Current mood:

nauseated

Idiotic Foreign Investment Meeting
Today I was invited to a foreign investment meeting organized by the Hangzhou city government. It consisted of various Hangzhou government officials, including the vice mayor, making speeches in badly broken Chinese with no English translation. They mostly went on and on about how wonderful Hangzhou is, and listed a whole bunch of foreign companies who have invested millions of US dollars here. Before the meeting they gave every attendee a set of eight really cheap plastic cartoon figures, including knockoffs of Disney characters such as Micky Mouse. The message I got from the whole thing was basically: "Sorry, we don't understand English and we barely even know Chinese, but please, spend millions of dollars here and we'll be sure to steal your intellectual property and rip off your products with extremely low quality imitations."