China Business Blog and Podcast

I just heard from a friend of mine that I worked with back in the ‘good old days’ of the late 80s, teaching in China.  Roger was (and still is) one of these rare people who combines an upbeat, optimistic personality with an IQ in the mid triple digits (we all know the opposite type: Mensa members with sandpaper personalities bookended by happy-snappy people who couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag).  Roger is a scientist – he is, in fact, Dr. Roger – and approaches life as only a scientist can.  In China in the 80s, EVERYTHING seemed to be falling apart, stopping up or breaking.  Roger was the only one in captivity who had a set of tools and knew how to use them – and he actually LOVED doing it!  I don’t know how to plug in a hammer so I am pretty worthless in such situations … but Roger could (and did) fix everything.

I give this background because today’s topic is “Engineering in China” and it was prompted by an email I received from Roger this morning.  He sent me a link to an article that says that China is now the global leader in indexed engineering publications – in other words, more words about engineering are coming out of China than anywhere else in the world.  I sent Roger a note back on the topic and, not seeing any shame in being lazy and re-purposing content, I thought I would riff on it a bit more here.

It would make sense, with all the manufacturing in China and the number of schools graduating HUGE numbers of engineering students here, that the total volume of engineering publications coming out of China would be quite large.  Heck, China is the number one exporter of engineered products … why shouldn’t it also be the leader in exports of articles about engineering?  However, as we often see in China, “volume” does not connote “quality” and that would be my primary concern in this case – just because there are a lot of engineering articles coming out of China does not mean that China is a leader in engineering best practices.

I think we have talked before in these pages about some of the challenges in engineering in China, particularly the differences we see between engineering education in the West and here in China.  In the West, students are trained in “engineer-to-solution” methods where they are taught how to provide a total solution using various principles of engineering.  Sketch a challenge out on the back of a napkin and a Western engineering student should, theoretically, be able to give you several ways of solving it (it seems like U.S. engineering students are always participating in some invention competition or another).

In China, the training is more “engineer-to-print” where students are taught how to “read” a problem (a blueprint, data output, etc.) and then solve that particular problem.  Foreign friends and clients here who run engineering departments are constantly challenged by their local staff who want to be given a problem to which they can apply their standard toolbox of formulas to come out with the “right answer” (I still remember our English students bringing us the TOEFL test and wanting to know which of the two choices was “right” … when actually, BOTH of them were “right”, given the situation!  Very frustrating for them as well, I’m sure!).  They have to work very hard to get their local staff to stop applying solutions until they fully understand what the problem is.

A British friend of mine runs an engineering department at one of the biggest Chinese car makers.  He said that the greatest frustration he has is working with local engineers who understand engineering theory…but don’t drive!!  He told me of a time that they were designing a car seat that kept rattling once the vehicle reached a certain speed.  The engineers said, “That’s OK, my bicycle seat rattles too when I go fast!”  My friend could NOT seem to get them to understand that this was a TOTALLY different situation that required a different solution!!

Roger embodies the Western approach to problem solving.  The small teachers college where we worked had a flat roof over the dining hall and, after heavy rains, the pipes would clog up and would not be able to drain the water, leaving a VERY heavy and dangerous weight over our heads (it did not promote good digestion, to have the Wading Pool of Damocles suspended above you over dinner!).  The engineers at the school did their best to unplug the drains, but it just didn’t work – so they threw up their hands and said, 没有办法 (mei you ban fa “nothing we can do about it”).  Roger, being Roger, did not agree with this assessment, nor did he agree with the basic problem.  The issue, said Roger, was NOT that the drains did not work … the issue was that the water was still there!  Just because the drains didn’t work did NOT mean that you could not get rid of the water.  After another nerve-wracking dinner one evening, Roger went down to the local store and purchased a long section of rubber tubing.  He then went up to the roof, put one end of the hose in the water and tossed the other end over the side of the building.  Using some magical principle of physics that I think he called “gravity”, he started the flow of water out of the hose and, after some time, the roof was completely drained.  The school’s engineers were VERY impressed and proceeded to go buy more sets of tubing to deal with other buildings on campus (I think the local store ran out of supplies and purchased a truckload of tubing the next week, wrongly thinking there was a bull run on the rubber tubing market … and that stuff is probably still there, 20 years later!).

By NO means do I intend to belittle Chinese engineers … the market is making quantum leaps every day and, to be honest, the quality of “engineering to print” can be phenomenal and much better than the West (the copy-market benefits from this!).  But there is still some way to go, as the editor of the Chinese Journal of Construction Machinery is quoted as saying about the engineering articles coming out of China, “… their quality is still an issue. Many of China’s EI papers are less than satisfactory.”  That’s OK … give it some time and there will be millions of engineers embodying the Spirit of Roger solving more problems than you can shake a rubber hose at!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 4:52 pm and is filed under China, culture, manufacturing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.