Innovation Matters

Palaces, Protoges and Make Believe People

Today we left Beijing and flew to the ancient dynastic capital city of Xi'an.  Our guide noted that between 200 BC and 700 AD this was one of if not the greatest city on earth with millions of people, a size 9 times bigger than it is today and tens of grand palaces .  Unfortunately the loss of water due to deforestation and new dynasties leveling the city repeatedly did it in.  Today there are a few buildings from 700 AD but all else has been plowed under...except for what was hidden or still remains underground waiting to be discovered.

When you drive in from the Xi'an airport there are literally tens of huge mounds along the highway where emperors or princes are buried...the government won't allow them to be dug up until they have more money, security and technology. But, you have no doubt heard of the one that did get dug up. A farmer was digging a well and found what turned out to be several football fields worth of life sized Terracotta warriors in his back yard 10 feet down.  His backyard is now one of the most popular tourist sites in the world. We are going there tomorrow.

So you never know what you will find when your farm is on the site of an 8th century world capital.

Last night we all went out to dinner and Marian invited five of her former Forestry students who are now in interesting and important positions in China to meet with the Yale group. It was fascinating and gave great meaning to President Levin's desire to make Yale into a true global institution. Seeing how far these young people had gone and the impact that Yale had had on their careers was impressive and humbling to everyone there.

Yesterday we also visited the Qinq Summer Palace...a combination of Central Park and Versailles. Built in the 1860s and then several time rebuilt after it was burned to the ground by the invading European and Japanese forces during the Boxer Rebelian in the early 1900s, it is now a favorite place to enjoy a family outing in the midst of a very crowded city.

Great wall and great fall

It is hard to keep the days straight when you are 12 hours ahead. You start off each day with a confusion about today versus yesterday. It seems each day lasts for 18 hours or so. Anyway, we awoke on Thursday to find the market had fallen to 8600 or so, the Red Sox and Rays would soon be playing for the pennant and that the second debate had ended in another tie. Actually the debate had happened yesterday morning and my daughter sent us text message "play by play" but the the analysis was delayed. Or at least I think that is when it happened. You will be disappointed to hear that the tourism infrastructure is not actively engaged in our political process, our guide has little to say about the election, although he is a fountain of insights about Chinese culture and policies.

Today we will meet my wife's, Marian Chertow, former students from the Yale Forestry & Environmental Studies school who are working in Beijing and her colleagues at TsingHua University and perhaps get the skinny on the Chinese perspective on the financial melt-down and the election.

Our sense so far is that if you are not in the Party life is about jobs, apartments, cars, picking the right pre-school for your one child and figuring out how to save for a great retirement. Hey, that sounds like America circa 1980.

Anyway, on Thursday Marian went to Temple and I went off to Badaling, the closest spot to see the Ming (~1400) version of the Great o r as they call it, Long Wall. A creaky Japanese cable car carries you to the top after a 45 mile drive on a gleaming and brand new highway that itself stretches to Moscow if you have a big enough gas tank. The Wall, a "really great wall" as Nixon is said to have told Mao, is amazing. 10 million built it, 2 million died making it, 1 million stationed on it to guard against the Manchus.  Only problem was that the Manchus got over anyway, took over the country by 1644 and, since the wall was now in the middle of their country, spent the next 250 years using the bricks for peasant housing. But it defies imagination to see the wall snaking off into the distance 100 or 200  miles into the mountains, even if it is not visible from space as a Chinese astronaut conceded last month.

So this was Thursday and I was not in Temple but I was fasting which is a problem if you are going up and down stairs and ramps that are very steep and getting tired quickly. Sitting and praying is a better task on an emptying stomach. Going to lunch with the 25 Yale Alums at a fancy Japanese owned golf course was a bit of torture but I did buy a nice golf shirt and some very fancy Japanese plastic tees for my my Mom's husband Bill Goodman. Unless he bought some when he was last here last year.

In the afternoon we went to the Ming Tombs, where an area the size of New Haven was set up according to Feng  Sui with hills, walks and water all set up to give the dead Emperors a comfortable place to remain for eternity. The pictures tell the story when I get them up and loaded, in a country of a billion the Tombs are a place where you can still "get away rom it."  Especially if you are going  away for eternity.

One problem was that during the Cultural Revolution the Emperors were considered enemies of Mao and the skeleton of one of the 13 buried there, whose body had been put on display in 1958, was cut into pieces and burned. An ignominious end to 530 years of rest. The other 12 remain in the ground, 90 feet below the surface just in case things get out of hand again.

On the way back we drove through the Olympic village and stadium area. Huge but less impressive from the ground in a smoggy mist when we were there then I remember from TV.  Still the birdsnest stadium is a remarkable site and will make a nice $1 billion addition to the local high school's soccer program in the future.  Even our tour guide admited the $30 billion spent on  the games could have built a lot of schools in the country side.

