Moving to Beijing

Monday, August 22 I am moving to Beijing. While this sounds exciting, the context is I am moving to Beijing from Shanghai. I relocated to Shanghai, People’s Republic of China in June 2004. I work for BearingPoint, a management consulting firm, and came for work. My wife Linda joined me that July and we spent the last year in Shanghai. Paybacks are hell, I guess, and while I left Linda in the US to pack up all of our stuff for storage in Chicago, Linda returned to work in the US last month so I am own my own getting to Beijing. Moving always has a degree of pain.

great wall

The one visitor to our new blog read my initial entry and was completely unimpressed with my technical prowess and stylistic prose. Hopefully, this will be more satisfactory. Seriously, we have a picture! The photo was added successfully the first try with no syntax errors – writing html by hand! WordPress has some image plugins that I will test, and I will play with formatting options (wrap text). It has now become apparent that I need (a) to refresh my basic html skills, and (b) buy a text / html editor. Linda has most of our photos and our graphics editor, so the extent of my testing will be limited to simple stuff. I also need to find a way to make the file size smaller for faster downloading. More updates on all that later.

Both Beijing and Shanghai are modern cities, at least on the surface. Cabs, busses, subways, airports, etc. Shanghai is one of the largest cities in China with ‘about’ 17 million people – no one really knows, especially with all the migrant construction workers. Beijing is much smaller, only 12-14 million people, I think. The difference is almost equivalent to the entire Chicago metropolitan area.

Beijing is much ‘bigger’ from a geographic perspective – Shanghai built up while Beijing built out. I think Linda told me that Shanghai has more buildings taller than 50 stories than any city in the world – something like 1500 buildings taller than 50 floors. In many ways, downtown Shanghai is like downtown Chicago – just more Asian people and 5 times bigger. Beijing is more spread out and literally takes forever to get from one side to the other. Everything seems farther apart – longer to get to the market, longer to get to the corner.
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I moved to Shanghai because that is where my company’s local leadership team is based and, at the time, was the HQ for the one client in my industry. As fate would have it, about everything else I need to do for work is in Beijing. I do not mind the travel but I spend more time in China trying to develop and sell business to our local clients. This has created two problems. First, since most of my clients are in Beijing, it is more difficult for me to stop in or to respond physically if there is something they would like to discuss. Second, the cost for these activities is a company expense, so basically it doesn’t make financial sense to live in Shanghai but spend every week in Beijing. The total cost of the move should be less than US$3,000, so the relocation should pay for itself in 3-6 weeks – don’t need an MBA to figure that out.

In retrospect, I should have moved straight to Beijing.

Movers are coming to pack me on Monday. We don’t have much stuff – Linda left many books and some of her clothes. Everything else is mine. All we brought with us to China were clothes, books, and small personal items that could come on the plane with us. Linda has picked up some furniture – an end table, a small bench, her prize possession wooden screen from an old Chinese home, and my prize possession, a bamboo chair from a 1930’s Shanghai brothel. My dad bought a huge drum (3 1/2 feet in diameter) and a gong during a Spring visit. Since you can’t really check an enormous drum on any airline, we will bring it back with us.

It will take 4-5 days to drive everything from Shanghai to Beijing. I think the drive is only about 2-days, but they depart and deliver to a local warehouse that I think adds a day on either end. During the transition week, I will stay at my usual hotel in Beijing, near the BearingPoint office.

I will miss my Shanghai friends – that is my biggest regret and disappointment about the move. While you meet some weirdo’s that can’t possibly function successfully in a western business environment, you also meet interesting people with an adventurous outlook on life. I will miss the latter very much.