Beijing
Back in Beijing again (i.e., my third trip to the city in the past six months), & it was nice to be back — although the 400+ air pollution index numbers on this visit were more than a bit daunting! My colleagues from the Shenzhen energy management company (see last year’s November posting) joined me for a number of meetings, and since one of them was celebrating a birthday, we had a ready-made excuse for a Peking duck dinner at the renowned Quanjude restaurant on Qianmen St., over near Tiananmen Square. Founded in 1864, the restaurant certainly lived up to its reputation!
A couple of other dinners were also memorable on this trip, because I had a chance to catch up with some former Energy Research Institute (ERI, of the NDRC) staffers. I had first met Song Yanqin back in my UN days, & we’ve had numerous chances to connect over the years, in both Beijing and New York. He’s now working for the World Bank in Beijing on renewable energy projects. Another former ERI person was Xu Litong, who also happens to have been a former student of mine at Penn. Litong and I worked together on a UN wind power project back in 2002 (& co-authored a paper about it, along with Prof. Wang Shujuan of Tsinghua University, the following year). Although Litong now spends half of his time in China & half in the U.S. (working on UN and other energy/environmental projects), we hadn’t connected in almost a decade. You might note from my recent summertime posting that I seem to spend a lot of time hanging around with ERI folks – certainly an advantage in my line of work – and these reunions were definitely a lot of fun!
Things are looking up in Beijing’s 798 art district!
A final treat on this trip was a visit to Beijing’s 798 art district. This is a former electronics factory complex, heavily influenced by East German Bauhaus designs, which subsequently became a fashionable enclave for Beijing’s arts community. With lots of sculptures, outdoor art, studios, design firms, shops, cafes and restaurants, the area has become a weekend magnet for tourists like me. And you can see that I fit right in with my newer (non-ERI) stalwart companions!