Lilian Kranenburg bids farewell to the China Café and looks back on 12 very interesting years
After 12 years, on June 17 I said goodbye to the China Cafe (CC) as an organizer and held my last interview. My consideration of quitting involves personal choices and considerations. Moreover, after the move and some downsizing during the past few years, the VNC has proved to be a warm haven for the CC since September 2023. That reassurance facilitated my decision to quit.
The philosophy of both VNC and CC overlap; bringing together knowledge transfer, stories and experiences to enrich connection, understanding and insight about China guide us. With the establishment of the CC in 2005, the founders took the bold step of creating a place for people with business interests in China. Here people could exchange ideas and experiences about business in China, go over the known risks and opportunities, and there was room for robust networking. Soon other interested parties joined in and the monthly meetings in Utrecht were lively and approachable gatherings where China-adepts gladly showed their noses. In 2012, I was asked by the Guanxi Knowledge Network to join the board. I was happy to do so, but was also eager to revamp the CCs. General knowledge and understanding about China was often lacking, and our network was ideally placed to address this, adding more nuance to the China debate. To this day, that is the CC’s mission.
And of course, China was and has never been a homogeneous concept. The need to show the diversity of this complex country and the stratification of its widely diverse population, as well as its effect on society, the impact of the urban-rural educational disparity on the economy, China’s manufacturing industry and Intellectual Property Law, the interpretation of the unbridled political ambitions of its leaders, both at home and abroad, the recalcitrance of the civil service presence in business, the volatility of Chinese CEOs, the real estate crisis and the Chinese
