in the eighties. This was first brought to my attention in a conversation I had on the plane from Hong Kong to Los Angeles after my first trip to China in the fall of 2001. I had gotten stuck in a middle seat on a very crowded flight, so I spent quite a bit of time standing in the back of the plane talking with a buyer on his way back from the trade show in Guangzhou. He was telling me how he would contract with a one of the factories in the Pearl River Delta to make products which he could then resell in the West for a price that was considered low, but which left him with a pretty nice profit.

In the fall of 2002, I went to COMDEX in Las Vegas with some of my colleagues from the university where I was teaching at the time. As I walked by the booths in the Chinese section, one person after another would come out from behind the booth and ask me to help them sell their product or service in the United States. I was struck by how sincerely the Chinese businesses longed for someone who could be a bridge between what they had to offer, and the market for their service.