Building Modern China

BUILDING MODERN CHINA THE MEN AND WOMEN BEHIND THE BIGGEST CONSTRUCTION BOOM IN HISTORY

Published by The Chartered Institute of Building

Contents Acknowledgments / 005 Introduction / 007 Xu Shengmo / 014

Lu Haiping / 048

Sun Jinke / 080

Xu Ronglie / 018

Dai Ruitong / 052

Zhang Feng / 084

He Bosen / 022

Ding Shizhao / 056

Li Shirong / 088

Liu Faqi / 028

Bao Guangjian / 060

Liu Gong / 096

Wang Pu / 030

Zhang Qinglin / 066

Yi Jun / 098

Ye Yaoxian / 036

Jin Weixing / 068

Lin Han / 102

Cai Jinchi / 042

He Zhiya / 074

Liu Mengjiao / 106

Produced 2009 by The Chartered Institute of Building Englemere, Kings Ride, Ascot Berkshire SL5 7TB, United Kingdom e: reception@ciob.org.uk w: www.ciob.org.uk t: +44 (0)1344 630 700 f: +44 (0)1344 630 777 Registered Charity 280795 Copyright © 2009 by The Chartered Institute of Building All rights reserved.

The book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Edited by Rod Sweet.

Designed by Doriane Laithier.

Set in Minion Pro Roman.

Printed in Great Britain at Alpine Press Limited.

ISBN 978–1–85380–500–4

Acknowledgments We are also greatly indebted to Bryan He and Lisa Liang at the CIOB China country office in Beijing for the hours spent facilitating the interviewing and photography and for expertly handling many other tasks as they arose, all well beyond the call of duty.

For their vision, enthusiasm and guidance in the project we thank Saul Townsend, the CIOB’s press and communications manager, and publications and communications officer Stephanie Lee. Thanks also to Paul Shepherd, Past President of the CIOB and former Chair of CIOB International, for sharing his insights.

Finally, thanks go to Michael A. Brown, Deputy Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB), who was key to both the conception and execution of this book. Further, had it not been for his vision, skill and commitment over 20 years, it is difficult to imagine how the work of the CIOB in China could ever have gotten off the ground.

Rod Sweet, Editor, May 2009

005

This book would not have been possible without the dedicated contributions of people from all over the world.

We are most grateful to the 21 remarkable individuals who agreed to tell us their stories and to be photographed. All are busy and in many cases, notably for Lin Han in Angola, Liu Mengjiao in Libya, and Bao Guangjian – rarely in any one place for long – the process was far from straightforward.

Their time and patience is much appreciated.

With the exception of Li Shirong and Liu Mengjiao, interviews were conducted in Chinese and written in English, and so special mention must be made of Dr. Liu Jun Ying, associate professor at Tianjin University, Ms. Tian Ni, PhD scholar at Chongqing University and Ms. Wang Fangqing, writer and journalist in Shanghai, for interviewing the profilees with diligence and sensitivity, for factchecking and for additional picture research.

INTRODUCTION

Their brave new world Bureaucratic, hierarchical and centrally directed along Soviet Russian lines, China’s construction industry lacked the skills and entrepreneurial flair it needed to serve the new economy.

However, thanks to the vision and commitment of these men and women, it transformed itself.

Michael A. Brown, Deputy Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB), was there from the beginning and sets the stage for this remarkable story.

he most tangible result of China’s

❛It’s no overstatement to call this the planet’s first urban development Big Bang.

1. Lai Pingyao, “Foreign Direct Investment in China: Recent Trends and Patterns”, China & World Economy, No. 2 (2002); Yan Cui, “Development of Foreign Banks in China”, China & World Economy, No. 4 (2001). Cited in The Concrete Dragon, by Thomas J. Campanella, Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.

2. Campanella, p 35.

boom unprecedented in the history of the world. It is one of the world’s oldest civilisations, with a written history dating back to circa 1750 BC, and yet the bulk of this huge country’s built environment has sprouted only in the last two decades. The number of cities grew from under 200 in the late 1970s to nearly 700 today. The tally of modern highways has expanded from 180 miles in the 1980s to nearly 30,000 now. In 2003 alone, Chinese builders constructed 28 billion square feet of new housing, equivalent to one eighth of the total existing housing stock in the United States.

It’s no overstatement to call this the planet’s first urban development Big Bang.

The result was to improve the living standards of hundreds of millions of people through better sanitation, housing, jobs, schools and universities, providing access to transport and communications, retail and recreation. Never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty in so short a time.

What makes this story even more remarkable is that in the 1980s China’s construction industry was ill prepared to meet the huge demand the economic awakening would place upon it. Bureaucratic, hierarchical and centrally directed along Soviet Russian lines, it lacked the management skills and entrepreneurial flair needed successfully to serve the burgeoning free market. And yet it transformed itself. Thanks to the vision and commitment of key men and women the industry rose to the challenge, embraced international standards of best practice, reformed the way it trains and develops new construction leaders and has even begun exporting its services abroad – even to America.

This book is about these extraordinary people, and the role the Chartered Institute of Building played in supporting their

development in order for them to achieve this transformation.

Mcareers when Deng Xiaoping made his ost of them had already started their

historic speech in December 1978 to the Communist Party’s Central Work Conference outlining a new policy of economic decentralisation that legitimised competition and profit-making among enterprises and even individuals. This “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, as Jiang Zemin later dubbed it, was approved at Third Plenum of the 11th Party Conference, and China’s way to becoming the fastest growing economy on Earth was cleared.

In 1980 central government passed laws creating four Special Economic Zones (SEZs), of which Shenzhen, the ‘Overnight City’, would become the most famous. These SEZs enjoyed tax concessions, looser immigration rules, free infrastructure development and other incentives to attract foreign investment.

It worked. From a negligible trickle prereform, foreign investment into China reached US$4 billion in 1991 and $41 billion by 2000.1 Shenzhen’s own GDP rocketed from 270 million yuan in 1980 to 79.6 billion in 1995. The population of this seaside town went from around 28,000 in 1980 to seven million in 2000.2 Between 1982 and 1996, more than 600 major buildings went up, including the Diwang Tower, upon which the famous project manager, Bao Guangjian, “the China Steel King”, cut his teeth. (See page 60.)

Diwang Tower broke records for both height in Asia and, achieving a rate of a floor every 2.5 days, speed of construction. The term ‘Shenzhen tempo’ derives from this period.

‘Opening up’ was followed by a fundamental change in land-tenure policy that allowed for commercial property development. Land is owned by the State but in 1987 the government experimented with its first property auction in which the rights to

007

Teconomic miracle has been a building

008

INTRODUCTION

use five lots for residential development were sold in Shenzhen. It became national policy in 1988 and within a decade more than 100,000 such transactions had taken place.3 The building frenzy spread out from the SEZs to Shanghai, Beijing and outward to all parts of the country. If anything, the ‘Shenzhen tempo’ has picked up pace. As urbanisation scholar Thomas J. Campanella observes: “In China, whole new towns are conceived, planned, and constructed in the time it takes to get a small subdivision through the permitting process in the United States.”4 High-profile examples abound. For instance, Shanghai’s high-speed maglev railway – project-managed by Sun Jinke (page 80) – took two years to build while a similar line in Germany took 10. And Terminal 3 of Beijing’s Capital International Airport was finished in just over three years while London Heathrow’s Terminal 5 took 15 from the first planning application. Away from the media spotlight even profounder transformations were, and still are, taking place. In Chongqing Prof. Li Shirong (page 88) and her team caused six brand new universities serving 40,000 students to rise up from a tract of farmland in just over three years.

Lying behind this frenetic pace of construction is another unprecedented phenomenon: China’s rapid urbanisation.

Long a rural country, China’s recorded urban population stood at just 26 percent of the whole in 1990, but the booming economy continues to draw millions from farms to cities for work and a better life, and by the end of 2006 the urban population had swollen to 44 percent5. Commentators predict that the urban-rural proportions will soon draw level and pass each other at speed.

Of course China’s construction industry has had to expand at a dizzying pace to meet this explosion in demand. According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, in 1980 there were just 6,604 construction enterprises, all either state- or collective-owned. By 2004 that number had rocketed to more than 53,000, and included companies funded by capital from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and from farther afield. The workforce has grown accordingly, from roughly 6.5 million workers in 1980 to more than 25 million in 2004.6 Our estimates put the figure at close to 40 million in 2009. According to the Industrialisation Report issued by the Ministry of Construction’s Promotion Center for Housing, by 2010, China will have built 80 billion square metres of new housing. By 2020, estimates are 205 billion square metres.

Construction spending in China increased 165% in the last four years, according to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, and is still expanding at 25% annually.

Eincluding those in government and

ven before this Big Bang many in China,

academia, understood that the way construction projects were managed had to be overhauled to cope not only with the massive growth in volume but also with new modes of business engendered by the economic reforms.

It struck Prof. He Bosen of Tianjin University personally in 1986 while he was consulting on a hydroelectric power project in Iraq: the relative innocence in commercial matters on the part of his Chinese colleagues meant they were regularly bested in negotiations with foreign project partners (see page 22).

A root-and-branch reform of the way buildings were commissioned and built was necessary. Chinese architects and engineers performed at an international standard of competence but a skills gulf opened up on the management side caused by the sharp withdrawal of the invisible hands of the planners and tweakers who direct affairs in a command economy. The free market ushered in a previously unheard-of requirement: the need to manage time, cost and quality. Prereform there was no competitive tendering to win projects. Inefficient enterprises were propped up by the state and managers were often political appointees whose posts were secure however the company performed. Site managers were trained in a technical discipline, usually engineering, and were at sea when it came to finance, supply chain management and procurement. Job titles were paramount, static hierarchies strictly observed, and the flow of information closely regulated.

A culture less conducive to efficiency, innovation and predictable outcomes would be hard to imagine.

The CIOB began working with China to transform its construction industry almost by accident – and very much in a supporting role to the talented individuals who had already started down that road.

It began in 1985 when Wang Pu, the multilingual and widely-travelled director of the Shanghai Research Institute of Building Sciences (see page 30), attended a conference in Bangkok on affordable housing and met there representatives of the CIOB. Dr. Wang saw that the CIOB could help introduce Western management techniques so badly needed in China and the CIOB representatives lost no time passing on the

❛Commentators predict that the urban-rural proportions will soon draw level and pass each other at speed.

3. Chengri Ding and Gerritt Knapp, “Urban Land Policy Reform in China’s Transitional Economy”, in Emerging Land and Housing Markets in China (Cambridge, Mass: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2005).

4. Campanella, p 282.

5. “NBS: China’s rural population shrinks to 56% of total”, from China’s National Bureau of Statistics, reported

by Xinhua news agency on www.chinaview.com, 22 October 2007.

6. Quoted in “China Statistics 2005”, www.allcountries.org

INTRODUCTION

finance and management, before taking the CIOB examinations in English. At the time I was the CIOB’s Director of Education. I remember visiting Shanghai for the first time in 1991 and I met those students.

Shanghai took me by surprise. There was construction everywhere. The November days seemed dark and uncomfortable. The only vehicles on the road were black and government-owned. The building was so cold we all had to sit in our overcoats to stay warm, but the students’ enthusiasm was palpable. As Dai Ruitong notes (page 52) they graduated in 1995, all CIOB members and all snapped up by the industry.

A further breakthrough came in 1993 and with very significant consequences. Again chance played an important role in engaging the CIOB with China. The British Council had organised a delegation from the Ministry of Construction to visit UK professional institutions in London. Almost as an afterthought the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) recommended to the British Council that the delegation should visit the CIOB. The delegation was led by the Ministry’s deputy director of education, Li Zhucheng.

I met with this delegation on two occasions, at the beginning of the visit and at the wrap-up meeting in the British Council’s Spring Gardens. Li Zhucheng, formerly an officer of the People’s Liberation Army, had by that point in the visit achieved clarity as to what needed to be done and as a result our role was brought suddenly into focus.

Construction management programmes in Chinese universities were based on a Soviet Russian model of contract administration. His vision was for a wholesale reform of these programmes and he wanted our assistance.

Michael Ankers, a fellow director of the CIOB, travelled to Beijing in June 1993 to explore in greater detail with the Ministry a joint programme to review construction management education across the board.

Eager to begin, I returned to China that year with Prof. Peter Clark, chair of the CIOB examinations board, and we conducted a tour of universities – in Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing in the west, in the ancient city of Xian and finally Harbin in the northeast – preparing the ground for collaboration. We were welcomed in university guest houses of assorted standards and generously plied with banquets challenging to our palates. We relied on interpreters with sometimes only partial English and were not allowed to use Chinese currency, only exchange certificates reserved for foreigners. This was our first real

009

❛Pre-reform there was no competitive tendering to win projects. Inefficient enterprises were propped up by the state and managers were often political appointees whose posts were secure however the company performed.

news of this dynamic individual to UK headquarters. The CIOB saw it as a significant opportunity as well – its business, after all, is construction management education. So in early 1986 the CIOB’s vice president at the time, Prof. Victor Torrance, led a delegation to meet with Wang Pu to explore the possibility of an accord. Prof. Torrance reported fruitful discussions. In 1987 Dr. Wang sent his colleague, another English speaker (they were rare), Xu Shengmo, to attend a project management conference hosted by the CIOB in London. Mr. Xu, a researcher at the Shanghai Construction and Transportation Commission, was so impressed by what he witnessed that he began a personal campaign to convince his employers at the Ministry of Construction to introduce the CIOB’s qualifications. The Ministry, a large, powerful and complex organisation, was receptive. It selected the China Building Technology Development Centre as the body to work with the CIOB and in 1988 the president of the centre, Ye Yaoxian, a distinguished engineer and expert on earthquake building and remediation (see page 36), led a delegation to the UK and an accord was signed.

These were small steps but it was still highly exciting for the CIOB, not least because we were dealing with the Ministry of Construction, which controlled all aspects of the industry from quality supervision to education. It owned universities, research institutes and exerted authority nationwide through a network of regional and municipal construction commissions. We could hardly have hoped for a better partner.

And yet where, exactly, were we to go from there? Profound barriers existed in language and culture. There was also a lack of confidence on both our parts as neither party had ever done anything like this before. The Ministry was probably not sure how far it could, or should, go.

A breakthrough came in 1991 with the establishment of China’s first CIOBaccredited course at the Shanghai Institute of Urban Construction (SIUC), leading to the CIOB’s own examinations. This was thanks to the campaigning of Xu Shengmo and also to the support of Lu Haiping at the Shanghai Construction Commission and to Prof. Dai Ruitong of SIUC who was actively seeking cooperation with foreign universities.

The course was a collaboration between SIUC and the UK’s College of Estate Management. Students had to pass an English language test and learned law,

010

INTRODUCTION

encounter with China and despite the startling foreignness of it all there was no doubt we were being treated extremely well.

This tour resulted in a full agreement signed with the Ministry in January 1994.

For the next nine years, during which I returned more than 20 times, I and other CIOB officers and academics, with support from the British Council, worked with the Ministry and the universities to help them develop a construction management curriculum to replace the old Russian one, as well as an accreditation process with teeth.

Our joint goal was to combine the traditional, ‘hard’, numerically-oriented skills such as engineering, project and cost planning and queuing theory, which the Chinese were strong in, with the skills needed for building well and profitably in a competitive market, plus the ‘soft’ skills of leading, negotiating, motivating and resolving disputes, all of which the old curriculum lacked.

To achieve anything in China you need guangxi, the famous concept of ‘networks and deep friendships’. We were fortunate in that what we had to offer – a gateway to international standards of competence – was keenly sought after by influential people in the industry. The pattern of ‘introduction-affinityintroduction’ replicated, but slowly. For instance it was a moment of great import when Prof. Ding Shizhao, head of the Research Institute for Project Management and Administration at Shanghai’s Tongji University, became the first actual CIOB member from the People’s Republic in 1992 (see page 56). However despite our mutual enthusiasm, communication was a real problem outside official visits. At the Ministry it seemed they had only one fax machine and nobody on the other end of the line who could speak English.

As it happened the Chinese would furnish their own solution. In 1994 I received a letter from a certain Li Shirong, a Chinese national studying in Holland, who wanted to become a CIOB member. Frankly, I didn’t know what to do with this letter. We had only two Chinese members by then and no clear strategy for assessing more. It went into the ‘too hard’ tray on my desk, where it was forgotten. But this Li Shirong – I didn’t even know if it was Mr. or Ms. – was not an easy person to put off.

About a month later I got another letter saying ‘Did you get my letter? I still want to become a CIOB member.’ But this time Ms. (as it turned out) Li pointed out that she taught in the civil engineering department at Chongqing University and sat on the national

steering committee for construction higher education in China.

Suddenly the penny dropped. From out of the blue had come an approach from a university teacher with Ministry-level responsibilities and connections. I was on the next plane to Holland.

Her remarkable story is on page 88 but what I will say is that Li Shirong, who became the third CIOB member from Mainland China, ushered in a step change in our relations with the Ministry. She moved from Holland to the UK to study for a PhD at Reading University and whilst there she was not only promoted to full Professor by her university in Chongqing, but she also acted as translator, facilitator and all-round chargé d’affaires in what was still for us a bewildering country. She also opened the door for us in Chongqing, a huge and developing municipality and an important centre of construction higher education, the largest in the world in fact.

AProf. Ding Shizhao introduced a number s our work with the Ministry developed

of highly influential people in government and industry to the CIOB. In fact over a decade or more Prof. Ding acted as guardian of CIOB standards in China; with his wide local knowledge and experience he could scrutinise applications, judge courses and qualifications and assess experience better than we ever could from the UK. We remain greatly indebted to him.

Thus, our guangxi spread. A cadre of influential individuals emerged, providing skillful leadership, opening doors and smoothing the rough edges of our fumblings in a foreign culture. The high calibre of this group is evident from the early chairmen of the fledgling ‘CIOB China’. In 1999 the first was Prof. Xu Ronglie (see page 18). Formerly the Ministry of Construction’s Chief Engineer, he was, and still is, a talented and hugely influential leader, yet modest and selflessly devoted to his profession. Always developing himself, he began learning English at an advanced age and his proficiency increases year on year.

He was succeeded in 2001 by Zhang Qinglin (page 66), Executive Vice President of China’s biggest construction company, China State Construction and Engineering Corporation (CSCEC). Mr. Zhang became the first employer in China to set up an in-house training course for managers leading to CIOB membership. This was a bold and progressive step and it added a new dimension to our work. Now the CIOB regularly establishes

❛A skills gulf opened up, caused by the sharp withdrawal of the invisible hands of the planners and tweakers.

7. See “Only the best”, by Liu Mengjiao, in International Construction Review, CIOB International, Quarter 3, 2006

accredited universities.

Tare many more than we have been able to his book is about the people – and there

include here – who kick-started the building of modern China. It’s no accident that all the people in these pages are Fellows or Members of the Chartered Institute of Building because, in a small way, this book is also about the CIOB, appearing, as it does, to commemorate not only our first two decades in China but also our 175th anniversary.

We are under no illusions: modern China is going to get built with or without us. We can in no wise, for instance, take credit for the venues of the Beijing 2008 Olympiad, although we don’t shy from mentioning that key leaders on both the National Stadium – the ‘Bird’s Nest’ – and the Aquatics Centre projects were enthusiastic CIOB members.

We’re under no illusions but we’re also glad to have played a role in this remarkable story and we believe our influence is greater than the size of our membership. Some of this is intangible but evident nonetheless when people like He Bosen, Sun Jinke, Yi Jun, Bao Guangjian, Liu Gong, Liu Mengjiao and others credit the CIOB with opening their minds to an international perspective. We derive no small pride from that.

In other ways our influence has been quite tangible, such as the assistance we gave to the Ministry of Construction in setting up its new Registered Constructor scheme, a huge project to overhaul the old Soviet system of qualifying and certificating the 300,000 new construction site managers the industry needs each year7.

A 175th anniversary is about celebrating the past but we find the future just as exciting.

The choice of Prof. Li Shirong as global President of the CIOB for 2009/10 is indicative. She is the first female, and the first non-British president. To have suggested to the CIOB founders, sitting in a London coffee house in 1834, that in 2009 their president would be a distinguished academic, and a senior official of one of the world’s largest cities, and a woman… oh yes, and from China – would have been to stretch their collective conceptual capacity to the breaking point.

It’s no cliché to say that China is a country of the future. At nearly all levels it is morphing month by month and predictions about what it will look like, what role it will be playing in the world and what its people will be doing in 10 years are a lot less reliable than similar predictions about Europe or even America. In their spheres of activity the people in this book led this process and their

INTRODUCTION

Training Partnerships with organisations in the UK and beyond, but it happened first in China. A powerful man holding a number of key positions with China-wide industry associations, Zhang Qinglin always cared about people and their professional development and always had time for the CIOB, participating in conferences and giving keynote speeches even to this day.

Lu Haiping followed with the new title of President of CIOB China (page 48). A Shanghai man of quiet dignity, he took CIOB China into a period of growth. Training had always been central to his efforts and he made our first programme at SIUC possible by weighing in with support from the Shanghai Construction Commission. During his presidency training for CIOB membership was reborn and continues. Vital people like him are always reaching out for new beginnings and Lu Haiping is now Chairman of the Shanghai Green Building Council.

A new breed is evident in Yi Jun, the current CIOB China President (page 98).

Aged just 49 at the time of writing, he holds one of the most powerful construction jobs in China as president of CSCEC, now a global top 10 contractor active in many countries including the United States. Fluent in English, more abroad than at home, he has presided over the public listing of one of China’s eminent state-owned enterprises.

It has been a privilege for me to know and work with such people.

