The sun rose unto a cloudless late summer sky above Gate D15 at BWI as I perused the six page China Daily supplement in the August 27th edition of the Washington Post. The timing of the supplement was coincidental and potentially propitious, as members of our Maryland delegation make their way west for the 2010 Trade Mission to China.

More about that "Hot Money" in a moment.

The delegation--a year in-the-making--is being led by Maryland Secretary of State John McDonough. We'll touch down in four cities in the ten day tour, celebrating the 30+ years of Maryland-China relationship, fostered in great part by public and private institutions that view trade as the connective tissue of peaceful relations between the US and the world's second-largest economy.

Governor Martin O'Malley sends Secretary McDonough off with his recognition of "our commitment to our relationships in China."

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake states in her message to our group that she "recently returned from China, and I share your enthusiasm for the tremendous opportunities."

Important US brands reside in Maryland and have large stakes in the China market. Our Gold Sponsors McCormick, EB-5 Ports, American Certification Body, Washington Laboratories, Cooper-Wallace and DC Regional Center have growing businesses in the land of 1.5B consumers.

Public-Private Partnerships At Work

The trade mission is a collaborative public-private partnership, organized by a pantheon of Maryland organizations that make things happen between our good state and her largest-trading partner. On the private side, we represent the Maryland-China Business Council, The Baltimore-Xiamen Sister City Committee and the Maryland-Anhui Province Sister State Committee. A key partner on the China side has been the Maryland China Center, located in Tomorrow Square in Shanghai.

On the public side, we worked alongside the Office of the Secretary of State of Maryland, the Baltimore US Export Assistance Center and Maryland's Department of Business and Economic Development, and were aided by an early boost from The Governor's International Advisory Council.

Central to the planning and execution of our mission was the fine orchestration by the indefatigable Mr. Fontaine Bell, who has as much China business savvy as anyone and was assisted by Ms. Xin (Cindy) Wang of Cooper-Wallace. Steve Drake, Prez of MCBC and Shao Ning and May Wang of the MCC kept the rails greased and the boilers stoked. Katie Kong of M&T is keeping track of the bucks and the yuan. We all thank them for their good work.

Of course, no undertaking is possible without generous sponsors, so we extend our thanks to McCormick, EB-5 Ports, Cooper-Wallace, DC Regional Center, Washington Labs, Vance Info and Rosetta Stone.

Building Bridges

A flurry of organizational and other events were held leading up to the Trade Mission. A pier was laid during popular MCBC John H. Holdridge Memorial Lecture this past Spring, wherein the Honorable Ambassador Carla Hills held forth at the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in Washington.

Ambassador Hills posed the most challenging of questions that evening with an essence that figures into debates in Congress, in the Media and across the blogosphere: "Have our increasingly competitive economies along with the differences in our histories, forms of government, and domestic sensitivities become too great to enable us to harness our respective strengths to deal effectively with today's difficult bilateral and global challenges?"

Her response? Continue to engage and hold talks at the highest levels, expand the dialogue that grew from Holdridge's work (Holdridge served under Nixon during Kissinger's historic mission of rapprochement prior to normalization of relations in 1972).

An extension of this engagement is our 2010 Mission whose "chief goal is to promote business and trade opportunities for participating executives, who represent businesses in a range of sectors, including transportation, manufacturing, technology, construction, education, and business consulting."

We plan to strengthen old relationships, knit the fabric of new and toast for mutual and long-lasting success. I like that.

Like a bridge is held up by the collective strength of thousands of stones, the Maryland-China connection is a necessary part of the bridge between the US and China. Many US companies already "get it" and US brands abound. Coffee and cars from the US are everywhere.

Hopefully our mission will address another of the good Ambassador's concerns that: "The knowledge gap is large. Most Americans, and indeed many of their elected representatives, know little about how China contributes to our economy."

Considering the daily beat of domestic economic doldrums in the national news and in the local barbershops in the US, it is critical for US businesses to engage internationally. Economic recovery is alive and well in Asia and the growth in the developing nations represents significant opportunity for expansion of US goods and services.

And golf balls.

Consider too that recent trade statistics show an expanding and flummoxing trade deficit. In spite of a rise in exports in 2010, an attendant rise in imports outpaced the export side of the equation. The US is still the world's largest manufacturing nation, but we are not effectively reaching the 95% of the world's consumers that live outside the United States, a considerable number residing 12 time zones away from Washington.

That is where we are heading...

The Hot Money: Shanghai Sky-High

Reinforcing the notion that scrunching inside an aluminum tube for 16 hours is a good way to broaden one's view of what's going on in that most diverse of nations and the world's number 2 economy, the China Daily supplement points out that property values in our first port-of-call, Shanghai, are sky-high.

This "Hot Money" originates in part from a large investor base from Wenzhou, a coastal city that was one of the first cities opened to capitalistic aspirations some 30 years ago (Long an economic dynamo, Wenzhou was known as "Little Hangzhou" some 300 years before Christoffa Corombo was wet-nursed in Genova).

"Every household in Wenzhou owns 1.2 properties in Shanghai" according to Gao Lei, a computer businessman Wenzhou quoth in the opening article. That sounds like a higher degree of ownership than New Yorkers have in Fort Lauderdale (although your correspondent is temporarily offline and can't do a quick look at quick and easy and suspect statistics on the internet).

Shanghai is host to the 2010 World Expo (a recent Saturday had 520,000 people attending) and it will be featured as part of our four-city itinerary where we'll be posting for matchmaking, celebratory activities, touring, trade discussions lite and probably some good gan bei...and a little potassium.

Banana Girl joins the parade daily at 4 p.m. along the main drag of the Expo. We had a chance to visit this past May, as detailed in an earlier MCBC Steps Out which can be found here.

Then it's off to Beijing, Hefei and Xiamen where we will continue the dialogue and discovery. If you came along, we'd be matching you up with some good contacts and help you find your way through the maze of opportunity and, sometimes, the great mystery that is China.

At the very least we could make a little time for some karaoke.

Mike Violette
mikev@wll.com