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Wednesday, July 23, 2025

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China mission accomplished?

by

20140227

Not for the first time, I am writ­ing this col­umn from Chi­na–in the Bei­jing Air­port wait­ing for a do­mes­tic flight to Shang­hai, af­ter a mix-up with the flight arrange­ments that may yet see me hav­ing to sleep on one of those hard air­port chairs sur­round­ed equal­ly strand­ed Chi­nese.

In some ways, it's been pro­duc­tive and eye-open­ing trip, but in oth­er ways, this has been a trou­bling vis­it.

Go­ing with the pos­i­tive first, and prov­ing the point that there are Tri­nis every­where in the world who are ex­celling, there were some ex­tra­or­di­nary na­tion­als at the of­fi­cial open­ing of the T&T Em­bassy in Chi­na.

The first one was Nived Moonasar, a friend­ly young man, who is study­ing to be­come an eye sur­geon in a rel­a­tive­ly small town in cen­tral Chi­na, who was say­ing he is do­ing more cor­rec­tive laser surgery there than al­most any­where else in the world. Nived took some leave from his stud­ies to come down to Bei­jing to meet with the group of his coun­try­men at the Grand Hy­att.

The oth­er ex­tra­or­di­nary young man is Kirk John-Williams, who spent six years work­ing in Chi­na and who, to the un­trained ear, speaks Man­darin with all the flare of a na­tive. Kirk is now the busi­ness de­vel­op­ment man­ag­er at his fa­ther's con­struc­tion com­pa­ny and it ap­pears to me that his lan­guage skills have placed the com­pa­ny in pole po­si­tion to get sub-con­tract­ing jobs from the many Chi­nese con­struc­tion com­pa­nies who op­er­ate or are about to op­er­ate in T&T.

The oth­er young Tri­ni who is do­ing great things in Chi­na is Se­je Hen­ry-Hugh­es, a Fa­ti­ma old boy, who was head-hunt­ed by a Shang­hai-based prop­er­ty de­vel­op­er and sent to the boon­docks in Chi­na for one year to learn the lan­guage. He is now the en­vel­op­ment man­ag­er at CDG Re­tail Man­age­ment, where he scouts for bil­lion-dol­lar mall projects through­out the coun­try.

And then there was Kevin Fleury, who did very well at his MBA pro­gramme at the Arthur Lok-Jack Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness and is now do­ing a PhD in Chi­na.

The oth­er point about the open­ing of the em­bassy is that all of the Bei­jing-based Caribbean diplo­mats turned out, which was a very strong sig­nal of Caribbean sol­i­dar­i­ty.

It al­so in­di­cates that many of our Caribbean col­leagues have been rid­ing the Chi­nese drag­on for many, many years and that T&T is new to the par­ty in terms of es­tab­lish­ing a pres­ence here.


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