Ed in China Weblog

A good friend of mine from Texas asked me if I was still in China since I’ve not posted anything in a long time.  I’ve been busy. 

The school year here lasts forever it seems — from Late February after the Spring Festival until The middle of July.  There is only one short break for the May 1st Labor Day holiday and one of three days of holiday is Saturday so it really doesn’t count.  Most US colleges are finished by the end of May.

College kids here work hard too and have it much harder than I do.  I’ve got twelve ninety minute classes I teach on odd numbered weeks and eleven ninety minute classes on the even numbered weeks and a total of about 500 kids in all the classes combined.  So giving a quiz is painful and takes a long time to correct; giving a written assignment of any length is more painful still.   Four of my classes are in the evening, from 7 to 8:30 and by that time, most of the students have already sat in nine classes for the day. 

I have no idea how they do it.

Also taking some time is a little business venture which envisions buying stone, pearl and glass jewelry here and in Hong Kong and selling it in the States.  Even with shipping US prices can very reasonable and the stuff is really nice.  There are also a couple of artists I’ve found here who can paint an exact copy of any photograph in oils and give you a perfect portrait or scene that you couldn’t touch in the States for six times the price.  (You can send your orders for paintings or jewelry to Silkroadtrader@live.com.)

Here’s one of my son and a rather impressive fish he caught in Western Maryland:

With the Olympics coming up in August (I will be back in the US by then), there’s been lots of news about China recently, much of it bad.  Some of it’s wrong.  Jack Cafferty on CNN called the Chinese a bunch of goons and ranted about the toy factories, toothpaste and “crackdowns.”  Of course he did not say that Chinese authorities closed half the factories making toys in Guandong Province once they got word of the problems.  I always liked Cafferty, he was a  NY City news guy for years before making it big as CNN’s answer to Andy Rooney.  But CNN has been getting it wrong about China where I know about the facts personally.  

In March, the Dodgers and Padres came to Beijing to play a couple of Spring Training games in China for the first time ever.  This was at the peak of the Tibet stuff where a well-orchestrated series of protests around the world brought attention to the Chinese equivalent of taking over the Sioux lands in the Dakotas. 

Anyway, CNN and other news outlets reported that the “Chinese Crackdown” eliminated a bunch of Boy Scouts from being in the baseball game ceremonies and that the National Anthem tradition of a US ballgame was also eliminated.  Well, I didn’t go to the Saturday game, but I was in Beijing for the game on Sunday.  I never saw any Boyscouts looking downtrodden after being denied participation, but I saw, heard and sang the US National Anthem and saw and heard the Chinese anthem just like a regular game.  Here’s a picture of the teams lined up, caps off while the anthem was played:

These swarthy characters are ticket scalpers; they’re the same all over the world:

The Chinese media used stories from the US press to illustrate how carefully cropped news photos suggested impressions of protests that were a little different from reality.  One most frequently shown was a widely distributed photo of two protesters apparently facing truckloads of Chinese soldiers singlehandedly.  The uncropped photo, also shown in the US media, showed a whole crowd of people pelting the trucks with rocks.   

Of course there is no story to sell if the headline reads “Chinese authorities reasonable and restrained in the face of organized violence.”   “Hillary Under Sniper Fire” sure made a better speech than strolling from the plane to the flower girl in Bosnia too.

Don’t believe everything you read or everything a self-serving politician or CNN pundit says either.

Maybe I’m “going native” but my view of this place is very different from what I am reading on CNN, Fox and the others.  Some of my students wanted to go march in front of Carrafour, the big French department store chain that has a store here in Xiamen.  The French were a little nasty during that Olympic Torch run. Their Chinese teachers advised them not to bother the French store and that it would look bad for the school and for China. 

As an aside, there were people from all over the place at the ballgame.  No vendors in the stands, but they sold beer and cold hot dogs and everybody seemed to have a good time.  Major League Baseball paraphenalia was all over the place and they made a bundle selling merchandise at prices that could feed a large family for a couple of months.  Nobody clapped or made much noise at the game.  Instead, the practice here is to take two inflated plastic tubes and beat them together to make appreciative noise.  Same thing at a concert.

