“I Bring the Sunshine and Rain; You Do the Growing”: An Hour Inside a Chinese City Hall

Recently, I accompanied an American professor and several of his students on a research trip to China. One of our stops was a major provincial capital—I will leave its name out of this essay, though it is one of the handful of Chinese metropolises most frequently held up as a national model of economic success. Receiving us was a senior official, a member of the Party leadership group of the Municipal Government General Office who has spent years overseeing commerce and cross-border trade.

The meeting took place in a VIP reception hall inside the municipal government complex. Stepping through the doors, the first impression was one of unmistakable grandeur: soaring ceilings, dark wood paneling, thick carpeting, and two rows of wide upholstered armchairs flanking a long conference table, with a white porcelain lidded teacup (gaiwan) placed squarely before every seat. For most of the American students, it was their first time inside a Chinese government hall of this rank; they sat with their backs ramrod straight, a trace of nervousness in their posture.

To be honest, as I lifted the lid of my teacup, I had already sketched out the script for the next hour in my head. In a setting this formal, facing a roomful of foreign scholars and students whose instincts you cannot easily gauge, the safest and most rational move for any official is to read from a prepared briefing: recite a string of handsome GDP growth rates, counts of above-scale enterprises, and trade volumes, rounded off with a few polished municipal slogans. One cannot even fault a bureaucrat for doing so—in any civil service on earth, boilerplate is the lowest-cost form of self-protection when speaking to strangers.

After a few minutes of pleasantries, the professor asked the simplest and grandest question available: "Why has this city been so successful?"

The woman sitting in the host’s chair did not reach for a folder of talking points. She was remarkably energetic, fast-talking, and expressive, with the crisp, brisk bearing of someone who has spent decades on the operational front lines rather than behind a ceremonial desk. She smiled, held up her hand, and said that if she had to sum up the city’s foundation, it came down to five words: History, Energy, Temperature, Future, and Safeguarding (历史、活力、温度、未来、护航).

Those five words were not my reconstruction after the fact; she called them out one by one on the spot. Over the next hour and a bit, she used those five words to lay out the city's thirty-year ledger.

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I. From Refusing to Live Off the Past to the East–West Calculus

She began with "History." The city is ancient, a wealthy commercial port for centuries. Yet she immediately turned the point on its head: the single most important thing about the city’s history, she said, was that it refused to lie back on its historical laurels and live off its past.

The remark sounds simple, but it carries weight. Many historically famous cities in China fall into the trap of dining out on their ancestors: restoring old quarters, fencing off scenic zones, collecting ticket revenue, and watching their entire economic structure slowly calcify around tourism until they become open-air museums with a tax base. In her telling, centuries of commercial prominence left this city not with baggage, but with the quiet nerve of a place that has seen the world. Because it has mattered for centuries, it assumes it ought to stand at the frontier—and that baseline confidence is what allows the city to tear up and rebuild its industrial base every ten years without suffering an identity crisis.

Her second word was "Energy," which she used to trace two consecutive industrial leaps: having eaten its fill of the dividends from the internet and digital economy over the past fifteen years, the city is now steering hard into the artificial intelligence (AI) economy.

Here she sketched a spatial map of the city that stayed with me. If you slice the metropolis into its western and eastern halves, she explained, the two sides run on entirely different industrial tracks. The West—home to the major universities and research institutes—focuses on the internet economy, platform giants, and software R&D. The East, which was historically poorer and had a much thinner foundation, was never told to catch up by copying the West's homework. Instead, municipal planners steered the eastern districts toward biotechnology, automotive manufacturing, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Anyone familiar with Chinese local political economy will recognize what lies behind that arrangement. The chronic disease of urban expansion in China is homogeneous competition (同质化竞争): the western district builds a lucrative software park, and within two years the eastern and southern districts, green with envy, rezone land to build identical glass office towers, offering the exact same tax rebates to poach the exact same pool of companies. For a city to keep its university-rich western half focused on software while its land- and factory-rich eastern half sinks roots into biotech, autos, and connected hardware requires more than a clever spatial plan on paper. It requires a blueprint that survives leadership transitions without being tossed aside.

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II. "Temperature" and the Promise of "Sunshine and Rain"

Her third word was "Temperature" (温度 — warmth).

Truthfully, when I heard the word "temperature," my internal propaganda detector flickered. In recent years, "a city with warmth" has become a standard trope in municipal promotional videos across China, often more sentimental than substantive. Yet she did not linger on sentiment. She immediately cashed the word out into brass-tacks mechanics: how to nurture the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem, how to mentor young colleagues hands-on inside her own organization, and how to solve three concrete problems for young people arriving in the city—training, startup loans, and housing.

