If You Can't Take a Joke...

by Gordon Gray

  “Well,” slurred Louis, “the old man kept piling food on my plate and not letting me leave anything. Then, when I had finished that he piled it up again. I thought ‘God I am going to be sick’, but then I noticed that the waiter kept filling the brandy, so I started drinking the brandy to help my stomach and then all of a sudden it’s over and I am here with you nice boys!” He smiled as his eyes rolled pleadingly from Tony to me.

  It was still only 8 o’clock as Tony and I laid Louis flat out on his bed. He was asleep before we left the room and we hoped all would be well. The next morning, after a cautious phone call to check he was actually alive, Tony and I were pleased to see him come down the stairs. Louis was fine again for the final day’s sessions before we, thankfully, flew back to Hong Kong. It was not all in vain as the reports issued by the Institute and sent to COSCO were positive and COSCO ordered a large number of systems over the next few years.

  Shanghai

  Shanghai is the main commercial centre and port in eastern China. It is situated near the mouth of the Huangpu River where it meets the mighty Yangtze. Shanghai became of interest to the UK after the first Opium War in 1839-1842 when it was named as one of five Chinese ports with which the British could trade. It was not a totally peaceful time and British troops actually held the city for a while. However, it continued to develop and an area was conceded to the British by the Chinese. The British sector was formed near the mouth of the Suzhou Creek and an American sector grew in an area to the north of it. Later, both were joined, becoming known as the ‘International Settlement’. It was here over the years that the vibrant and cosmopolitan centre of Shanghai grew and developed with many large and grand colonial buildings, banks and hotels. The waterfront along the Huangpu River, where ocean-going ships could moor and handle their cargoes, was called ‘The Bund’. It was the centre of town, along with the Nanjing Road that leads from The Bund deep into modern Shanghai. What is now called ‘Old Shanghai’ is in this area and small parts of it have been preserved as a time capsule from earlier days. Across the Huangpu River in 1981, in an area called Pudong, there was nothing; just marshes and the flat lands of the estuary and a few farms, a village or two. Down towards the Yangze River, some of the new shipyards were springing up. Today, the whole area is a major city in its own right with fantastic skyscrapers and futuristic-looking buildings that dwarf the original Shanghai buildings on The Bund; and it is home to the new financial centre for Shanghai.

  By the 1930s, Shanghai was ‘the place to be’ in the Far East. It was a major financial centre and was known as the ‘Athens of China’; an exciting city with wealthy foreign traders and overseas companies setting up offices and warehouses in the area – all making money and spending it on the delights that Shanghai offered. The French now had their own concession to the south of the International Settlement.

  In 1942, the Japanese invaded the International Settlement and life there stopped. Most of the foreigners left and things were never to be the same again. Following Japan’s defeat and the end of the War, there followed, in 1949, Mao’s Revolution and communism. Again, the world changed and many of the international companies still remaining in Shanghai moved to Hong Kong and ran their China operations from there. Until the early 80s, Shanghai remained virtually unchanged, and when I first arrived in 1981 I thought that I had gone through a time warp. However, with China opening up to the West for trade and investment, Shanghai entered a new phase of rapid development and growth.

  Our next event in China was a big marine exhibition hosted by China for the first time in December 1981 and called “Marintec”. It was aimed at the rapidly growing Chinese shipbuilding and marine industry and held in Shanghai,

  We landed at Shanghai Airport from Hong Kong. In the early 80s, it had a single, but imposing, terminal building built in the early part of the 20th century. We walked to it across the tarmac from the aircraft. The road into town was a pleasant, tree-lined, two-way country road. It was busy with bikes and ox carts heading into the city loaded with watermelons and other fresh fruit and vegetables. We were booked into a hotel called the “Jin Jiang”. At the time, it was one of the biggest hotels in Shanghai. It was built in the 1920s as Shanghai grew and was situated in the old French quarter, and consisted of a large main building of about ten or twelve storeys and another large accommodation multi-storey building as well – all set in its own walled grounds. It towered above all other buildings in the area and was the hotel that Richard Nixon, then President of the USA, stayed in during his breakthrough talks with China.

  To enter the main building, there was a flight of stone steps up to a brick portico. On entering the hotel, it was as if we had entered a 1920s time capsule. The carpets, the furniture, the pictures on the walls were all as they had been in the 1920s and 30s. Nothing had changed. The lift with its sliding iron cage doors, the faded, worn carpets and the upholstery on the aged settees and chairs all could have been from a film set for a Hollywood silent movie. The Jin Jiang was to be our home over the next few trips to Shanghai and we grew fond of it in spite of its non-updated shortcomings.

  As I recall, the bedrooms were fairly well-sized but the furnishings and fittings were basic and from the 1920s and 30s. I recall lots of wood panelling, wooden floors, old rugs, big light fittings and baths, but no showers. Some people said they heard rats or mice rattling along behind the panelling but I never did. TVs, radios, Internet, DVD, CD players, trouser presses, mini bars and all the other standard trappings of today’s five-star hotels were still far-off in the future for the Jin Jiang.

