A German's home away from home

'Shenyoungsters' have left an indelible impression with their warmth

I like to call the people of Shenyang "Shenyoungsters".

First, they are young compared with the people of other European cities, statistically 10 years younger than the average age in Germany.

Second, the city has been going through an amazing rejuvenation since I first visited in 1985.

In 1985, I was a postgraduate scholarship student at Renmin University of China in Beijing, researching management reforms in China's shipbuilding industry. The then dean of economic history, Sun Jian, guided me during an excursion to major shipyards, and our last stop was Dalian Shipyard in Liaoning province, the yard that built the largest ships in China.

At a time when men and women alike wore a blue or green Mao suits, when streets were jammed not with cars but with bicycles, and when people addressed each other as "comrade", Dalian was a buzzing and relatively westernized city with business and modernization in the air. Then we took a train from Dalian back to Beijing, with a one-night stop in Shenyang.

I expected Shenyang to be even more modern than Dalian because Shenyang was the provincial capital and seat of government. But on my first visit, Shenyang disappointed me very much.

My first impression of Shenyang was that of a huge village in the middle of early industrialization. Even people's faces seemed dusty. At the time, I saw no reason to ever come back.

And I didn't, for 11 years. In 1996, I was appointed coordinator of a Sino-German project to support the chambers of industry and commerce. We considered the Liaoning chamber to be one of our key partners, and the main reason for my second visit to Shenyang.

This Shenyang was quite different from the one of a decade earlier! There were international hotels, pubs with German beer, and entrepreneurs full of vigor and eager to cooperate with Europe.

I met some wonderful people, such as Li Yingzhang of the provincial chamber, descendant of a "capitalist family" whose father had donated the family wealth to the Party in the early 1950s, and Yang Guanxing with a similar background and the present chairman of the chamber. People in general were friendly, especially to Germans, and not as intrusive as elsewhere. Many of my best friends in Shenyang today are friends I met then.

In the late 1990s and 2000s, I visited Shenyang many times and saw its progress. I moved to live there in 2008. A year later, Shenyang expanded the airport freeway to eight lanes and became host of Germany and China Together in Motion with some of the high-level events arranged.

Shenyang built its first subway line, which was opened on the same day Governor Chen Zhenggao honored me and some other foreign experts with the Liaoning Friendship Award. Shenyang opened a new international airport and hosted the National Athletic Games.

Though I had to move back to Beijing, I still consider Shenyang my second home after Germany. My Shenyoungster friends, young or old, are the ones I can trust, rely upon and both have fun and do serious business with.

The author is program director of the German Agency for International Cooperation in China

(China Daily European Weekly 04/11/2014 page16)