David's Big Adventure in China

I’m continuing to work long hours and expect to do so until February or March. At least now I feel like I’m making progress in some areas. I have two good accountants working for me and still need to hire an experienced accountant who can speak English. I still meet new challenges almost every day. One recent challenge was getting some payments made to contractors. The banks here are to a large degree an extension of the government and there are very strict controls on foreign currency exchange. We have money in the bank in a US $ account but they only let us exchange the money into Chinese yuan under strict circumstances. We are investing a lot of money into the local economy that provides jobs and will provide food but they make it very difficult for us to spend our money. The money we have is all capital and none of it is borrowed from the bank. It was so frustrating when they were making it difficult to spend our money for the local economy.

Our business model requires very close cooperation with the government and we’ve probably had more than 100 government officials visit our sites in the past 4 months. There was a group of 80 that was supposed to visit a couple weeks ago but there visit was cancelled because the local villagers were protesting and blocked the road to our farm by putting boulders on it. Some of our managers were at the site to greet the government officials and got trapped there for several hours. The locals have protested several times but we often don’t know why. I’m just amazed by the number of government officials that come to visit. Maybe they don’t have anything else to do?

I finally got to see part of the mini-series I helped make more than a year ago. It’s showing on tv now and it’s a 25 episode series. I’m in the first episode but if you didn’t know it was me, you wouldn’t recognize me. The scene happens so quickly, you don’t really get a good look at me.

This is probably my last post before Christmas so I want to wish you all a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year and Happy Holidays if you celebrate any other holidays! It’s starting to get a little cold here now (sometimes in the low 50’s F) so I checked to make sure I had heat in my apartment and found that I didn’t so I bought myself a portable heater as an early Christmas present. I hope all your presents make you warm and happy!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 9th, 2010 at 4:11 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.