Housing, in particular, went straight to the bone. For a twenty-two-year-old engineer arriving from an inland province with empty pockets, grand talent-attraction manifestos mean very little; whether they can afford a roof over their head is the life-or-death line that determines whether they stay or pack their bags. When she talked about transitional apartments and getting young people through their first three years in the city, she sounded less like a bureaucrat reciting metrics and more like a startup co-founder explaining how she retains early engineers.

That operational instinct led naturally into her fourth word, "Future," and her fifth, "Safeguarding."

Speaking of the future, she returned repeatedly to "AI+" and the idea of a full ecosystem. Hanging a brass plaque that reads "Artificial Intelligence Industrial Park" is easy, she noted; building an ecosystem means weaving compute, data, university talent, venture capital, and industrial application scenarios into a single fabric. And the plus sign in "AI+" was deliberate: rather than treating AI as an isolated standalone sector, the city’s goal is to drive AI directly into the industrial muscles it already owns. If you recall her east–west map, that means AI into biotech, AI into automotive manufacturing, and AI into IoT hardware. The pieces of her five-word framework locked neatly together.

Then, explaining how the municipal government "safeguards" private enterprise, she delivered the most memorable line of the afternoon:

"I take care of the sunshine and rain; you take care of growing strong." (“我负责阳光雨露，你负责茁壮成长。”)

I turned those twelve Chinese characters over in my head long afterward. In standard civil-service prose, the idea would be rendered as "continuously optimizing the business environment and stimulating the vitality of market entities"—impeccably correct, wooden, and instantly forgettable. By casting it instead in the vernacular cadence of a popular couplet ("I'll handle X, you handle Y"), she made the promise portable—something a founder can repeat over dinner. More important is the boundary the metaphor draws: the government is not a farmer walking down the furrows to dictate which row must plant potatoes and which row must plant corn. The government is the climate. Its job is to supply dependable sunlight and timely rain; how the crop shoots up and branches out is the business of the seed itself.

To show that "sunshine and rain" was an operating procedure rather than a figure of speech, she pointed to three mechanisms the city runs year-round: early-stage government guidance funds, regular entrepreneur roundtables, and a standing schedule of government–business breakfast meetings (政企早餐会).

One should never underestimate a breakfast meeting. Inside a sprawling bureaucracy, if a private firm hits a regulatory wall and files a request through normal administrative channels, the memo can easily take three to five months to climb from a desk officer's inbox to a decision-maker's desk—by which time the market window has closed. A weekly breakfast compresses months of bureaucratic hierarchy onto a single dining table: founders sit across from a deputy mayor or bureau chief over soy milk and fried dough sticks (豆浆油条), raise the bottleneck face to face, and get an instruction issued on the spot. When Chinese cities compete for business, what they are ultimately competing on is those few days of response latency.

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III. A Thirty-Year Personal Footnote: Dialect, Mayors, and Going Global

Had she merely delivered those five words with polish, it would have proved only that she was an unusually gifted speaker. What truly captivated the American professor and students was what happened next: to explain why the city is genuinely open and why its pro-business policies have remained steady over time, she casually used her own life as the footnote.

She was born and raised in Hunan Province, she told us, and came to this city as a fresh university graduate more than thirty years ago. She has lived and worked here for three full decades, rising to a senior leadership post in the municipal government—and to this day, she still cannot speak a word of the local dialect.

In China, as in much of the world, a local dialect is never merely a medium of speech; it is an invisible velvet rope guarding the inner rooms of power. In cities bound by traditional clannishness, not speaking the local vernacular immediately brands you an outsider (外地人). You may be welcome to work on a factory floor or run a merchant stall, but the core politico-business networks remain closed to you. Pointing to herself—an outsider from an inland province who spent thirty years rising near the top of the city's economic apparatus without ever learning the local tongue—was worth more than ten thousand glossy investment-promotion brochures. It proved that the city had long ago untethered career advancement from birthplace, accent, and local patronage. Whoever could deliver results could rise.

She then broke her thirty-year career down into three roughly ten-year chapters. Fresh out of college thirty-some years ago, she spent her first eight to ten years working inside a State-Owned Enterprise (SOE); her second decade was spent in an intermediate public-service and industry-coordination institution bridging state and market; and for the past decade, she has worked inside the municipal commerce apparatus, where she has been spearheading outbound cross-border e-commerce (跨境电商出海).

Listening to her recount those three decades matter-of-factly, I was struck by how uncannily one person's résumé mirrored the entire thirty-year industrial evolution of coastal China: accumulating the initial industrial and managerial capital inside SOEs during the 1990s; building market institutions and industry ecosystems in the post-WTO decade of the 2000s; and, over the last ten years, taking Chinese supply chains and brands global through cross-border digital trade. Every move in her personal career landed squarely on the beat of the city's next upgrade.

Along the way, she added another crucial detail: over those thirty years, she had worked under a succession of different mayors. Even as top municipal leaders rotated according to political schedules, the city's underlying commitment to supporting entrepreneurs never broke stride from one administration to the next.

