Down to Business

State Department Briefings
Monday.
I knew it was serious because I woke up and shaved for the first time in a foreing hotel. Am I a real-live business traveler now? Perhaps. We as a team knew it was serious, because were were putting on suits. Away were our gym shoes. To Beijing I brought with me two of my Rodney Collection suits. With it I rocked the brown pin stripe shirt and the Danielle New Delhi Tie. I was ready.

We had our coordination meeting over a delightful breakfast including steamed buns filled with sweetened red beans in one batch and pork sausage in the other; eggs; rice; some pickeled salad and egg; orange juice and coffee.

Our mission - and we chose to accept it - was to come to China to learn about its role in implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1540. In short, "1540" is a global law (the Security Council took the rare step of acting as an international legislature in this case). The substance of 1540 is to prohibit the sell of nuclear weapons or pieces of nuclear weapons to "non-state actors" (read: Osama bin Hidden).

Professor Blumenthal's voice kept ringing in my head throughout our coordination meeting. In my Management seminar, she always makes the class think not just about the conversation at hand, but whether that conversation is going to lead us to the kind of goals we have set (versus never-ending talk sessions that lead to nowhere and are never followed-up).

...It was a good prep meeting, a really good prep meeting, and we were ready to do our first round of interviews today which began at 10am and lasted through until 5pm. At the close of the day my brain was fryed from all that time spent in "active listening" and note-taking. Dinner this night was nothing fancy and sleep came crashing on me quite early. I would shoot up at 2am after my standard 6 hours of rest, but strangely be unable to get back to bed. Its normal for me to awaken after 5.5-6 hours, but usually if I want to I can drift right on back to bed. Hmm, perhaps this mythical "jet lag" thing is real? Funny I did not feel it at all yesterday.

Today we got the US Embassy perspective on our nuclear non-proliferation research. Tomorrow we get the perspective of Chinese government officials that actually have to implement these policies...We have been in general policy la-la land, and now with these folks we hope to learn about how this stuff all works practically.