It is hard to find the best places to interview truck drivers, and we need to plan some time for it in addition to working on questions and completing interviews. It is important to start early to also be able to engage our Tsinghua teammates, get their inputs on questions to ask and their experience from interviewing truck drivers in China.
Laura Swenson:
Some things I've learned in my research about the Chinese trucking industry:
- Containerization rate in China is less than 2%
- There is a project going on in China right now called the Guangdong Green Freight Demonstration Project which is a model trucking efficiency project that is piloting techniques to improve efficiency that can be shared with other provinces in their trucking practices
- Getting clients is cited as the number one issue for truck drivers
- The average trucking company in China is comprised of 1 truck and less than 2 employees; moreover, from a presentation given to us by our Tsinghua teammates, I learned that 64% of China's truckers are owner-operators
Christina Zhou:
We should definitely work closely with the other green freight team, since we have many similar goals (understand local trucking system, etc). Additionally, I don't personally feel extremely qualified yet to provide recommendations on publicity approaches in China as someone completely unfamiliar with the social media/censorship landscape (not that a video about green trucking provides a major threat to political powers). The script has an interesting tone in my opinion, and is probably more cutesy than would be appropriate in a professional setting here, but that is probably not as much of an issue there in China.