Day 4, all work and no play...

The internet is really unreliable here. This morning I tried to make some calls with Skype for 2 cents a minute rather than using my phone for $1.99 a minute but the internet was too slow. The demand is so high the internet companies can’t keep up. That is a common theme here for about everything until the recession started. So many people moved to this area because the factories were growing so fast. The water and sanitation departments can’t keep up. That is why we have to use bottled water to brush our teeth.

The first time I came to China about a year ago the turn over rate of employees was only a few months because there were so many jobs. If someone didn’t like their job they would just quit and go to another factory and get a new job. That makes it really difficult for production from a consistency and quality standpoint. Things are a little different now. China is/has gone through the recession just like the rest of the world. It might have actually done some good from a quality standpoint because it weeded out the less desirable workers and the good workers remained.

From an education standpoint the engineers here are very intelligent and educated. I communicate with one engineer here daily and he continues to impress me every week. The problem is that educated people here are educated in the “China” ways with out any outside influence. I don’t know how to explain it but the mindset here is probably close to as it was 500 years ago when China was the greatest country in the world. This is the center of the world to them and for the most part they don’t care about the outside world. They don’t want too learn about Six Sigma or Lean Manufacturing. They have tons of cheap labor so if there is a problem they just throw more labor at it and hope it goes away. They will use twice as much labor on an assembly line rather than putting processes in control to prevent problems. Standard work procedures and manufacturing practices that any first world country uses are not even considered here. Things are changing though and they have changed since I was here a year ago. I am in industrial China, places like Beijing and Shanghai have much more of a western influence. The reason for that is that the people in the larger cities get out of China and see things done differently. Where I am at there are some areas were the people just stare at me because they have never or very rarely seen a white person. I’m not saying the American and European ways are the best ways but there is a lot that China could learn from us if it wanted too. It probably goes both ways though. The government controls a lot of the media and internet here so most people don’t realize what the rest of the world is like.

We needed to take a fast lunch today so we ate at a KFC. I know what you are thinking, more United States fast food. Actually it is very different. You can get chicken sandwiches and fries but you can also get Chinese KFC. I got some type of sandwich and I’m not sure what it was. I tasted like chicken but one of the guys I was with thought it was eel. It was different but good and of course spicy.

This afternoon I visited an investment casting factory that was a three hour drive each way. I went there with four Chinese people, which only one of them could speak very little English. I only speak enough Chinese to say hello, thank you, and order a beer. So the 6 hours in the car was pretty quiet. I had some I-pod time.

The company we went to makes a lot of investment casted parts. They actually make the Cooperstown Hall of Fame rings. How ironic is that? A company in China makes rings for the baseball hall of fame in the US!

I should probably mention that the above and previous posts are my opinion of China and the area I am at. I am sure other regions of China are completely different. Please take everything I say with a grain of salt.

We finally got dinner tonight at about 9:00. We had fish head soup, spicy tofu, spicy chicken and spicy pork. It was all good but I drank 2 liters of beer to keep my mouth from burning. I still have that conference call at 11:30 tonight and then its bed time!