Last week, I (LIA President, Matt Crosson) returned from my second trip to China in four months. My earlier trip was the first of the LIA’s “China Adventures” and, for me, was my first visit to a country I thought I understood. I found out that I understand very little about what’s actually happening in China and what the country’s true potential is. That’s why I was anxious to return after so short a time, on this trip with a delegation of chamber of commerce presidents from across the country.
The trip was very informative; it opened my eyes to many potential business opportunities for Long Island companies. About 35 other chamber executives were in the delegation, representing chambers from Los Angeles to Buffalo-Niagara, and dozens of cities in between. The LIA and the Los Angeles Chamber were the largest represented. The delegation was organized by the American Chamber of Commerce Executives and the delegation was the ACCE’s Metro-Cities Council. The trip was underwritten by Citslinc International, Inc., the LIA’s partner in the China Adventures trips.
The delegation met with government economic development officials in Beijing and Shanghai, including the man who proposed bringing the 2008 Olympics to Beijing. We also met with the president of the American Chamber of Commerce People’s Republic of China and the president of the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Shanghai, as well as American business people doing business in China.
We learned too much to write in one blog entry, so I will write more about China in the days ahead. The most important thing for American business to understand about China is the enormous scope of the potential market that exists there. We’ve all read that China is being affected by the global recession and that’s true. But the affect it’s having there is quite different from our experience. China’s growth rate in 2007 was 13.7 percent; it’s growth rate for 2009 is estimated at 6.4 percent. Its growth rate has been cut in half, but the growth China is still experiencing, even in the midst of a global recession, is amazing.
In part, that’s because China’s economy is developing and America’s is developed. China has more room to grow than we do. It’s also because the Chinese government has redirected its economic policies, aiming less at exports and fixed asset investments and more at meeting domestic demand. And domestic demand will be huge by any standard. There are, after all, 250 cities in China with one million people or more. The United States has nine. Even if entire metropolitan areas are considered, we have only 50 with one million or more people.
So the scale of opportunity is remarkable. Taking advantage of that opportunity presents real challenges, however, and that’s what I’ll discuss in future blogs.
