Ron Gifford's (boringly titled) Blog

So at 8:00 o'clock this morning, the delegation boarded the bus and began the three-hour drive from Shanghai to Hangzhou. Governor Daniels called shotgun; yes, sometimes it's good to be governor. I sat next to Mayor Wayne Seybold of Marion; yes, sometimes it's good to be mayor. Anyway, I had a great conversation with the Mayor about the innovative things they're doing in his community to spur economic growth. This is his third trip to China in the past 9 months, and each time, he's following up with companies and contacts to make the case for investing in Marion. It sounds like his community has some great opportunities as a result of his hard work, and we all can benefit from Mayor Seybold's example here: be strategic, committed, and focused on the long-term. (In case you're wondering, this is an unpaid, unsolicited commercial for Mayor Seybold; I just think it's important to give credit to creative public leaders).

After sitting in Shanghai rush hour traffic for about an hour (trust me, after sitting in this stuff for two days, the traffic on I-69/I-465 each morning should be embarrassed to call itself congestion), we hit clear sailing for our next destination: Hangzhou, the capital city of Zhejiang province.

Our tour guide, a native Shanghainese, cracked us up when she referred to Hangzhou, with no sense of irony, as a small bedroom suburb of Shanghai. Small, as in only 6 million+ people living there (compared to Shanghai's 20+ million residents). 

For all of its modern ways -- nice charter bus, new highways -- China can still surprise you with a throwback to days gone by. We stopped at a rest stop after a couple of hours for a coffee and restroom break, and just as we were about to hop off the bus to grab a snack, the tour guide reminded the women to take their own toilet paper with them. Yeah, that's right, it's BYOTP in most public toilets in China. (And now you know why pocket size Kleenexes were on the suggested packing list for the trip).

So on one hand, you have to pack your own paper for a public restroom that looked like it was channeling the 1950's. But a mere 100 meters away, running parallel to the interstate, work crews were building huge concrete pilings and supports for a high-speed rail track that will connect Shanghai and Hangzhou. So here's the question that interests me: do you think they'll have toilet paper in the bathrooms of the 265-mph bullet trains that will run on those new tracks? Who knows; maybe it's just easier to hold it when you're going that fast.

I simply can't describe all the construction activity we saw on the drive into Hangzhou. At one place, at least 20 sky cranes were lined up in a row, lifting midrise office or apartment buildings of 10-20 stories each out of the ground.

We arrived at the Hangzhou Shangri-La with just enough time to grab a bite for lunch before heading over to a special event on the hotel's grounds: the public launch of Hangzhou hybrid transit buses powered by Cummins engines.

The Hangzhou Transit Company has nearly 1,400 buses -- a third of its fleet -- that are powered by Cummins diesel engines. Today the company launched 50 new buses that employ hybrid technologies along side the diesel engine, that will permit fuel savings of 20% or more. Check out the Governor's website for more coverage of this event, if you're interested.

What's the Indiana connection, other than a great Indiana company doing good things on the other side of the globe? Cummins is a key partner in the "Hoosier Heavy Hybrid" initiative, working with Delphi, Duke Energy and Allison Transmission, among others, to create heavy and medium weight hybrids. You can check out a nifty little video on the program on the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership's website. Part of my focus on this trip has been talking about that initiative and many others, including a meeting tomorrow with a Chinese auto manufacturer to talk about electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles.

One last note: today was a very lucky day in China. The number 9 is considered to be a lucky number, so the date of 9/9/09 (or 09/9/9, as the Chinese might write it -- year, date, month) will only be surpassed in 90 years as the luckiest date on the calendar. That made it a good day to get married in China. As far as I know, none of our delegation participated in that local custom today.