China In 1997, the first trade mission that I was involved with was to China. Our previous model was to have full trade offices to support in maybe just 3cities in the world like London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, which is very expensive to rent space and hiring somebody with the necessary expertise and contacts. We hadn’t been doing too well on international business development with that model, so the model had been switched over during the early years of the Leavitt administration to having part time representatives in maybe ten to fifteen different countries who would be available on call, and they were high-level people that had a lot of connections in the government. The representative we had for China was a guy named Shawn Hu. He was only about 30 years old and had been at Weber State University so he was a friend of Utah. This young guy was just absolutely unafraid of doing anything in terms of getting in to see high-level persons. We got over to China on the trade mission and Beijing was the first stop. Shawn had it set up so that Leavitt had to leave right away from the airport and go (more…)
