By Jack LeBlanc

Two weeks later the Hong Kong company had flown back to Chongqing together with the representative of an American glass manufacturer. Apparently this was their long-term partner, and the favored supplier for the job. The American sales team had already
visited Chongqing several times for this project over the past year, and wanted this contract badly.

Any interference with their plans had to be stopped at any cost, especially after all the courting they’d gone through. I knew nothing of the meeting or of the existing competition until two days afterwards, when Jackson told me that the Americans had come up with a killer price. In the meantime, I also had received feedback from Jan, who had made a quote based on the previous information gathered. Read the rest of “The great glass curtain walls of China. Part 7″ or post a comment

By Jack LeBlanc

Arriving at the temple, our remaining giggles stopped instantly when we witnessed Jackson go into a religious frenzy, burning large amounts of incense, offering hell bank notes – a kind of fake paper money to appease the ghosts of his ancestors – kneeling on one of the red cushions and praying next to the seventy-some-year-old grannies. For my part, I thought he’d been bitten by some sudden Buddhist beliefs, while the others just didn’t know how to respond when faced with so much devotion.

This ‘performance’ was definitely the talk of the evening. After liberation, religion had been entirely marginalized and was only practiced by the elderly. In the eighties, however, religion made a slow comeback as new uncertainties emerged in people’s lives, and they sought new sources of comfort. Read the rest of “The great glass curtain walls of China. Part 6″ or post a comment

By Jack LeBlanc

On a miserable drizzly Friday afternoon, a minibus from the Chongqing city government turned up at the university gate, blaring Michael Jackson’s Thriller over the sound system. An import/export company had arranged the bus to drive us to their offices for a price discussion. Jackson and, surprisingly enough, several familiar and unknown faces greeted me from inside the bus. There were ten of us, including the driver. ‘Come on, we’ve decided to bring you to the Northern Hot Springs!’

Yet another unexpected change: the official agenda had been transformed into an entertainment program. The official goal was to ‘get a vehicle to pick up the customer for price negotiations’, while the unofficial goal was ‘having fun for the weekend’. For any time conscious Westerner, this was a stressful experience. Read the rest of “The great glass curtain walls of China. Part 5″ or post a comment

By Jack LeBlanc

As the Sichuan dishes entered in a well-orchestrated ballet of flavours, the waitresses started to take away the little cups and replace them with bigger glasses that could handle a more manly volume of rice wine. The drinking now took off in earnest, every toast demanding another, more bottles opened and circulated around the table. As the empty bottles started to clutter the little trolley, the heads of some at the table transformed into a wide spectrum of colours starting at cherry red, darkening into burgundy and finally dark purple.

To me the liquor tasted like fuel capable of powering a Long March rocket to the moon. The fifty-plus percent alcohol left an aggressive burning trace on the tongue and throat, but it seemed that the quicker you emptied your glass the easier it was to get rid of the heavy after-taste. Read the rest of “The great glass curtain walls of China. Part 4″ or post a comment

By Jack LeBlanc

In the meantime the College of Architecture, which sits a ten-minute walk from Chongqing University, had somehow heard of the barbarian with slides of Western-style buildings. Over the course of three weeks I ended up giving four lectures, in front of an audience of specialists, about a subject I had only begun to grasp. In China, faith is definitely put through unexpected twists and turns. It so happened that among the audience were a couple of employees from the Chongqing Design and Architecture Research Institute, who seemed to have been inspired by what they saw.

In a planned economy those institutes can be likened to the R&D department of a company, except these guys worked on behalf of all the state-owned enterprises involved in the construction industry. Read the rest of “The great glass curtain walls of China. Part 3″ or post a comment