The fruit of our collaboration with the Ministry came in 2002 when the CIOB signed a reciprocity agreement with the newly formed National Board for Construction Management Accreditation, which cleared the way for graduates of eight Chinese universities to become incorporated members. Our joint work had continued to be led by Li Zhucheng, by now a life-long supporter and friend of the CIOB. China now joined an international network of accredited universities encompassing Asia, Australia, South Africa and the USA. In that year Chinese membership stood at just 225, on the face of it a very small number considering the 10 previous years of development, but all parties were concerned that the quality of the qualification should be preserved over the quantity of its holders.

There would be no opening of floodgates: the proper accreditation process had to be carried out and training programmes provided. The rate of growth increased after 2002, by 33 percent in 2008 alone to approximately 1,500, and there are now 24

011

❛A cadre of exceptional individuals provided skillful leadership, opened many doors and smoothed the rough edges of our fumblings.

The fourth son of a well-off banker, Xu Shengmo worked for the government in research, planning and accreditation. Despite his own modest appraisal of his career, it was he who in 1987 persuaded the Ministry of Construction to seek cooperation with the CIOB to educate a new generation of construction leaders

I

was born into a well-off family in 1930 in Shanghai.

I had five brothers and sisters and I’m the fourth.

Since my father was a banker I was exposed to Western culture when I was a boy and I’ve kept some of the habits, like drinking coffee and eating cakes.

The first 18 years of my life were pretty easy and comfortable.

I didn’t share my father’s interest in banking. I wanted to study management so in 1948 I went to Shanghai Jiao Tong University and majored in financial management. My first job after graduation in 1952 had nothing to do with construction. I worked as a planning official in the electricity bureau overseeing the whole east China region. In accordance with the government’s policy after 1949 of developing state-run enterprises, all private construction companies were forced to close and I was, after a time, assigned to Shanghai Construction Group. My new job was planning, which required me to learn a lot about construction.

By 1978 I had participated in some major projects such as heavy industry development in northeast China and the rebuilding of heavy machinery plants in Shanghai and Luoyang city, Henan Province, and Shenyang, Liaoning Province. I travelled a lot during that time.

At the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 I began to do research on construction economics and management for an institute under the Shanghai Construction and Transportation Commission (SCTC). This was very interesting. I had to create a lot of mathematical models, something I found I was good at. In truth it would have been much more helpful if I’d studied the topic abroad first but given my age at the time, 46, I decided to teach myself. And anyway I believe college graduates should be able to learn on their own throughout life, which is what I’m

still doing. My diligence paid off when I passed the strict qualification exams to become senior economist and cost engineer. I also chaired the qualification appraisal committee for senior economists in the SCTC.

I

had no opportunities to display my skills in English until 1987 when I was sent to a project management conference hosted by CIOB in London. It was my first trip abroad and I was a little excited. (British English is like an old friend to me because that’s what I learned at my British-run primary school.) The CIOB was considering entering China at the time I was invited to visit the head office. When I learned that they offered training in project management – which was exactly what we needed to cope with the rapid development sparked by Deng Xiaoping’s reform and open-door policies – I decided to try my best to help them.

As soon as I got back I reported to the Ministry of Construction (MOC), giving them a detailed introduction to the CIOB and explaining the reasons why I thought we should work with them. In the meantime, I also wrote a string of articles in the major journal Construction Economy about the CIOB and my trip to the UK. Owing to my efforts, the MOC became interested and decided to support the idea of the CIOB helping with training and qualifications. Full cooperation was delayed by the Tiananmen incident in 1989 but I was glad to see the first CIOB-accredited degree programme finally open at the Shanghai Institute of Urban Construction in 1991, and felt honoured to be one of the teachers giving lessons in contracts and the construction market.

During the 1980s and early 1990s I translated FIDIC’s Conditions of Contract for Works of Civil Engineering Construction, also known as the “Red

❛I had no opportunities to display my English until I was sent to a conference in London. I was a little excited.

014

XU SHENGMO b. 1930

Our man in Shanghai

Xu Shengmo’s home city of Shanghai when he was born in 1930. Western influences are visible in fashion and cars

016

XU SHENGMO b. 1930

❛I don’t have a brilliant career story.

Maybe it would have been different if there had been no Cultural Revolution, but I no longer have regrets.

Xu Shengmo with the CIOB’s Michael Brown at a conference in Chongqing, April 2002

I

017

could have started to enjoy retirement in 1994 but working with the CIOB showed me how lucrative the training market is. Aided by the SCTC I set up a consulting company, Shanghai PM Firsttrack Ltd., when I retired. I used to be general manager but now I’m an honorary director, which means at least that I don’t have to work full time.

Education is extremely important, which is why I never neglected my duty as a father even if I was very busy with work. Largely influenced by me, my daughter is now a doctor and my son does IT engineering.

As you can see, I don’t have a brilliant career story. What I tried to do was introduce advanced project management expertise here. Maybe it would have been a different story if there had been no Cultural Revolution but now that I’m 79 I no longer have regrets.

I like reading, especially about history and culture and now, with less involvement in work, I have a lot more time for that.

XU SHENGMO b. 1930

Book”, as well as the CIOB’s material on project management.

The CIOB has trained many Chinese professionals and helped our industry progress but I think it can do more, given that so many Chinese companies now want to do business abroad or form partnerships with foreign companies. Training is needed all over China.

China’s building industry has developed fast over the last 20 years and there are both positive and negative effects. We have all seen the dramatic changes for the good but the amazing speed is often accompanied by low quality. I think one of the reasons could be a lack of self-confidence. For example many Chinese companies still see themselves as builders only, forgetting that they should also be offering management services, which prevents them upgrading themselves to catch up with their Western counterparts.

I

Left: Xu Ronglie, first Chairman of CIOB China, served as Chief Engineer in the Ministry of Construction and as a university teacher and consultant Top: The ancient ruler Dayu, legendary for his ingenious flood control techniques and civic dedication, was a major inspiration for Xu Ronglie

was born in 1931 in Shaoxing, a very old city in Zhejiang province. Back then its economy was not good but it has been developing its industry and agriculture fast since the reforms began in 1978.

Foreign direct investment is rising. Education, quite good even before the changes, and culture, have been getting more funding and are improving fast.

My parents were ordinary people. My mother was a housewife and my father was a businessman who traded in antiques and curios. They paid a lot of attention to my upbringing, especially to teaching me the virtues of self-control and dignity. I was welleducated and my father’s understanding of Chinese culture, especially literature, had a great effect on me.

My family influenced my decision to work in the construction industry but I was also inspired by the ancient hero with connections to Shaoxing called Xiayu, or Dayu (pictured left). He was a ruler around 2000 BC who devised ingenious solutions to the floods that were devastating the land. He dedicated his life to this massive effort, directing thousands of workers to dredge rivers and dig new canals to divert water to distant farmland. According to the legend he had only been married five days when his great battle with the floods began. During his 13-year campaign he passed by his home three times, the first time seeing that his wife was in labour, the second time seeing her with their toddler son, and the third time hearing the son call out to him to come in and rest.

But each time he resisted the temptation to go in and be with his family because the floods were destroying the lives of so many of his people.

I was also inspired by tall buildings such as the Shanghai International Hotel, famous in those days

for being 24 storeys high! And the skyscrapers of Manhattan! In our small town building towers like this was considered an amazing job and I dreamt of being able to build these and railways and other things to help improve the way people lived. Fired by these dreams I enrolled in the civil engineering department of the China State Nanjing Institute of Technology, graduating in 1953.

At first I worked in government, but I also worked on construction sites and did some teaching and research as well. The dual experience of working in industry and academia taught me a lot. I believe practical work is just as important as theory: it has proved invaluable to my work in central government.

When I started my career we were assigned to lead many important projects and in truth we weren’t knowledgeable enough to deal with them, but we had to find our own solutions. The difficulties inspired me to do my best and learn important lessons.

I was an ordinary college student. My intelligence is average, certainly not outstanding. After college I studied deep foundations in the Soviet Union and back in China I became deputy director of a research institute specialising in soil mechanics. Projects require expertise in a variety of topics so as my career progressed soil mechanics wasn’t nearly enough and I had to learn a lot by myself.

As Chief Engineer in the Ministry of Construction from 1982 to 1994 my main tasks were to collect and summarise experts’ ideas, solve complicated problems and organise and integrate resources. I don’t think I was given this role because of any special knowledge. I made a good Chief Engineer because I always encouraged everyone to put their ideas forward and to

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❛My intelligence is average, certainly not outstanding. I made a good Chief Engineer not because of any special knowledge but because I encouraged everyone to put their ideas forward.

XU RONGLIE

Inspired by magnificent buildings and stories of the ruler-builders of China’s ancient past, Xu Ronglie distinguished himself and worked on secret defence projects before being appointed the country’s top engineer. Despite his own success he insists that good teamwork is far more important than personal brilliance

b. 1931

Top brains, top brass

XU RONGLIE b. 1931

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put them into practice. I was also good at choosing the right person for the job. I’m not being unduly modest when I say I couldn’t have done it without a lot of help from others.

I worked exceptionally hard and had a strong sense of responsibility. At times I sacrificed family life for my career. For instance in the late 50s and 60s I participated in certain military projects and the locations had to be kept secret. My family didn’t know where I was. I had no choice but to do the work. I participated in testing the explosive effects of early nuclear warheads and I also helped to build the first military base for intercontinental missiles. All that time my family had no idea where I was and I could do nothing for them even when they had problems.

But I was willing to sacrifice family life for my work.

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y work has been highly recognised and I won some awards but I must say that my colleagues contributed a great deal to my success. I truly thank them for their trust and encouragement.

I won First Prize in the Science and Technology Development Awards from the Ministry of Construction in 1987; then I won an Outstanding Prize in the National Science and Technology Development Awards in 1988. Another prize was for the best National Construction Technology Book in 1992. My award-winning book, The Theory and Practice of Piling and Deep Foundations in China, was written in English. It was published at an international conference on deep foundations in Italy.

At the conference we also discussed other papers written either by me or colleagues. Our talks attracted

Right: China detonates a hydrogen bomb, 1967. During that time Xu Ronglie took part in top secret testing of the explosive effects of early warheads and also helped build the first military base for intercontinental ballistic missiles

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embership of CIOB has been very useful to me.

Although my main job is working as a scientific researcher, I also do work on construction sites, which keeps my feet on the ground. But I don’t know much about construction management, especially the

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rojects are increasingly complex and demand more and more knowledge. Engineers must have a good understanding of fundamental principles but at the same time their range of knowledge should be broad. Everyone can improve their professional skills.

In China’s construction industry too much work has been carried out in isolation and people have seldom paid attention to teamwork. As a result, standards of planning and management used to be quite low. Now we are putting more emphasis on integration. We plan carefully from the start and

❛All that time my family had no idea where I was and I could do nothing for them even when they had problems.

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make predictions about the future. The overall planning of a project will also take the environment into account. We understand much better the relationship between buildings and their surroundings, which allows us to work faster, more efficiently and more economically.

Over the next 20 years the biggest challenge we face is a shortage of talent. Knowledge and technology give us control over development but first we need to discover new knowledge and then we have to learn how to use it. We need intellectuals to uncover the knowledge and to share it among lots of people so good things can be done through cooperation. A well-organised team can make the most of every member’s contributions. In some ways, teamwork is more important than knowledge.

I like talking to young people. I have a lot of young friends and I learn much from them. As for hobbies, I like sport and I swim every day. I am also fond of music but my taste is quite narrow – I only like classical music and Peking Opera. I appreciate the musical atmosphere and the artistic treat.

I’ve said before my intelligence is average. The most important thing is diligence. The phrase should be “Diligence, plus Wisdom”, not “Wisdom, plus Diligence”. That is my motto.

XU RONGLIE

science of management. The CIOB’s focus on construction management has improved my skills and helped me communicate with my peers.

With less than 2,000 members the CIOB is still in its infancy here. I think we should focus on promoting the communication of management science and civil engineering, not only between members but also between China and the UK. We still have a lot of improving to do. The experience and knowledge we can get from more developed countries will help us.

b. 1931

a lot of international attention and we were able to show the rest of the world the development of deep foundations in China.

When I was the chairman of the China Civil Engineering Society, I established a prize fund named after Zhan Tian You (b. 1861), the distinguished railroad engineer, known as the Father of China’s Railroads, and I was also one of the instigators of the national Zhan Tian You China Civil Engineering Award.

I have done my best to promote professional societies like the China Civil Engineering Society and tried hard to forge links between the society’s professors and the construction industry. The China Civil Engineering Society has 100,000 members with links in many counties and a big influence at home and around the world.

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b. 1932

HE BOSEN

He Bosen didn’t want to become an academic but his country needed rebuilding and he would help in whatever way he was asked. After three decades teaching in the Department of Water Conservancy at Tianjin University, he received a dramatically different call: to cultivate young professionals who could get China competing on the international stage

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was born in June, 1932, in Jinan City, Shandong Province, but my ancestral home is in Wuyang City, Henan Province. Since my grandparents passed away, leaving no relatives, I have not been back there. My father’s work took us also to Nanjing and Nanchang.

When the war of resistance against Japan broke out we moved to Chongqing. I was six years old. Once I was nearly killed when Japanese planes bombed our area.

My father with some of his friends built a small house in the Cuntan valley in the countryside and we moved there. Chongqing is my second hometown. I’ve been back five or six times and the changes there since preLiberation have been earth-shaking. There used to be mostly wooden houses projecting over the river but now there are skyscrapers, highways, dozens of bridges crossing the Yangtze and Jialing rivers and a big airport. Where I lived as a child is now a logistics terminal.

My mother was a primary school teacher and she taught me as a young child. My father was an engineer, later a university professor. Education was very important in our household. I remember very clearly one year, when it was time to pay tuition fees

the fees for my little brother and me. He followed it and ran dozens of miles. It was summer and I remember him sweating. So I learned as a child that the opportunity to study was hard to get and that we must treasure it. Because my parents were both educators, they were honest, upright and loved their children but were also strict. My parents’ influence is unobtrusive but lasting, and deep and wide.

The focus at Chongqing Nankai Middle School wasn’t just books but all-around development. The president of Nankai University, Zhang Bo Ling, put forward as the school motto: “Dedication to Public Interests, Acquisition of All-round Capability, and Aspiration for Progress with Each Day”. That motto has had a great impact on my life.

I wrote my college entrance examination in 1950, just after Liberation. Because there was a nationwide need for major water conservancy projects, and because I liked engineering, I applied and was accepted to the Department of Water Conservancy at Peiyang University (now Tianjin University). In 1952, Premier Zhou Enlai sought to tackle the vast engineering skills shortage by mandating that college

❛We longed to go to the toughest places to do something for our motherland. I applied for surveying, construction and design jobs on the front line of the campaign... students should graduate early, so I graduated in 1953, a year ahead of schedule. Chairman Mao had called for solutions to the flooding problems on the Yellow and Haihe rivers. How roused we were by this!

China was weak from invasion by imperialist

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to Chongqing Nankai Middle School where I was enrolled, you could pay with rice. My father calculated that rice bought wholesale from the market would be cheaper. He had to hire a horsedrawn carriage to carry the rice to the school to pay

b. 1932

HE BOSEN

Go forth

❛I perceived a gap. It was as if Chinese engineers had one strong leg and one weak leg.

The weak leg caused a lot of mistakes. these worked for the China International Water and Electric Power Corporation (CWE), one of the first state-owned enterprises licensed to work abroad.

These men had a request for the head of my department. They needed a professor with design and construction experience, and good English, to help as a consultant. I was chosen, and my life would never be the same.

CWE sent me to northern Iraq to be a technical advisor in the reconstruction of dams. As well as technical aspects, I was responsible for contract management. During my time there I perceived a gap between our approach, in China, to educating construction project personnel, and how it was done in other countries. It was as if Chinese engineers had one strong leg and one weak leg: strong in the theory and practice of engineering but weak in management, due to innocence in areas such as economics, law and finance. The weak leg caused a lot of mistakes. I took part in many negotiations with the Iraqi owners and consulting engineers from other countries. Every negotiation was a war of words. After a particularly difficult session I submitted to habits formed from a

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HE BOSEN b. 1932

countries, especially Japan. Professor Zhang’s motto rang in my ears. Dr. Sun Yat-sen had said: “In one’s life, the most significant thing is being patriotic.” We longed to go to the toughest places to do something for our motherland. I didn’t want to stay in academia.

I applied for surveying, construction and design jobs on the front line of the campaign to rebuild the country. But Premier Zhou also saw the need to strengthen technical education. There were 108 students in our class and among them, around 50 were assigned to academia. I was one of them. I was asked to stay there at Peiyang.

And so began my career in education. The Department of Water Conservancy would be my professional home for more than three decades.

Fortunately, as it would turn out, my work was not purely academic. I participated in the design and construction of a number of water conservancy projects, accumulating practical experience in the field.

1985 was the 90th Anniversary of Tianjin University, and alumni from all over the world returned to participate in the celebrations. Two of

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Above: with a new generation of students

lifetime of teaching and recorded and analyzed our exchange, distilling it into case studies, with notes.

The idea had dawned of cultivating personnel specifically for projects like this. I pledged to my colleagues: “In ten years my students will come back to compete with them!”

When I returned to Tianjin University in April 1987 I began preparing a proposal for a course in international construction management. I discussed it with the president of the university, Professor Wu Yongshi, an educator with a long-term strategic perspective. Professor Wu shared my enthusiasm. He called it “a great thing” and said Tianjin, a key university in China, should be cultivating such talent for the country – multi-disciplinary professionals at home on the international stage.

In September 1989, in my 57th year, I made up my mind to leave the Water Conservancy

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Left: Prof. He Bosen onsite in northern Iraq, 1986

t was not all smooth sailing. Getting official approval for the new major was in some ways the easy part. For instance, providing teaching materials was a real problem because there were very few books on international construction management in China at the time.

In 1994 I embarked on a research tour of Canada and the United States, visiting a number of universities and engineering firms. During those three months I gained insight into running a construction management major and collected a great deal of information for teaching materials. I came back and initiated the compilation of the International Construction Management Textbook Series. It took six years and a hundred experts from Mainland China and Hong Kong to produce the 20 books – 748 million words – of which 15 were brand new approaches in China.

There was also the problem of staffing the course.

I had to organise and train a new group of teachers.

International construction management encompasses a wide range of areas, so I invited teachers from a wide range of disciplines, including language instruction. None knew much about international projects, so I provided opportunities to go and participate in some so they could teach from experience.

HE BOSEN b. 1932

Department where I had worked for 36 years.

Aspiring to found the international construction management major, by arrangement with the university, I embarked on a new journey as head of the university’s Management Department.

Politically, the catalyst came in 1992 when, during his famous ‘Southern Tour’, Deng Xiaoping pressed for the expansion of economic reforms and greater openness. I had introduced new courses, but the time for a fully-fledged programme was near.

Professor Wu Yongshi submitted a proposal to the State Education Commission to establish an international construction management major at Tianjin. The purpose: to support China’s construction companies competing for overseas projects. At the start of 1993, the Commission authorised a meeting among experts from government, construction companies and the China International Contractors Association. All agreed that the programme was needed, urgently.

Things began to move fast. Several teachers and I got to work on a full appraisal and submitted it to the State Education Commission before the Chinese New Year. By the end of February that year the report was approved and shortly after the new major, a five-year undergraduate programme, was formally offered. I should give special thanks to Mr. Wu Yongshi and Mr. Li Guangquan. Without their help I could not have done it.

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think effective management is our major future challenge. In the early 80s, World Bank financed projects, such as the Lubuge Hydroelectric Power Station diversion tunnel, revealed the failings of China’s traditional command-style management models. It made everyone pause. It became known as the “Lubuge impact”.

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HE BOSEN b. 1932

I joined the CIOB in 1995. An international, wellknown and high-level institution, it brought a lot of opportunities to learn from British expertise and to hear about the latest trends in international development. I have introduced six teachers and hundreds of student members to the CIOB. Having made international construction management the focus of my work and passion for so long, it has been a privilege to be able to educate not only students but stakeholders in the sector as well, both in government and in enterprise.

In 20 years I have written or translated 19 books, including five translations of the FIDIC Conditions of Contract. The most recent is an 820,000-word monograph entitled International Practice of Construction Project Management, which began as a research project for the Ministry of Construction.

I am editor-in-chief of International Project and Contract Management, which won the Second-class Award from the Ministry of Education for outstanding teaching. I also edit an English-Chinese dictionary of international construction management, now in its second edition.

I have done arbitration for 12 years, sitting on the China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission.

From 1993 to 1999 I was vice-president of the China Association of Engineering Consultants. In 2003, the association organised a research centre and I became its deputy director. Commissioned by the Ministry of Construction, I spearheaded a major piece of research on international project management practice, comparing it to our own industry. We did a great deal of research nationwide, wrote a 150,000-word report, published 21 papers and made 23 recommendations to government departments, industry associations and enterprises on the prospects of the sector and the measures we should take. The research won the third-class Huaxia prize from the Ministry of Construction.

I consider my efforts to have been richly rewarded. On December 12, 2008, the China Association of Engineering Consultants held an event in Beijing reviewing the last two decades of China’s construction project management sector. Out of the blue I was asked to stand and accept the Innovation Award for Special Contributions to Development. It was a big surprise. I felt honoured because it was recognition of 20 years of work.

At that time, China was moving more toward a market economy, and it began to be understood that we should look to other models to improve our project management. At the commencement ceremony of the Three Gorges dam project Premier Li Peng proposed “Four Systems”. They covered a) legal responsibility, b) tendering and bidding, c) project management, and d) contract management.

Since then China’s development in project management has broadly followed Premier Li’s injunction.

