Ed in China Weblog

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.

I went to pick up my shirts at the local laundry where they hand iron everything and fold them if you like. Five shirts, lightly starched, hand ironed and folded for 5 yuan each (7.5 yuan = $1).  I pay almost that per shirt in the States — at a Chinese or Korean-run laundry!

 On my way back I passed a barber shop and thought I might as well try a haircut.  I thiought it might have been a place for women only, but they gestured and I gestured and after mutual gesturing, we figured they’d do it.   

I like getting my hair cut by a female anyway.

 Now you’ve got to pay attention with Chinese barber shops.  If no one is inside getting their hair cut, but there are young women standing about all hussied up and an older women watching the street, it’s a place of business for more than haircuts and provides happy endings on a back room massage table (so I am told and have read).  They have barber chairs of a sort to keep up the facade, but the real action ain’t with clippers. 

The one I picked had people actually getting their hair cut, no sign of a back room and no hussies, so I was safe from that perspective. I pointed, they pointed and sat me down in a pretty typical barber chair and went to work with scissors and a comb, shortening everything and doing a nice job.  Then I motioned to have the back of my neck shaved for that nice all-American clean-cut look. 

The woman took out a new double edged razor blade, physically broke it in two and fit one half in a small holder and proceeded, after applying some lotion that did not resemble shaving cream on the back of my neck.  Whatever the process, I got a nice clean neck — something the shops in VA won’t due because of some State regulation and having customers bleeding all over them.   Not China. After that, the woman gestured to a put-your-head-back ceramic basin — kind of built in against a wall with a chair in front so you could comfortably lean back.  I figure I’m in for a penny, in for a dime so I move and get my old head shampooed about six times. 

Then I get a Chiquitta towel and moved back to the first chair for the next phase.   In this phase, I get my ears cleaned — Kleenex and Cue-tips and very, very gentle and soothing………….a really nice feeling. But, no, she’s not done……………………..she points to my beard, clearly not satisfied with the trimming job I’ve been doing — I go with the flow, but call a halt when she gets electric clippers figuring I could lose my beard in translation.  I point to the scissors, she “gets it” laughs and trims me up using scissors and a comb;  I end up with a very nice job and we wrap for the day………. I had heard about head and neck massages, but it didn’t happen here, at least not the first time…………maybe she was being gentle, etc. etc. The bill for the whole nine yards was 8 yuan……maybe a buck ten……..not bad.  

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  In the past few days, after the new Freshmen arrived on campus on Labor Day Weekend, early in the morning and into the evening on the track behind my building there is much shouting and group responding to megaphone instructions. 

Freshmen at Chinese Universities go through fifteen days of getting to work together and follow instructions.  They dress alike, act alike and get practice operating as a unit – like a class.   

From afar, it looks like every kid is in the ROTC program – all in uniform, all marching around, all shouting stuff I can’t understand and one, monolithic cadre.  But it’s just kids and after the half-a-month of this sort of regimentation and training, they put on regular college kid’s clothing and pretty much do what college kids in the States do.   

After all the organized activity is finished, the kids go their separate ways, disheveled, with uniforms askew, caps off and carrying their jackets – it’s hot here anyway. 

They smile and giggle, especially if you try saluting one of them.  Up close, like most of what I’ve seen in China so far, it’s very different from the view from the US through the media and guys like Lou Dobbs and the Fox News crowd.  

All those kids marching together every morning sure looks ominous from afar like in the picture.  But it sure looks a lot less ominous from up close like with these two young women (they are not demonstrating a lenient Chinese Army “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy —- it is commonplace for people to walk arm-in-arm here here, guys and gals; old and young).  

The kids want to own companies, travel overseas, learn English, get rich and help their families and the towns where they came from.  They all recognize that the government is changing – maybe not as fast as they want.  They all understand what the WTO and the Olympics can do for their country and as one student put it, it’s a chance for the world to know the real China and the real Chinese people.

Here is one of the dining halls (one of several), in one of the campus buildings.  Big…………

-The scale of things here is hard to fathom.  There is major construction everywhere, multiple projects any one of which would qualify as a single, very large task that might take years to complete — think of Boston’s Big Dig.

At the University, one dormitory and classroom building, six connected buildings in fact, each of four or five stories, went up in less than a year.  Three thousand construction workers participated; living on site and working around the clock, seven days a week. 

A causeway connects Xiamen, an island, to the mainland as does a large suspension bridge.   Two additional bridges, each nearly a mile long are being built simultaneously on either side of the causeway, almost a mile from it on either side. 

