The China link: Lord Mayor means business following China visit

It is so different from anything you might have expected. The welcome foreign visitors can get is so warm, there are so many people – and everything is done on such a large scale.

More than a week after their return from a whistle-stop four-city visit to China, York’s Lord Mayor Dave Taylor and his Lady Mayoress Susan Ridley were still spinning.

As guests of honour, they’d attended a light show on the walls of Nanjing’s 15-mile-around city walls; been invited to a fashion show featuring no fewer than 61 models; and seen a farm park featuring giant tableaux made of vegetables which, in the summer months, receives as many as 300,000 visitors every month. “That blew our minds,” admits Cllr Taylor.

On top of that, they’d been treated virtually like visiting royalty: put up in 5-star hotels, chaperoned everywhere they went, and given pride of place at a conference in Nanjing attended by 23 mayors from 14 countries around the world, including Paris and Florence.

Nanjing: the bridge over the Yangtze river

The Chinese, Cllr Taylor says, are very conscious of hierarchy. “And I think they deduced that my title of Lord Mayor must be higher than a mayor!”

Quite right too.

In between all the social occasions, however – always part of any official visit to China – there was some serious business to be done.

Cllr Taylor had been invited – at the Chinese government’s expense – to take part in two different conferences. One, in the ancient southern capital of Nanjing, focussed on historical and cultural cities.

A second, in Changsha, capital of Hunan province and famed as the place where a young Mao Zedong converted to communism, focussed on agri-business. “But it was really about tourism in rural areas and its value to the rural economy,” Cllr Taylor says.

The two conferences were held three days apart – and with China now the world’s second largest economy, and clearly keen to boost trade links with the rest of the world, Cllr Taylor decided it made sense to combine the two conferences in a single visit.

To make the most of it, he and the Lady Mayoress also managed to squeeze in a visit to the ancient city of Suzhou, where the York Museums Trust is forging links with Suzhou museum, and Shanghai.

Suzhou museum

The only thing York had to pay for was the train tickets from York to Manchester – and the train tickets, in China, between Suzhou and Shanghai. “They cost 59.5 yuan each,” Cllr Taylor says. That’s about £7 to you and me.

So what did they achieve during their whistlestop tour?

Quite a lot, actually.

The conference in Nanjing was an event called the World Historical & Cultural Cities Expo. Mayors from around the world gave presentations about their own cities. But Cllr Taylor – a former marketing director of the York Inward Investment Board – was the only mayor to accompany his talk with photos captioned in Chinese (courtesy of Will Zhuang, head of the recently-established York Chinese School).

And he even produced a promotional video featuring a Chinese student who’d studied in York walking around the English city and explaining, in her own language, how much she loved it. “That went down amazingly well!” Cllr Taylor says.

The Lord Mayor at a pre-meeting ahead of the Nanjing conference

Having wowed his hosts, he then went on to sign a memorandum of agreement with Nanjing’s mayor, Miao Ruilin, committing York and Nanjing to become “sister cities” and cooperate in everything from tourism and culture to trade, education, science and technology.

The memorandum will build on existing links – the University of York and Nanjing University already operate a joint spintronics and nanotechnology research centre – and could lead to real benefits for both, Cllr Taylor says.

“It felt like a very fruitful visit. Doors are opening in China and we have the chance to walk through them to do business.”

His visit to Nanjing has already had more than one direct result. The Chinese city’s main hospital is keen to enter into talks with York District Hospital. And Nanjing itself is taking about sending a lights show and fashion show to York, Cllr Taylor says.

City lights: the FuZiMiao quarter of Nanjing at night

It didn’t stop there. In Shanghai, Cllr Taylor met the head of a tour operator whose package tours included a two-hour stopover in York. Cllr Taylor told them in no uncertain terms that two hours wasn’t enough to see York – and the company has now changed the itinerary, ditching Cambridge to allow for a one-and-a-half day stopover in York.

A couple if weeks ago, just days after Cllr Taylor returned from China, he met up with Kingdom Vacation’s general manager right here in York – during the Christmas lights switch-on – where the arrangement was confirmed.

It all goes to show how in China it is the strength of personal connections that leads to business being done, Cllr Taylor says.

That, he believes, was the main benefit from his high-profile visit – and the reason he hopes future Lord Mayors will continue the link.

The Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress pose beside a statue of Mao at Changsha

Yes, he says, China continues to have a problematic record on human rights. Western countries have a duty to continue to challenge this. But the way to do that isn’t by turning our backs on China, he believes. It is by engaging - to the mutual benefit of both sides.

“That’s a much better way to do things,” he says. “China is reaching out to the world in so many ways. There are great possibilities of exchange, and if we get the cultural links right, the business links will follow.”

180mph trains and the emperor's new clothes

It was pouring with rain when Cllr Taylor and his Lady Mayoress Susan Ridley touched down at Nanjing airport on a grey November morning. Proper rain. “Monsoon rain,” Cllr Taylor says.

There wasn’t as much pollution as he’d expected. But the city was warm, wet and muggy. “There was a haze in the air.”

It wasn’t the most auspicious of first impressions. But the sheer hospitality the pair were shown quickly won them over.

They were taken to a stunning light show on Nanjing’s ancient city walls. Proper walls they are too, Cllr Taylor says, high and thick and dwarfing York’s at almost 15 miles around.

The YiFeng gate in Nanjing's ancient city walls

“We were taken up on top of the walls,” he says. “It was the opening ceremony of the conference. We were watching the light show just about while people here would have been watching Illuminating York– and it was phenomenal.”

Then they were taken down to one of the underground passages beneath the walls, where a fashion show was staged in honour of the conference delegates. Costumes had been designed beforehand for every one of the 23 mayors attending the conference by Lawrence Xu, one of China’s leading fashion designers.

Cllr Taylor had been asked to send his measurements in advance – and he looked up photos of the clothes worn at previous Chinese conferences to see what he could expect. He feared the worst. “There were all these guys in bright yellow, looking like Elvis in the Seventies.”

No such thing in Nanjing. His suit was made of tailored black cloud brocade silk of the kind traditionally only worn by emperors, and was finished with elegant red cuffs. “I’m going to wear it at the next full council,” he says.

OLD AND NEW: The Nanjing skyline

The Lady Mayoress, meanwhile, was wowed by the fashion show itself, which featured no fewer than 61 Chinese models in the latest looks. “It was amazing,” she says. “I’ve never seen anything like it before – and I’ve been to a few fashion shows.”

They saw plenty more that they’d never seen before during the remainder of their trip – things which gave them food for thought. In Nanjing, they stayed at a hotel in a residential area – and the Lady Mayoress admits she could scarcely believe the scale of the development she saw all around. “There were all these apartment blocks, huge, stretching as far as the eye could see.”

They also saw retractable pedestrian barriers. “They would be great for Fossgate,” the Lady Mayoress says.

Retractable pedestrian barriers in Nanjing: a good idea for York?

They travelled between Nanjing, Suzhou, Shanghai and Changsha by train – and at one point, out of the window, Cllr Taylor saw fields covered in solar panels. Ever the Green, he couldn’t resist snapping a photo through the window as they sped past.

The trains themselves were ultra-modern, whispering along at 180 miles an hour.

Fields of solar panels glimpsed from the train windows

But the thing that perhaps stunned them the most – and reminded them of the awesome hunger of the Chinese people to travel and see new things – was an agri-tourism attraction they visited near Nanjing.

It was called the Taiwan Farmers Development Park – and it included everything from orchid breeding to farmers’ restaurants to giant tableaux made out of vegetables, featuring characters from Chinese history and myth.

Cllr Taylor casually asked how many visitors they got – and was told, equally casually, that in summer it was anything between 200,000 and 300,000 a month.

Now that’s a tourism industry...

The four Chinese cities visited by the Lord Mayor:

Nanjing: a city of eight million people on the lower reaches of the Yangtze River that is the capital of Jiangsu province, and a former southern capital of China (the name Nanjing means “southern capital”). The ancient city walls date from the Ming dynasty, are 15 miles in circumference, and are said to be the best preserved ancient city walls in the world.

Suzhou: A city of just over four million people (the second-largest city in Jiangsu after Nanjing), which is 2,500 years old. It is famed for its classical gardens (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) and temples.

Changsha: A city of seven million which is capital of Hunan province, hundreds of miles to the south-west of Nanjing, and which is famed as the place where Mao Zedong converted to communism.

Shanghai: A city of 24 million – a global financial centre and one of the world’s great megalopolises.