China business trip chronicle

From June 7th - 13th, I was on a business trip voyage to China. The people on the trip consisted of two teams from a class we took (Entrepreneurial Engineering), which was also a collaboration with the infomercial company Telebrands (have you guys heard of Billy Mays with Oxyclean?). We had to design an informercial product for the class..and our two teams won the infomercial competition, so we were rewarded with a trip to China (also the point was to look at the possibility of mass-producing the product). My team's product was a home-fitness sliding machine, and the other group's product was a portable water filter.
It was really the most luxurious trip ever for all of us (all paid for by Telebrands), especially for people our age...even more so than when I was volunteering for the Olympics last summer.
I went with a bunch of fratty guys from elite eating clubs of Princeton:two on the baseball team, one in TI, two in Cottage, three in Ivy (all are selective eating clubs) and two executives and one employee from Telebrands.

June 7th: we arrived in Hong Kong around 8pm. Immediately we went to an upscale Japanese/Italian restaurant on a 28th floor @ the tip of Kowloon peninsula overlooking HK harbor with the classic view of HK skyline. The place was truly one of those places you see in the Matrix movie....glass/marble/optical illusion/meta/mind-numbling lighting. With all the glass you feel suspended above the harbor. I was forced to try two kinds of martinis (everybody immediately realized my embarrassingly low tolerance level) and they served lobster pizza for appetizer. Two pieces of eel sushi cost around 25USD.

The best part was that the CEO invited two female flight attendants from our plane for the night. I guess that's how the CEOs chill in foreign countries and how the female flight attendants get perks lol. We then went to Lan Kuai Fong - the expat clubbing/bar section Since I was with these fratty guys, it was amazing to see how they and the CEOs behave in the clubs (I've never really seen this before).... The telebrands employee and me were enjoying the scene vicariously.

June 8th: Today was the only mandatory "business" day. We pitched our products and showed our prototypes to the executives of a factory from neighboring Guangdong province. I had to bust out my mandarin to negotiate with them, even tho they spoke mainly cantonese. For dinner we went to a revolving restaurant ontop of a skyscraper on HK island, and then accidentally stumbled upon the redlight district. But since it was raining and we were all tired, we just went back to the hotel.

June 9th: Today was a really long day. We drove to Shenzhen (a 8million city right across the border from HK, around 30min away http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen). We had to go through customs, and Chinese health officials personally came on the bus and tested our temperatures individually (for H1N1 flu...so many people in HK and China wear masks esp @ airports/places with westerners...and if you are a westerner and you cough, everybody will run away from you. It's amazing how the US is so much less concerned than China/HK even though we have half of the world's cases).

We visited two factories in Shenzhen in the morning. I think touring the assembly lines was the coolest thing of the entire trip. We were treated with VIP status.......these factories make all kinds of things home appliances to plastic/metal parts to high tech digital products to clothing accessories. Each factory employs a few thousand workers...all in uniform clothing/expression. I discovered that they are not allowed to talk to visitors/foreigners...esp when we ask questions on their salary/hours of work that type of things. They have dorm rooms/dining halls for the workers...because they usually come from faraway villages.

We also sat in the executive lounges to listen to confidential discussions between Telebrands CEO and the factory owner.
The third factory was in Dongguan...probably the biggest factory city in China: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongguan
We were warmly welcomed with a banner, and we wore those factory uniforms when touring to minimize dust/static exposure. I looked really like a random factory worker (all my age also) that I was afraid that assembly line supervisors would mistaken me for one of the thousands of workers, so I only spoke english during the tour. Basically, people rotate and each "line of production"..it's literally people sitting in a line . Each line has a supervisor to make sure everybody is working diligently. In this factory they actually had air conditioning....I can't possibly imagine how people survive in the other places. The most stunning thing was that you realize how all these trivial things you think can be done by machine or programmed, are actually done step by step by hand..... Like simple packaging...one person could be just sitting at the same seat doing one sealing, next person one clicking, next person placing one instruction manual into the pakage and repeated for literally hundreds of thousands of all of these packaged products you see occupying all the shelves in Walmart!!!! And all the cleaning, polishing for hours all by hand to make things look immaculate.

For the evening, lots of people went to this gigantic body massage complex. It was basically unreal. You electronically pick the type of massages, and select the girls/guys who you wish to massage you. You can get the massage in any condition imaginable. And people stay there for a whole day for different kinds of massages. A few of us chose not to participate. Two hour long massages were indeed bit intimidating.

June 10th: We flew from Shenzhen to Ningbo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ning-po where I metup with my relatives. We toured the main Telebrands factory. The office building of the factory is like a castle. In addition to the craziness of the other factories, this place they actually had full time security guards standing on every floor...the entrance to the assembly rooms. And when we walk through, they would salute to us. Late afternoon, we drove to Shanghai, where we went on the longest trans-oceanic bridge in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangzhou_Bay_Bridge). We stayed in the Hilton in Shanghai's old French quarter. We briefly visited a western bar there, but it was terribly full of old people and smoke. The best thing was ordering tailor made business uits and shirts in Shanghai. Around 10 we called them to come personally to the hotel, and they waited for us for two hours to pickout style/material. Each shirt costs around 15USD, and suit 70USD (all personally measured and fitted), so some people ordered over 10. The shirts/suits were ready in less than 24 hours, and when a couple of them didn't fit, these people went back to the factories and delivered them to us in two hours including transportation time, around 1AM!!!!!!!!

June 11th:　
Today was the grand tour of Shanghai. We had a private tour bus and a cute tour guide took us first to a back alleyway to buy cheap stuff. It was surreal....In these illegal markets they have invisible doors that they take you through and once they are opened it's like a whole market...reminded me of harry potter. For the rest of the day we did lots of touristy things...including an incredible tea tasting, and karp feeding stint. In the end we went to Old Shanghai with lots of traditional Chinese goods. One guy bought a real samurai sword and Ninja stars and smuggled back to the US. We were surrounded by curious old Shanghainese people who asked us everything about America....
We went to a private room restaurant for dinner and I had to order traditional Chinese food for everyone with the help of the boss. We drank 10+ liters (pitchers) of "tiger draft" beer...we were playing a lazy susan beer spinning game. I was forced to play one round and a half before I was afraid that I was about to be sent to the hospital. A couple guys jokingly or not, threatened me with their hazing tactics if I didn't participate at least one round. And then I made a Telebrands executive drink one glass with me, who never drank a glass of beer in his life. Afterwards, other people went to some expensive bar and I was with my relatives.

June 12th: We flew from Shanghai to HK. We went to the truly crowded/oppressive/dense Mong Kok section of HK to look for pirated softwares but with no luck. The night we went to Aqua again. We had to get our temperatures tested individually before going up to the restaurant. This time we had a private room of chandeliers and roses, all surrounded by glass walls so we could see the skyline. The total tap for this extended dinner was close to 10,000HK dollars.
We then went out to another expat section with all clubs in the suffocating humidity. Shoulder to shoulder partiers from all over the world packing the streets/alleyways/all the clubs/bars/ ...even the seven-eleven convenience store was packed with westerners chugging beer competition. All the sticky feeling of people rubbing on you was too much for me to handle. In any case, that was a truly amazing scene to see HK on a friday night.