Construction on this scale is ongoing all over China, I am told and most of it is being paid for with money paid for Chinese manufactured goods — sold all over the world.

Today I had to go to the government health office for a chest xray.  Part of the process of getting long-term work permits and residency permits is having a medical exam.  The permits are like a Green Card, in fact that seems to be the name applied to residency permits now world-wide.   The process took about half an hour and cost 102 Yuan or RMB.  That’s about $13.50. 

I had an X-Ray in the States and the doctor checked a box on a form provided by the Chinese, but they wanted the pictures themselves so we got to repeat the process.    The chest X-ray in the States cost more and neither one showed anything so I am now twice checked.

Teaching is fun and interesting. 

Every kid has a small electronic translator and dictionary.  And Chinese schools teach their kids that the teacher talks and they listen, so there are almost no unprompted comments, questions or anything else from students, especially at first. 

I’ve found that if I watch carefully and scan the room, I can note surreptitious queries about a word or two. 

My habit has been to circulate around the room and have a look to see what the word is, I thank the student for helping me and then explain the word or words to the whole class.  

This seems to neutralize somewhat loss of face from holding any particular student up to ridicule and has also increased their willingness to ask about a word and share with me whatever they have keyed into their translators. 

In every case, however, it is significantly easier to get a student’s questions in a pseudo one-on-one exchange (by stopping at the students seat, than it is from standing in front of the group and soliciting questions. 

Suggesting to the students that their classroom culture is unlikely to be the culture they will find in the workplace, particularly if they work for a joint venture or a global company makes an impression. 

It will be interesting to see if this changes over time.    

Hello from China.

I’ve been here two weeks now, on an adventure and to avoid too much boredom in the wilds of the far western part of Virginia — having overcorrected from downtown Boston a few years back.

 I came over to teach college — not English like any number of people, but management stuff — in English which is certainly good for me and probably questionable for the kids subjected to it.

Judy is ok so far (easy for me to say), and will be here in a couple of weeks which will be a good thing, especially for me. She’s visiting over the Chinese National Holiday which closes school here for a week.

One of the first things to strike you here in China is the friendliness of the people.  All the people.   I was looking for some stuff in a grocery store in Jimei, the suburb of Xiamen and was deciding between a couple of brands — apparently looking confused. 

A woman came over and pointed to one of the two giving me the “thumbs up.”  I doubt she was a sales person for the brand she pointed to.  In any event I thanked her (shea, shea), she smiled and nodded and that was that.

In another shop, I needed some stuff, including a couple of cases of a popular orange-juice like drink.  I gestured enough to convince the shopkeeper to deliver, a feature pointed out to me by a colleague.  So two young people from the shop and I carried a bunch of stuff back to my apartment.  I thanked them. They left. 

Some fifteen minutes later, the shopkeeper knocked on my door, apologetic that he had overcharged me what turned out to be about three bucks.  He adamently refused a tip or splitting the difference and went on his way. (And this was all in sort of a broken sign language). 

That doesn’t happen any place else I’ve ever been.

These are some of the kids in one of my classes.  Fourth year students in the “Overseas College.” 

I’ve got two classes of about 60 kids each.  The course lasts six weeks so we meet for ninety minutes three or four times a week which changes depending on if the week is an even or odd week of the sequence of six.  I wrote it down.

The

kids are pretty much kids once you get past a couple of cultural things and the language.  They’re trained to shut up and listen to their teachers, so getting a conversation going or an interactive anything in a group setting is a little tricky.  I do this in English which means they do too.  They probably understand more than they let on and are pretty reticent with spoken English.  But think about that for a minute………How many US college kids would take courses in Mandarin?

Where am I? 

I am in southeastern China, on the coast, right across from Taiwan.  It’s a city which with the burbs is probably over 2 Million.  The main part of the city is an island, Xiamen, and I am sort of in Queens or the Bronx……over a causeway on the landside. 

If you want to see my building exactly, figure out how to get to Google Earth and when you do, my coordinates are 24 degrees, 34 minutes and 54.09 seconds north by 118 degrees 05 minutes 30.77 East. 

Plug that in and you’ll be looking at the roof of my buiding on the campus of Jimei University. 

Or you can just tell Google Earth to take you to Xiamen, China and you can fly around the island, go up the causeway just north of the airport to Jimei and I’m on the left.Try it.

What time is it? 

With daylight savings time on your end, I’m twelve hours ahead of EDT on the East Coast which means I never had to change my watch when I got off the plane.

That was different too.