Day Three – Arrival in Shanghai
You can follow Michael Russell’s journey here.
Another early start today – and more to come during the week. We had to be at the airport just after eight to catch the flight to Shanghai. The mini bus journey was through the usual mix of urban high rise, sweeps of water and thickly-shrubbed hills. A unique landscape.
I have found Hong Kong exhilarating and I am determined to come back – less than 48 hours does not even allow a scratching of the surface.
The journey to Shanghai was almost routine but the pollution in the air when we left Hong Kong – and when we came into land at Shanghai – was visible. But all our hosts tell us it has greatly improved in recent years and that China is very serious about environmental action. Certainly that was clear from the school yesterday where environmental messages were all around.
I had a hint of things to come in terms of infrastructure as the plane banked to land. Below me was the straightest piece of road I have ever seen, and it seemed to be going on forever across open water. I asked about it as we were driven in to the city and apparently it is a 35 km stretch of bridge – the longest crossing over water in the world. It leads to a new container port, which is now, also, the biggest on the planet.
We drove for miles from the airport, and all the time through suburbs or industrial estates – and of course past the Maglev Line which links one of the airports to the city. Eventually we arrived at Jiao Tong University, one of the top 50 in the world, where I met leading academics from both China and Scotland who are part of an renewable energy symposium which is meeting this week in Qingdao and which has been organised by the British Council in Scotland.
As part of today’s meeting I was able to announce 650 new training places which we are offering to employers in Scotland to support our efforts to move towards a low carbon economy, which has the potential to deliver more than £9 billion in economic benefits.
The green training places will provide huge support to our employers and it was a great opportunity today being in one of the world’s economic powerhouses and reinforcing Scotland’s commitment to ensuring our workforce is skilled and ready to continue our global lead in green energy.
Following a briefing meeting with the UK Consul General in Shanghai and an interesting exploratory discussion with Professor Ian Gow the Principal and CEO of The Sino-British Council, it was on to a dinner that had been arranged by Scottish Development International – a chance to meet their customers from the life-sciences industry and discuss the potential research and commercial collaborations that they are looking to develop with Scottish partners.
Our productive and interesting discussion was set against the backdrop of the impressive skyline of Shanghai’s Bund district. Teeming with people even late on a Tuesday night, the sight of colonial buildings sitting beside the sleek, brightly-lit office accommodation housing some of the world’s top companies was truly breathtaking. So were the light-festooned boats which plied up and down the river taking tourists on dinner trips and sight seeing voyages.
One of my dinner guests told me that the sight I was seeing did not exist 25 years ago and one of the extraordinary things about China is that simple fact. Places like Shanghai have changed utterly in a very short space of time but that change, whilst bringing great prosperity, has also brought its own problems.
None the less there is a huge national pride here and it is well-justified. The sight of the Chinese flag flying everywhere, but particularly over the art deco rooftops of Shanghai’s Bund gives local people great satisfaction.
Michael Russell: Cabinet Secretary for Education & Lifelong Learning, from China
3 comments
… One can only hope in this time of fiscal restraint that the Cabinet Secretary and his team are paring every expense to the bone in return for the benefits to Scotland. Presumably these benfits include:
*Seeing how much we can charge overseas students from Hong Kong and China (hope everyone heard the Radio 4 documentary on the poor deal overseas students get in the light of the excessively high fees charged by HE providers)?
*Learning the lessons of Hong Kong’s introduction of a new curriculum: “There were concerns that the implementation schedule was too hasty, the curriculum framework and means of assessment were too complex, resources were inadequate, teachers were not well prepared, and that parents and the community needed to be better informed, etc. Worse still, some academics even criticized that the policy had not been field-tested and rationally grounded. Thus, its suitability to bring about the desired ends was considered doubtful (Centre of Research & International Collaboration 1998). Ring a bell with current events in Scotland?
*Encouraging links with China: ‘huge national pride’? surely not in what Amnesty International called “China’s disastrous human rights record” (20 September 2010)?
Perhaps this could all have been done over the internet instead…
Edited by Community Manager
Many thanks to the above An.T who reminded me of the great time I had in China; can I recommend the Chairman Mao watch souvenir sellers as subsequent street vendors cheerfully bantered with me as to how much I had paid … “too much”. Indeed I would say it is not a poor use of tax payers money for the top brass to find out how the competition/collaborators do business. And, believe me you cannot feel the national pride and get-up-and-go that all the Chinese we met exemplified, over the internet. Indeed how many countries have IT companies have beaten Google at their own game. (Ans: China’s Baidu). So lots and lots to learn.
You beat me to the Google comment as I ran into a little censorship myself! Not unlike Google, News International etc etc who’ve not been able to do anything over the internet in China without the Chinese government censoring left right and centre. In the light of this you are right, you wouldn’t have been about to feel much of anything genuine over the intenet as it is manipulated by the Chinese government.
As for poor use of money, the other question I had hoped to ask was how many aides / support staff were off on this trip to China with the Cabinet Secretary.
How the competition do business is through widespread environmental devastation (air quality is still horrendous in many areas, as is the water), economic exploitation (NOT a state for ordinary workers), militaristic totalitarianism (Tibet!!!) and cultural fascism (lets hope no other Chinese intellectuals get a Nobel Prize judging by the vitriol churned out by governmnet propagandists).
I too have been to China and did manage to meet some ordinary people who were less than enthusiastic about what has gone on in their country. So one can only hope the Cabinet Secretary doesn’t pick up some nasty habits based on the Party line!