Anyone who has done business in China knows the four-character phrase private entrepreneurs dread most: xin guan bu li jiu zhang (新官不理旧账 — "a new official ignores the old official's ledger"). When a new mayor or Party secretary arrives eager to build a signature political achievement within a three-to-five-year term and scraps a predecessor's promises, a founder's ten-year capital bet can evaporate overnight. How did her city escape that curse? Looking across the table at her provided the answer. Mayors rotate, but the seasoned, operational technocrats who spend thirty years in the same city form the administration's unchanging spine. Institutional memory does not live in government filing cabinets; it lives in the heads of career officials who have lived through three generations of industrial turnover and are still sitting at the conference table.

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IV. Lingering Thoughts Outside the Building

The meeting lasted a little over an hour. Throughout, she radiated an almost infectious energy—a genuine desire to show foreign visitors the most capable, pragmatic side of China.

We had come as visiting scholars and guests for an open exchange, not as inquisitors looking to pick a fight; faced with a host this warm and forthcoming, no one had any inclination to ask abrasive gotcha questions. Still, as we walked out of the conference room and I turned her memorable line—"I take care of the sunshine and rain; you take care of growing strong"—over in my head, a quiet question naturally surfaced.

If you press one step further into the logic of that sentence: Why, in the relationship between state and business, is the government inherently the "sunshine and rain" up in the sky, while entrepreneurs can only be the "crops" down in the soil?

As well-intentioned and self-restrained as the metaphor is, its underlying grammar remains one of unequal rights. Traditional Chinese political statecraft has an old saying: "Thunderbolts and rain-dew are alike the grace of Heaven" (雷霆雨露，俱是天恩). When the sky bestows sunshine and rain, it is a blessing—yet crops ultimately can only depend on and adapt to the weather; they do not stand on equal footing to bargain with the sky. In a year of mild wind and timely rain, everything flourishes. But if the climate suddenly shifts or an unseasonable frost rolls in, the crops in the field cannot take a written contract to court and sue the heavens.

And yet, on second thought, that is also the most honest description of how China actually operates. Within an institutional framework where the state inherently commands vast resources and rule-making authority, expecting local government to behave like the purely neutral "night-watchman state" of Western economics textbooks is beside the point. Given that the government is destined to be the sky overhead anyway, the decisive dividing line between a city that thrives and a city that stagnates comes down to a simple question: do the people in charge of the weather act like erratic storms that tear up the field every few years, or do they—like the officials of this city over three decades—restrain the urge to pull on the shoots by hand and steadily provide predictable sunshine and rain? Read in that light, even if her metaphor carries a view from above, it is already the most pragmatic and enlightened bargain this system can offer.

There was one more small detail during our conversation that stayed with me. When the talk turned briefly to family, she mentioned lightly, the way any parent might in passing, that her son is currently working in the United States.

She said it casually, though the weight behind it was not lost on me. Anyone familiar with China's cadre management rules over the past decade knows that under the strict Regulations on Reporting Personal Matters by Leading Cadres (领导干部个人有关事项报告规定), a senior official whose spouse or child studies or works abroad must formally declare every detail for organizational review and auditing; in many sensitive posts, having family overseas is a significant constraint on promotion. Yet in her life, these two worlds sit side by side without drama: her son lives and works across the Pacific in America, duly recorded and vetted under Party discipline, while she sits every day in a grand municipal office in China, pouring her energy into helping Chinese e-commerce merchants conquer global markets and welcoming visiting American students with pride.

When we stepped out of the municipal government building, the afternoon sun was bright against the plaza. Walking down the steps, the American students immediately began debriefing what they had just heard, visibly struck by the pragmatism, openness, and industrial fluency of the official across the table.

In the popular imagination abroad—especially in Western media discourse—it is easy to flatten the Chinese government into a monochrome caricature: either a sluggish, rigid bureaucratic dinosaur reading from ideological scripts, or a cold, faceless monolith of state power. Spend a single hour inside a room like that in one of China's premier cities, and the caricature falls apart.

What actually carried China's economic miracle over the past thirty years was, to a large extent, a specific generation of pragmatic technocrats very much like her: men and women who walked out of inland provinces in the early 1990s, earned their footing through performance in cities that did not care about their accents, learned the plumbing of state enterprises as well as the pain points of private founders, and can talk fluently about "AI+" and cross-border supply chains—all while remaining humanly tethered to a connected world.

Glancing back at the imposing government building behind us, her phrase echoed once more: "I take care of the sunshine and rain; you take care of growing strong." Thirty years ago, this city gave a young graduate from Hunan who couldn't speak the local dialect enough sunshine and rain to build a life. Today, the twenty-two-year-olds filing into her building for housing subsidies and startup loans are trying, under that same sky and within that same climate, to grow into the next season's harvest.