In the last ten years, the Ministry of Construction has put pressure on the general contractor to do better in project management, and overall the quality has improved, and continues to improve, but by international standards there is still a gap.

Premier Zhu Rongji said: “The socialist construction depends on two wheels: one is science and technology, the other is management.” In science and technology, our development – demonstrated by such structures as the Three Gorges, the National Stadium (the Bird’s Nest), Hangzhou Bay Bridge – has begun to move us toward the forefront of world standards. But in management we lag behind. Our students are promising, which is why I encourage them to go abroad after graduation, to discover what new things in the world we should learn, and also for crucial development of the will, personality and so on. We are gaining experience but closing the gap needs more time.

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ach coin has two sides. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Taking one opportunity means you have to give up another. I chose what I liked and what I thought was meaningful for my country, my university and my students. In my career, the support of my wife Mrs. Hong Rongjia (also a professor in the Department of Water Conservancy!) has been crucial. Her support for my choice to go to Iraq and for my work in developing the new major over the past two decades is a testament to her quiet, selfless dedication. I have been busy for so many years, to the neglect of my family. Her contribution has been tremendous, and I appreciate it very much.

Even though originally I wanted an engineering job, I grew to love academia. Education is a noble career. The product of education is talent and when students make achievements teachers are proud. As a teacher I must first be strict with myself and be a good example. Now the footsteps of my former students can be traced to every corner of the world.

This is my biggest contribution to the country and provides the largest inner satisfaction.

As for my ambitions now, as long as I’m healthy, I’m always willing to help in raising professional standards and training students, plus book writing, arbitration and consulting. It is what I fancy.

â?›I chose what I liked and what I thought was meaning ful for my country, my university and my students.

A veteran of many high-profile construction projects, Liu Faqi oversaw the rapid development of Chongqing before taking the helm of both regional and national industry associations. His dedication won him a place on the national honour roll

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was born in Tianjin 74 years ago. My birth place has changed a lot in that time. My father died when I was little and my mother brought up six children alone. Our family was poor but my mother was strict because she wanted us to grow up pure-hearted and serious-minded. Thanks to her we have been able to make a valuable contribution to our country. I love and respect my father and mother and they deeply influenced me.

Working in construction may be hard but it’s very satisfying to build beautiful cities for the benefit of our people. The greatest thrill comes after we have used our hands and brains and the project is complete. I love it when the buildings are in use, the factories are producing, people are enjoying the town’s amenities and using the highways and railways to travel around the country.

I graduated from Huabei Industrial Vocational Institute and have worked in construction engineering and management ever since. My career breaks down into two distinct periods. In the first period, from 1954 to 1978, I served as a technician, supervisor and director in the engineering department of the Chongqing Construction Commission (CCC). After 1978 I joined the construction management department of the government, first as deputy director general of Chongqing Construction Bureau, then as deputy director of the CCC, and finally as director of the Office for Major Projects in Chongqing. It was a major turning point for me to switch from practising

construction to the management of the process.

After I retired from government in 1999 I was selected as chairman of Chongqing Construction Industry Association (CCIA), a milestone for me. I am also standing director of China Construction Industry Association. I was listed in the honour roll of Outstanding Persons of China’s Construction Industry and I’m proud to say that the CCIA was rewarded as National Outstanding Nongovernmental Organisation.

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was good at organising big construction projects. I was the project manager for the 447 factory, a major project for the military. This left a deep

❛Working in the industry helped develop my character. I am hard-working and decisive, pure-hearted, direct and open. impression and had a big influence on my career.

After the 447 factory project, I managed a number of high-profile projects, including the Ministry of Construction hotel in Beijing, a research centre in the East China Sea and the Jiulongpo electric power station. I was project manager for Kuixinglou, a realestate milestone in Chongqing and I was deputy general manager on the construction of Nanping International Exhibition Centre. All these came through severe tests in last year’s earthquake.

These projects gave me the chance to help introduce new techniques, such as the reinforcedconcrete chimneys in the Jiulongpo electric power station, uncommon in Asia and regarded as pioneering in China.

Working in the industry helped develop my character. I am hard-working and decisive, purehearted, direct and open. I am good at surveying and collecting information. I can also live simply.

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consider joining the CIOB and becoming a Fellow to be another milestone. Back in 2000 we built up a

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LIU FAQI b. 1935

Purity of purpose

Liu Faqi rose through the ranks in the Chongqing Construction Commission before taking charge of the municipality’s major projects office

LIU FAQI b. 1935

people, innovating, keeping equipment up to date and modernising management skills. Opportunities will come from the opening up of international markets and China’s rapid economic growth. The construction industry needs to be based locally and radiate outwards by widening contacts and getting more information with the help of CIOB. Talent, quality, information, development and benefit are the key words in our work.

Although I have retired, I hope I can work and contribute to society continuously. I like sports and I used to play football, so I like watching it very much.

I watch a variety of sports on TV. I like writing also and sometimes I play Mah-jong with friends.

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friendly relationship with CIOB headquarters and worked with them to put together a training guide for international project managers. After the training some of them became qualified CIOB members.

Joining the CIOB widened my horizons. Our colleagues in the UK have a lot to teach us about new ways of thinking, being respectful of talent, taking work seriously and developing cordial relationships. If we put together the CIOB’s emphasis on training with the traditional Chinese focus on people we will be able to develop our technological and management skills and play a more important role in the world.

For China to develop in the next 20 years, we need to remain open-minded, focus on training

After pioneering the use of fly ash as a construction material, Dr. Wang Pu went on to lead development projects in Africa as technical advisor for the UN, finding time along the way to help break the world record for the highest non-stop concrete pour in Shanghai

I

was born in May 1935 in Suzhou, Jiangsu province.

After I graduated from a local college in 1956, I was sent to Harbin, in northeast China, to work as an assistant researcher with the Civil Engineering and Architecture Research Institute (CEARI) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Then, in accordance with China’s Ten-Year National Science & Technology Development Plan (1956-1965), I was appointed to a project experimenting with the use of fly ash in building materials. Fly ash is the waste left after burning coal in power plants and the purpose was to recycle industrial waste and to capture the ash instead of letting it pollute the atmosphere. It was also to replace the clay bricks that threatened to ruin fertile farmland. Thanks to the efforts of our team China’s first apartment building using fly ash blocks with steam curing technology appeared in Harbin in 1958.

Health problems brought me back to Shanghai in 1963 and I started to work with a team at the Shanghai Research Institute of Building Sciences (SRIBS), a major advocator of fly ash applications at the time.

At the start of the Cultural Revolution I was sent to a factory in the countryside to do manual labour. I had no idea what the real purpose of the revolution was, but I believed it wouldn’t last long and that English would be useful in the future. I studied every night after a long day of hard work and the only textbook I had was the English version of Mao’s “Little Red Book”. My efforts paid off. In 1969 I was picked to join a group of graduates who had majored in English who were reviewing English documents left by Chinese and foreign companies in Shanghai before the Liberation in 1949.

Shortly after, I was sent to join a team working on a new English-Chinese dictionary because English was becoming important after China established

diplomatic relations with the US. I also listened to the BBC regularly.

Before the Cultural Revolution had ended I managed to resume my research and we succeeded in completing a study on the anti-seismic properties of a six-storey apartment building constructed with flyash blocks. Such blocks were used in the construction of more than 10 million square metres of residential space in Shanghai between 1962 and 1979.

The focus of my research shifted to tall building construction in 1974, specifically to concrete shear walls, and I participated in most of the tall building projects in Shanghai between 1974 and 1978. In 1978 I passed an English test and qualified for government-funded study abroad. Out of the 10,000 candidates only 800 passed the English test. But since the quota to Britain was full I had to choose France, which meant learning yet another language at the age of 44.

I went as a visiting scholar to Paris, to the Centre Experimental De Recherches Et D’Etudes Du Batiment Et Travaux Publics (CEBTP), the biggest structural laboratory in Europe. Because of my academic background the chief of the laboratory, who was also my tutor, suggested I stay on to pursue a PhD. It was a big challenge because it usually takes at least three years to complete a PhD and my French was only at the simple conversational level, which made it very hard to understand the lectures.

Fortunately I had a sound basic knowledge of construction engineering, which helped a lot in figuring out what the professors said. I completed the PhD in two years.

After that I came back to SRIBS, in late 1982. I was appointed director in 1984, a post I held until I retired in 1992.

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❛I studied every night after a long day of manual labour and the only textbook I had was the English version of Mao’s “Little Red Book.”

b. 1935

WANG PU

Expert export

WANG PU b. 1935

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hanghai’s rapid development in the late 1980s offered me great opportunities to apply our research into fly ash. The first was the Nanpu Bridge, the first cable-stayed bridge in Shanghai across the Huangpu River. Because it was new, fly ash accounted for only five percent of the concrete. Later, when Yangpu Bridge was built, the proportion rose to 15 percent.

The biggest success story, for two reasons, was the

468-metre-high Shanghai Oriental Pearl TV Tower, begun in 1991. The record height then for non-stop concrete pumping was 184 meters, set by Americans.

If the building was higher than that you had to do it in stages. But we broke the record by doing the pumping non-stop. This project also made fly-ash technology famous, and significantly widened its application across the country. As a result, I was appointed director of the China Fly Ash Utilisation

Nanpu Bridge over the Huangpu River, an early application of Dr. Wang Pu’s research into fly ash in concrete

WANG PU b. 1935

â?›The quota to Britain was full so I had to choose France, which meant learning yet another language at the age of 44.

for one, started using it for highway construction.

Because I knew English and French, quite rare for a technician in China two decades ago, I was appointed by the UN as Chief Technical Adviser (CTA) for a reconstruction project in N’Djamena, the capital of Chad. I was really proud of this because I was probably the first Chinese CTA after China joined the United Nations in 1971.

Living conditions in Chad were terrible when I

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Centre (CFAUC), which had been established in SRIBS in 1987. I was able to share this expertise with other developing countries. I was made project manager of a United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) scheme to promote the technique in 1985 and from 1986 I held three workshops with participants from 50 nations as part of a project sponsored by the UN and our own Foreign Trade Ministry. From this, the Philippines,

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y greatest moment of professional pride came in Chad. As a CTA, I led a team whose members included a PhD from Switzerland.

Understandably, perhaps, he didn’t show due respect for me at first. On a certain occasion we were determining the bearing capacity of an arch for another museum, a project aided by the Swiss government. According to my calculation (done with pen and paper) the capacity was all right and I presented the calculation at a meeting attended by technicians from different countries. Suddenly the Swiss man stood up and said in front of everyone that my calculation had a serious mistake. You couldn’t imagine how embarrassed I was. I was the first Chinese CTA since 1949 so it was not only about my own reputation but China’s. The next day was Friday and I spent the whole day and night reviewing every step of the calculation. Finally I concluded that he was the one who had made a mistake by using a wrong unit. At the meeting on the next Monday morning I pointed out to everyone the mistake he made. The UN representative in Chad said: “The Chinese CTA is very good.”

More UN work followed. In May 1997 I was invited to Paris by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) to join a group evaluating the “1995 to 2005 Solar Energy Program”. China’s then president Jiang Zemin was one of the honorary members. After four months’ study I presented a 100-page evaluation report to UNESCO. My work has not all been scientific. In 1986 when the first modern Sofitel hotel started construction in downtown Shanghai, the engineers available were deemed inadequate. To grasp this opportunity, SRIBS set up China’s first construction project management company to lead the project and I was made president.

My first encounter with the CIOB came in 1985, when I was invited by the UN to attend a meeting on low-cost housing for developing countries in

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WANG PU b. 1935

was staying there between 1990 and 1992, but it didn’t dampen my enthusiasm. Owing to the hard work of our team, which included experts from Europe as well as local African staff, we accomplished some big projects. An example was the renovation of the National Museum, designed by a British architect and built in the 1930s. Without changing the original look of the museum we had to complete the job within four months before the rainy season began. We put almost all our resources on the project and finished in three months. I still remember the party we had.

Guests, including diplomats from the German and US embassies, were impressed but couldn’t believe the project was managed by someone from China. I had to make constant corrections when they referred to me as Japanese.

Bangkok. Some people from the CIOB were also there and when they learned I was an expert from China fluent in English they passed this news to the UK office. During the Chinese New Year holidays in 1986 people from CIOB headquarters visited me and we discussed the idea of starting a training programme in Shanghai. I was interested. I thought it was a golden opportunity to introduce the advanced techniques of the West to help push the development of our industry. The next year I sent my colleague Mr. Xu Shengmo (page 14), also fluent in English, to London to attend a conference hosted by the CIOB and he did a lot of work setting up the training class.

Though our authorities did not in the end choose us at SRIBS as the CIOB’s partner in Shanghai I am still glad of the contribution it made to our industry.

Of course you can’t expect significant changes overnight but at least our people could begin to see how others worked outside China which, in my opinion, is very important, especially now when there is more and more cooperation between Chinese and Western companies.

Above: Wang Pu with dignitaries after the successful renovation of the National Museum of Chad Right: Dr. Wang in Shanghai, retired but still active

❛They couldn’t believe it was managed by someone from China. I had to make constant corrections when they referred to me as Japanese.

I’m getting older but work remains the focus of my life. Although I’m retired I’m still interested in learning: I browse news on the Internet, from politics to science, as I want to be updated everyday. I’m also thinking about writing a memoir because I’ve been through so much. I’d like to do whatever I can to facilitate international cooperation and I’d welcome the opportunity to do more for the CIOB in China.

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WANG PU

Growing up poor in a thatched village with mud streets, Ye Yaoxian followed the ‘Will of Heaven’ to become an international expert on building in seismic zones and earthquake remediation. He was a key advisor to government after the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008

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was born on October 1, 1935, in Yejiadang Village, Jurong County, Jiangsu Province. The whole village is one big family with the same last name: Ye. Before the Liberation the town was very poor. There were no landlords or rich peasants before Land Reform. In the whole village only three families lived in tile-roofed houses. The rest lived in thatched cottages, including my family. There was no plan for house building and everywhere was messy. The dirt roads on rainy days were full of mud and we could only walk barefoot.

The villagers all planted rice but every year there was nothing to eat for a few months. The only way to survive was to take out usurious loans.

There was a private school in the village hall that commemorated our ancestors and there I studied some traditional Chinese Confucian writings for four years. The vast majority of the villagers were illiterate and only a few people learned to read at the private school. A few years ago, I went back to my home town and the quality of life had improved.

Everyone lived in tile-roofed houses and about 10 young people were going to university. However, there was still no good planning for buildings and the roads were still dirty.

My grandmother was a beauty. Though illiterate, she was very smart and wise and firmly believed that to be a scholar is to be at the top of society. She wanted to pay all her children’s school fees. When I was a little child she told my younger brother and I a lot of interesting stories about people who had succeeded through hard work. I deeply respect her.

After four years at private school I couldn’t continue studying in my town. So my younger brother and I left my village with my grandmother to go to Longtan town, 7.5 kilometres away. We attended a primary school and rented a small room from a Mr. Zhang, the owner of a cloth store. Grandmother lived with us and looked after us.

My grandfather had passed away when my father

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YE YAOXIAN b. 1935

Mastering the angry earth

was only five years old and grandmother did not remarry. She sent my father to a teacher training school and later he became a teacher at a primary school. Father was good at handwriting and loved Peking opera. He often performed songs at home.

He was very strict and we were afraid of him. I remember once our private school teacher was away for some reason and asked my father to substitute.

When it was time to recite my father asked me to have a try but I refused, for which he gave me a sound beating. I still don’t know why I refused – maybe it was just the antagonistic psychology of a teenager.

My mother was a farmer. Although illiterate and less wise than grandmother she was very industrious.

After the Great Tangshan Earthquake (below) in 1976 Ye Yaoxian worked with Japanese research institutes and the UN

�I’m doing my best to prevent the large-scale demolition of earthquakedamaged houses.

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oday, when young people take the university entrance exam and choose their major, they get lots of information and advice from their parents, relatives and friends. I was not so lucky. I had no choice but to follow my grandmother’s advice, which was: ‘follow the Will of Heaven’. I remember several students standing in the playground. They picked up a multi-sided stone and drew various figures representing possible majors on the surfaces, civil or mechanical engineering, textiles, architecture, etc.

They were counting, one, two, three, and throwing it into the air. When it dropped, the figure showing was the major to be chosen. Mine was civil engineering. I guess it was Heaven’s Will. Later I thought I might have been better suited to diplomatic work, but I’ve never regretted my choice.

During the college summer holidays in 1952, I went to Changshu City to be assistant to a maths professor, Mr. Zhong Guangran, who taught preparatory classes for pupils wanting to enter higher education. I once went to his home, where I saw shelves filled with foreign books. I asked him: “How can I read these foreign books skilfully like you?” He replied only with: “Success will come when conditions are ripe.”

In 1956 I was one of three students chosen to go to the Soviet Union to study. My Russian was the best so I was translator. I prepared two Russian-Chinese dictionaries, though they were never published. Later we went to the Leningrad Institute of Technology to study welding. Our teacher was a famous professor and a brilliant lecturer. Using only his piece of chalk

❛Equations, which bored me before, suddenly became vivid. he managed to explain all the chemical compositions of a welding rod. I was impressed by his excellent memory and the way he carried himself in lectures. I think he was an example of “Success will come when conditions are ripe”.

From 1957 to 1960, I did research at the China Architectural Institute of Science and Technology. My supervisor was Professor He Guangqian who had studied in the United States and France. He was fluent in English and French, with a rigorous scholastic approach and a willingness to help others.

He could also be severely critical if we were unable to

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She loved her children deeply, and was a perfect wife and mother. She had 11 children but because she couldn’t afford medical fees four of them died young.

Grandmother, father and mother had the biggest influence on me: they taught me that people must acquire knowledge, work hard, love others and earn a living to the best of their ability.

complete tasks in time. He taught me about basic research methods and the best approach to studying: be steady and rigorous.

In 1958 I was sent to gain practical experience as a concrete worker helping to build a sugar factory in Guangdong Jiangmen. My supervisor and I were tasked with pulling a trolley filled with concrete from the mixing station to the pouring point. The

YE YAOXIAN b. 1935

scaffold floor was very narrow and we had to take great care pushing the trolley. If the vehicle was askew and the concrete missed the form we had to fish it out with our hands. We were on night duty and didn’t knock off until the early hours by which time my hand was so exhausted it couldn’t grip anything. The experience was valuable because I realised how hard it is to be a construction worker

and that buildings are built little by little.

From 1960 to 1962, I studied computational mathematics and computer programming in the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of Peking University. I soon made the link between mathematical theory and practical problems.

Equations, which bored me before, suddenly became vivid.

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Wenchuan earthquake in 2008

ne turning point in my life was when I went from being a researcher to a government official. This happened after the Liaoning Haicheng earthquake in 1975. I was transferred from the China Construction Technology Research Institute to the Anti-Earthquake Office of the State Construction Committee to be the deputy director.

After the Great Tangshan Earthquake in 1976, I was responsible for organising investigations into earthquake damage and disaster prevention work for most of the next 10 years.

After the Tangshan earthquake I accompanied the United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Director of Disaster Relief on his visit to Tangshan, which had been flattened, and other places. He was a minister from Turkey. After a dinner we walked around a pond in a hotel. I saw a beautiful water lily and asked him: “What is the English word for that?”

After a while he said: “I don’t know. My English is limited.” “Is it ‘lily’?” I said. “Maybe,” he said. As a senior official of the UN, his modesty and truthseeking spirit left a deep impression.

Our director at the State Anti-Earthquake Office was Mr. Han Guang, head of the State Construction Commission. I got to know many veterans like him who started working before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. I learned a lot about dealing with people from them. Mr. Han was very strict. He gave each document a verbatim reading, using a brush pen to highlight mistakes. He made us afraid of presenting sloppy work and we doublechecked everything. In 1979 I accompanied two professors of civil engineering from Stanford University on a visit to Tangshan. They were James M. Gere and Haresh C. Shah. Their knowledge and rigorous research were impressive. Later, we returned and cooperated on research, which benefited me a lot.

Another big change came in 1985 when I went from being a government official back to the China Construction Technology Research Institute, this time as president. During the next 12 years there I used my skills to help establish a number of new bodies to push forward research, design, income generation and to make opportunities for the best use of talents in important areas: living-environment technology research, urban residential construction, villages and towns construction, and technology marketing and promotion.

After this I started to do cooperative research with international partners. In 1997 Teizo Fujiwara from Kyoto University’s Disaster Prevention Research Institute invited me to participate in a Sino-Japanese seminar on reducing urban seismic risk held in Xi’an.

One night he invited me to a party in his room.

There were about 20 experts and I was the only one not from Japan. Then I saw a familiar face: Professor

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YE YAOXIAN b. 1935

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❛13 million people move to China’s cities each year. That brings huge challenges surrounding sustainability and quality of life.

I was visiting professor at Kyoto University Disaster Prevention Research Institute and wrote a book, in English, on quake risk management comparing our Tangshan and Japan’s Hanshin-Awaji quakes. The book was translated into Chinese and published in April 2008 in Beijing. It was great to work with world-class experts.

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fter the Wenchuan earthquake of 2008 I worked on restoration and reconstruction. I took a very public stance that reconstruction elsewhere must be prudent, and that Wenchuan must be abandoned.

These opinions were published in science and industry journals and acknowledged by the Ministry of Construction and well-known experts.

I was also asked to give presentations on principles of post-disaster reconstruction to municipal and party leaders and planning and construction sector leaders.

Finally, I was assigned by the Ministry of Housing, along with academic Zhou Ganzhi, to submit a report on reconstruction regulations in certain affected areas.

