Plastics News' Shanghai correspondent Lauren Hilgers was excited when she told me that she met a very interesting person at the recent Chinaplas event. She kindly wrote this following piece for my blog, succinctly portraying a Chinese industry veteran who bridges the East and the West:
Li Qin Ren's American colleagues rarely or never refer to him by his first or full name. To Russ Johnson and Carl Olson, the bespectacled general manager of China Array Plastics's Wuhan operation is always "Mr. Li." And Mr. Li comes up so much in conversation that I had begun to think of him as fictional--China's Mr. Rogers of manufacturing.According to Johnson and Olson, Mr. Li can cook, he can run a factory, successfully negotiate China's bureaucracy and leap the cultural divide between the U.S. and China in a single bound. "What people don't know about Mr. Li," said Olson at Chinaplas, "is that he is a renaissance man in China."After meeting Mr. Li, it is hard to think less of him. At 65, he has weathered sea changes in China's economy, going from work as a chief engineer at a state-owned company, to a few years doing research in the United States, to retirement in 2003 and resurrection in the plastics industry."I always joke that, although my past position was very high, I never had to worry about the whole company," Li said. "Now I work at a much smaller company, and I feel more pressure!"It was Li's relationship with Johnson that brought him to plastics at this late stage in life. Li's previous expertise had been in the shipbuilding industry. When Johnson came to China in 1984, he met Li across a negotiating table. "In our company there were not many people who could speak English, so they asked me to do negotiations and interpretation," he said. The pair hit it off. When Johnson returned on trips to China, Li helped him source goods and ensure quality. When Li went to do research in the U.S., he thought, "Naturally, Russ is the one American I would like to know."Li has helped Johnson navigate what Li sees as three phases of China's economy--the first negotiating with state-owned enterprise. "State companies are not so flexible, and these companies were defense industry companies so they will neglect other orders."As China's economy opened up, Johnson began contracting with private companies, but ensuring quality was an issue. "Now is the third phase," Li said. "This is a wholly-owned foreign enterprise and we are operating according to international standards."Li has been working with China Array since his retirement, but thinks the company should look to the future. "At first they needed a person like me, who has experience working in a manufacturing company," Li said. "But we need to consider the next generation." |