Today was one of the hottest days of our visit that we needed to spend dressed in business casual attire. We had two site visits, one to Delphi Technologies and the other to the American Chamber of Commerce.
Our first site visit to Delphi was interesting, but definitely more geared to the engineers in the group. We were given an overview of the company by a gentleman that went to graduate school at Pitt, so it was easy for us to make friendly connections and show how small a world it really is out there. We talked about the automotive industry and how important it is in China due to its large population of drivers and increasing pollution concerns. Many drivers are converting over to hybrids, but not many people are switching over to fully automatic cars. The problem that they found was that the fully electric cars were considered high end, like Tesla and the electric cars that were affordable were considered ugly and undesirable by consumers. So, they are working to make an affordable electric motor that will fit in most cars so that fully electric cars will become more common and they believe that in ten years, only ten percent of city drivers on China will be driving fully gas powered vehicles.
After Delphi, we stopped for a quick lunch. The restaurant we went to had the stickiest white rice I have ever seen which really helped when it came to eating it with chopsticks. One student in our group was brave enough to try a fried chicken foot that they served in one of our dishes. Aside from all the bone, they said it was not that bad.
From lunch, we headed over to the American Chamber of Commerce, an organization that works with American businesses that have branches in China. The room that we were in really could have used some air conditioning, but the information was interesting regardless. They talked to us about why companies open up branches and plants in China in order to save money and how they are able to govern these businesses from the other side of the world. One problem that companies run into that I thought was interesting was that China has very loose trademark and copyright laws so it is easy for people to steal a companies product and recreate it and resell it at a much lower price. Companies are aware of these risks, but it is worth it so that they can make their products at such low prices.
When we returned to the hotel and were able to get back into some more weather appropriate outfits, me and a couple other students in the group took a trip of our own to the other side of Shanghai to see the M50 art zone. The art zone was full of small galleries from local artists and they even had rooms that doubled as studios where the artists would be working on a piece right in front of you. We also found a cool shop that had crazy and hard to find shoes and almost every item from the Supreme brand which is a hard to come by brand since everything sells out so fast. Even though the shop was interesting, the prices were way too high for single articles of clothing so we treated that shop almost as another art gallery of things just to look at and not take home. Trying to get home, no taxi wanted to pick up a couple of tourists, so after about a half hour of trying to hail a cab, we decided to try and figure out the subway back to our hotel. Luckily, we only had to switch lines once so it was not too difficult and we were able to get home rather quickly and cost us about a dollar each.
We beat the heat and were able to explore some local art while doing so. Tomorrow is our last day and I plan to do everything I can to make it just as good as the rest of the great days on this trip.