This young lady threw six strikes in a row……..and fast too……someone from the Dodger’s Organization was talking to her after her demonstration, but of course human rights problems in the States prevent women from being part of many professional sports teams.

So that’s a little of the news from China…busy, busy, busy…….but the next post won’t be so long in coming.  I promise.

It is not snowing in Xiamen, being close to the ocean and as far south as it is saves Xiamen from any of that. But the weather has been miserable for the last ten days, heavily overcast with rain or drizzle and temperatures in the 40s.

Provinces to the west and south of here, Guangdong in particular, where the elevation is higher have been getting a lot of snow and cold and as has been illustrated in the media, China is a mess.  Complicating things is the holiday, Spring Festival, where everyone with any chance at all, tries to get back to their ancestral home city or village to visit family.  It’s the one time of the year they can.  There are few other breaks of any duration. 

Having a billion and a third people and having tens of millions of them working far from home (because that’s where the work is for many), means that tens of millions take plane, train or bus — or all three — to get from their temporary place of work and living to their homes and families.  Throw some ice and snow into the middle of that, in places like Georgia or Mississippi where ice, snow and cold are rare and you get what we’ve got over here.

People travel a long way the hard way.  Some of my students here have daunting journeys home.  One has a three hour plane ride, a four hour train ride and then takes a bus for half a day.  Another takes a thirteen hour train ride and then spends a day on a bus to get home.  Getting home in China takes longer for many people that getting home from China for me

There is no inside heating here other than the occasional electric space heater.  Stores leave the doors open; the big overhead garage doors in most smaller shops and store clerks stand around bundled up in coats, sweaters, gloves and scarves.  It’s impossible to tell a shopped from a store clerk.  Restaurants are mostly the same and even personal apartments are often found with windows and doors open and people just bundled up.  

 Longjohns are popular and sold every where. 

Friends here in Xiamen say it’s the worts winter they can remember, for thirty years or more.  The Chinese say it’s the worst in fifty or sixty years for most of the country.  Even  Hong Kong, where I will be for Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) is about ten degrees (F) colder than normal for this time of year.   In the ’50s as a kid I remember one day waiting for the school bus in Poughkeepsie and it was 40 below (look it up, it really was), and dry as anything so you squeaked when you walked on the snow.  Those times may be coming back — an odd side effect of global warming. 

I don’t think I’ll like that much. 

In early January I went to Nanjing (Nanking) where a piece of history sticks in the Chinese psyche like a burr under a saddle.  During the Japanese War, which many other people call World War II, Nanjing was the capital of China or at least of the part run by the Nationalists. 

World War II started early for China and Japan.  By 1937 they had been at it for more than a year and a lot of China particularly along the coast was occupied by the Japanese.  By the 13th of December, 1937, the Japanese marched about 200 kilometers inland from Shanghai and took Nanjing.  

There, depending on who you talk to, the Japanese army went nuts.  they attacked US and British representatives, but paramount for the Chinese, they killed 300,000 people, many if not most civilians in a brutal wave of horror that lasted until mid-January 1938.  Iris Chang, an American writer of Chinese descent, wrote “The Rape of Nanking” which popularized the tragedy for a while,  but the Chinese never forgot.

Ask a Chinese about either Nanjing or the Japanese and you’ll see that they neither forgot nor forgave.  Young people, old people, students or shopkeepers, they all know.  One returned overseas Chinese guy I know startled me when he said that if the Japanese don’t acknowledge and apologize for their transgressions in Nanjing, there would be war. 

The problem seems to be that Japan has always had a problem coming to terms with the Second World War and their part in it.  And the Chinese quickly contrast Japanese post-war behavior with that of Germany where the latter owned up to it’s deeds and took steps toward atonement.  Japan, from schoolbooks to politicians kind of ducks and weaves………… alluding to transgressions maybe, but either couching them in ambiguous language or discounting them as minor side effects of noble actions. 

A substantial museum in Nanjing, built on a mass grave site of perhaps 10,000 victims of the 1937 events, recounts what apparently happened and is marked by what seems like a court-like presentation of evidence as proof.   Eye witness accounts, survivor accounts, contemporaneous newspapers accounts by Chinese and Japanese alike make a compelling case.   

Outside the museum in Nanjing there are several statues and these are accompanied by footprints of survivors cast in bronze along a pathway……….

