Using Womeeting

I was invited by Dongcheng District as one of the few foreigners in Beijing to be part of the CIFTIS online meeting on 4 September 2020, 8 pm. The 2020 China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) was co-hosted by the Ministry of Commerce and the Beijing Municipal Government and was held in Beijing from 4 to 9 September.

200901 invitation1

The online meeting was to join the “Global Trade in Services Summit”.
My official name posted was 北京大策略商业顾问有限公司范克高夫.
We were ordered to test the day before. The online meeting also offered English translation (and other languages). We were a total of over 300 online participants.

(You can see me in the upper left corner)

Official speeches

The keynote speech was of President Xi Jinping, I noted in particular his insistence on an “open and inclusive environment”.
That was later repeated by Premier Li Keqiang who pledged to develop a better and more open business environment to bolster confidence among foreign investors.
The Summit was featured in many media such as China Daily and South China Morning Post.
See:

4 September 2020 – China pitches services trade fair as proof of ‘unwavering confidence in opening up’ to foreign firms
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3100142/china-pitches-services-trade-fair-proof-unwavering-confidence
If you can’t use the link: 200904 tradefair

and

4 September 2020 – CIFTIS to drive global economic recovery
CHINA DAILY
http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202009/04/WS5f51786ea310675eafc576a9.html
If you can’t use the link: 200904 CD_CIFTIS

The challenges for the so-called “opening up”

We could not provide feedback or comments during the CIFTIS online meeting, nobody could neither in the Summit.
I wish I could have given my 50 cents of comments to the President.
More about it in a new post. Stay tuned!

The view from a former EU official

See here the text of an informal luncheon address by my friend Michael Graham, former EU official currently living in Beijing, looking at BREXIT in a historical context.
It was addressed in Beijing at a Chinese-American group on 6 March 2017.

The title:
BREXIT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
PERCEPTIONS AND OUTLOOK IN THE UK AND IN EUROPE
Download here: 170306 Brexitspeechrev3

EU and Brexit

The well researched document gives a unique insight and provides historical data on how the EU was set up and evolved over the years, how the complex interactions between the UK and the rest of the EU changed, how it led to Brexit, and how it could affect the Brexit negotiations. It also explains the underlying causes that lead to the Brexit vote.

No Dunkirk Spirit Can Save Britain From Brexit Defeat
The following article from the New York Times gives a rather sober/somber outlook on what Brexit could mean for the UK: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/opinion/dunkirk-christopher-nolan-brexit.html

See here two quotes:

A senior ex-diplomat, a man who has spent a professional lifetime building up Britain’s trade and its credibility with investors, is aghast at what the Brexit chaos is doing to our reputation. “The core narrative of the country for the past 40 years has been that we’re stable and politically predictable; the ideal platform for investing into the single market,” he told me. “And now we’re rudderless and in a mess.”
…
Britain is not an economic powerhouse waiting to be liberated. We are a country of mediocre education and limited skills, whose preening vanity has prevented us from seeing our failings. Our membership in the European Union is not a set of restraints; it is what has been propping us up. If we insist on cutting ourselves off, parts of our economy will start to die.

Does not sound encouraging…