By Norm Jacknis

9/7/98 9:00 PM Xiamen City, Fujian Province

Today the wake up call was around 5am because the delegation had to catch an airplane to the Pacific Coast city of Xiamen in Fujian Province. This fairly young and relatively affluent city is the location of the Second Annual China International Investment and Trade Fair.

When we arrived in late morning, we went to a government building to meet with a large number of local officials. We were greeted by cameras from television news crews, who heard that a delegation from the important county of Westchester would be arriving as the only American government represented at the fair. Aside from the TV cameras, the meeting followed what we have come to realize is standard procedure in all meetings with foreigners.

The meeting began, as usual, with the ritual of exchanging business cards.  The ritual consists of receiving the Chinese business card with both hands and carefully reviewing it, then in turn handing over your own business card with two hands.  This was complicated by the large number of people on both sides.

The card exchange is followed by 10-15 minute presentations of the leader of each delegation. In this case, the Chinese group was led by Zheng Shan-Jie, Director of the Huli District Government of Xiamen. (See Mr. Zheng next to County Executive Spano in picture.)

Mr. Zheng is part of a new generation of local officials, with an MBA as well as training as an engineer. His district (equivalent to one of our municipalities) is the heart of Xiamen.

	At the end of each "speech", there is an exchange of usually token mementos.
Then finally, the ending handshake.

At that point, you're friends, so you sit down to eat and the real discussion starts. In this case, we went to lunch with most of the local officials as well as leaders of several large businesses in the area. Contacts were established between Larry Dwyer of the County Association and the Director of Xiamen's Economic and Trade Bureau, Chen Ding Quan, as well as the Vice Director, Ms. Nancy M. Chen. There were several individuals who provided translation services to us, so each table at lunch was able to conduct conversations understood by everyone.

When lunch was finished, we departed back to the hotel so that we could break into several groups. Various delegation members went off to a kindergarten class, a hospital, a court and a "high tech zone". In addition Dr. Gotti and Dr. Flynn met with the Presidents of some local universities. (See below for more detail on this.)

At night, we broke into two groups to attend two different dinner meetings. The County Executive and many of the business people on the trip went to a special dinner related to the Fair. The rest of the delegation was invited to a meeting with government, economic development and business people from the City of Nanjing (and its Province, Jiangsu). This included Mr. Luo Zhi Jun, Deputy Mayor; Mr. Ji Yunshi, Executive Vice Governor of the Province; and Mr. Xu Ming, Deputy Secretary General of the Province.

After the formal meeting, we went to a large dinner hosted by Nanjing. At the dinner we were inundated by companies wishing to do business with Westchester companies. We have a large number of brochures from those companies, as well as a CD-ROM prepared by the city government. Nanjing is one of the most aggressive and sophisticated cities in China in regard to economic development, so she was quite happy to start working on a future video conference with Westchester.

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Our educators on the trip also had a very successful day.

Dr. Margaret Gotti of Pace University and Dr. John Flynn of WCC went to Xiamen University. They met with President Lin Zu-Geng, Dean of the School of Business Administration Wu Shi Nong. The Dean is also the Deputy Chair of the National Supervisory Committee on MBA Education, as well as a former Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University.

They discussed various opportunities to further international understanding and cooperation through faculty exchanges. The Xiamen University officials were interested in signing an agreement for joint ventures in business administration, environmental and international commercial law studies. Following an exchange of faculty, there might be opportunities for student exchanges. President Lin Zu-Geng was enthusiastic about these mutually beneficial opportunities. Drs. Gotti and Flynn believe that Xiamen University is well positioned to follow through on implementing these agreements.

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