Premier Wen Jiabao read the report and ordered the National Development and Reform Commission to carry out major feasibility studies.

Now I’m doing my best to prevent the large-scale demolition of earthquake-damaged houses. As far as possible, I want to reinforce them to minimise the amount of time victims spend in temporary accommodation. I’m also looking into how best to deal with the prefabricated houses when they are no longer required.

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s a scientist and government official I feel I’ve made significant contributions to preventing

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y time has mainly been spent on work. Before my parents passed away I spent little time with them. When my children were young I didn’t spend much time with them either especially after the Tangshan earthquake. For a period of time my wife and I both went there to work so the children had to be cared for by colleagues in Beijing. These two things make me feel very guilty even now.

Construction has been through massive changes.

It used to be done by humans: designers calculated with slide rules and drew pictures on a map board.

Now we all use computers.

China is going through a period of rapid urbanisation. About 13 million people move to cities each year. City dwellers reached 44.9 percent of the population in 2007 and that figure is predicted to be 70 percent by 2030. That’s an urban population of over a billion people. As a result, the construction industry will have a huge opportunity to develop and there are huge challenges surrounding sustainability and quality of life.

In addition to the completion of existing work, I am summarising research results from past work for a book. I am currently writing reports on postearthquake rehabilitation technology, and I plan others on sustainable design and urbanisation.

When I have some spare time, I like reading, searching for information on the Internet, driving to the countryside to have a rest, and walking.

YE YAOXIAN b. 1935

and reducing earthquake damage to the built environment and human life. Listing them all would be impossible here, and cruel to a general audience, but here are a few highlights between 1974 and 2000: • I was responsible for the investment of billions of dollars worth of research into anti-seismic reinforcement projects between 1976 and 1984 • My research into earthquake damage on nonstructural components and anti-seismic design led to reinforcement measures on the National Palace Museum, and the resulting report, “NonStructural Anti-seismic Design”, filled a gap in this area (1988-90) • I used mathematical models to propose a quantitative analysis for post-earthquake reconstruction decision and policy-making, which was adopted by the Ministry of Construction (1990-93) • After carrying out on-site measurements I proposed residential elevator planning and performance requirements, as well as life-cycle service and technology integration ideas. My report was received favourably by United Technologies Corporation (1997-1998) • In cooperation with Japanese researchers, I implemented niche analysis, graph theory and a topological index in urban earthquake disaster diagnosis (1999-2000).

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Hiroyuki Kamed, from the Kyoto institute, whom I’d met in the US way back in 1978. I sat and chatted with him and our friendship was reawakened. I went on to cooperate in research with him and Professor Okada Norio for six years.

From 1999 to 2003, I was director of the Japanese Earthquake Disaster Research Centre.

Professor Hiroyuki Kamed also invited me to be international adviser to a 14-country project he ran on earthquake and tsunami mitigation technologies, funded by Japan.

So hungry for education that he ran away to Beijing where the schools were cheaper, Cai Jinchi would later be called upon to spearhead modern China’s first quality monitoring system for construction

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’d like to say something about my name. Jin means gold, and Chi refers to the space in front of the socalled Dragon Stone on the steps leading up to the Imperial Palace. It was forbidden to step on that space, the Chi. Nowadays all empty spaces can be called Chi, so it has lost its original meaning, but not for my grandfather, who named me. The way he looked at it, the Emperor’s Chi was made of stone, but mine is gold. He hoped one day I would become a government official.

I was born in Shengfang Town, Bazhou City, Hebei Province on November 15th, 1935. We were poor and moved often to find work. I left Shengfang for good at the age of three and moved with my family to Tianjin, then to Nanjing, and then to Shanghai. In Shanghai our prospects improved with my father’s cotton yarn business and we planned to settle. But this was during the war of resistance against Japan and my grandmother wanted to go back to her home town, Tianjin. She was worried about dying far from home.

My parents were dutiful children so we returned to Tianjin. My father carried my grandmother on his back all the way to the railway station. The seats were divided into three classes. The seats near the locomotive were third class because during the war the locomotive was usually the target. We bought first class tickets but the Japanese forced us to go to third class. Fortunately we reached Tianjin safely.

Times were tough in Tianjin. My father had to close his business when we left Shanghai. My mother made Chinese clothes at home and he sold them as a street hawker. All the same, we were alive.

In 1951 my father teamed up with some others to set up an electrical plant but a few years later the plant was moved to Baotou. Baotou had a poor climate so my father didn’t bring my mother. At that time the government was changing corporations into public-private joint ventures and launching the ‘Three-anti Campaign’ of 1951 and the ‘Five-anti Campaign’ of 1952.1 My father’s plant was assessed and found to be basically law abiding. He was an operations manager.

He died in 1969. My mother continued her job as a worker in Tianjin Dongya Wool Plant where she started in 1960. My parents’ careers were so unstable that it gave me the impression that people worked just to stay alive and must always live in haste, without a certain purpose.

Cai Jinchi: From poor beginnings to Vice General Engineer of the Beijing Construction Commission

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longed for education but money was always a problem. When I graduated from primary school in Tianjin I wanted to go to a particular church school because it taught foreign languages and music.

There was a band. I could learn bugle! I spent one year there, playing in the band and, once, going on tour. My mother even bought me a bugle for that tour. But it was a private school with high tuition fees. We couldn’t afford it, so I quit.

Then, without seeking the blessing of my parents or even telling them what I was doing, I went to Beijing. I had heard that tuition fees there were lower.

I passed the entrance examination of the No.14 Middle School in Beijing, and enrolled. It was a public school with no accommodation fees and low tuition.

As I approached graduation in 1952, our school

1. Editor’s note: Waged against the capitalist bourgeoisie, the ‘Five-anti Campaign’ targeted tax evasion, theft of government property, bribery, cheating on government contracts, and stealing state economic information.

Employees were encouraged to inform.

❛My parents’ careers were so unstable that it gave me the impression that people worked just to stay alive and must always live in haste.

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CAI JINCHI b. 1935

We had better do it right

CAI JINCHI b. 1935

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Beijing in the 1950s amazed the young Cai Jinchi

❛The industry has changed almost beyond recognition. When I began it was sometimes hard even to find a person to write a specification. construction companies.

It was a pity for me to lose the chance to be a designer, but my thinking was that no matter where I was assigned, as long as I had the opportunity to reduce the burden on my family I would work hard at it.

I was assigned to an embassy construction project in Beijing. We had to dismantle an old Russian-style church. It became clear why the company needed graduates. I worked on that project for three years and performed a variety of roles, sometimes as leader of the workers and sometimes as a technician, but my main job became changing the original design into detailed construction drawings. There I saw the truth of the saying about experience being the mother of wisdom. And I saw that my school had assigned me to

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hen I started to work I began to understand the real meaning of life. I left home for Beijing when I was very young and my family could offer only a little support for subsistence. When I could make a living my mother didn’t want me to send money home. She wanted me instead to support my sister at college because she thought that she wouldn’t accompany us much longer and that it was up to us, brother and sister, to take care of each other. My parents’ behaviour made me understand how to be a good person. They taught me that one should be strict to oneself and generous to others, should care for others and be forgiving, and to cherish relationships with parents, relatives and friends.

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he person who was the biggest influence on me was Dong Weiyu, Chief Engineer of Beijing No. 1 Construction Company. He graduated from Peiyang University (now Tianjin University) and was always top three in his class. He was the youngest in a big family. Before the Liberation some of his brothers went to Taiwan and some went to the USA. He began to follow them but after the whole of China was liberated in 1949 he went back to Beijing to help the capital. He was highly earnest and strict and thorough. What’s more, he paid great attention to the cultivation of young people. He selected 30 people, me included, for special training in the company. He taught us Linearity Algebra, the foundation of computer programs. His thought was really ahead of his time. He was concerned about the country and was once a member of the national committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and the National People’s Congress. He died in the 1990s at the age of 85. He was an upright man, and demanded continuous improvement in himself. He had a great impact on

CAI JINCHI b. 1935

the right place. If I hadn’t been assigned there I would now be just a designer in an office whose design depends on his own imagination. Thanks to my school I gained lots of experience early and got to be a leader at the age of 29.

Under my supervision we set up a national defence project team. Later this team was incorporated into Beijing No. 8 Construction Company, and then into Beijing No. 1 Construction Company and became the Xijiao project office specialising in national defence projects. I stayed there for some years. During this time I furthered my technical education, studying reinforced concrete at Tsinghua University and political economics at the People’s University of China. I was promoted to the post of group leader at an unusually young age.

However, the Cultural Revolution began in 1966 and stopped my career development. It was a really tough time. I did not go back to my job until 1970.

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was encouraging us to apply for technical colleges because China needed technicians. Taking the poverty of my family into account, I chose Beijing Civil Engineering and Architecture School. I fervently wanted to study architecture. There I was in Beijing, surrounded by the amazing old designs of our capital. What’s more, I was good at drawing.

Many of my drawings were put up for display in my school.

There were four hundred new students seeking entry to the college but there were just three majors to choose from: water and drainage, roads and bridges, and architecture. If students were left to choose their majors by themselves it might have been that everyone chose architecture and the other two majors would have no students, so the school decided to select students by their drawings – and I got in.

After graduation I was assigned to work in a design institute, but when I went to register with the company I was told to report to Beijing No. 5 Construction Company instead. What had happened?

Later I learned it was because construction companies had complained and asked the school to allocate more people to them than it had at first. The school complied. Those who were weak and had been assigned to the design institute stayed there, while those who were strong like me were switched to

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n 1985 the Ministry of Construction called for the establishment of a quality supervision office, and asked me lead it, which I did for eight years. My job was not only to carry out the daily tasks of supervision but also to sketch out a regulatory framework for quality monitoring. Throughout, we sampled 1,514 projects, which brought forward many quality problems and weak points in management. At the end we published a report in the national construction press about the widespread noncompliance with the rules in order to prove the necessity of setting up a supervisory office.

Building on this work I joined the Beijing Construction Commission to establish the Beijing General Engineering Quality Supervision Centre.

Here I organised investigations into quality problems that improved construction quality across Beijing, including 34 new buildings for the Asian Games. Our efforts won us the Special Lu Ban Award from the Chinese Construction Industry Association.

As before, I also helped draft new, relevant codes and regulations governing quality monitoring, supervision and technical standards. Finally, I oversaw the production of a training video on quality management that was distributed across Beijing and then out to the entire country.

Much was happening in my career at this time. I was responsible for supervising key environmental schemes in Beijing. One was a multi-billion-yuan project to improve air and water quality and to tackle the rubbish problem. It was part-funded by the World Bank who assigned me as chief engineer, a position usually taken by foreign experts.

Another highlight was the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing. I was appointed by the Beijing municipal government as the deputy chair of the preparatory committee. I had to supervise the construction of 102 meeting rooms, 120 venues for seminars, a dining hall for 20,000 people, 10 light-steel structure restaurants, 64 accommodation halls, and the refurbishment of 32 hotels to international standards.

During this time I also organised experts and scholars to write the standard text on construction project supervision under FIDIC terms of contract, and The Handbook of Construction Supervision Knowledge, published by China Planning Press in 1993. I was also editor-in-chief of Rules of Construction Project Document Management in 2000, jointly implemented by Beijing Construction Commission and the Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning.

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he CIOB really influenced me, opening my eyes to the whole discipline of project management. Years

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CAI JINCHI b. 1935

me and I miss him very much.

❛As for my ambitions now, the spirit is willing but the body is weak.

ago when doing projects, like everybody else then, I was technology-oriented and paid little attention to project management. It has developed in our country just in the last several years. We have realised that no matter how excellent your technology is you can’t benefit from it without good management. In my opinion, project management from a client’s perspective should be the main concern of CIOB China. It seems that most Chinese members come from engineering companies, but improving the client’s management capability is key to our industry reaching an international standard of competence.

Project management is still immature here. The CIOB needs to work on getting it recognised by the whole industry. Most project teams are temporary and disperse when the project is completed so it’s hard to record and share the lessons learned, which leads to waste and repeated mistakes. Special project management companies may be a solution.

Differences in management capability can make a galactic difference among enterprises. Some can go abroad and be successful in the world while others cannot, even though there is no real difference in the technology at their disposal. Our technique is now

CAI JINCHI b. 1935

highly developed, better than in many countries, but we are fettered by old management methods, especially in economic management. Take the FIDIC clauses as an example: why can’t we use all of them in China? And why can’t we use FIDIC on all projects? We still model our contracts on a sample published by the Ministry of Construction. Or take bills of quantities. No matter what is happening on the price, we still adhere to the price schedule and allow no changes. Our management capability lags behind the world. Only when the old ideologies finally retire can this situation change. This is a transition period.

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till, we have come a long way. I came to Beijing before the Liberation. The past three decades of reforms and opening-up have led to impressive developments, and people have made an historic leap from having only adequate food and clothing to being well-off.

The industry, too, has changed almost beyond recognition. When I began, designers could be counted as top intellectuals while those who did the building work often didn’t have any formal education.

There were few technicians and it was sometimes hard even to find a person to write a specification.

Now education levels are much higher. I always prized my technical expertise. Even when I took on an administrative role in the construction commission I kept my title of “Vice General Engineer”. Without this expertise I wouldn’t have been able to do the administrative work very well because only when you have it can you judge others’ technical work.

As for my ambitions now, the spirit is willing but the body is weak. I am 74 and many things are out of my reach. I can, however, give advice to construction companies in difficulty, and help train people in construction supervision companies. I like sharing my experience. I read the news every day to know about our country. Sometimes I look through the website of the Beijing Construction Commission and the Construction Supervision Institution to see what’s happening now. I also like sports and singing. At Beijing School of Civil Engineering and Architecture, I had been the sports commissary in the Student Union. I often listen to CDs, and sing in events for the retired. Last year a solo performance of mine got an

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Beijing today

Lu Haiping may have spent his career as an unfulfilled high school teacher had it not been for the threat of war with the Soviet Union. But his ‘little innovations’ propelled him into leadership roles in the Shanghai government, where he did everything he could to bring quality and professionalism to the building boom of the 1990s

Below right: An airraid shelter in the Fengjing Commune Museum. Lu Haiping’s designs for such shelters won him fame in the 1970s

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was born in November 1937 in Wuxi, a city in Jiangsu Province. My father was the owner of a small drugstore and my mother was a peasant. Given the limited income we had and the difficult life due to the war between Japan and China it was impossible for my parents to support all of their eight children to receive tertiary education. My second elder sister, for instance, became a junior high school teacher after she graduated from high school even though her grades were good enough for her to go to university.

You could call it unfair but as a son I was given preference and allowed to study at the civil engineering department in Tongji University in 1956.

I didn’t have a special interest in construction when I chose it but I thought it could be fun to deal with house building. But my job after graduation in 1961 was not to build houses. Instead I was assigned to be a junior technician with the Shanghai Municipal Housing & Land Resources Administration Bureau, taking charge of things like housing-repair cost control, identifying dilapidated buildings and inspecting the quality of repairs.

In 1969 I was transferred to a high school to teach basic engineering. It was not an interesting job but people were not free to choose their jobs then.

My job would have remained unchanged had it not been for the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet

Union in the late 60s and early 70s, which sparked a nationwide construction boom of air raid shelters.

Because I’d majored in civil engineering I was appointed to build one at my school. So I did, and it was so good and looked so nice that it was reported to the district government. Before long I was promoted to be director of shelter construction, responsible for designing and building them for soldiers. I was sent to Nanjing and Xinjiang to learn how to build shelters to resist nuclear shock waves and radiation.

❛The air-raid shelter I built was so good and looked so nice that I was promoted to be director of shelter construction.

It turned out I was a man of innovation. I was first aware of it in 1975 when I used open caisson technology to build a shelter nearly 28 meters underground when the average depth in Shanghai was three meters. It was not some new technology but few people would use it. Shanghai soil is soft and wet and going deeper than three meters brings a danger of collapse, especially when only human labour was being used.

This little innovation made me famous. I was awarded the title of “National Model Worker” in 1977 and 1978. I was even invited to go to Beijing and was received by Deng Xiaoping. It was then I realised it had been a good choice to go into construction, which seemed quite promising in China.

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y interest in training was aroused while I was working on shelter construction because I didn’t have many skilled workers. The majority of my team were retired old men and housewives who knew

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Lu Haiping: Former director of the Shanghai Construction Commission and the third President of CIOB China

LU HAIPING b. 1937

Nearly overlooked

❛My interest in training was aroused because most of my team were retired old men and housewives.

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little about construction. To make sure they were capable of doing their jobs I opened a training class, which worked very well. From then on training became one focus of my work, especially after 1992 when I resigned as Governor of Changning district, Shanghai, and became director of the Construction and Communications Commission of Shanghai Municipal Government.

When I knew the Shanghai Institute of Urban Construction (SIUC) was to open a training class in cooperation with a Western organisation called the CIOB, I showed interest immediately because I was aware of our weakness in project management. I urged the commission to invest over 300,000 yuan in the education programme. This trained the CIOB’s first batch of Chinese professionals now active in construction or other related fields. One of them is Sun Jinke (page 78).

Shanghai experienced a rapid development in the early 1990s and I thought it would be beneficial to expose our professionals to Western practices. In 1993 I invited the government of Queensland, Australia, to open a training centre at SIUC. The class was welcomed because of its up-to-date and interesting topics such as risk control and energy saving materials. As CIOB was doing, we also sent top students to Australia to work as interns after their graduation. Unfortunately this training was discontinued after my retirement in 1999.

I have been interested in energy-saving materials since the 1980s. For example, in cooperation with material experts I developed hollow concrete bricks to replace clay bricks to protect farmland soil. Though I’m retired now I’m still working with the Green Industry and Technology Promotion centre in Shanghai to help develop more eco-friendly materials and promote clean energies like solar and wind energy.

My other long-term interest is underground development, no doubt a result of my shelter-building experiences. In the 1990s I participated in two big projects in Shanghai, underground shopping centres at People’s Square and in the Xujiahui commercial hub. I also wrote an article on underground development, which won a government prize.

I’ve witnessed the dramatic changes in our building industry in the past two decades. If I’d not

been to other countries I’d probably just have revelled in these eye-catching high buildings springing up like mushrooms but, having been to countries like Japan and Germany, I see our shortcomings, management and quality in particular.

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verseas organisations like CIOB can help us improve our management but improving quality is really a matter of attitude. We have advanced techniques and can buy the latest equipment but people are getting lazy and less responsible, which could be fatal to the industry. In one sense I mean that literally because, for example, there are more accidents at construction sites now than before.

We must think seriously what the real reason is behind these accidents. Speed is not the only thing we should care about.

I’m now helping CIOB recruit new members in eastern China. CIOB has been introducing the latest developments like new materials, ways of management and relevant technology to keep members updated. In the next few years as the government focuses more on infrastructure, especially in the vast rural areas, we need to give more training to managers and workers to improve quality.

I enjoyed working in the building industry whether as technician or official. The pleasure of my accomplishments, in research, in seeing a structure take shape and in cooperating on a project, is hard to describe.

I have three children, none of whom followed me into construction. Since I was always very busy my wife, a mechanical engineer before, took care of the family and gave me a lot of support. Looking back, I didn’t have many setbacks. I would like to call it good luck.

In my spare time, I like travelling, taking pictures and gardening. I didn’t have much time for my hobbies and interests in the past but now I can really enjoy my life.

Above: Lu Haiping on the left with colleagues in the early 1990s Right: Shanghai’s Grand Gateway underground shopping mall, one of the structures he helped build

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LU HAIPING

After distinguishing himself as an army engineer Dai Ruitong was rewarded with a cushy admin job, but he soon grew bored and set his sights on overseas study. His efforts paid off. He would go on to establish China’s first internationally accredited construction course at Shanghai Institute of Urban Construction

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was born in Wenzhou city, Zhejiang Province in 1939. We had a moderate income as my father was an accountant. When I was eight my family moved to Shanghai.

I was interested in chemistry when I was in high school because it was so fascinating to me. I still remember when I saw a purse made of some Japanese-made plastic material. I couldn’t figure out how they could make plastic look like real leather.

I was also fond of writing and reading newspapers, and I even thought about going into journalism. But considering the political situation in China at the time, my father persuaded me to major in anything but liberal arts and suggested engineering should be the best choice.

Following his advice I went to Tianjin University to study construction engineering in 1958, though I had no idea what I was going to learn. But later I discovered it was pretty interesting because there was a lot of mathematics and mechanics, which I liked very much.

I didn’t go to a research institute or factory after my graduation in 1963. Instead, I joined the army.

The next year, because of my major, I was sent to Wuxi city, Jiangsu Province to help build a large lab, about 6,000 square metres in floor space, for the navy.

I was in charge of the field construction work and my responsibilities included cost control, quality control and process control, all part of project management.

This was a subject I’d never learned anything about because this major was cancelled by the government after 1949. Through learning by doing I got most of my experience in project management from this lab project.

By 1970, when the lab was successfully completed, I’d been in the army for seven years and

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DAI RUITONG b. 1939

The first link

❛In spite of my lousy English I applied immediately. Not surprisingly, I failed. had attained the rank of lieutenant. As a reward for my work I was transferred to the administrative department to do a job with less responsibility but more fringe benefits. However the work soon bored me and I wanted to go back to Shanghai because my wife was there.

In 1973, I was transferred to Shanghai and assigned to take charge of capital construction in an institute. Two years later, everyone in the institute was urged to learn English and computers. I’d never learned English because when I was a student Russian was the prevalent foreign language course in schools at all levels. But when I saw that people who passed the English test might have a chance to study abroad I told myself I had to do that too, for a better career.

In 1980 I applied for a post at a branch of Tongji University teaching reinforced concrete structures.