Inside the museum are many artifacts and documents, including the records of a substantial western community of Europeans and Americans who witnessed what happened, tried unsuccessfully for the most part to intervene and successfully maintained a small enclave or safety zone that saved some lives.  Ironically, one of the leaders of the efforts was a German who represented Hitler’s goverment in China at the time, so swastikas are among the artifacts and documents too, including on a set of “red cross” flags.

Part of the museum reveals human remains……….

And part has the tables and artifacts used at the Japanese surrender to the Chinese in 1945, appropriately staged at Nanjing.

Japanese scientists and troops conducted some gruesome experiements with chemical and biological agents using Chinese and some western POWs as test subjects.  This is the depiction of uncovering the remains of some of those victims and the precautions necessary to protect researchers from still-active chemical or biological agents.

A great hall near the museum entrance is lined with stone and the names of victims.  Here on a wide black backdrop, photos of victims in a slowly paced slideshow fill the laureled oval, one after another.

Nanjing is a pretty city, surrounded by a mostly still intact wall on the banks of the Yangtze River.  A tributary runs through the city creating opportunities for picturesque bridges and banks.

END

My Uncle Mike Spisso, one of the last of his generation at 98 if he makes it to August 1st of this year, was in China at the end of World War II.  He spent some time in Tianjin the closest seaport to Beijing and says he got to the Great Wall.  One of his oft-repeated stories about China concerns bathroom habits when he found himself squatting across from some women in a communal public toilet.  I haven’t found any communal public toilets here, everything is clearly marked with male and female silhouettes, but squatting is still the dominant form for doing one’s business here and squatting is something these folks do quite naturally. 

And they can stay squatting forever it seems — waiting for the bus, eating lunch, having a smoke or playing cards………….a Chinese at rest is a squatter.

It’s not like the duckwalk squat in gym class or like squatting exercise in aerobics or kindergarten, but a full, on-your-haunches squat that seems to defy centers of balance while encouraging cramps.  They Squat here a lot.

Most bathrooms require squatting unless you are in a big hotel or some other place with western influence.  Porcelain inserts in the floor with ribbed sides for foot grips and a recessed bowl are the deal.  For foreigners without significant camping or other field experience achieving balance in the squat while perfecting blind aim into the recesses of the elongated bowl is akin to bombing through clouds with an optical bombsight.  There is a tendency to miss and a miss can bring with it unintended collateral damage.

Some combination of the WTO, western influence, affluence and bombing error seem to have combined to create a small shift in plumbing preferences, at least in parts of Xiamen and Jimei where supply houses and showrooms have what we would call modern fixtures, thrones or reading appliances.  Actually it could be improvements in universal literacy that is the real factor and the Chinese need a quiet place to read.  In any event, there are very modern fixtures including electronic flushers with heated seats for the especially affluent or perpetually cold.

So there is a slow migration, but most places, including places like Walmart, McDonalds and KFC retain blind bombing squatters so be prepared. 

And speaking of being prepared, unless you are in a western hotel or maybe in somebody’s home, you bring your own TP.  While there is no shortage of paper products I can see, there is a decided shortage of distribution of same in places where it’s most needed.  Everybody carries their own in small personal kleenex like packages sold in all the stores and in attended WCs where they happen to be.   Being unprepared in this category is something you do not want to contemplate and I suspect more than one westerner has yielded all or part of something valuable here and there before they got the habit of always taking along a package of paper.  Why that is defies logic and reason, but it is what is is. 

You’ve been warned.  Squat on……………….

A friend of mine from Virginia dropped me a note a couple of days  ago in which he suggested that Christmas was probably not too well recognized here in China.  Au contraire………. 

Xiamen has a long history of association with the west, all the way back to the Dutch, who were about the first Europeans here.  And the place is among the more prosperous of Chinese cities in the middle of the trade boom where all your dollars for all that stuff for the holidays end up in or near here, all or in part, since most of what you went and bought came from China.

So it’s entirely appropriate that these friendly folks have adopted Christmas as a big commercial event and signs of it are all over.   The Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend saw the lobby tree-lighting at the Sheraton Hotel where the unhappy angel was. 

