10 Yetis Meets Team China - Chinese Government Departments Come to Gloucester

Well, today has been a fun day! I (andy) delivered a talk to a 21 strong business delegation from China, at Gloucester Rugby Club.

The delegation was made up of two directors from Chinese Government Departments and the rest were Directors from 19 other State Owned companies such as China Telecom and China Power etc etc. The delegation were on a 28 day tour of the UK, looking at all manner of ways in which UKPLC operates.

Along with the CIPR, we were the only agency in the UK asked specifically about presenting to the delegation and we were asked to speak about crisis communications and the UK approach to PR in general. The talk was two hours long, and as I said, was held at Gloucester Rugby Club.

As well as preparing the talk and sending it to the translation team, I also had my on translator on the day, Jingling, and she helped me avoid any pitfalls. The first pitfall I avoided was that i was going to talk about rugby, but apparently it is not big in China, so she tipped me off that I should mention that Harry Potter was filmed in Gloucester.

Turns out that they were indifferent to both pieces of opening information. Good job the PR side delivered.

We gave them a few gifts to help them remember Gloucester, and we were all flattered to receive three silk ties from the most senior person there, Zhang Tao, from State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (bit of a mouth full I know).

All in all, a very surreal but very insightful talk. There was mention of me going over to China to deliver the presentation to individual departments but I am not so sure if that will happen (fingers crossed).

The first pic is of me and Jingling, my translator.

Andy and Jingling

This is a Team shot...

Lise, Andy and Iona with Team China

	Andy posted on 13/09/2012. Follow Andy on Google+.