China

When the euskal etxea of Shanghai turned two, at the end of January 2007, euskalkultura.eus told where it had come from: it had started with seventeen founding members, and two years later there were 43 individual members and 10 companies, with another two in the process of joining. Among them were SPRI, Ulma Construcció, Fagor Automation, Fagor Arrasate, Wingroup, Orkli, Ampo-Poyam, Metalocaucho, Cegasa and Danobat. The centre was then chaired by Jokin Laspiur, from Arrasate.²

The life of the centre was on Sundays: potato tortilla, mus championships, cookery courses and the feasts of the Basque calendar. To celebrate its second anniversary it launched a website, designed by Maider Saracibar and the Vitoria-Gasteiz firm Odei, and paid tribute to the Basque Jesuit Iñaki Larrañaga, who was ninety years old and had been in Asia since he was twenty-one, with spells in China and Hong Kong.²

The centre was also useful for something else. Its founder and first president, Juan Ignacio García de Mutiloa, said years later that it worked as a professional meeting point, with meals and informal gatherings where people talked about the problems of doing business in China. Mutiloa spent ten years in the country and later became Deputy Minister for Industry and Energy in the Basque Government.³