Back to the mainland (sad face)

Friday is our last day of business meetings. Not a whole lot of meetings but a busy travel day. We left early, took a train (first class!) back into China from Hong Kong. I felt sick sitting backward on the train so moved down the car, and almost missed the stop when everyone got off. That would have been an adventure! The forty minute train ride was followed by an hour and a half trip bus trip to Shenzhen. The differences between Hong Kong and mainland China became even more stark after coming back. This was particularly true because Shenzhen is pretty much just a city for cheap labor. You can tell Beijing and Shanghai had been (and are in the process of) being updated. Beijing for the Olympics, and Shanghai is hosting the World Expo in May.

After a long and BUMPY ride on a dingy bus we started our day at a manufacturing plant. It was pretty much what you think of when you think about Chinese manufacturing. Very inefficient processes, few safety measures, and lots of labor. It was pretty unbelievable to see they actually had people doing silk-screening and folding boxes instead of machines. Archaic but financially the best means I suppose. Talking to some of the engineers we found this particular plant has relatively high standards. They comply with somewhat new Chinese labor laws that include 8 hour work days, and their wages are ‘high’ in comparison to their counterparts (750rmb or $100 US per month).We witnessed the entire plant shutting down at exactly noon for lunch.

Daniel let me down for lunch. Traditional Chinese round table. Ugh. That means American food for dinner! Good thing I brought Oreos today.

The afternoon was a trip to Huawei, another case study from last semester. It is certainly cool to see the businesses in real life instead of just reading about them in a case. Unfortunately we only had a tour and did not get to talk to them about their business at all. Pretty useless. Hi-lite from the trip included seeing their sweet pallet retrieval system that was all automated.

We then went to ANOTHER marketplace, where people tried to get us to buy their knockoff stuff. The train ride back one of my friends lost his ticket, but did not get detained or anything. We had to go through several customs and immigrations checks today, since Shenzhen was mainland. Very annoying. The whole one country, two systems thing still blows my mind.

This would have been up Friday except the internet I have been using was being fuzzy yesterday. Grr!

-R-

street restaurant! this was actually tasty...beef and broccoli. yum!

what was to be our dinner! nothin like fresh

wrist pads made for 3M, made in China, right here, for real!

pretty much what you would expect:

this gentleman was manually placing a stamp/cut out on the fabric and then having the machine cut it, and repeating. infinitely.

part of the quality assurance, this guy was checking for defects. by sight. yeah, those are big spinning things. don't get your hand stuck!


you're not going to believe this. this is the paper towel dispenser in the plant's bathroom. the characters are upside down, but it literally translates into 'suggestion box'. One of the guys on our trip can read mandarin and he told us, then we looked it up online to double check. someone has a very sick sense of humor.

Yeah, we're kind of a big deal. and then they wouldn't let me take anymore pictures :(