National Day and Golden Week

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 

Wisdom from the soda factory

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.