He and a bunch of kids from a music school on the small island of Guilan Yu sang a couple of Christmas songs for the amusement of a small crowd and a large wedding party sharing the lobby.  It was a little unusual to my eyes to see the angel’s and chorus in the background and the back of the wedding couple in the foreground as they greeted wedding guests entering the hotel lobby.  But standing in back of the bridal party offered a good view of a Chinese wedding ritual where every arrival discretely hands the white-gowned bride a small red envelope stuffed with cash.  The bride, with the aplomb of an illusionist, discretely stuffed each stuffed envelope into her mothers purse, itself stuffed with a whole lot of red envelopes. 

Those two got a good start. 

The kids in my classes knew the date of Christmas better than they knew the date of the end of the school term.  Some of them think I look like Santa Claus and when I joked that I actually was Santa Claus, they hit me up for their gifts………..stupid me. 

There are a number of big, multi-storied malls downtown here, one operated by a Philippino consortium is called the SM (for Shopping Mall, not for bizarre entertainment) and there is no Chinese translation which is interesting.  City busses have SM on their name-boards and if you tell any Taxi driver “SM” they know exactly where to go.  The place has six floors, a huge Walmart in the basement and rivals the biggest ones in the States.  Whole floors are  dedicated to specialities — one for furniture and an entire floor to electronics — these guys live by cell phones. known here as “mobiles.”  There is a food court as big as a football field where you can get anything from octopus and squid to funny hotdogs they eat on long sticks, kind of a cocktail party h’ordeurve on steroids.

The malls, including the SM, like malls almost everywhere got decorated for Christmas at Thanksgiving (the latter holiday is not well-recognized).  The Sheraton advertised a Thanksgiving Dinner, but their turkey missed the plane so they moved the dinner (part of a big buffet) to Friday night.  The fellow who does guest services didn’t realize that the specific day counted that much.  I’ve been to some peoples homes for thanksgiving and the interminable delays waiting for all or part of the meal suggested they and the Sheraton guy were on the same page.

Classes are held here on Christmas Day just like any other.  The holiday is completely commercial except for the Christian community which includes no few Chinese.  The first Christian Church was established in Xiamen (when it was called Amoy) in the middle of the 19th Century.   I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve got a book somewhere with the address.

So foreign teachers can actually take Monday and Tuesday off if they want to, but doing that screws up the sequence of all the class sections for the week so it’s better to keep it just another day.   January 1st is a regular holiday though, no classes at all.

So, yup Virginia, there is Christmas here………..they’re only a couple of years ahead of the States…….the whole thing is already totally commercial.

A friend of mine who taught here at Jimei University gave me a good idea for solving a grading problem with team projects.  He’s working in Kunming now, but before he left he passed on his idea.  Most U.S. business schools use projects or case studies to illustrate business problems and form student teams to work on them.  This approach gets students used to working together, helps them understand the strengths and weaknesses of individuals and simulates most workplace environments where people are supposed to work together.

With a team project it’s often difficult for the teacher to know the individual contributions of each team member.  Projects are usually presented by one speaker or submitted in written form where you really don’t know who wrote what.  One way to grade the project is to give the team a single grade and have each team member get the same grade.  My friend suggested that you give a single team grade, but that the teams multiply the team grade by the number of team members and then have the teams figure out how to allocate their budget among team members.  So if a team has six members and the grade is eighty, the team has a budget of 480 which the team, by consensus, divvies up among the team.

Some of my students had a problem with my friend’s idea.  Some teams wanted to keep grade distribution more “Chinese” and give everyone the same grade.  Others thought those who contributed more ought to get the better grades.  Some complained that allocating grades based on contribution was selfish – not the Chinese way.  These kids were friends.  Some had lived together in the same dormitory for four years.  So keeping friends was important.  And some kids actually argued that the smarter kids should do the hard work anyway since they were more capable which left added time for the less capable kids to play video games.

I’m not sure any of this has anything to do with being Chinese.  Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) wrote of a fictional character, Tom Sawyer, who made a habit of tricking friends into doing his work.  Tom Sawyer pulled his trick in Misouri or something.

I promised my students at the beginning of the term that I would teach them how business really works, so I explained merit systems and differential pay.  That’s how business works……sometimes.

