Among the 44 foreign consulates of Shanghai at present, Finnish Consul-General Hannu Toivola has the longest experience which has led to his elevation as the Consular Corp's new Dean.
As the Dean, Toivola will work more closely with the municipal government. For example, he was present at the municipal meeting last weekend in celebration of Shanghai's winning the bid for Expo 2010.
China connection
Having worked for four years as Consul-General, Toivola wished to stay in the position "as long as possible". Actually, he has a connection with China going back more than 30 years.
Finland was among the first European countries to start trading with China in the 1950s. Toivola started to work in the trading company that initiated Sino-Finnish trade and was doing business with China in the early 1960s.
The first products China and Finland exchanged were paper pulp and soybeans. Paper products are still a major part of Finnish business in China, but China has started to import soybeans from other countries instead of exporting them.
Later on, Toivola worked in the Foreign Trade and Industry Ministry of Finland, which gave him opportunities to come to China several times in the 1970s.
His first visit to Shanghai was in 1971, when he stayed in the Peace Hotel. Few foreigners could be seen in China at that time. When Toivola and his colleagues appeared on Nanjing Lu, everybody looked at them with curiosity.
Toivola was among the delegation which signed a bilateral trade agreement with China which was received by Premier Zhou Enlai. Young Toivola appeared in the picture with the Chinese Premier, which won him envy from young people at home.
Finnish expertise
Premier Zhou was quite familiar with Finland, visiting the Finnish Embassy in Beijing many times, as "not many countries had diplomatic relations with China" during those years.
In his master's thesis, completed in 1972, Toivola made a study on Finland-China business relations from 1953 to the 1970s. His conclusion was that, if China wanted to increase its GDP, it had to open up and accept foreign investment. "About six years later, Deng Xiaoping followed my theory," he said. "When it was written, the 'cultural revolution' was still occurring and China didn't accept any foreign money, not even from lenders."
During the four years Toivola worked in Shanghai, Finnish investment in Southeast China has grown fourfold. One of the three largest paper producers in the world, UPM-Kymmene Group, has an important factory in Changshu of Jiangsu Province, supplying the Chinese market with fine paper as well as exporting it.
"Finland used to have the same environmental problems with the paper industry in the early 1970s," Toivola said. "There were quite a few lakes in Finland that suffered serious pollution from paper factories." Then the government laid down strict regulations: when you invest in a paper company, you also have to invest in a system to prevent pollution. Advanced technology was put into use.
"The UPM-Kymmene plant uses water from the Yangtze River," said Toivola. "They say, and I believe them, that the output water is cleaner than the input water." The problem in China is that, many factories are so small that it is too expensive for them to invest in pollution-prevention systems. "That is why the government has to close many small mills to prevent pollution."
Paper companies like UPM used imported material, but they are planning to start using paper pulp from southern China, where woods can supply short fibre pulp like that currently imported from Indonesia.
'No' confusion
Toivola has enjoyed working and living in Shanghai most of the time. He likes Chinese food - he sometimes prefers everyday dishes cooked by the Ayi to courses served at banquets - and felt it tastes better when using chopsticks. He doesn't miss the famous sauna baths of Finland as he can enjoy them regularly in the Regal International East Asia Hotel on Hengshan Lu. What he does miss sometimes, is the forest of his homeland. "Sometimes I just want to take a walk in the trees."
Toivola and his wife go back home twice every year. "When walking in the streets of Helsinki, I often feel something missing, and then I realize it's the people." Finland has a population of just over 5 million, only one-third of Shanghai's.
Although Toivola is quite familiar with China and its people, there are occasionally some cultural difference that confuse him, for example, the Chinese unwillingness to say "No".
"The way of thinking is so different," he said. A main problem is "when the Chinese don't want to say no. They just feel ashamed to reject something. They say 'maybe'. And it can cause problems in business, when we need direct answers to questions. We try hard to understand whether it is possible, or not possible."
Besides taking care of the more than 70 Finnish companies in the southern part of China, the consulate is busy with frequent visits of high officials from Finland - the Finnish President herself was in Beijing last week - as well as more and more Chinese visitors to Finland. The Chinese tourism bureau has not yet officially opened tours to Finland for Chinese citizens, but it is possible to tour in Finland through reliable tourist agencies, and the consulate is happy to issue visas to tourists, as well as to young Chinese people studying there.
"We believe that a person with a good job and better opportunities at home would not want to stay in a foreign country without permission," Toivola said. But some people do get rejected when applying for visas, such as those rejected by other EU countries. "We believe these countries had good reasons for not issuing visas to them."
(China Daily December 17, 2002)
