Bernhard Weber first came to China in the early 1980s as a student at Shandong University. „At that time, it was a country with practically no cars. A city like Shanghai probably had hardly more than 500 passenger cars,“ Weber recounts, to illustrate the rapid development. In the meantime, the 62-year-old is the managing director of the Chinese branch of the Baden-Württemberg International (BW-I), a state agency based in the six-million metropolis of Nanjing in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu. He supports companies from Baden-Württemberg in gaining a foothold in the Chinese market.