A difficult problem for new managers is being fair and equitable in evaluating individual contributions particularly when some of the people he or she is evaluating are old friends.   Many new managers come from the ranks and have friends they’ve known for as long as or longer than my college seniors.  And some new managers sometimes choose friends over the business.

I think when one becomes a manager; he or she leaves one club and joins another.  While they can go to the old clubhouse and the meetings from time-to-time, they have to remember they are now in a different club. They left the worker-bee club and joined the management club.

There is kind of a rule in business that one can’t hold membership in both clubs at the same time. Of course they can keep their friends, but they can never compromise their position as a neutral, objective judge of performance – in reality or in perception.  In their new club, being a dispassionate judge of performance is what they are paid to do.  Sometimes they’ll lose a friend or two, but I think the one’s they lose, probably weren’t the friends they thought they were. 

Managers get performance budgets to divvy up too, whether it’s the skew of performance evaluations, the salary budget or the bonus pool.  They’re expected to allocate rewards and sanctions according to contribution.

That’s the way business works.

There is some weird stuff here.  

The most popular form of transportation is the motor bike.  Most people have one and they pile on everything in ingenious ways.  It is not unusual to see someone with a TV, five gallon bottles of water, almost anything tooling around taking something home or for a commercial delivery. 

Motorbikes and bicycles.  On the bicycles, particularly on this campus at Jimei, kids are always hopping on someone’s bike getting rides.  They either sit on the small flat luggage carrier over the rear wheel, or stand over the rear wheel on extenders on the axle that leave just enough room for a smallish Chinese foot.  Nobody I have seen does the handlebar trick, which may be a practice abandoned due to bad experiences. 

Traffic here and the ways and wisdom of driving protocol is a hoot.  The rule is that first gets the right-of-way, no matter the vehicle, lane, intersection, whatever.  If you’re first, you win and if you get hit, it’s their fault.  This idea kind of makes rear-view mirrors superfluous……………….everybody focuses ahead of them, maneuvering to get there first.  What happens behind them ain’t their problem.

So except for within Xiamen proper, where tooting your horn is outlawed, the deal is you blow your vehicle horn continuously and go like hell.  It makes for quite a racket but surprisingly few accidents.  And the protocol applies to pedestrians, most of whom have no horn, so they are non-competitive with any sort of vehicle from semis to bikes.  It is not unusual for a motorbike or a car to go barreling along a pathway, jammed with kids going between classes, blowing it’s horn madly and bothering not a bit for people who may be in the roadway.  Pedestrians seem to get it and move, some barely in time.  Deaf Chinese aren’t very plentiful, which probably is a result of Darwin’s observations and flattened people with bad hearing.

Despite some pretty bad air pollution that takes the sharpness and clarity out of the picture of anything in these parts, things are pretty clean.  In Xiamen and elsewhere, there are streetsweepers everywhere, people that is, with bamboo shafted leafy branches sweeping up leaves, trash and anything else.  The efficiency of leafy tree branches in sweeping is remarkable.  They used to use straw brooms the same way in Paris when I first traveled there.  In later years the Parisian’s replaced the natural material with plastic that is supposed to resemble straw or twigs or something.  Here, they stick with the natural stuff and it seems to work better.

There are also more conventional streetwashers, tank trucks that drive around the city spraying high pressure water to clean the streets.  The unusual part about this process is that the trucks are equipped with amplified speakers and play “Happy Birthday” in a high-pitched single horn rendition that is startling, but instructive. I have no clue as to why they’d pick “Happy Birthday” as the streetwasher song, but if you are in Xiamen and hear the strained refrain of “Happy Birthday” you will know to step lively and avoid a soaking.

Nevertheless, the food is plentiful, really cheap and very, very good. 

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Smog and Defectors

When I was in China five years ago, air pollution was apparent in some places but nowhere near the level it is now.  Xiamen (shaman) was one of the better cities in China for air quality.  No more. 

When I arrived in August, the heat and humidity were oppressive and the air was heavy and hazy which I attributed to the humidity.  It’s cooler now, in the 70s and sixties at night, but the air never cleared.  Crisp and clear it ain’t. Pollution in the air here is palpable. Visibility toward the horizon is often limited to a mile or two at most due to heavy smog.  On the clearest days, visibility is seldom greater than five miles – and “clear” days are few. I have seen no day with clear visibility at the horizon that permitted a view.  A “raspy” throat is commonplace and the smell and feel of incinerated particles in the air is constant.

