• First Person - Bill Thomson

Bill Thomson relives his very first trip to China.

From the very beginning China was special to me. I had read about Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution as a teenager and had always wanted to go to see what it was like. My first trip to China was to Shanghai in the summer of 1993 following a market report we had commissioned by a group of mature students doing an MBA at Strathclyde University; they called themselves "Team China" and they did a heck of a job for Clyde.

When I arrived at Hongqiao airport it was roasting hot and I was met by Lily, the employee of an old friend of our company from Singapore that had set up an office in Shanghai. Lily was to be my interpreter and companion during that first exploratory trip.

I stayed at the Park Hotel in Nanjing Road and we went back and forth to the factory of our proposed JV partner every day for a week to have meetings about our boiler cleaning technology (sootblowers) and discuss how we could co-operate. It involved long days of discussions and questions about our products and our company probing to find out if we were good enough to be their partners or not. Every night I went back to the hotel and got on the phone back to base to get the answers to technical details I was asked from the day's meetings.

The journey back from Yang Shu Pu Road to the Park Hotel late every evening was fascinating as there were literally hundreds of thousands of people sitting out on the pavements. There was no air conditioning in houses is those days. I saw generations of families sitting around playing cards, chess, mahjong or reading under a dim light, older children studying and the younger children already asleep on makeshift beds. I was told that the people sat out until the wee small hours until things cooled down, then everyone moved back in-doors. Sure enough, by the return trip in the morning they were all gone.

I went for a walk down Nanjing Road on the Saturday morning before I returned home and over onto the promenade along the Bund to catch the breeze and watch the ships and barges making their way up and down the Huangpu river. After five minutes I turned around to make my way back to be confronted by a large crowd that had gathered to watch me! They were all very friendly and several made attempts to speak to me in English and almost all of them ventured to say "hello" accompanied by a broad smile.

Clyde established our first company in Shanghai with our partners SDF on 5th January 1996 after on-off negotiations and posturing that went on for three years, although once we really got down to establishing the JV it only took about three months. Shanghai Clyde has gone on to be a very successful company for Clyde and a star JV within the Shanghai Electric Corporation Group.

Bill Thomson is executive director of Clyde Blowers and a vice-president of CBBC.

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