With my experience and educational background I got the job easily. However, coincidentally, I was promoted to be director of a section of the institute as well. After weighing the two options for some time I decided to go to Tongji, in 1981.

The school where I worked actually involved three parties. Tongji University provided teachers, the government of Yangpu district contributed the teaching facilities and the administrative department was composed of people from Shanghai Construction and Transportation Commission (SCTC).

At the time the school was selecting teachers to study overseas. Candidates had to pass the English test

Dai Ruitong made it to New Zealand (above), and then came back to establish a new-style college course in Shanghai (below right)

y involvement with the CIOB began during this time. Owing to Mr. Xu Shengmo’s introduction, we began discussing a new course in cooperation with the College of Estate Management (CEM), affiliated with Reading University in the UK. CEM’s course was accredited by the CIOB. Everything seemed to be going smoothly except on the issue of textbooks: originally we were supposed to use only textbooks imported from the UK, which would have significantly increased tuition fees. It took us a long time to persuade CEM to let us print our own.

We opened the course in 1991. Candidates had to take six courses including law, finance and management. It was all new to our industry, especially the idea of claims because you don’t have ‘claims’ as such in a state-run economy. Since the textbooks were in English our candidates had to pass the IELTS English test first. The first batch of graduates in 1995, all members of CIOB and all possessing a good command of English (apart from heavy technical English), were very much welcomed by the industry, which was experiencing rapid development.

It seemed a winning formula. However, the course was terminated after our school merged with Tongji University in 1996, and I soon quit my job to join a real estate company.

T

❛I pushed myself hard and even lived in the school to avoid distractions from family life.

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specialising in seismic resistance. He offered me a scholarship to stay for another year. What I could learn in just one year was very limited, he told me.

My overseas experience was a strong advantage later in my career. After I came back in 1987 I was promoted to be dean of my institute, now called the Shanghai Institute of Urban Construction and, in 1990, I became the assistant to the president, who wanted me to develop international cooperation.

With my impetus, we established relations with universities overseas, including one in Australia and one in Finland.

he CIOB brought the concept of management into Chinese construction and greatly helped upgrade local talent with an internationally recognied qualification. It was important at that particular time because construction in China had been run as part of a planned economy for so long. It was through CIOB that we started to use and understand such terms as “bid” and “claim”. Two decades on, we have a lot more skilled workers and we are no longer strangers to the latest technology. But the fact that our managers have different levels of qualifications is preventing the industry from improving further. How to overcome the bottleneck is probably a good topic for CIOB to study.

I’ve done different jobs and generally speaking I’ve liked all of them because they offered me chances to learn something new or do something I liked.

Working with the CIOB gave me the chance to be part of the push to develop the industry. I’m retired now but I’m still working as a part-time consultant for an architecture and design company.

I have a daughter and a son but neither is interested in construction. My daughter studied banking and lives in New Zealand, and my son works for a consulting company in Shanghai.

I’m a bookworm. Before retiring I read a lot of books related to my profession but now I prefer Chinese history and biographies. It’s interesting to see history repeat itself.

DAI RUITONG

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b. 1939

and in spite of my lousy English I applied immediately. Not surprisingly, I failed. To prepare for another try I went to Shanghai International Studies University, a college famous for foreign language study. I pushed myself very hard during my six months there, and even lived in the school to avoid distractions from family life.

My efforts paid off at last. In 1984, I passed the test and was told to choose an overseas university.

Since I knew little about foreign universities, I turned to my former teacher in Tianjin University for advice. He recommended me to Professor R. Park, head of civil engineering at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. So, I went to New Zealand as a visiting scholar. I had one year. I was the first student the university had admitted from mainland China. I was deeply impressed by the way we were taught. Civil engineering is usually a serious and sometimes even boring subject, but my teachers always tried to give the lectures in a humorous way to make their classes more interesting. It was a totally different experience for me.

I was grateful to my supervisor, a professor

After a gruelling stint learning project management in Germany, Ding Shizhao became the youngest professor ever at Tongji University. But far from being a dry academic, he applied the new methods to dozens of high-rise projects during the Pudong development craze. His search for excellence in theory and practice made him a natural for the CIOB and he became China’s first member in 1992

I

was born in October 1940 in Shanghai to a middle class family. My father was a lawyer and my mother was a teacher of Chinese at an elite primary school run by Americans, thanks to which I received a solid foundation in English.

After I graduated from high school, my mother wanted me to study engineering and, more importantly for her, to stay in Shanghai because my older brother had gone to Beijing to study. So in 1958 I went to Tongji University in Shanghai to study construction engineering. It felt like the right choice for a career. After graduation I became a teacher at Tongji, but a year later I was sent to construction sites to be a carpenter, the policy of the time being that intellectuals must be re-educated through manual labour.

Against my mother’s wishes I was transferred away from Shanghai in 1965. I spent four years labouring in Sichuan Province and one year in Anhui Province. The experience was valuable because when I returned to teaching I had more to tell my students than what was in the textbooks.

The biggest turning point in my life came in 1980 when I was picked by the university to go to Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany to study “project management”, something we’d never heard of. I was very eager to learn anything new and decided to pursue my PhD. To many my life in Germany must have looked pretty boring as I spent all my time on study and struggling to improve my German. A local newspaper even wrote a story about me entitled “A Chinese who doesn’t sleep”, referring to my daily schedule, which lasted from 6am to 2am.

After the PhD I came back to Tongji in 1985. Two years later I became the youngest professor in Tongji’s history. My work wasn’t all academic, though. Thanks to the development of Shanghai’s Pudong financial zone, I took part in about 40 projects, including

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DING SHIZHAO b. 1940

Them as can, do... and teach

Pudong’s first skyscraper, the 28-storey Shanghai branch of the Central Bank, plus the 56-storey Bocom Financial Tower and the new Guangzhou Baiyun Airport completed in 2004.

I

enjoyed the sense of accomplishment the work brought, especially when I was able to prove myself to people who doubted my abilities. As an example, in the early 1990s I was invited by the governor of the Bank of China to write a feasibility study for a 50storey class A office building with 100,000 square metres of floor space. The target budget was around US$100 million. There was no draft design, and there were very few high buildings like that I could use as models. So I asked professionals in every field concerned, from piling to elevators, to write budget reports of about 500 words, and I paid them each 500 yuan. I even contacted people in Hong Kong as they were more experienced in such buildings. It took me four months to arrive at a figure I was confident with: US$130 million, at least.

The governor knew me well, so he had confidence in my report. But one of the investors was a Japanese company and they were doubtful. They had reason to be, because it was common in China at the time to work out the project cost on a notional, per-squaremetre basis, which resulted in rough and usually inflated figures. They raised 19 questions but after

‘Practising professor’ Ding Shizhao, active consulting engineer and chair of the Research Institute of Project Administration and Management, Tongji University, Shanghai

❛A German newspaper even wrote a story about me entitled “A Chinese who doesn’t sleep”, referring to my daily schedule, which lasted from 6am to 2am.

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y first encounter with CIOB was interesting.

I didn’t know the organisation much before 1991, when Michael Brown, its director of education, visited Tongji. I was assigned to accompany him because of my knowledge of English and of course we fell to talking. He told me they were planning to expand their membership and accreditation scheme into mainland China, so I expressed my interest because I was keen to introduce advanced Western expertise. When he learned I held a PhD from a German university recognised in the UK, he recommended I join. So I became the first member of the CIOB in China in 1992.

It took 10 years to carry out CIOB’s plan in China. As a key liaison person between CIOB and the Ministry of Construction (MOC), I witnessed all the important stages. In 2002, CIOB signed the agreement of mutual recognition of construction management degrees with the MOC. That was followed in 2006 with a similar agreement with the American Council for Construction Education. So far, 24 out of more than 300 universities and colleges with construction management departments have passed the strict CIOB accreditation requirements.

This significantly upgraded China’s education in construction engineering and is one of the biggest contributions the CIOB made to China.

The dramatic changes in China’s building industry in the past two decades are undeniable.

❛You think improving quality is only a matter of developing skilled workers?

No, it’s much more complicated.

However, I think quality should catch up with the speed. You think improving quality is only a matter of developing skilled workers? No, it’s much more complicated. In the West contractors are privately owned companies who know how important quality is for keeping clients. In China you can hardly find a contractor not somehow backed by the government.

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DING SHIZHAO b. 1940

hearing my detailed answers and seeing that I had relied on opinions from experts their unhappy faces softened and doubt was replaced by appreciation.

DING SHIZHAO b. 1940

Above: still active in retirement building tobacco factories in three provinces

This has some advantages but foreign developers find they cannot always rely on the same level of quality they expect in their own countries.

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nother factor is education. In Germany, all project managers must at least hold a degree in building while in China it’s not unusual to find project managers with a very limited educational background. Having said that, our teaching is still focused too much on theory, which doesn’t suit the highly practical subject of construction management.

In Western universities teachers use real case studies which are more interesting and helpful.

With China’s economy growing stronger, the

CIOB still has a lot of work to do. Professionals who can work in a way accepted in Western countries or take charge of a team with foreigners in it are badly needed.

Though I’m retired, I’m still active in the industry.

The projects I’m working on now include tobacco factories in Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Xiamen. I’m also editing several college textbooks on project management.

Under my influence, my son and daughter both went to Germany to pursue their studies and now live and work there. I don’t have many hobbies, or watch TV often, but I enjoy listening to Chinese opera, especially Beijing Opera.

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Left: Shanghai’s Bocom Financial Towers, which Prof.

Ding helped build

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b. 1940

BAO GUANGJIAN

His family out of favour after 1949, Bao Guangjian learned welding to support himself. By showing flair, reliability and technical acumen he rose to project manager and became highly sought after by developers investing in Shenzhen and Shanghai in the mid 1980s.

Some of the tallest and most famous structures in the world rose under the hand of ‘The Steel King of China’

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❛This time the pressure was even higher.

A Chinese man was to build Asia’s highest building? I became the focus of intense media attention.

was born in Shanghai in 1940. We had a moderate income before 1949, the year the Communist Party won control over mainland China, because my father was a government clerk and my mother was an office worker.

Unfortunately my father’s work in the pre-1949 government brought sufferings to my family. As life became difficult my parents had no money to support my further education in senior high school.

I needed skills for survival so I went to a polytechnic to learn welding.

It was a happy surprise to find that we had to learn not just welding but chemistry and construction materials as well. I devoted myself to study. After my graduation in 1958 I started to work for the China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC). I worked on many projects, leaving my footprints all around China, including Guangdong Province where I settled down to help build the oilproducing city of Maoming.

I was making my mark in the company – I was very good despite my young age. In 1980 I was sent to the Republic of Yemen as a workshop director for a project aided by China. That gave me management experience. It was also my first foreign trip and I began to appreciate how big the world was.

A big turning point in my life came two years after Yemen when I was appointed project manager for the 43-storey Shenzhen Development Center, China’s first super-high steel building. The appointment brought me honour but also huge pressure. At the time a similar project in Shanghai supervised by a Japanese

b. 1940

BAO GUANGJIAN

King of steel

company had been suspended after a mishap threatened to leave the structure permanently skewed.

But the positive side of my personality told me to meet the challenge. The steel components were to be sourced from Japan so I flew there with my team for a one-month training session at the renowned Kawasaki Steel Corporation. Our classes included steel construction and welding and I was deeply impressed by the Japanese meticulousness in management. Here I became aware of the gap between developed countries and us, but I was proud when everyone in our team passed the test, which broke a record in Kawasaki’s training history.

Under the pressure of nationwide attention I successfully completed the project and, more importantly to me, solved the most difficult technical problem – how to weld 130-mm-thick steel plates.

The thickness required absolutely no deviation, making it a difficult job even now. The feat was reported on by the People’s Daily, one of the leading national newspapers.

As well as making me famous the project laid the foundation for my career as a project manager.

During the finishing work in 1988 Shanghai was planning to build the Shanghai International Trade Center, another tall, steel building. The Japanese investors gave the project to our company to ensure that I would be the project manager. This led to a dilemma because I had already been promoted to the post of general manager of CSCEC’s Hong Kong office as a reward for my accomplishment. It was not an exciting job but it was a comfortable one with a big salary. It was really hard to give up but after deliberating for some time my enthusiasm for challenges beat the temptation of the easy life and I decided to go to Shanghai.

With the Shenzhen tower behind me I didn’t encounter many difficulties and had the roof sealed in seven and half months. From there CSCEC sent me to Bangkok to build a 55-story building in 1990.

The second important turning point of my career came in 1993 when a Japanese developer was preparing to build the highest building in Asia at the time, the 384-metre-high Diwang Tower, part of the Shun Hing Square complex in Shenzhen. By then I was pretty well-known among Japanese investors so they appointed me project manager. This time the pressure was even higher. A Chinese man was to build Asia’s highest building? I became the focus of intense media attention, which felt uncomfortable, as

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BAO GUANGJIAN b. 1940

❛I will never forget the day I first experienced actual fear. I was working in the office next to the site when I heard a huge crack.

if everyone was looking at me. But I was confident that it would be just like any other project.

However, things did not go as smoothly as I had expected. I will never forget the day I first experienced actual fear. I was working as usual in the office next to the site when I heard a huge crack. I stood up on reflex. Only something very serious would make a sound like that. I was sweating heavily and even felt dizzy but calmed myself enough to hurry over to investigate.

It was chaos. Workers were running away from the building and everyone was so scared that no one could explain what had happened. The Japanese had

Above: the Shenzhen Development Center, China’s first supertall steel building and the cause of Bao Guangjian’s first taste of fame Right: Mr. Bao on the day he became a CIOB Fellow, pictured with CIOB chief executive Chris Blythe

y fame reached its height with the construction, starting in 2004, of the new headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV). This steel tower didn’t just look weird, it was also very tricky to build.

Helping our company win the job of building it was another interesting experience. I was asked to join our team of experts for an interview with CCTV. They had appointed a foreign expert to question us.

He must have been very experienced because the questions he asked were all about the details of the welding process. I was the only one in the team who could give him answers, which he marked “excellent”.

The CCTV project was covered extensively in construction and architecture media around the world. I was even featured in the UK’s leading industry journal, Building, in 2005. They referred to me as ‘The Steel King of China’.

My experience and fame led to membership of the CIOB even though I don’t speak English.

Through CIOB training I was introduced to some fresh management ideas. Now I’m helping develop members in southern China. I like the membership system because it helps people get in touch with each other, expand their business connections and upgrade themselves. I, for instance, have close ties with some members in Hong Kong. I once arranged for them to visit the new Baiyun Airport in Guangzhou and

sometimes we turn to each other for advice on workrelated problems.

To boost domestic spending the government will focus on infrastructure in the next few years. This could offer chances for foreign companies to enter China’s construction market, especially designers, so attracting talent to compete with foreigners should be a concern for all Chinese companies.

I have experienced first-hand the remarkable development of China’s building industry in the past 20 years. Our people are more sophisticated through working with foreign companies or studying abroad and materials on the market are advanced and

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begun isolating the whole site in case of collapse. I ran up to the floor where the Japanese and some of our workers were gathering and found that the welding of two sides of a pillar had broken apart. I felt immediate relief because I knew it was not as serious as I’d imagined, and indeed it wasn’t even due to the welding but rather to the low-quality concrete which wasn’t curing properly.

I didn’t say a word to the Japanese manager, who was busy writing an urgent report to head office.

Instead I calmed down the workers and made a quick fix plan. By the time instructions came by fax from Tokyo two hours later the problem had been solved. As

BAO GUANGJIAN

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b. 1940

it happened, my plan matched the faxed instructions.

That earned me even more trust from the Japanese.

BAO GUANGJIAN b. 1940

Bao Guangjian led his company’s bid for the job of building the hugely complex China Central Television (CCTV) Tower, which spread his fame beyond China Below: Mr. Bao on site over the years

❛Some may think it’s a pity I’ve never polished my educational background with a degree, but I don’t feel sorry. The focus of my career has been to win projects and complete them successfully.

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plentiful. On the Shenzhen Development Center almost every material had to be imported because we couldn’t find them locally but now we export materials overseas, though quality is sometimes a problem which must be addressed without delay.

Some people may think it’s a pity that I’ve never tried to polish my educational background with a degree. Maybe it’s true. It’s probably the reason why I’m not a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, though I was recommended by my company. But I don’t feel sorry at all because the only focus of my career has been to win projects and complete them successfully.

I must say that my accomplishments couldn’t have been achieved without my wife’s support. She used to be my colleague, manager of the materials department in our company. She never complained much about my frequent business trips and did her best to take care of the family and our three children.

I retired in 2006 but I still do some consulting work, which I really enjoy. I used to love sports, especially football, but now given my age I stick to moderate exercise like walking.

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b. 1943

ZHANG QINGLIN

Below: the CSCEC logo, which he called into being, making his company the first construction firm to develop a ‘brand’ inside China and beyond

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was born in 1943, in Zhaodong City, Heilongjiang Province. My father was a teacher in a private school. As children my brothers and I were treated strictly and we received a good education. We learned a lot from him and we formed good habits from which we benefited throughout our lives.

As a child I was selected to take part in the first ceremony of children’s training held at Harbin children’s park because of my outstanding performance in study and morals. Zhaodong was a small, provincial city. The population now is something like 100,000. With a population of over nine million, Harbin is big, and famous for fashion and ice sculptures. It was my first trip to the outside world. From then on, my only goal was to get to the city. After high school I applied for the urban construction major at Harbin Civil Engineering College. I was determined never to go back to the countryside. Since then, my whole life has revolved around urban building.

I may have been the first to use project management theory in China. I studied the Lubuge hydropower project in the 1980s, China’s first construction project to use a loan from the World Bank. According to the terms of the agreement the project had to go out for international bidding. In 1984, Taisei, a Japanese company, finally won the tender. Its bid was at least 43% lower than any Chinese company. Two years later Taisei completed the project ahead of schedule and the high quality was recognised by experts from China and elsewhere.

I kept asking myself, can’t our workers do their jobs efficiently without the supervision of Western managers?

By chance I attended an advanced training course for young talents in the Party School of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Deep theoretical

❛Overnight CSCEC’s blue logo appeared everywhere in China. The effect was immediate.

study made me start thinking about reforming the industry. This was a big brainstorm for me. So, based on my working experience, I proposed that in a construction company, labour must be identified as part of the means of production because it constitutes the productive forces in a project. This broke with standard theory of the time, which said that the means of production are defined only as the machines and factory buildings – or, for a construction company, equipment such as tower cranes. My ideas grew into an integrated theory and, with help from professors in the Party School of the CPC, gradually improved. New theories such as these increased our efficiency and helped us move from a planned economy.

My second major achievement was to improve the branding of the Chinese construction industry. This may sound like a simple thing but I believe I may have been the first person to bring logos, long used in manufacturing, to construction in China. I was executive vice president of China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) from 1993 and CSCEC’s goal was, and is, to become the most competitive Chinese construction company in the world. For a long time I had been thinking about how to achieve this. Suddenly an idea came to me.

Mercedes-Benz has a logo – the three-pointed star – that is recognisable the world over whether you speak German or not. Why couldn’t we also use a logo to identify ourselves to the world? We made a decision to have an international label so those who could not read Chinese could still recognise our company.

What’s more, CSCEC has many subsidiaries but the logo, which uses the letters “CSCEC”, gives us a single brand for the whole company, which makes us look united and improves our reputation as an entity.

In 2001, under my instructions, CSCEC published its first ‘Visual Identity Standards Manual’. This was the first time we unified our external image and internal quality assurance. I remember how overnight CSCEC’s blue logo appeared everywhere in China.

The effect was immediate. A giant Japanese company contacted me directly and granted us two important projects after they saw our logo. Now, the brands of China’s construction companies make a beautiful vista, even outside China.

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Zhang Qinglin was executive vice president of China’s top contractor and the second Chairman of CIOB China

ZHANG QINGLIN

To have a Japanese company outbid all Chinese firms for the Lubuge power station – and for it to do the job ahead of schedule and so well – made Zhang Qinglin very keen to reform the industry. He was also the first to develop a brand for a construction company that would cross borders

b. 1943

Sign of the times

Jin Weixing made his name delivering projects successfully in the turbulent Cultural Revolution, but his dream was to teach. Forsaking a pay rise, he joined his old university and turned a moribund department into a research centre so robust the central government would call upon it for advice

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was born in September 1944 in Zhouzhi County, Shanxi Province. At that time Zhouzhi was the best place in the whole of Shanxi. It was known as “Golden Zhouzhi” because its nature was unspoilt and water conservation was good. Its poor industry made it an underdeveloped area but it was nevertheless a place where people didn’t need to worry about starvation even during the most difficult times of the 1960s. Zhouzhi has always been a typical agricultural county, and is famous for the Chinese gooseberry, which is sold commercially. But there have been many fundamental changes to housing and transport in Zhouzhi. These days, the average accommodation in the countryside is larger than in the city and the roads have been concreted.

My father is 96 and in such good health that he still farms the fields. My parents have played a key role in my life. Their simple, honest behaviour had a great influence on me. I greatly appreciate what they have done for me. I lived in a poor family in a poor part of China, but they made sacrifices so they could afford to pay my school fees. It was not easy. I will never forget the hardship. Without their support, I would never have been successful.

At middle school I was a good student. I got high grades and gathered lots of experience of leadership in the Student Union. Most young students, including me, longed to attend military school. No tuition fees were required and I was recommended for admission.

But I wasn’t allowed to enter because of my poor background in the political class of yeoman.

Instead, it was arranged for me to study at the Xi’an University of Metallurgy and Architecture, which is now Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology. I majored in construction management and economics even though it wasn’t my first choice.

