The big boom of this week: Chinese energy giant Kaidi plans to build a €1bn biofuel plant in Lapland, Northern Finland.

Welcome to the land of Santa Claus, Northern lights and amazing sceneries!

The possible deal tells about the great cooperation and trust between China and Finland. It’s also a success of a gradual work by dozens of individuals who are working hard to get Finland and China closer and increase the attractiveness of Finland as a great place to invest in. The deal may create new 4000 jobs in the small town of Kemi and much more through the service and retail network supporting the plant.

     
Lately many countries and cities in the West struggle for losing jobs. China offers a great chance to balance those losses. Despite its challenges the country is on the rise and hasn’t seen the top yet. China’s government, which obviously has a huge leverage on everything happening in the country, has put two policies that we should be interested about:

1) 一带一路, Yi Dai Yi Lu, or the “Silk Road” strategy focused on strengthening the cooperation towards Europe and Eurasia. Finland is geostrategically in an optimal position as the gateway between Asia and Europe, only 7,5h away from Beijing. We also lack the challenging colonial history of the many European powers. 

2) 大众创业，万众创新, Dazhong Chuangye Wanzhong Chuangxin, or the “mass entrepreneurship” campaign to boost the innovation, especially among the Chinese youth. This is where Finland and Nordics as one of the world’s most interesting hubs of startups, education and innovation come to the picture. We have a lot to give to China. China needs us, and they want us. We’ve experienced that first hand in our discussions with local startups, investors, government officials and non-profit actives.

We should still not get blinded by the lure of the Middle Kingdom. Getting things done here needs a lot of understanding of the local environment, great relationships (guanxi, 关系) and very good relations with the local governments. 

To get things right and done, one needs to work hard on China; our education system is lacking content wise very badly behind in providing the students enough necessary information and skills on China and Asia. Our education is top in its socially inclusive and constructive methods, but the focus lies still too much on the worldview based on the 20th century. The fast rise of China and “the rest” hasn’t been updated in our curricula.

That’s why YOU need to work hard on catching up. 

Misunderstanding and lack of experience on China, Chinese and their cultural habits may lead into disastrous consequences. Just thinking about what happened in Kouvola a few years ago. 

In China everything is difficult, but everything is possible. Understanding the both sides of the coin is crucially important. Finland has relatively many really good experts on China, let’s pick up a few names on different industries such as Jyrki Kallio, Matti Nojonen, Yrjö Sotamaa, Oskar Helling, Jaani Heinonen, just to name a few. But we also have Chinese highly skilled, very reliable “settlers” such as Aavi’s Harry Feng and Beijing’s Tom Zhu who are supporting Finland with their hearts fully on. And what about people like Peter Vesterbacka, who’s devouting 2-trips a month to China to get to know how to do stuff here?

There are some really positive initiatives lately, such as a few pioneering schools in Espoo, Helsinki and Tampere focusing on teaching Chinese language and culture.

Also our foreign pundits and influencers have started to get it.

The future between China and Finland looks bright, but only if we understand what we are doing and if we play our cards right. We are giving too much ahead for countries like Sweden and Denmark, who have even three times bigger and more meaningful presence in China. And according to a close contact, Finland has around 15 Chinese companies, Sweden 300. See any difference.

They say that 1 Finn “equals 10 Russians” and in icehockey we beat the Swedes, and Danish even with 4 players. Yes I get it. In China too we’re doing relatively well, but not as well as we could. 

  
 

If we want to get more stories such as Kaidi’s investment in Lapland, and the great cultural and startup cooperation between China and Finland, we’d need to add one more wheel, on the short term investments to our human capital in China, but also in a more deeper cultural and educational level recognize the need to understand China and Asia better than we do now. This would be a gift for our children which they’ll be thanking us 30-40 years from now. And even sooner.

Finland shouldn’t also stop the great transatlantic cooperation we have to the North America, and even endeepen and improve the relations with Europe, inside and outside the context of EU. But as a third crucially important direction we should get our Eurasian directions up to date to the 21st century and fulfill the great potential in the many layers of cooperation on the new Silk Road. Kaidi is just a good start – and we need to get it still right before the investment, 4000 workers and a great constructive Sino-Finnish cooperation takes place in Kemi.

Good luck! 加油！