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It comes from coal-fired power plants, widespread use of charcoal bricks for cooking and fume-emitting vehicles of all types from conventional tractor trailers, to hundreds of busses, to thousands of motorbikes, the principal means of transportation for most people. 

Public transportation is mostly a variety of busses and a larger variety of taxis.  The taxi’s range from conventional cabs with dome lights, to marginally legal blue busses which are small, over packed vans that operate as gypsy cabs or the vans in New York, to motor bike contraptions and regular motorbikes where anybody and everybody hops on for a cheap – and risky – ride.  I’ve seen families piled onto the back of a motorbike, with plastic bags of groceries hanging on them while they hung on to each other. 

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Defectors

At the Sofitel Here, a French hotel brand operated here by a Singapore company, they inaugurated a new ballroom by showing the BBC documentary “Crossing the Line” about four American soldiers who defected to North Korea in the 1960s.  One of them was the guy who was able to rejoin his Japanese wife, a kidnapping victim of North Korea, in Japan after settling up with the US Army and another is still in North Korea, an aged celebrity now in failing health. 

The fellow who got the tickets for some of us is a Malaysian-born Chinese who after spending twenty years being an Australian, came to China.  He’s got an unusual accent in both English and Mandarin.

The event featured the film, a well done and balanced study of North Korea and the US deserters, accompanied by comments by one of the co-producers, Nick Bonner.  Bonner who lives in Beijing runs a travel agency that arranges tours of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.  It’s not particularly busy.

The irony of sitting in the ballroom or a luxurious French Hotel, in what some call Communist China (with special emphasis implying a closed restrictive society), watching a BBC produced documentary depicting North Korea in a candid and unflattering way, with a mixed audience of expats from all over the world and Chinese nationals was illuminating.  Well within my lifetime, North Korea was a client-state of both the Soviet Union and Communist China.  Some of the first television I remember ever seeing was newsreel coverage of the Korean War when hundreds of thousands of Chinese “volunteers” streamed into North Korea to fight GI’s.  North Korea didn’t learn how to be a closed society by reading books; they were taught by folks whose kids and grandkids now think it’s a pretty bad idea.

The first week of October here includes National Day, China’s July Fourth which marks when Mao’s guys finally chased the Chinese Nationalists off the mainland to Taiwan and to a few small islands a couple of which are almost in the harbor here in Xiamen. 

The Chinese don’t get many holidays and if you are not wealthy you pretty much work every day.  So National Day is a big deal and one of the two or three times a year when some people, except for the very poor laborers, get enough time off to go any place.  Most go home to see their families. 

For National Day, folks got a “golden week” which means the whole workweek off.  But to add Thursday and Friday to the National Holidays of Monday through Wednesday, most people had to make up the time by working the previous Saturday and Sunday.  That included us at the University where our otherwise Thursday and Friday courses were rescheduled to Saturday and Sunday. 

So much for an early getaway.

One of the young folks who works at the University in his first job after college invited us to his home when he learned that Judy and I were planning to go see the “Hakka Round Houses” a few hours inland from here. 

Judy came over for a couple of weeks and the Round Houses are very old dwellings built and still lived in by Chinese “Hakka” clans that migrated from central China to the South a thousand years ago.

Exterior of Roundhouse

His family had lived in the same village for 800 years and he grew up living in a square version of a Hakka round house.  Some of his family’s two hundred pigs now live in what was his room; the family moved to a newer house next door when he was in his teens. 

Hakka House

By mountain road, the houses are about three and a half hours from Xiamen.  By the Chinese version of the Interstate, with a couple dozen tunnels to straighten the road, it’s about ninety minutes.  Some of the tunnels are nine hundred meters long. 

The mountain road was exciting.  In most places the road was built of twelve inches or more of concrete.  The way you can tell the thickness is by looking at the edge.  There were no shoulders or much of anything else at the edge of the concrete road, so pulling over for a minute, means going over the edge — literally.