As I got to know more about it I fell in love with the subject and have never done anything else. My greatest influences were my college teachers. The most important was my first instructor, Mr Li Fengyin, who later became the secretary of the Party committee at the university. Next most important was my second instructor, Mr. Wang Songqing, who

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JIN WEIXING b. 1944

Better late than never

treated me like his own son and helped in both my career development and personal life. Apart from them, I still remember many other teachers, from primary school through to university. They deserve great respect as role models and I still remember their wise words.

I graduated in 1969 and went to work for the next 11 years in the construction headquarters at Chongqing 112 Plant, which is now called the Southwestern Aluminium Fabrication Plant. There I was involved with a host of projects including schools, hospitals, clubs, kindergartens, even roads and railways. Doing so many different jobs made me appreciate the wide range of knowledge covered at university. The course also taught social adaptability, and I felt that my fellow students and I were able to do a better job than those who knew only about technique. That’s really the big advantage of our major and the reason I eventually went back to Xi’an to teach, which I still do.

Those 11 years in Sichuan Province were significant. I carried out construction work but also managed a client’s company. I was highly regarded because I was able to deliver projects well during the

Jin Weixing, dean then professor at Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology

❛In 10 years I completed three nationallyfunded research projects, something nobody had done before.

Cultural Revolution, a time of great political unrest.

They told me I had made a great contribution to the organisation and were reluctant to let me go back to Xi’an University to teach and even promised a salary rise if I stayed. (We worked for the country’s benefit so salaries were low.) But I turned down the offer because I really wanted a career in education and also because it allowed me to move a little closer to my family. It was the right decision. I finally began to do what I enjoyed most. Researching and teaching was

I

’m proud of how I developed my subject here at Xi’an University, first as teacher, later as dean and finally as professor. When I took on the role of department head there were no research programmes underway because there was no budget for it. This major effectively meant nothing in our school. I changed all that. Under my leadership, we were awarded money from both national and provincial funds. It meant we could actually carry out research projects. A short time later our department had the largest number of majors in the New Major Contents put forward by the National Ministry of Education.

The subject continues to grow. These days we have the largest number of specialisations leading to Masters’ degrees in the whole field of Management Science and Engineering. We are also one of only four

departments at our university with specialisms leading to PhDs. We are in the top three for numbers of undergraduates and postgraduates. We have definitely made great progress.

While I was dean I found myself too busy to do much research, and research and teaching was what I wanted to focus on. So, before the end of term, I resigned to become a full-time professor. This ushered in a period of significant personal academic achievement, and further raised the prominence of the major. In 10 years I completed three nationallyfunded research projects, something nobody had done before. These were major works. The first was about relevant construction policy for the 21st Century, the second on tracing the growth and development of the industry and the third was on scoping the potential capability of the industry. The third one hit the big time, so to speak. The National Social Science Planning Office deemed it so

❛My department had not admitted any students during the Cultural Revolution so there were no undergraduates to teach.

Left: Employees of the Shin Chiao Hotel, Beijing, respond to Mao’s call for increased steel production by building rudimentary smelters during the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in 1958 Right: Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. The poster, depicting two workers and a soldier, reads: ‘Peasants and soldiers are the principal force in the fight against Lin Biao and Confucius’

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JIN WEIXING b. 1944

the fulfilment of my dream.

Because my department had not admitted any students during the Cultural Revolution – between 1965 and 1981, in fact – there were no undergraduates to teach when I arrived, so we started offering training courses for managers of enterprises.

I played a key role in that training. Many of my students did well in national examinations and I won recognition from the university and in the community at large.

JIN WEIXING b. 1944

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important that they sent a copy to all government leaders, instructing them to refer to it when making decisions. It was categorised as ‘confidential’ and not allowed to be publicised. For my project to be used as a reference for China’s decision-makers was one of my career highs. The report was later sent to the Ministry of Construction, where they also took it very seriously. They accepted it without discussion – except on how to carry out my recommendations.

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joined the CIOB formally just two years ago and I regret not having made a big enough contribution to it. CIOB definitely influenced me. For example, in 1998, CIOB gave us the chance to learn about construction management at some British universities. This helped me to prepare lesson plans and reform some of our educational methods.

It is hard to assess the status of the CIOB in China. I reckon the first thing the CIOB needs to do

is enhance the level of public recognition of its certification. As yet, it does not have the recognition it deserves. Once that problem is solved there will be fewer restrictions on its progress and it will have more influence.

The changes in construction since I started are amazing. Years ago, our technical knowledge lagged behind other countries and there was not much mechanisation. Construction was the most back-

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❛A day without thinking would make me feel vacuous.

JIN WEIXING b. 1944

breaking industry and the least respected, comprised mostly of handcraft and hard physical labour.

Workers used basic concrete mixers and barrows to transport materials. Now it’s highly technical and mechanised: pumps push concrete hundreds of metres into the air. Though people still work hard, they are more efficient and their jobs are relatively stable. There are far more professional people as well.

Looking forward to the next 20 years, the major technical challenge is to develop new materials and machines. Currently, most new Chinese buildings are made of reinforced concrete. New materials will allow us to build different types of structures and develop better techniques. Innovation is the only way for China to meet the huge challenge and opportunity of sustainable construction. The UK has gone a long way in this area and we should learn from the variety of green and sustainable buildings there. We have begun to pay more attention, which is a good thing. I attended a check-up meeting on eco-construction very recently. Sustainable construction will be a future trend.

They say you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and I have had to make some sacrifices to pursue my career. One example has been, on occasion, family life. I went to Japan in 1986 to receive extra training and was there for over a year. It was hard because I left behind a very young child and, even worse, a wife who had just had an operation. It was a lot to sacrifice for my career but the training in Japan taught me a lot.

I am a little too old to talk about ambition. I am sixty-five and it will soon be time for me to retire as a PhD supervisor. I have only a year left here but I still want to do many things. The first is to help my students to win National Natural Science Foundation of China projects. Up to now, only one has got a National Youth Science Funds project. Then I need to complete my tuition of my latest doctoral students.

Finally, I want to ensure there is a smooth handover of all the subject development duties which I have taken charge of for so many years. I applied to set up the Shanxi Construction Management and Economics Research Centre at our school in 2004. It has been approved. Though I will retire soon, I hope my successors will do their best to continue my work.

As for hobbies, I am neither good at singing nor dancing. I don’t like playing cards either. I tend to spend my spare time reading books and watching TV, but I only watch certain programmes. News is my first choice and the PHTV is my favourite channel. I also watch sports, although I won’t watch the Chinese football team, and I enjoy TV series based on the novels of Jin Yong, a popular Chinese writer. If asked what I like most of all, however, I would have to say “thinking”. That is also what I do most frequently. A day without thinking would make me feel vacuous.

The race to develop in China has sometimes put its older buildings in the paths of the bulldozer and wrecking ball. Moving to government gave He Zhiya the chance to carve a niche for himself as a champion of this rich and delicate heritage

who completed higher education so they expected even more of me. Although my parents were poor because they had so many children, they taught us strength of character and we developed pleasant personalities.

I graduated from high school in 1966 and had begun preparing for the university entrance exam when the Cultural Revolution started. I had to go to the countryside to do farm work, and lived in a village for three years. It was a chance to learn about China’s countryside and peasant life. I did everything on the farm – seeding, threshing, feeding cows and pigs and harvesting. The hard physical labour and simplicity of the life had a great healing effect on my mind and body.

In 1972 I returned to Chongqing and joined the Chongqing Steel Company. I still wanted to go to university, however, and in 1978 I took the university entrance exam and enrolled at the Chongqing Construction Institute. This felt like an achievement because it was not easy to get in: only one applicant in 26 was accepted. I studied hard and after

I

was born in Sichuan province. In my early years my father was a clerk at Jikang Bank, headquartered in Ya’an. After 1949 he worked for the Bank of Construction. My mother was born into a wellknown family in Fengjie, one of the counties of Chongqing. Her father was a doctor. He loved my mother very much and gave her the best education available, at Huiwen High School in Nanjing, famous throughout China. She excelled at handwriting and exhibited her excellent paintings in the local town.

Maybe I get my love of painting from her. When the Second World War broke out she returned to Fengjie to be a primary school teacher. That’s when I was born. My parents were strict but they wanted us to make the most of our gifts and to make a major contribution to China. For reasons I cannot remember, I was the only one of their eight children

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HE ZHIYA b. 1947

Making way for the old

❛I took note of the hall while vice-mayor and began several years of preparations before the project even had official approval. graduating I could have gone to work in another city or for another company but I chose to go back to Chongqing Steel Company because I loved the work there and because the company had paid me a salary throughout my studies. On my return I became the key technologist on the redesigns of our rolling mills.

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n 1983 the company bought a calculator for more than 1,000 yuan. It was considered a vital piece of equipment and was certainly an advance on using a

He Zhiya, veteran of urban planning and regeneration, latterly Vice General Secretary of Chongqing Municipal Government

HE ZHIYA b. 1947

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He Zhiya’s first successful project, the pedestrianised Jiefangbei Street, Chongqing, which officials came from cities far and wide to see

❛My role was to find a way of uniting the Western and Chinese ways of working, which wasn’t easy.

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Another important project was Chaotianmen Square, built in 1998. Chaotianmen is a port where the Yangtze and Jialing rivers meet. The cost was about 100 million yuan and it was an important symbol of Chongqing’s progress. I was the general project manager. The municipal government told us to complete the project in one year, which meant finishing in March 1998, just before April and May flood season on the Yangtze. The dangers were obvious but under my leadership the team made strenuous

HE ZHIYA b. 1947

slide rule. Such a small calculator would cost only tens of yuan today.

I learned a lot during this period. Later I improved my management skills when I became director of the factory’s affairs office and chairman of the union. In October 1986 I moved from industry to government, having been appointed vice-director of Yuzhong District’s construction commission. I’ve worked in government ever since and although I’ve changed jobs many times I never left construction, city planning and construction management. In 2002 I was promoted to Vice General Secretary of Chongqing Municipal Government. Also, since June 2006 I’ve been board chairman of Chongqing Yufu Assets Management Company.

Looking back, I feel I made all the right choices, from going back to the factory after graduation to entering government. My wife supported me all the way. Because I stayed in one industry I was able to become an expert in a subject that always inspired me.

My first successful project was the Jiefangbei Pedestrian Street in 1997, after the central government had approved Chongqing’s status as a city. I was the vice-mayor of Yuzhong District at the time and we wanted a project to lift the confidence and morale of the people of Chongqing. They made me general project manager and I went to the site every day for discussions with designers, contractors and supervisors. I put all my efforts into the design, landscaping, ductwork, water and electricity, brickwork and surroundings. When we paved the street I checked the quality of more than 100,000 granite bricks. It took five months to build and cost only 13 million yuan but on the day the street opened delegates came from cities all over China to learn how to ‘pedestrianise’ a street, and it’s still one of the best and most famous pedestrian streets in China.

HE ZHIYA b. 1947

❛I directed the project closely, going to Beijing to study common elements in the Forbidden City.

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efforts to finish on time. I took part in detailed design and construction work and together we met the deadline. President Jiang Zemin came to name the square and there was a great party for Chongqing’s people at the opening ceremony. The square won the golden cup award for the National Public Facility Project. After this I managed other important public projects, such as Haochijie Street, the Linjiangmen intersection rebuild, Shahu Park, Huguang Guild Hall, the People’s Great Hall and the former residence of Yang Shangkun, President of China between 1988 and 1993. All were high-quality buildings.

Of all the projects I managed the most important was the renovation of Huguang Guild Hall when I was the deputy-secretary of Chongqing municipal government. During the Qing dynasty the rulers ordered people living in the Hu and Guang districts

to move to the depopulated Sichuan province to cultivate the fertile land there and Chongqing became an immigrant city because of its convenient location on the banks of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers. Many immigrant businessmen set up guilds, the biggest of which is Huguang Guild. A key symbol of Chongqing’s history and culture, the Huguang Guild Hall is a glorious complex of buildings dating back to 1759, consisting of multiple temples, halls and towers built over time and decorated with ornate carvings.

I first began to take note of the hall while vicemayor of Yuzhong and in 1998, before the project even had official approval, I began several years of preparatory work. Construction started in December 2003 and was completed in September 2005. We used complex technology to renovate the outside of buildings and clean bricks, tiles and stone. There was

HE ZHIYA b. 1947

A Above left: Peking Opera staged at the Huguang Guild Hall, restored by He Zhiya Above right: Mr. He travels extensively photographing China’s built heritage Right: giving a public tour of a renovation project

fterward I was regarded as an expert in this field and went on to other renovation projects, like the People’s Great Hall. This was especially challenging because we had to replace the wooden structure and all the coloured glazing. We began in July 2007 and finished in May 2008. I directed the project closely, going to Beijing to study common

elements in the Forbidden City, and choosing all the glazed tiles, for which I visited craftsmen in Mentougou.

In the next few years I hope to build a new industrial museum inside the factory of my old employer, the Chongqing Steel Company, which is scheduled to relocate out of the city. This museum will show the history of industry in Chongqing. If the municipal government supports my plan it will be ready in four or five years.

Looking more widely, the Chinese construction industry is forming partnerships with foreign companies and taking note of new design concepts and methods, even if they filter down slowly into actual practice. CIOB developed fast in China and has become a major vehicle for introducing more advanced techniques, materials and management skills. With the pace of development over the past 30 years there has had to be openness to new ideas.

For myself in the next 20 years I’d like to do a field study on Chongqing’s civilian buildings from the Qing Dynasty, with the aim of calling attention to them and securing greater protection for them.

Actually I’ve already begun. If I can I would like to renovate some of them and write a couple of books about it.

When I get free time my hobby is to photograph historic buildings in old towns, and modern buildings as well. It is not just about taking pictures. I am studying the history and culture of Chongqing with the combined insights of an historian, architect and photographer.

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a lot of international involvement. The World Bank contributed US$400,000 and an Italian company, ARP, did consultancy work on the technical aspects.

As a Western company they worked differently to Chinese companies. In fact my role was to find a way of uniting the Western and Chinese ways of working, which wasn’t easy. Their approach to materials, design, even renovation technique was different.

However, I learned a lot and wrote a book to record the whole process.

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b. 1950

SUN JINKE

SUN JINKE

How Sun rose

was born in 1950 in Shanghai. My father was a steel worker and my mother a tailor. My normal education was interrupted in 1966 by the Cultural Revolution. When I was 18 I was assigned to work in Shanghai No. 7 Construction Company, a subsidiary of Shanghai Construction Group (SCG), and my life as a worker started.

It was certainly not an interesting job. Furthermore, I was hardly suited to the heavy manual labour because I had kidney disease at the time. Nevertheless, I did my best and before long I became a very skilled worker and was appointed team leader and Maoism propagandist, then an honour for a youth.

Despite the Cultural Revolution I never gave up learning. I concentrated my time and energy on two things, work and study. The biggest turning point in my life came after President Nixon’s visit in 1972. As US relations improved, the government decided to train more English translators. Out of 80,000 staff in the whole group, six were picked to learn English full-time and the lucky arrow hit me.

After studying general-purpose English I went to the renowned East China Architectural Design Institute and the Shanghai Research Institute of Building Sciences (SRIBS) to learn technical English.

Meanwhile I was working as an intern translator in

❛Out of 80,000 staff in the whole group, six were picked to learn English full-time and the lucky arrow hit me.

both institutes. My English teacher, an old gentleman with a PhD from London University, advised me to study civil and industrial construction, so I enrolled at Tongji University and the Shanghai Adult Civil Engineering College. Those five years of professional study would prove essential to my career.

A golden opportunity came in 1985 when I was sent by the China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) to Baghdad to work for a project manager as translator and assistant. I got to participate in things like overseas procurement and negotiations, which entailed travel to countries like France and Germany. This showed me how huge the gap was between China and Western countries in the management side of construction. Chinese companies were suffering significant losses on overseas projects because of this gap.

The Iraq experience aroused my interest in management. After I came back to China in 1988 I was appointed to take charge of foreign affairs in SRIBS and that’s how I heard about the CIOB. It immediately caught my attention. Here was a global, professional organisation specialising in the management of construction – I didn’t hesitate to apply for the courses leading to membership. It was hard work and I was by then 40 years old – not exactly the energetic young student – but I saw very clearly what it would mean for my career.

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made the right choice. After four years’ hard study, I became one of the best students in the class and was sent to the UK for 14 months to be an intern with Tarmac Professional Services, one of the top consultants there. I was really lucky because I had the chance to take part in some great projects, such as renovating the Parliament Buildings and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The efficiency these people showed was impressive. The daily meetings

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b. 1950

Starting out as a manual labourer physically unsuited to the hard work because of an illness, Sun Jinke ended up leading some of Shanghai’s most iconic projects. He credits hard work and tireless study – plus some extremely good luck

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here is still a huge need for the CIOB’s internationally-focused qualification here, though it’s different from what it was 20 years ago. China’s fast growing building industry will surely attract more foreign companies, such as design houses and consultancies, and to train enough professionals to work productively with these foreigners presents a huge task. Also, more Chinese construction companies will explore overseas markets in the next 20 years as the domestic market begins to shrink.

I love the building industry and always enjoy the sense of accomplishment my work brings.

Looking back I can’t help feeling extremely lucky.

Chances are, without all the opportunities that came my way I’d be one of the many laid-off construction workers you see nowadays. I am grateful to SRIBS for giving me this platform and I’d never consider leaving even if “better” options presented themselves.

But I sometimes feel sorry that I’ve given my family so little time and care. I married in 1979 and have a son who is not in the building industry, a pity for me because I think if I had had enough time to influence him he could have followed in my footsteps. In my spare time, if I had any, I would participate in swimming and table tennis, both of which I am fairly good at.

Above: Pudong International Airport, built under the leadership of Sun Jinke, Chairman of Jianke Project Management

❛Here was a global, professional organisation specialising in the management of construction – I didn’t hesitate to apply.

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SUN JINKE b. 1950

were surprisingly short and to the point.

I returned in 1995 and became the first mainland Chinese member of CIOB to complete all its courses.

After that my career path was quite smooth. That year I was appointed general manager of Shanghai Jianke Project Management (JKPM), a subsidiary of SRIBS. Shanghai was developing fast and I took charge of several big construction projects such as the terminal buildings at both Pudong International and Shanghai Hongqiao airports, the Westin Bund Center and the high-speed maglev railway, all of which were awarded prizes by the government.

Becoming a CIOB member was a milestone in my career.

Now as chairman of JKPM I have more than 2,000 people working under me. Like all company leaders I’m afraid of losing talented people. Based upon my UK experience I introduced a bonus incentive at JKPM to keep our talent and I’m glad to say it works very well.

By sharing its valuable expertise in management over the past 20 years the CIOB has helped push the progress of China’s building industry. As far as I’m aware all my classmates in CIOB courses now are leaders in construction companies or related industries.

Our industry does not lack skilled workers or advanced technology. Chinese curtain wall systems for instance are prized in the Middle East because of their quality and price, but we do have problems in the commercial aspects of development. Before building a hotel, for example, there has to be meticulous calculations about returns based on nearby amenities, payroll, peak and off-peak occupancy forecasts, floating exchange rates, projected land values, and more. But most Chinese developers are still not familiar with the whole process and it speaks volumes for the importance of CIOB. There is no doubt that China’s building industry will continue to expand despite difficulties in the global economy. Real estate development may cool down but infrastructure construction is still heating up. JKPM has, for instance, been invited to participate in the rebuilding of Dujiangyan, one of the areas worst hit by the earthquake of May 2008.

We also have a string of programmes including courthouses and other public buildings. In fact, in 2008 our work increased by 50 percent from 2007 and we had to recruit 20 new graduates with Master’s degrees to handle the additional work.

After the Cultural Revolution Zhang Feng returned from the remote village he was posted to and grasped every opportunity to acquire world-class expertise, which placed him increasingly at the centre of Chongqing’s explosive development

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was born on August 19, 1955 in Chongqing, and now I am deputy general manager of Chongqing Land Development Group. In the past 30 years Chongqing has changed a lot. Its economy and society made rapid strides especially after central government promoted its status from sub-provincial city to provincial municipality in 1997.

❛When I started we had no way of learning about more advanced technologies abroad. The increase in international communication has taught us many new things.

My family was an ordinary one and my parents didn’t have any specific ambitions for me. When I graduated from high school the Cultural Revolution was in full swing and I had to go to the countryside and teach at a primary school in a remote village at Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province. It was a tough time but it strengthened my character. I didn’t want to stay there forever so I took the university entrance examination and enrolled at Chongqing Construction University, majoring in civil engineering. Many people have helped me in my career and I am grateful to them. For example my tutor Liu Faqi (page 28) helped me to grasp many of the new techniques.

After graduation I spent a year working in the field of building design. Then, from July 1981 to November 1990, I worked for the Chongqing House Building Company. I was mainly responsible for project and technique management. From 1990 to 1994 I worked for the Chongqing Construction Commission as deputy director in the department of

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ZHANG FENG b. 1955

Further up, further in

085 b. 1955

ZHANG FENG

ZHANG FENG b. 1955

❛My attitudes have changed.

I’ve learned that when I’m having fun I do my best work.

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construction supervision. Then I went to the Chongqing Engineering Construction Supervision Company to work as general manager until 1997.

From 1997 to 2000 I was the deputy director at the Chongqing Construction Cost Station, mainly in charge of checking costs and rationing supplies. In 1998 I moved to Chongqing Northern New City Development Office to be the director of the engineering department, responsible for managing the whole urban construction. In 2000, Chongqing City Construction Development Company was set up and I was made general manager. The company is mainly focused on government projects.

