Day 10: Shanghai

We started off today with a lecture on "The Global Economic Recession and the Chinese Economy" at Fudan University, the university that my professor did his undergraduate work at. The guy giving the lecture was pretty good, albeit a bit unrealistic about China's future economic plans in my opinion. He talked about their plan for increased investment in public housing, rural infrastructure, transportation, R&D and industrial and rural home support. He forecasted that this year that their GDP would be fueled by 25% government, 25% social and 50% consumption. What about exports and investments? There are certainly some serious implications to think about if China breaks away from exports - particularly for the US. I doubt that they will completely stray from this model anytime soon, but it's something to think about none the less.

After the lecture we grabbed lunch and then did some walking around on Nanjing Road - an old shopping street. It was really crowded, but such a nice day. We also walked along the water on the Bund - really cool to see a view of the city during the day. Next, we walked to Deloitte and sat through what was one of the worst presentations I have ever seen. The poor guy just read his powerpoint slides with his back to us... very slowly in broken English. His knowledge of accounting was limited, so he couldn't really even answer people's questions.

Next we went to the "New Heaven and Earth" area to walk around. It was almost like Fanuiel Hall - tons of little shops and restaurants with outdoor seating. After walking around for a while we went to our last company visit at McKinsey. While we were there, we met with the author of one of the books we had to read for class "Operation China". It was interesting to hear him talk about the transformation of China over the last 20 years and his opinions on where it was heading.

After the lecture we had free time, so a bunch of us decided to stick around the New Heaven and Earth Area to walk around and find some dinner. We ended up stopping at this packed restaurant/bar. We sat outside and ordered all of the American food we had been craving (Nachos, Baked Brie, Mozzarella sticks, steaks) - it was awesome. Glasses of wine were also buy one get one free for happy hour, so that was pretty sweet. It made me wish that Boston had happy hour specials. We also met 2 Canadians who were traveling with Disney on Ice. We had a pretty long dinner, so after we were done I went home and crashed.