Marian was back from services Thursday afternoon when we returned from the Tombs and our "Breaking the Fast" was in the Famous Peking Duck Restaurant #1, festooned with pictures of Nixon and others on the wall. A 5,000 seat, 5 story building it was once one of the only clean and modern places foreign groups could go for a banquet outside their hotel. We went there with the Connecticut Governor's group in 1987. The food was still great and not having eaten in 24 hours made the extreme nature of the banquet seem quite deserved and almost normal.

Friday was a change with visits to see technology at a Chinese hospital in the morning, then we went the Temple of Heaven and the main Beijing recreational park followed by a visit to a old park of the city with traditional courtyard homes. More to follow.

The Forbidden City and Atoning over Peking Duck

Yesterday we walked many miles through the 15th century "Forbidden City," once the ultimate symbol of plutocratic, autocratic wealth and devine rights, now the largest tourist destination in one of the world's largest cities. Note to Wall Street tycoons - be careful, who know what your houses may become for Greenwich in 600 years. What they don't tell you is that the financial and political costs of building the world's largest (then and now) palace complex (we would this The Congress, White House and Chevy Case with a wall around it all painted the same color) is that the country was on the verge of its greatest period of exploration and technology but also was poised to plunge into financial and political chaos that would effectively take it out off the world stage for many hundreds of years. More on this later. So, while Mel Brooks would say "Its good to be King," everything in moderation has its points as well.

Last night we went to Kol Nidre services (first night of Yom Kippur) with about 200 ex pats, about 50 who live here and the rest on business or traveling through. At our dinner table of 10 three had gone to Yale and one knew most of the people Marian works with and was a classmate of Bill Clinton's at the Law School. Did I say "small world?"

I am headed to the Great Wall today while Marian is going back to Capital City Club for a full day of services. I will fast and think about atonement, but I don't want to miss the greatest WPA projection in history masquerading as the 13th century version of our "Star Wars" anti-missile system. Let's see how that turned out...

Off to meet the bus. More to come and later I promise to have pictures figured out.

Good morning Beijing

The good thing about traveling east is that you get an early jump on the day. We woke up at 5:00AM rested and ready for our first day in the great city of Beijing, 21 years after my last stop here as part of Governor Bill O'Neill's entourage in the summer of 1987.  My wife Marian Chertow, a professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies is the reason we are here. She is leading a Yale alumni group of about 25 folks interested in China and in gaining an environmental and sustainability perspective on the country. The alums pay a lot for a 5 star trip around the country and I will be putting my networking skills to work making sure everyone has a good time and that the cocktail parties start on time. Its not too hard being the spouse on one of these tours.  I think my official title is photographer. Seriously, I will be giving my own lectures to the group about economic development in New Haven and around Yale.

Of course I will also be taking side trips when I can to tech parks, talking to government officials about China's growth and sending you my impressions.

21 Years ago on the trip with the Governor were several folks I still work with daily. David Driver from Doug Fisher's NU Business Development team, our own John Schuyler, now the partner in charge of our upcoming UHY Tech Top 40 gala on November 6, Ed Stockton who we met with last month as part of the DECD strategic planning process, former Hartford Alliance (Chamber) president Tim Moynihan and William Ellis, then CEO of NU and now a fellow in my wife's department at Yale to mention a few.

It would not an exaggeration to say that flying from Newark to Beijing is going from a tired and rundown part of the world to someplace gleaming and new. Its cliche of course, but when we landed at Beijing Terminal 2, build in 1989, after my last trip, it was hard not to be impressed with the building and the huge video screens welcoming us into customs at every turn. Our guide was quick to note that terminal 2 was a mere sideshow, the rest of our group had arrived at terminal 3, the new Olympic Airport. I guess Continental had been relegated as a mere second tier US carrier to the outskirts of the air city. Terminal 3 looms ahead, 6 miles on the other side of the field.  Perhaps eighty feet high in places designed to look like a dragon from the air, it is now the largest airport building in the world and can process some 85 million people a year. Three new highways - each as large as i-95 link it to parts of Beijing.

We are off to the Forbidden City now. Pictures and more observations next time.

Escaping from one whirlwind into another

In a few hours I will be leaving the suddenly not-so-stable US for what now seems like a remarkably calm and relatively wealthy spot, China.  For the next 18 days we will be touring the major northeastern part of that vast and powerful land. I will be reporting back on what I see and how the reality compares to what we read about on the OPED pages of the Times and Wall Street Journal. I will also get a sense of what people there think about the changing role and perhaps fortunes of America. Somehow we are intertwined by more that the location that much of high tech equipment is made and more and more designed. We count on the Chinese to loan us the trillions that we read about on the front page of the papers. They expect us to keep our wits and keep buying their merchandise. It should be annn interesting two and half weeks. Through the work of Paige Rasid back at the Council's offices I hope you can follow me through this blog, flickr and youtube. The trip will also give us a chance to explore and work with the new ways that all of us are communicating. 

It should be fun. Ask question or comment as we progress.

Matthew, on my way to Newark Liberty Airport