When I look back at the biggest turning points in my career, the first was when I moved to the Chongqing Construction Commission to do management work in 1990. The second major step was when I passed the qualifying examinations to become a Registered Construction Supervision

Engineer. I was one of the first to get this qualification in China and it was tough. A third major turning point was when I went back to university to study again and got a Master’s degree in project management from Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

I studied advanced project management methods used for projects on the international market. These have continued to prove very helpful to me.

One of the most important projects in my career was Jiefangbei Trade Centre, which became a symbol of Chongqing’s growth. In 1997, the central government decided to merge the city with three neighbouring districts to create the Chongqing Municipality, containing more than thirty million people in forty-three former counties. This promotion in status was part of central government’s plan to develop its vast western regions.

Because Jiefangbei was right at the heart of the city, the site of the monument to the People’s

ZHANG FENG b. 1955

important project for the local government. It was built for the 13th Asia Cup, had a capacity of 60,000 fans and a host of facilities. It took one and a half years to complete and became a symbol of the excellence of Chongqing public projects because of its short completion time, high-quality build and tight budget. We selected the best equipment in the world and employed advanced methods for scheduling. For example, we bought German ventilators and made sure they arrived just in time for installation, which saved time.

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IOB provides a platform for members to communicate with experts and professionals worldwide. We can learn a lot from each other. We hope CIOB will focus its attention on China even more because it is one of the biggest and fastest-growing markets in the world. We need more members to promote the CIOB and the construction industry here.

Changes can be seen everywhere in China. In construction the biggest changes have been in the development of technology and management techniques. When I started we had no way of learning about more advanced technologies abroad.

The increase in international communication has taught us many new things and the quality of our work has improved immensely as a result.

My attitudes have changed. When I engage with a project my first thought now is to enjoy myself. I’ve learned that when I’m having fun I do my best work.

I used to focus on build quality or timescales or budgets, but now I look at the whole process.

As for hobbies, I like the arts and photography.

When I travel I take many pictures. I hope I can get better at photography and generally enjoy my life.

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Zhang Feng’s projects include, clockwise from top: Chongqing’s new Jiefangbei commercial district, the Three Gorges Museum and the Chongqing Olympic Central Stadium

Liberation, it was considered one of the government’s most important developments. It consisted of a broad pedestrianised square surrounded by modern shops and malls. I was the project manager and oversaw a group of young workers. When we ran into technical difficulties our elder colleagues, whom we called “tutors”, would tell us how to track down relevant documents from overseas projects. We learned a lot from original documents in English about new construction methods. I worked very hard with my colleagues on that project.

In 2000 I helped set up Chongqing City Construction Development Company, which has developed into a project management company focusing on big public projects in Chongqing. The most important ones have been the Olympic Central Stadium and the China Three Gorges Museum, which has been the biggest public project since 1997.

We began the museum in October 2002 and the design work took one and a half years. When the primary design was finished we invited famous experts in heritage protection and museum design to a workshop where we had in-depth discussions about the proposals. They offered suggestions about how we should make adjustments to our primary design and modify our budgets. Because I like the arts, I took great pleasure in studying the designs and entering into discussions with the designers. I even sought inspiration by reading about the history of Chongqing. The designers accepted my suggestions.

The total budget was 0.65 billion yuan, although we used the best material and construction methods. We controlled the cost using scientific procedures and advanced management skills.

Chongqing Olympic Central Stadium was another

Forced to start her career as a collective farm labourer, Li Shirong persevered to become a distinguished professor, bringing on a new generation of leaders badly needed amid China’s rapid development. She sacrificed family life to study overseas and then applied her hard-won knowledge to the modernisation of one of the world’s largest cities. Now she is a trade emissary for Chongqing and in 2009 became the first female, and first non-British, President of the CIOB

t an early age I learned that I could rely only on myself to get ahead. I was born in the town of Ya’an in Sichuan province in 1957. My mother was a primary school teacher and my father a civil engineer, which was the main reason I chose construction as a career.

I attended high school during the latter years of the Cultural Revolution, when there was a lot of hostility directed at families perceived to be from the pre-revolutionary upper classes. It was hard for my father, a professional from a family of former landlords. Traditionally one’s family contributes to securing one’s advancement but my father told me he couldn’t help because of his background. This is the reason I always worked hard, even in primary school.

He said if you want success you have to go your own way without family support.

I graduated in 1976 but could not go to university.

I had to leave my family and work on a collective farm. So at 18 I learned the hard life of an agricultural labourer, working long hours and sharing a room with two other girls. It was a wheat farm on the banks of a river and I had to carry fertile mud from the mountains to mix into the sandy soil. I got very strong. I could carry 90 kilograms, and not just on flat ground but up and down steep hills.

❛At an early age I learned that I could rely only on myself to get ahead.

I applied myself vigorously. My main ambition was to return to the city one day to do any kind of work. We were allowed to go home for weekends but although home was only an hour and a half away by bus I worked 340 days that year. I don’t look back on that time with bitterness. It was, and would still be today, a valuable experience and a lesson in overcoming difficulty.

In 1977 a new policy was formulated in China that provided people with equal opportunities for higher education. Young people were now encouraged to take exams to go to university. I was excited. I had to start preparing but I was not permitted to leave the farm because it was a busy season in the countryside.

My only choice was to study during the night, which I did with one of my room mates who had the same ambition. We studied quietly, using a torch so we didn’t disturb our other room mate.

There was a ten-year backlog so competition for university places was fierce, but I passed the exam and enrolled in the civil engineering programme at Chongqing Jianzhu University, a constructionoriented university which later merged with Chongqing University in 2000. I began my studies in January 1978. I was proud to be in the first cohort to enter university by taking examinations since the Cultural Revolution began in 1966.

I graduated with a BSc in 1982 and was selected to be a teacher in the civil engineering department, where I met and married my husband, Zhang Siping.

At that time Deng’s economic reforms were underway and more and more people were studying abroad.

That became my dream. This fascination with the

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b. 1957

LI SHIRONG

First lady

LI SHIRONG b. 1957

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wider world also drew me to Chongqing’s Master’s programme in Construction Management in 1984. It had been set up only in 1980. It was an exciting time.

Civil engineering had been around for a long time but this was new. During that time the president of the university, Prof Lu Zhongzheng set up links with Reading University in the UK which meant we had opportunities to read foreign books in this field.

1987 saw me complete my MSc and for the next five years I taught, and studied English at the same time. I was also appointed to sit on the Ministry of Construction’s national steering committee for construction management education. It was a hot topic. China may have been moving away from a planned economy but most construction projects were still managed the old way, by the remote command of engineering technicians, with static

hierarchies and a strictly regulated flow of information. We really lacked the entrepreneurial instincts for tendering, contract administration, risk management, innovation, value engineering and budget control that you need for construction in an increasingly competitive market.

An opportunity appeared in 1987 to study at Reading, which was to me like a beacon of the ideas I knew we needed to explore. I wanted to do a PhD there but I was pregnant with my daughter and couldn’t go. I kept on teaching and researching and was promoted to associate professor. Then in 1993 I won a scholarship for a year’s study at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. It wasn’t Reading but it was a genuine taste of the outside world and I went eagerly.

However, it was not a happy year. I was convinced

Above: A worker on a farming commune in China, 1978. After high school the young Li Shirong believed her life would be spent doing work like this

that forging links overseas was the best route forward but in some ways I had bitten off more than I could chew. I was isolated in a foreign culture, confused by another language, and I missed my family terribly.

It was during this time that I first made contact with the CIOB. I had heard about the Institute because of the link between my faculty and Reading University and I wanted to become a member because it was an internationally-recognised qualification. I wrote a letter in 1994 inquiring about membership. About a month went by and I didn’t hear anything. Later I would learn that the director of education at the time, Michael Brown, wasn’t sure how to respond. I waited and waited. Finally I sent another letter saying I still wanted to become a CIOB member and I mentioned my position on a steering committee for higher education in construction appointed by the Chinese Ministry of Construction.

That got them interested!

Right away they arranged for me to go through the application process and later to attend a professional interview before a panel at Reading University consisting of professors Roger Flanagan and Peter Lansley, and Michael Brown. It became clear to everybody that I was more than qualified to be a member. Of course I was proud. I was to become only the third mainland Chinese member of the CIOB and it was exciting to be at Reading, about which I’d heard so much.

What happened next, however, took me completely by surprise. The CIOB had won a UKgovernment contract to undertake a comprehensive study comparing the British and Chinese construction industries. The Institute contacted Reading University, and Prof. Flanagan suggested that I could do this study, which would provide funding for the first year of a PhD there at Reading.”

Wonderful news, or so one would think. In fact, however, I was thrown into turmoil. The reason was that I had also had an offer from Nottingham Trent University for a three-year, fully-sponsored PhD. I had also been offered a consultancy position in the Netherlands – a six month contract. The Reading offer was conditional on finding sponsorship year by year, and depended on my performance. Reading had an impressive reputation for offering an international perspective, but it seemed risky.

LI SHIRONG

e are warned to beware lest we get what we wish for. In February 1995 I began the work of completing the government’s research project and completing my PhD, all of which had to be done in three years. It was a very difficult period. On top of the financial worries and the intense pressure of the work, I had to come to grips with unfamiliar research methods in a language that was still new.

People wondered why I was putting myself through this. My career was secure: I was already an associate professor at Chongqing and later in 1995 I was promoted to full professor.

Plus, although I could return to China for the occasional brief visit, I was haunted by the fact that my daughter was growing up without me, though she was well looked-after by my husband and my mother-in-law. She had been five when I left for Holland and by the time I finished my PhD she would be 10. My friends were telling me I was not a good mother or a good wife. But I had my principles.

How many people in China had this chance during that time? One in a thousand? One in ten thousand?

Taken as a whole, it would be a short period in my life. I would overcome this difficulty.

But stress took its toll. I developed tinnitus, a maddening ringing in my ears. I went to the hospital every two weeks but no treatment worked. Silence

b. 1957

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❛I could carry 90 kilograms, not just on flat ground but up and down steep hills.

I had to make a decision without help from family and friends. It was so hard. I was crying. In the end though, I cast my lot with Reading.

B

y 2003 I had spent 21 years in academia, not only teaching but also researching and writing.

I’ve published more than 170 papers and 26 books in China and abroad on sustainable urbanisation, the government’s role in construction, urban planning, private finance, industrialised building systems, the industry in transition and much more. I never imagined I’d do anything else. But that year the Chongqing municipal government decided to tap into the intellectual capabilities of the nearby universities and launched a recruitment drive among university staff. I was asked to become a vice mayor of the Shapingba District of Chongqing, responsible for urban development and construction.

Overnight I was transformed from a career academic into a senior civic administrator!

Chongqing is an important city. In 1997 the central government decided to promote its status from a provincial city of Sichuan Province into a provincial municipality on a par with Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin. It merged with three other districts to create a total area of 82,000 square kilometres containing over 40 districts and counties, with a population now of 12 million urban and 20 million rural residents.

One of my jobs was to lead the team at my district in planning and delivering a whole new university town in Shapingba. The scale of this

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made it worse so that while I needed to concentrate intensely I couldn’t bear to be in a room without the television on or at least a window open to let in traffic noise.

In 1996 I wanted to quit and go home. But Prof.

Roger Flanagan was supervising my PhD and he urged me to stay and finish it. He told me that what I was doing was very important for my future and that if I gave up I would regret it. In China one’s teacher is afforded nearly as much respect as one’s parent so I couldn’t easily refuse his request. I had to draw on the same resources that were first tested as an 18-year-old separated from home and made to haul 90-kg baskets of mud out of the hills. I so appreciate his encouragement during that time and I have since seen that he was right.

During this time I was also helping the CIOB enrich its contact with the Ministry of Construction by leading delegations from China, making introductions and translating. This led to a greater understanding and interest on the part of the Ministry in the CIOB qualification.

A happy time came in March 1998. By then I had completed the government-sponsored study, which became a book, and I was ready to submit my PhD thesis. After, I hurried home to see my family and take some time off before resuming my duties at Chongqing University. My tinnitus disappeared.

project would amaze anyone. In 2003 we began urban planning. In 2004 we started relocating farmers from a 30-sq-km tract of farmland and putting infrastructure in place. By the end of 2005 we had three separate universities operating with a total of 12,000 students enrolled. By the end of 2006 we had completed six universities and 40,000 students were attending. By October 2008 there were 10 universities and 80,000 students. Altogether there will be 15 universities in this new ‘University Town’.

As vice mayor of the district I was able to push for a key improvement in the development process: urban planning. Each year 400,000 people are moving off their farms, creating huge pressure on urban areas in Chongqing, and yet the district didn’t pay much

❛My friends were telling me I was not a good mother or a good wife. attention to planning strategy and spent little money on it. I put a lot of energy into changing this. I managed to get the district to raise its planning budget for Shapingba to ten million yuan per year, a big improvement. By creating satellite cities and towns we prevent everyone converging on the centre.

The central government has made Chongqing a pilot zone to test ways of maintaining harmony amid rapid urbanisation.

Bureaucrats are rarely expert construction project managers and yet in Shapinba we had many large public projects underway in addition to the University Town. I had researched public sector project management in other countries extensively, and I was worried about our ability to deliver this vast volume of work. I was hearing stories about bickering and money and time being wasted. So,

Top: Chongqing’s urban explosion. Each year 400,000 people move off their farms to the city Right: Main square, Chongqing. Foreign investment into the municipality grew by 151% in 2008 alone

LI SHIRONG b. 1957

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drawing on examples from Singapore and Hong Kong, I proposed the setting up of a Public Works Bureau – a roving, multidisciplinary team of construction experts whose remit was to advise on all aspects of procurement and delivery. I was so happy when my boss threw his support behind my proposal.

This bureau has played an important role in many key projects.

We should be proud of the improvements we’ve made to the industry in China. Pause for a moment and think about it: all the policies and regulations you see are new in the past 30 years – we’ve developed this from nothing.

I

n 2007 my role in the Chongqing government changed in an exciting way. For 30 years China has been ramping up the level of business it does with the rest of the world. Investment first flowed into coastal areas like Shenzhen and Shanghai and then moved inland to Beijing and some of the bigger cities in the south east, but 80% of the country’s land mass remains relatively unexplored by global and Chinese entrepreneurs. That is why Chongqing is so important. Situated right in the middle of the country on the Yangtze and Jialing rivers, it’s seen as the gateway to western China and is pivotal to the government’s plans to develop the vast interior.

Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong.

We’ve had excellent results. 2006 saw foreign direct investment in Chongqing grow 35% on the previous year. In 2007 it grew 55%. In 2008 it topped 151%, the highest in our history.

Ford is here. The financial services sector is growing, with new branches opened recently by HSBC and Standard Chartered. Other companies with a growing presence include Suzuki, Honda, Yamaha, Pepsi-Cola, British Petroleum, ABB, Phillips and Siemens.

And we’re ‘going green’. In 2008 the UK’s Secretary of State for Business came to sign a Memorandum of Understanding giving Chongqing pilot status as a “sustainable city”, which meant it would offer incentives for UK companies wanting to sell innovative products and services with a green edge, from light-emitting diodes to urban drainage systems. I came up with the idea and lobbied both sides to come together.

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Since returning to China in 1998 I’ve maintained many links overseas through my academic work and also as a representative of the CIOB. The Mayor of Chongqing, several tiers of seniority above, approached me and said that my command of English and my familiarity with foreign customs and processes could fill a gap in the municipality’s interface with the potential foreign investment community. Keen to put my skills to use, I joined the Chongqing Foreign Trade and Economic Relations Commission, leading a group of four divisions whose job is to attract inward investment. Target countries and regions include North America, Europe, South

t is a great honour to be President of the CIOB in the year it celebrates its 175th Anniversary. The CIOB is my professional home. One of the prerogatives of being President is that for a year I have a platform to press for an improvement. As well as sustainability, I am promoting the idea that the Institute should help members world-wide communicate and work together in tangible ways.

Transcontinental joint ventures may be one result, for instance. I believe this will help the global industry make better use of resources and disseminate better practice.

Radical? Maybe, but the CIOB gave real assistance to me and I’d like it to do that for others.

When I was first approached to be president I did stop and think about it carefully. The role involves a lot of travel. One of the key people I consulted was my daughter, now grown up and studying in America. I felt very bad, spending so little time with her when she was growing up, not being there to look after her, to help her with her studies. But then she told me that once, when she’d had to write a paper about the most influential person in her life, she’d said it was me! I was shocked, but she was serious.

She said my actions, my studies, my links overseas, my experiences, had all made her confident. Her verdict was instant: I must take this honour as a confirmation of my achievements and skills.

LI SHIRONG b. 1957

❛Think about it: all the policies you see are new in the past 30 years – we’ve developed this from nothing.

His hunger for travel and new perspectives took Liu Gong from Chongqing to Canada, Hong Kong, London and back in time to join the new private sector constructing expressways. Now he’s president of a firm building and investing in roads in China and abroad

I

was born in 1960 in Chongqing, which has changed a great deal in the past 30 years. The city looks totally different now and people’s lives have been transformed. I graduated from high school at the time of the Cultural Revolution. My parents were office clerks and their only wish was for me to go to the countryside for physical education.

After leaving high school I joined an art troupe. I wanted to pursue my studies at the art institute but I failed the entrance exam. At that time everyone was proclaiming that “the spring of science has come”.

Maybe the message had an influence on me. I took the university entrance exam for Chongqing Construction University and passed. My major was highway engineering and I excelled at it. On graduation I went to Yunnan province where I helped to maintain the highways for the Transportation Commission. In 1985 I came back to Chongqing to work in the government construction commission, assigned to the Landscape Bureau doing landscape and architecture design.

In 1993 I went to study city planning in Canada but I found it was too different from the Chinese system. In 1998 I joined the Yutong Company, which specialised in heavy civil engineering. I carried out

❛In the UK I was exposed to a lot of new financial models starting to be used in construction.

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LIU GONG b. 1960

Paving the way expressway projects. In 1999 I got my Master’s degree in project management from Hong Kong Polytechnic University and in 2002, supported by a Chevening Scholarship, I went to London, UK to study for a Master’s in project management at Southbank University. In 2005 I left the state sector to become president of the Chongqing Highway Group, a private company.

Looking back, the first event which influenced me was the Cultural Revolution. Living and working in that environment helped form me as a person. It made me very adaptable. The second great influence was travelling abroad. I saw the disparities between China and other parts of the world and this awareness of the way things could be done has always helped me in my career.

The first turning point in my life was when I went into the road-building sector in 1998 because the projects were bigger and more demanding than what I had been used to. The second turning point was when I went to the UK to study because I was exposed to a lot of new financial models starting to be used in construction, such as BOT (build-operatetransfer) and PPP (public private partnership).

LIU GONG b. 1960 Studying new business theories was also illuminating.

We looked at fascinating questions: What is the optimum structure of a firm? How do you diversify your business? I’ve been able to put these ideas into practice with my company.

We not only build expressways, we also invest in them. It is not easy for a private company because expressway projects usually need a great deal of capital. I have completed several big projects. The Chongqing ring expressway had 1.6 billion yuan of investment; the figure for Haier Street was 0.8 billion yuan, and for Chengyu Road it was 0.6 billion yuan.

My company invested in all of these projects. We even invested in the Ugandan market and we are constructing their national highway system.

T

o promote itself in China the CIOB needs to find a way to link its qualification with the domestic qualification for builders or its influence

will continue to be narrow.

The biggest change I’ve witnessed in my career is the growth in the scale of construction projects. The industry now makes a great contribution to China’s revenues. There has also been a boom in transportrelated construction projects. The number of workers in the industry has been increasing exponentially in the past 30 years and while the quality of the workforce may be a little lower compared to some industries, the quality of managers has increased greatly.

Looking forward I think demand for construction will eventually begin to shrink, so we will face a challenging time, but for now there are still massive opportunities in China.

Personally I hope to carry out more high-quality projects and I hope my company develops fast so it can achieve a lot more. I also hope to find time to indulge my love of travel.

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Liu Gong, fourth from left, surveys the course of a new road with clients and colleagues from his company, the Chongqing Highway Group

While still in his 40s Yi Jun found himself at the helm of China’s biggest building contractor, tasked with steering a sprawling state-owned enterprise into the very top of the global big league

I

was born in Yuanlin, a small town in Hunan Province in December 1960. My parents worked in the transportation industry for their whole lives.

When I was young I was actually interested in radio technology – a novelty to the ordinary Chinese at that time – because I was fascinated by the mystery of it. But after I graduated from high school I went to Chongqing University and majored in civil and industrial construction engineering, somewhat by accident.

❛You can imagine how I felt when I saw computers being widely used in the daily work of a company.

I didn’t realise how interesting construction work was until I joined China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) in 1982, the year of my graduation. As experiences accumulated I became more devoted to my career and wanted to learn more, particularly management. In 1986 I went to the UK to study construction project management at Cardiff University. The first year I worked very hard to improve my English, and the second year I joined a famous British construction company as an intern manager. During the internship I had the opportunity to see every department in the company, from the estimating office to the worksite, and I acquired a lot of practical knowledge that would have

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YI JUN b. 1960

No stopping now

099 b. 1960

YI JUN

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ow as president my job is managing the daily operation of CSCEC, including our overseas businesses which have been our focus over the past decade. So far we have had projects in over 26 countries, mainly in the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia. And our businesses are growing in Russia and the US. Doing business abroad is much riskier than doing business at home. Different cultures, languages, ways of thinking and regulations are the big hurdles. After many years of experience we’re getting better at handling them.

