In the plane to Holland

In the plane back to Holland for a two week stay in the Netherlands. Sitting in an airplane always makes you so lazy and sleepy. I’m one of these persons who cannot find sleep very well when traveling, but it a good time to write you this little update, although not much happened since my last writing on Sunday. To summarize, I was working and enjoyed some social activities at night (diners). Because I’m going back to the Netherlands it was nice to see some people before I left.

In Shanghai it felt a little bit like we are awaiting a second Christmas holiday, because the Chinese New Year will be celebrated this Sunday. On the streets people are wishing each other happy New Year (xinnian kuaile) and the streets are less busy. A lot of the Chinese leave town to go on Holiday and even a lot of Westerns leave to go back home (like me), or go on a little holiday. So for business this is not great time. This makes January a really ‘slow’ month in China, everything just got started and now again a break. So I’m happy to go back to the dynamic Holland. I’m curious how I’ll experience it after being in this totally different culture for the last four months. Actually I don’t expect to find much change in the Netherlands since my departure, but maybe my own perspective has changed a little. ‘Culture shock’!

This week I still had a couple of meetings. The most interesting was probably my visit to the Fudan university. This is one of the biggest and best universities of China. I visited the incubator of this university which holds approximately 1.000 starting companies – it’s definitely large. I want to include the Fudan University in the program of the Baak-program “The New Manager” that visits China in March. Fudan was very interested in this and even wants to talk about more possibilities for collaboration in the future. Personally I’m interested in the developments of the entrepreneurship network in Shanghai, so I’ll be happy to be more involved. It will give me a change to use my valuable “New Venture”-experience. This could be connected to my meeting with the Consul-General Eric Verwaal two weeks ago. He also plans to develop a strong (Dutch) entrepreneurship network here (potentially in collaboration with De Baak). So everything comes together (again – good!).

I’m curious to find out about the Dutch view on the “financial crisis”. One of my good friends in Shanghai (working for a recruitment office) was fired last week, so you can also feel some signs of some sort of ‘recession’ here in China. What stroke me most was the speed in which this happened. She heard it Friday afternoon and last Thursday was already her last day. So within a week, everything just goods quicker than we Europeans are used to, it seems. A few weeks ago I was speaking about this with my American friend Eddie. He said that Europe is really a ‘planned’ culture, when compared to China (or even the US). He could be right – at least it’s food for thought.