My name is Gilbert Van Kerckhove. It's a complicated name for our Chinese friends, so I'm normally called Lao Fan. I am Belgian from the Flemish region.
I came to China a very long time ago, I was in China for the first time in 1980. I was recruited by a Belgian company, called the Ateliers de Construction Électrique de Charleroi, in simple ACEC. They had obtained a very important contract with China for the construction of a power plant in Henan province, the city of Pingdingshan. It was the power plant called Yaomeng.
I never made the plan that I would stay 40 years in China. A year has been added, another year has been added. Eventually, even if I wanted to leave China, everyone told me: No, Mr. Kerckhove, you are the China specialist, we don't want to use you in another country. So it was a little bit marked here, "Mr. China". The Olympic past, because of that, I was decorated by everyone. Then I received the green card.
"Old China Hands" club started in a very funny way. One day I thought to myself: there is no one in China who does that, why don't I start? So I had the idea of assembling foreigners, otherwise the term does not apply to "Old China Hands". And this is for foreigners who are living in China since 10 years at least, because we want people to feel comfortable with each other.
People assist each other, and chat with each other. And very often people meet again. "We met 30 years ago, and now we're here. “ It's quite funny. I love doing that.
The payment I get is the friendship and camaraderie we built in that group. You have probably seen a lot of changes in China in the past almost 40 years. So, the changes I have seen in China in these 40 years, is quite incredible, I think it is also unique in the world. No other countries in the world has experienced such a radical transformation in such a short period of time.
It's a radical change, we're discovering another China. This is particularly true of infrastructure investments, which are extremely important. When you look at all the highways, high-speed railways, and others that have been built in China, it's impressive. China is no longer the country of T-shirts, today, China is 5G and electric cars is something else.
The change we see in China is not only visible in big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, etc. I am very happy that I have had the opportunity to visit regions other than the big cities. It's very exciting, because you find a China that foreigners don't know about. We think that these regions like Gansu, Sichuan, Chongqing are poor. So, when you get there, you don't get there at all. It's extremely modern.