We had a great time.   I was the first white person his family ever met and by the trooping in of all the neighbors and relatives while we were there, I may have been the first white guy in memory who had visited the village!  

Livingston, I presume? 

We got a feast for lunch.  Mom and her relatives cooked up all sorts of things, all fresh which is the Chinese way. 

So we sat at a big round table with about eight people comparing notes and eating stuff.  Home made rice wine is a little strong, so I am not particularly sure what I ate, but it all seemed to agree with me.

Jhilian’s Family

Judy was an item for these folks, because while she wasn’t a white person, she didn’t speak Mandarin or the local dialect, but the Hong Kong dialect, which, despite being the language of the province whose border was maybe twenty miles away, was Greek to these Chinese. 

As to the round (and square) houses, a few are set aside as tourist places, but most are still lived in and a couple were built in the last thirty years or so. 

The idea was to keep the community all together in a safe place (the notion of community is huge in China), and the outside of the round/square houses work kind of like blockhouses of old Indian Frontier forts or the palisades construction of Jamestown or the Iroquois Indians.  

There is a story that says some guys in the Pentagon went nuts when they first saw the Hakka houses in satellite photos.  Depending on who’s telling it, some tired eyed Colonel figured they had to be missile silos or nuclear weapons installations.  Sometimes I hear, the Pentagon gets things wrong.  Fortunately the “discovery” if it happened that way was before the development of cruise missiles and Dick Cheney.  Who wants to visit holes in the ground.

Hakka roofs 

Little Hakka 

People from the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia know JMU as James Madison University.  Where I teach business strategy here in China at Jimei University, JMU means this school and if you type in www.jmu.edu.cn you get the JMU I’m at versus the one everybody knows about back there in the Shenandoah Valley.

This one is bigger with over thirty-five thousand students and a building program that dwarfs anything else I’ve seen and plans to eventually have 200,000 students.  Now, with the population of China in excess of 1.3 billion, the country graduates something around 4 million kids each year from undergraduate programs.

Fortunately for me, thousands of Chinese college kids take business courses in English as a ticket to the world economy.  Every Chinese kid gets exposed to English in middle school, their Junior High, but without a chance to practice with native speakers very often, they end up with unusual pronunciation and a penchant for big complicated words that are tested for in English fluency exams.  So they tend to string together huge, complex words pronounced in odd ways which makes them a little hard to understand. 

But they sure do try and are almost desperate to find a native English speaker.  It makes you almost ashamed not to know their language and to realize that there are few if any kids in the US willing to study business courses in Chinese – instruction, textbook, exams – the whole deal; like they are doing in English. 

A number of my students are pretty well off and I visited the factory owned by the father and uncles of one of them during this past National Holiday break which in China is like having a week off for the 4^th of July.

The Yinlu Group is one of the top ten brands in China, with 8,000 people and a diverse set of businesses the largest of which is food and beverages including canned foods, beverages including drinking water, sodas and fruit juice drinks, plus flavorings, noodles and fruits and vegetables.  They’ve imported processing equipment from all over Europe and for a couple of big ticket items they’re the first site to employ some unique specialized gear.  Think of a Coors brewery on steroids.

I met my student’s dad, Chen Qing Shui Chairman of the Board and we had lunch over the holiday break at his Corporate digs.  It was a little more than lunch – almost a banquet. 

So anyway, I was interested in the guy’s business after realizing its scope and how he and his brothers managed to build the thing from scratch in less than twenty years.  He had three years of formal education – that’s three as in Three Blind Mice, and now runs a hugely successful enterprise.  He prides himself on being mechanically inclined and before taking over the business, ran the production lines for beverage making and packaging. 

So I asked him about his experience and noted that mechanical things were intricate, but predicable so it wasn’t necessarily a push for a mechanical guy to move from getting machinery to work to a general manager getting people to work.

He thought about that for a minute and said that for mechanical reliability you needed processes and once the processes were in place and followed, machinery tended to perform well.  And in his experience, he thought the same for people, despite their variability.  You needed to have processes in place that were tested and followed he said and you also needed to let your people know that you gave a damn (my word, not his) about them and their families, not only on the job during the workday, but also in their lives and in their communities.

I thought there was a lot of wisdom in that and maybe, as I’d hoped, I will be learning even more than I am teaching.