But I have to admit that 2008 was not a good year due to the global financial crisis, especially in the Middle East, where the economy was hugely affected by the plunging oil price. Revenue for that year had been targeted at around 40 billion yuan but we only achieved 70% of that. But I’m optimistic about the coming years since infrastructure will be a priority in many countries. In the US President Obama has released his stimulus plan, with billions earmarked

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been impossible to get in a classroom or in any Chinese company. For example, in the mid 1980s computers were very expensive and totally new to most Chinese so you can imagine how I felt when I saw computers being widely used in the daily work of a UK company. I was also deeply impressed by their well-scheduled workflow and highly organised teamwork. Most important, studying abroad widened my horizons and taught me a new way of thinking. I brought what I’d learned back to China in 1987.

I was lucky because I was appointed to take charge of the biggest project at the time in Beijing, the Beijing Lufthansa Centre, which won the Lu Ban Award in 1992, the highest honour in China’s construction industry. It was a milestone in my career because it was my first post as a project manager and the first step to all the later promotions: chief of the Joint Venture Contracting Division in the Industrial Department, then managing director of China State Construction International Co., a division of CSCEC, and then vice president of CSCEC and now president of the company.

My overseas experience was an extraordinary advantage when I was running the JV during 1993 to 2001. Over 75% of our clients were foreign, including the German Embassy. How could a young company like us be favoured by so many foreign clients?

Smooth communication was the key. I don’t mean speaking English, though that’s a must when you’re working abroad, but rather managing every project the way our clients were familiar with. We used a simple but standardised project management manual, very rare at the time and not so common even now.

I was extremely busy during those eight years but I still managed to go back to Chonqqing University to earn a Master’s degree in engineering in 1999.

for infrastructure, and that is a huge opportunity for us. CSCEC started its US business in 1987 when we set up our New York office. Since then we’ve participated in projects such as hotels, roads, schools and embassies. In China the government plans to invest four trillion yuan in infrastructure and other fields to stimulate the economy, which means a huge market for us. We are now working on a high-speed railway (350km/h) between Harbin and Dalian, scheduled for completion by 2011. In Moscow we are building one of the two towers constituting the highest building in Europe, the Federation Tower, developed by Mirax Group.

C Above: Federation Tower, Moscow, one of CSCEC’s growing number of projects in Europe and the West Top right: Yi Jun, currently President of CIOB China, at the 2008 Beijing global construction summit Left: His first major project, the Lufthansa Centre in Beijing

learly CSCEC has provided a lot of opportunities for me and what I’m focusing on now is giving something back. I’m working on improving the IT collaboration in our group, including ERP systems and information sharing. I think this is one of the areas we lag behind our counterparts abroad. CSCEC has many divisions, departments and subsidiaries and while it’s not difficult to share information within a division it’s proving very hard to let the whole group know what’s going on. This causes various management problems, from staff training that ignores our actual needs to outright wasteful procurement. It’s not just about upgrading IT systems. We also have to loosen up our complex hierarchies – but that takes time.

I’m happy that CSCEC is one of the world’s top 10 construction companies by revenue but my goal is to push it into the top three. It requires a lot of work and it can’t be a one-person job, which means we need to attract more professionals with excellent business or

A

s a 175-year-old global professional organisation of construction management, CIOB has been offering its help in many countries. In China, for example, it has been developing steadily for 20 years and Chinese members can get the most advanced knowledge through its training. I’ve certainly benefited. Furthermore, membership sets the stage for sharing knowledge and even for developing business relationships. But it’s a non-profit education association, not a university, so members shouldn’t expect it to give concrete, specialised classes. What you can expect is new ideas and different ways of thinking to broaden your horizons.

Over two decades I’ve seen China’s building industry go through an incredibly fast development.

Our people are getting more professional, organised and responsible, but there is much room for improvement to keep pace. Investors from all over the world now seek China’s construction services and this challenges our traditional business modes and sometimes backward management, all of which offers the CIOB an excellent chance to grow in China. The CIOB could provide frequent seminars to members to keep them updated about developments or create more opportunities for Chinese members to get hands-on experience in overseas companies. The building business is still on track to expand and internationalised talents are still greatly needed. This is certainly the CIOB’s central value proposition for local professionals.

I love my job. It actually inspires passion in me.

But it’s also very demanding. Sometimes I feel guilty for not giving much time to my family. Fortunately my wife, who majored in Chinese, is not a workaholic like me. She spends a lot of time taking care of our family.

In my spare time, limited as it is, I like to do exercise such as jogging and playing golf. Since I have to fly a lot I use that time for reading, usually books related to my work, such as management, but I’m also interested in social sciences.

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❛I’m happy CSCEC is one of the world’s top 10 construction companies by revenue but my goal is to push it into the top three.

YI JUN b. 1960

IT backgrounds to join us. We also intend to recruit more foreign talents for our projects abroad. In Dubai we have a team composed of people from 17 countries, including Ireland, UK, Australia and India.

In our US operation six out of 20 employees are local Americans. They’ve accelerated our localisation, which is very helpful.

But how to keep those talents with us presents a challenge, and it is not only about salary. The most important thing is to make a plan that is attainable and to make people feel confident working for a competitive company with a clear strategy. Offering a good platform for personal career development is another way of attracting long-term professional commitment.

Lin Han is part of a new generation to begin working life abroad – and also to expect a degree of satisfaction from her career. First hired by one company to probe for commercial opportunities in the Middle East and Africa, she left to buy into another, becoming vice president responsible for operations in Angola. On the distance China’s construction industry still has to go, she doesn’t mince her words

I

was born in December 1973 in Chongqing.

Influenced by my sister, who’s good at painting, I wanted to study industrial design but my father, who used to be a mechanical engineer, insisted I study a technical subject. Chongqing University was also his choice because my grandfather had been a professor there before 1949 and my father not only graduated from there but spent his entire childhood on the campus.

As my father wished I enrolled at Chongqing University in 1992, majoring in civil engineering.

For an outgoing person like me it was pretty boring.

However during those years I also volunteered in organising cultural activities in the Students’ Union and I found that what I was really interested in was management. So, to give myself a second chance, I decided to study for a Master’s degree in Construction Economics and Management, which turned out to be a good choice.

Inspiration for pursuing my PhD came from Prof.

Li Shirong (see page 86). She returned from the UK to teach at Chongqing in 1998 and started to enroll doctoral students. I applied one year after I acquired

❛For an outgoing person like me civil engineering was pretty boring.

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LIN HAN b. 1973

Great expectations

my Master’s degree, in 1999.

She recommended the next year that I participate in a project supported by the British Council as a research worker from Chongqing University. The project was a three-year collaboration between Chongqing and UK universities to study the economics and delivery of affordable housing in the UK with a view to submitting a proposal for supplying such housing in the poor, rural areas of western China. The project offered me the chance to see the world outside. Between 2002 and 2004 I was in the UK visiting universities and housing organisations and attending courses, workshops and conferences relevant to the topic. I also had the opportunity to talk to senior managers of companies and organisations involved in providing affordable housing. My English, which was not even good enough for simple, day-to-day communication before, improved remarkably. I am grateful to Prof. Li for giving me the opportunity, which totally changed my career aspiration: I wanted to work abroad.

My chance came quickly. After I got back to Chongqing in 2004 one of my friends recommended me for a part-time job at a local, privately-owned construction company whose general manager wanted to explore the Middle East market. Because of my professional background and facility with English I was temporarily hired as a translator and went to Qatar with their team for a two-week visit. A little later they hired me as a part-time employee and sent me back to the Middle East to do market research in 2004.

Excitement in the early days was soon replaced by dismay. My work there wasn’t going well because I saw clearly how hard it was for a Chinese company to do business in the Middle East due to the strong competition in the market and the high requirements on quality and management. For example, at the time very few Chinese companies were familiar with British standards, which had been widely used in the Middle East for a long time. The language barrier and differing management styles were also major hurdles.

LIN HAN b. 1973

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I came back with nothing positive to report and, it felt, nothing achieved.

Luckily China had begun building a cooperative relationship with Angola based on China’s energy strategy – China would help rebuild Angola in return for guaranteed supplies of oil. Angola has endured more than 40 years of unrest, with a war of independence from Portugal starting in 1961 and a civil war grinding on from independence in 1975 until a permanent ceasefire took hold in 2002. Four decades of war left the country’s infrastructure in ruins. Fortunately our company was selected to be one of 35 from China tendering for projects and I was designated as the one qualified to represent us in Angola. I left for the capital, Luanda, in March 2005 to do research for a month. From what I could see it was the right place for Chinese companies to be because the construction market there was like China’s in the 1980s. And we would have a supportive host government.

Soon I was sent back to represent our company’s

new office in Luanda. However, I was getting more and more uncomfortable about the way our company dealt with business and office politics, so I quit and joined the company I’m working with now as one of the shareholders in mid 2008. The company is called Ecadi International Group and although its headquarters are in Hong Kong, as vice president I am based mostly in Angola, responsible for sales and marketing as well as engineering-procurementconstruction-style projects (EPC). I travel often to China because clients are interested in seeing China’s building industry for themselves.

We’re busy with a good variety of projects. We were commissioned to design three football fields for the 2010 African Cup of Nations, hosted by Angola.

We have worked on an institute of communication technology for the ministry of telecommunications, plus water supply and sewerage systems for a residential quarter.

While the global recession has not so far hit Angola seriously, the downturn and the drop in oil

Above: the Stadium of Luanda, designed

by Sua Kay Architects, being built in Angola for the Cup of African Nations football tournament in 2010.

Lin Han’s company is also working on Cup-related projects Right: Lin Han with Pele at a 2006 charity event in Angola

prices have made commercial projects such as hotels, luxury residential and corporate office space seem more risky. So we’ve shifted our focus to big government infrastructure projects such as highways and bridges. The national reconstruction programme aims to invest around US$4 billion in infrastructure, including 12,000 km of new roads and 1500 new bridges by 2012. We have also targeted the agriculture sector, which gets continued support from the government.

Building in Angola poses special challenges. Most materials have to be imported from China as they are either not available or too expensive on the local market. Long lead times and logistical feats have to be scheduled into any construction programme. And since the infrastructure here is still under development we often suffer from water and electricity shortages.

Compared with other African countries, however, Angola is a nice country to work in. The government is investing heavily in reconstruction to attract foreign companies, such as shopping facilities,

I

learned about the CIOB from Prof. Li and became a member in 2005. It has definitely helped upgrade China’s building industry but I think the CIOB in China could do more. It should remind members that the qualification is not just an ornament to a business card but actually means an obligation for selfimprovement through continued training and development. There is a lot to be learned by Chinese companies wishing to explore overseas markets, such as standards and the way to deal with foreigners.

I feel it’s unrealistic to require all Chinese members to be good at English and, what’s more, it’s not always necessary to invite foreigners to conduct the training. A better alternative is to train Chinese members and let them pass on the knowledge.

China’s construction workers urgently need

training. I find that compared with their foreign counterparts our workers are sometimes too ‘smart’: they don’t strictly follow instructions and are too often tempted to employ ‘clever’ shortcuts instead of just doing the work. The consequences might not be visible right away but I think this tendency is the cause of many serious quality problems.

Another problem affecting our industry is shorttermism. Chinese companies often change their plans based on assessments of convenience, which makes the strategic planning process meaningless. In the UK I saw people following plans strictly and thought at the time that they were too rigid but later realised it’s more effective that way in the long run.

The future? Right now I just want to get my job done and help run the company properly because I’m one of the shareholders. However I don’t plan to work till I’m 50 or 60 years old. I want to have more time to enjoy my life. I love to travel and I like photography and I hope someday in the future I will be able to travel around the world with my camera.

LIN HAN b. 1973

restaurants and housing so life is becoming more convenient. I truly enjoy my job as it brings challenges and a sense of accomplishment. Dealing with people of a different culture is a valuable experience in itself.

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❛Our workers are sometimes too ‘smart’: they don’t strictly follow instructions and are too often tempted to use shortcuts instead of just doing the work.

LIU MENGJIAO

Out there

Right: Liu Mengjiao with Prof. Li Shirong in 2006

M

y hometown is Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan province in southwest China. The city’s history goes back four thousand years and it is proud of its various titles including ‘Land of Abundance’ and ‘Panda’s home’. From a construction point of view it’s very famous for the Dujiangyan irrigation system, built two thousand years ago and still functioning perfectly.

I come from an ordinary family. Both my parents were doctors and like a lot of people who suffered from poverty and the Cultural Revolution they tried their best to provide a comfortable life and, more important, a good education. Their ambition was that I would grow into an honest and useful person equipped with enough knowledge and skills to be independent and to choose my own career path.

I was born in 1979 when China had begun implementing its open-door policy and developing its cities and towns. I’ve witnessed not only a dramatic improvement in the quality of people’s daily lives but also the opening up of their thinking, the growth of their confidence and most of all the proliferation of opportunities to better their lives. My generation is old enough to have witnessed the massive boom in the construction of high-rise towers, residential developments and infrastructure, all of which attracted young people to the industry. I was susceptible to this too and enrolled in the construction management programme at Chongqing University in 1997.

As an undergraduate in 1999 I took part in China’s first national English contest for college students. Much to my own surprise I got a firstdegree result and received much praise and commendation from both faculty and students. It

❛I haven’t worked on ‘real’ projects before so I’m starting from the very beginning – and in an Arabic-speaking country!

gave me a huge boost of confidence in my English studies and brought opportunities to get involved with international exchange activities.

Another turning point for me was becoming a student of Professor Li Shirong (see page 86). I got involved with Prof. Li’s research projects when I was in my third undergraduate year. They taught me a lot and broadened my understanding of the industry at an international level. One such piece of research compared Chinese and UK site management. Stakeholders included the British Council and the CIOB. When the CIOB established its Student Centre in Chongqing University I was elected as its first president and started organising student activities. I was awarded ‘Best Student Member’ in 2000 and was invited by Paul Shepherd, CIOB President at the time, to participate in the CIOB China Membership Meeting in Beijing that same year.

Because I work well with people and I know how to get things done, I was offered the post of CIOB China Country Manager after I got my MSc in Project Management. This was an interesting five years. Working by myself I had to establish offices and recruit an operational team. My career is really just beginning so I look to those five years to find some of my achievements so far. I helped to raise the CIOB’s profile in China and extend its influence. I also set up a good operational system which handled a rapid membership growth. Starting up an organisation with links abroad, from scratch, threw

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Liu Mengjiao in Tripoli, where she works for CTDI Engineering Corporation as vice commercial manager, responsible for contract issues and external relations

b. 1979

Talented and ambitious, Liu Mengjiao was a safe pair of hands for the fledgling CIOB China. Now, having studied construction to Master’s level and helped to introduce an internationally-recognised qualification in the field, she’s glad to be finally doing it herself, in Libya

I

n 2008 I left the CIOB to join a company building a large residential project in Libya. I loved working for the CIOB but I had both a Master’s and a Bachelor’s degree in construction project management and I was longing to put them to use.

It’s a great challenge. I haven’t worked on ‘real’ projects before so I’m starting from the very beginning – and in an Arabic-speaking country!

Libya is a very exciting place for construction. It has been underdeveloped for a long time and now the government is channelling its billions of dollars in oil money toward housing and infrastructure and tourism. I’m working on a US$598-million project building 4,000 housing units in Zawiyah city, 50km west of Tripoli. It’s not just houses but schools, conference centres, medical centres, a mosque and infrastructure.

The company I joined is CTDI Engineering Corporation, a subsidiary of SINOMACH, the China National Machinery Industry Corporation. My position is vice commercial manager and I’m responsible for contract issues and external relations.

The project, currently in the design stage, is an Engineering, Procurement & Construction (EPC) style of contract: fixed-price, turnkey. The actual contract is the standard Libyan form, compulsory for state projects. It strongly protects the client and transfers most risk to the contractor. It does not always recognise international practice and disputes must be settled in Libyan courts rather than third-party processes like arbitration. In general, the contractor is in a much weaker position compared with the client.

The majority of workers will be from China.

There are local contractors but they lack a strong presence. Local workers hired are mostly from midAfrican countries like Sudan and Ethiopia because Libyan workers are few and unskilled.

Yes, we do have plans to develop the local market but I have some advice for companies seeking to come here. Be patient. Libyans do not have a strong sense of time. The efficiency of local organisations, especially government, is very low. There is a shortage of professional management and technical staff. They prefer face-to-face over email or telephone, but are not used to making appointments in advance.

Also, respect local culture and religion; most

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LIU MENGJIAO b. 1979

up many thorny issues which I had to resolve.

In various ways I believe my work also helped promote communication between China and other countries. For instance in my spare time I translated into Chinese the book, Construction Contracts: A Handbook for Chinese Parties. Written by William Godwin, it provides practical contract advice for Chinese firms in international projects, and I believe it will help reduce conflicts and promote understanding between Chinese and foreign parties.

people are Muslim.

I may not be working for the CIOB any more but I’m pleased to say that they can’t get rid of me that easily: in 2009 I was appointed the CIOB’s ambassador in Libya, meaning that I will seek to raise its profile here and be an official point of contact.

T

he world is getting smaller and so is global construction. Everyone working in this field needs to have an international vision but I would say that the industry in China is generally still ‘closed’ and needs to ‘go out’ in order to be competitive. After gaining some experience in international projects I hope to be in a better position to promote the internationalisation of our industry.

The CIOB helps young professionals look beyond their regional or country borders. At university it opened a window for us to get that international perspective. Student members received free magazines and got access to current industry news and professional knowledge through its website. We had chances to meet and learn from foreign academics and visiting professionals through lectures and seminars. In the eyes of a young professional the CIOB pushes the industry to a higher level by promoting and recognising best practice.

Even in my short career the industry has changed.

The most remarkable change is that people now pay

❛Yes, we do have plans to develop the local market but I have some advice for companies seeking to come here: be patient.

LIU MENGJIAO b. 1979

Left: Liu Mengjiao at Tiananmen Square in 2005 with CIOB chief executive Chris Blythe (left) and President Geoff Wright

more attention to ‘soft’ skills like management. In the past we put a high premium on ‘hard’ knowledge, in engineering and technology for instance. Now management skills are recognised as key – and they are what Chinese companies lack most.

Looking forward to the next 20 years, this will be one of the major challenges: being able to compete in the global market. I would include here also sustainability, including pollution, safety and the availability of materials.

Frankly, I’m not the sort of person who constructs highly detailed plans for the future – beyond hoping, as my parents wished, to be useful and to make best use of my talents. So far I’ve never been short of interesting and worthy challenges! I do, however, have an interest in the legal aspects of construction

projects and maybe through further study and experience I’ll become one of those interdisciplinary professionals combining expertise in law, contracts and building. Such a mix of talents would go a long way toward reducing conflict in international projects. As an observation, more efficient communications and less conflict help make the industry more sustainable.

I also wish to travel to as many places in the world as I can to broaden my vision, and I would like to master another foreign language besides English – I’m working on my Arabic now but it is a very slow process! I like reading and travelling: ‘Read ten thousand books and travel ten thousand miles’ goes an old Chinese saying. I also like singing and the karaoke house is one of my favourite outings.

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Above: artist’s impression of Liu Mengjiao’s Libyan project, a US$598million development with 4000 housing units in Zawiyah city, 50km west of Tripoli

Credits Dai Ruitong, Bao Guangjian, Yi Jun, Sun Jinke, Xu Shengmo, Wang Pu, Lin Han, Lu Haiping and Ding Shizhao were interviewed by Shanghai-based writer and journalist Ms. Wang Fangqing.

He Zhiya, Liu Faqi, Liu Gong and Zhang Feng were interviewed by Chongqing University PhD scholar Ms. Tian Ni. Cai Jinchi, Xu Ronglie, Jin Weixing, Zhang Qinglin, He Bosen and Ye Yaoxian were interviewed by Dr. Liu Jun Ying, associate professor at Tianjin University.

Li Shirong and Liu Mengjiao were interviewed by Rod Sweet, editor of International Construction Review.

All reasonable efforts have been made to trace the artists and copyright holders of the visual material reproduced herein.

We apologise to anyone who has not been reached. Credits are as follows: 015 016 018 019 020 021 022 025 027 029 030 032 035 036 037 038 040 043 044 046 048 049 051 053 054 057 059 060

Design Conceptual Photography Studio of Shanghai Hulton Archive / Getty Images Wang Pengfei The Granger Collection / TopFoto Wang Pengfei AFP / Getty Images Wang Pengfei Wang Pengfei Wang Pengfei Tan Gangqiong Design Conceptual Photography Studio of Shanghai Riser / Jeremy Woodhouse / Getty Images Design Conceptual Photography Studio of Shanghai Bettmann / Corbis Wang Pengfei Michael Reynolds/epa / Corbis Wang Pengfei Wang Pengfei Hulton Archive / Richard Harrington / Getty Images Riser / Walter Bibikow / Getty Images Design Conceptual Photography Studio of Shanghai Aaron Wen Markus Bahlmann Design Conceptual Photography Studio of Shanghai Design Conceptual Photography Studio of Shanghai Design Conceptual Photography Studio of Shanghai Design Conceptual Photography Studio of Shanghai Tan Gangqiong

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Fridmar Damm / zefa / Corbis Tan Gangqiong Wang Pengfei Wang Pengfei AFP / Jacquet-Francillon / Getty Images AFP / Getty Images Wang Pengfei Tan Gangqiong Bill Glover Redlink / Corbis Design Conceptual Photography Studio of Shanghai Design Conceptual Photography Studio of Shanghai Tan Gangqiong Best View Stock / Construction Photography Ed Tyler Time & Life Pictures / Carl Mydans / Getty Images Ed Tyler Peter M端ller Michael Brown Tan Gangqiong Wang Pengfei yuandacn.com Liu Yu Sua Kay Architects Mahmoud Turkia Rod Sweet CTDI Engineering Corporation