nothin China Trip Taps Transit, R&D Prospects | New Haven Independent

China Trip Taps Transit, R&D Prospects

Yale In China

Harp at one pitch session.

The owners of two Chinese agricultural-products companes plan to visit New Haven this summer, the first potential fruits of a trip local officials took last week.

Twenty-two New Haveners made the trip to China in a delegation led by Mayor Toni Harp.

The first order of business was to finalize New Haven’s new sister-city relationship with Changsha, a city of 6.5 million people that serves as the capital of China’s Hunan Province. Mayor Harp participated in a formal ceremony with Changsha Mayor Hu Henghua that sealed the relationship.

Harp and the delegation — which included Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker and Albertus Magnus College President Marc Camille — took in sights like the Forbidden City and visited Hong Kong and Beijing as well as Changsha. They saw the Beijing Opera and dined on local delicacies, which turned out to include (a fact learned after consumption) prepared donkey meat.

The city paid a total of $20,000 for the five government officials on the 10-day trip, according to Harp. The officials included Walker, culture and tourism chief Andrew Wolf, mayoral aide Andrea Scott, and Controller Daryl Jones.

Yale In China

Harp at a gathering with students, which she called one of her favorite parts of the trip.

The other main order of business of the trip involved pitching New Haven to potential investors from China. That part produced promising new contacts, Harp reported on her latest appearance on WNHH FM’s Mayor Monday” program.

I absolutely believe that it was worth it. Not just for businesses, but also for professional talent,” Harp said. She also came with a new appreciation for the possibilities for ambitious public transit projects.

Harp and her team set up a room in Changsha’s Intercontinental Hotel to meet one-on-one with potential investors.

One company that participated in those one-on-one meetings is developing a thin cymbal carbonized silicon fiber to be used in airplane engine parts. Its principals expressed interest in locating a research and development facility in an academic city like New Haven that’s near jet-engine customers like United Technologies and Pratt & Whitney. The company expressed an interest in visiting New Haven in July.

Other companies expressed similar interest in R&D facilities (as opposed to factories) for advanced manufacturing.

One company looking to expand in the U.S. was described as having investment interests in hospitality, agriculture, healthcare and welfare,
advanced material, advanced manufacturing, electronics, and tourism” in a summary provided by mayoral aide Scott, who was present on the trip. The company has reviewed New Haven city marketing material and wishes to understand more details on investment attraction policies and sector developments … [The] company is interested in visiting New Haven in July/August and will try to bring 30 female enterprises.”

Harp pitching New Haven in China.

Another company that invests in modern agricultural product processing, cultivation, logistics, and tourism sectors” also discussed a possible July or August visit.

Then we met with two companies that dealt with water,” Harp said. We’re a place on the earth that has plenty of water. Our regional water authority is always interested in businesses that need a lot of water. We met with one company that mineralizes water, that purifies it and remineralizes it. A lot of the water that we buy doesn’t have an adequate amount of minerals. They try to make sure it’s the aprprpiate pH balance as well. Another company that has a new patented way of actually purifying water.”

Both companies are run by women. They’re planning follow-up trips to New Haven this summer.

Harp also pitched New Haven investment at a gathering at Beijing’s Yale Club. Many in attendance were Chinese nationals who had attended Yale University, she said. She had discussions about possible private investment in a planned second parking garage at Union Station, which the state of Connecticut is currently overseeing and paying for. Harp threw out the idea of mixing private investment in return for shared ownership of the project with both the city and Connecticut state government. Such public-private partnerships abound in China, she said.

New Haven, Chengsha mayors seal the deal.

In Changsha, she discussed rail with Mayor Hu.

The city of Changsha owns the patent for the magnetic rail that they have there. He had an interest in seeing whether or not that would be some kind of a technology that we in a city would be interested in,” Harp said. The magnetic rail systems rely on gravity. You can have some that are up really high and on these podiums. The train doesn’t actually sit on what we would consider a track. It is a little bit elevated. There is some at ground level. Some are underground.”

In the group’s travels, Harp — who has advocated for a 60-minute train from New Haven to New York — noticed how fast rail runs in China. From Changsha to Hong Kong, we went on a train that went 195 miles an hour!”

The group also passed through many tunnels.

That made her reconsider her previous reluctance to embrace a proposal by the joint New Jersey-New York-Connecticticut Regional Plan Association to construct a tunnel below Long Island Sound connecting our state to either Long Island or the Big Apple.

When you hear about it, knowing what we know about tunnels in this country, you would think,’“Oh that’s impossible.’ Well, the tunnels they have [in China] are phenomenal. Most of our tunnels are straight. They had a tunnel there that went in two different directions.

The technology they have there is amazing. They have the technology to build these tunnels really quickly. They use tunneling all the time there. Almost everywhere we went, there were tunnels. I think we shouldn’t just write tunnels off, which is what I was willing to do based on my experience with American tunnels.”

The Great Wall, and the Beijing Opera, two stops on the itinerary.

Harp also met engineers who offered to spend a few months in New Haven in a knowledge-sharing fellowship of sorts at City Hall.

In addition to a transit theme, the visit ended up having a feminist theme. Harp, New Haven’s first female mayor, met with Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s first-ever female leader. She also met with the female president of Changsha’s Central South University, who designed the bullet train that Harp’s group rode. And then there were the female-owned water-preneurs who may get to know New Haven better.

Overall, Harp was blown away by how modern China looked. Outside of the Forbidden City, Beijing was crammed with skyscrapers and connected by state-of-the-art transit. The wealth that you see displayed and the improved infrastructure that you see … What you see going there,” Harp said, is like New York times three.”

Click on or download the above audio file or the Facebook Live video below to hear the full interview on WNHH FM’s Mayor Monday” program about the New Haven delegation’s trip to China, including Mayor Harp’s reflections on privacy, public works, and other similarities and differences between our two societies.

This episode of Mayor Monday” was made possible with the support of Gateway Community College and Berchem Moses P.C.

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