"Beijing" - Dave Ellison

This is a beautiful city. Wide avenues, lots of parks and flowers, and landscaped. It's also huge with about 18 million people. I like it a lot better than Shanghai as Beijing feels much more open visibly. We are having a great time but tomorrow - last day in China - should be the best with visit to Tiananmen Square, Mao's tomb and The Forbidden City. That is in the morning.

Today, Kate Kaup's sister Virginia, Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi (she's the #2 person at a 700 person operation) arrived in Beijing in time for drinks and dinner. And tomorrow she will accompany us in the afternoon to our embassy here for a private briefing. Tomorrow night we have our final dinner together of Peking Duck.

Tonight we went to a delicious meal in a private restaurant room in a quaint shopping district and were joined by Adrian ?, a Chinese-American who is a young lawyer (probably about 30) with the Natural Resources Defense Counsel here. He holds degrees from UT-Austin in electrical engineering and Harvard Law. He grew up in Houston. He explained to us what is going on in China regarding environmental and energy policy. Basically, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is driven to become energy self-sufficient. A coal-dependent country, 2007 was the first year China became a net importer of coal. It was a wake-up call. So lots of alternative energy investment is happening, plus a Chinese Clean Air Act is moving to become law to help on the environmental front. Dinner took an interesting turn. Even though we had two "experts" on U.S.-Asia relations present in Kate and Virginia - we spent time discussing urban planning in the U.S. led by Ron McKinney, Coleman Shouse and Jason Richards who have varying disciplines and perspectives on the subject.

This trip mimics what I expect Kate is trying to accomplish with Furman undergrads: it's primarily about learning rather than pure sight-seeing. We are all ignorant about China, so pretty much sponges every day. A lot to learn, but what a way to learn it!