  At night, we would walk across the road to the Jin Jiang Hotel’s own club. In the 1920s and 30s, it had been the ‘French Club’. In this complex was a large swimming pool, a snooker room with about four full-sized tables as well as billiard tables. There was a restaurant where we sometimes ate. The club put on a dinner cabaret every night with a young female violinist and a middle-aged male singer. Neither of them were ‘to our taste’ but given that they were Chinese playing western and singing western songs in English, it was not a bad effort. However, little did we know on that first trip that when we returned to the Jin Jiang Club three years later, we would find the same two performers playing the same songs in the same order every night just as they had done every night since our first visit. We found much the same atmosphere when we visited the old ‘Cathay Hotel’, now called the ‘Peace’, down on The Bund. This hotel had been the decadent centre in the 1930s and had a world-famous jazz bar at the rear of the ground floor and an equally famous Chinese restaurant on the top floor where the speciality of the house was boiled crabs. Both were still there and the jazz bar looked as though the 1930’s musicians had just left for a break and the restaurant was thriving.

  Surrounding the Jin Jiang were streets of single or two-storey houses, or villas – many built for the French expats and a few shops at the street corners. These, like the rest of the city, were pretty much unchanged in decades. It was hard to see who lived in the larger villas as they had tall garden walls. Some of the smaller houses that fronted onto the street were home to large families, often of two or even three generations. Nearby, there was a French restaurant called the ‘Red House’. It was just that, a red painted house. Inside it had very simple decor, but it served good French food and made a welcome change from the hotel’s continual Chinese style food. The speciality at the Red House was a marvellous lemon soufflé. That this place had been here since the 1930s was remarkable, but how it had survived the War, the Mao years and the Cultural Revolution, and could still provide good French food in the 1980s was incredible. We had to book days in advance and the latest time that a table could be booked was 1900.

  Marintec 1 & No 4 Radio Factory

  Initially, our main interest was with a Chinese electronics company who made marine radars. It was called No 4 Radio Factory, Shanghai. During the first Marintec exhibition, we were invited to see the factory and open discussions with them. So it was that on a bitterly cold December
day we found ourselves in Shanghai on a visit to the factory. During the tour, we were shown into one of the work areas where girls sat at rows of work benches making printed circuit boards. It was freezing cold in the room. All the windows were open on both sides of the room and an icy north wind from Mongolia blew straight through the factory. The women workers sat huddled at their benches with coats and hats on, faces frowning as they tried to solder the boards. They all looked as if they were shivering.

  “Why are all the windows open?” I asked.

  “Solder fume,” explained the interpreter.

  Sure enough, the PCBs were being made using soldering irons held in shivering hands.

  “But why can you not have fume extractor fans and then heat the factory?”

  The interpreter slowly told us that in China if your factory is north of the Yangtze River you can have heating in winter. If it is south, then you cannot have heating. No 4 Radio Factory was five miles to the south of the Yangtze.

  We also were taken on a tour of some of the shipyards. These were situated some distance away from the city. It gave us a chance to see life in the countryside. It was not pretty. We saw people in poverty – living in holes in the ground, almost. Tiny mud brick shelters half dug into the ground with rubbish and waste piled against the walls, while all around filthy, ragged peasants scratched a life out of the cold mud and dirt that encased them.

  The shipyards were mostly new and China’s infant industry was beginning to find success with their low prices. They seemed to have many new technology machines and equipments to help them, but were still building basic, simple ships such as bulk carriers or small general cargo ships. Many of their naval ships were either bought from the Russians or built under licence with lots of Russian help. On arrival in the yard, we were all given safety hats to wear. These were all made of woven cane. We did not see any workers wearing them but we did see them using their washroom. This consisted of one outside tap on a stand pipe over an old bath, in an area of mud and weeds between two piles of rusting sheets of steel.

  Exhibitions, Chinese style

  The exhibition was chaotic. When we first arrived, a couple of days before it opened, we noticed that there were small, but robust, fences round all the stands. We had not seen this before and wondered why they were there. Then, came the first day of the show; it was not like any exhibition that any of us had ever been to before. Every day, all day, it was not just crowded, it was jammed from opening to closing. Once we were on the stand in the morning, there was no way we could get off and go for a stroll round the other stands as we normally might do. The crowds were just too solid. Going to the loo had to be planned well in advance. Hundreds of milling people, all dressed the same, were gathering up everything they could. Brochures that were put out vanished in seconds, and any one daft enough to put down a sandwich, well, that went too. The Chinese took everything in arm’s reach. We now realised why there were fences up. If they had not been there, the crowd would have flooded across the whole stand probably taking us with them. They were, however, very good and did not try and get inside the fence, but anything within arm’s reach of the fence was fair game. Their thirst for knowledge was immense. We had already seen from our discussions with No 4 radio factory that they had books covering modern electronics theory, but they had no way to put it into practice as there were no R&D labs as we have.

  At closing time, the security guards walked round the halls shouting into loud hailers telling everyone to leave. If they did not move, then they literally pushed people out of the building. If you were talking to someone, you could find that they suddenly vanished from in front of you as a grim-faced security guard pushed them out. One of the problems we had was the fact that they all dressed and looked exactly the same. You could be talking to a cleaner or an admiral, and you had no way of knowing which until the interpreter told you. Any conversation that you had with a visitor instantly created a crowd of other people all listening in intently to see what you were talking about. We quickly learnt to take anyone who appeared important or genuinely interested inside our tiny back room on the stand where you could, with the interpreter’s help, have a reasonably private conversation.

  The show ran for six days and closed at lunchtime on the last day. We all felt totally drained as the continual crowds, noise and endless questions never slackened once. That afternoon, the show’s organisers had arranged a river trip for some of the exhibitors. So as we sat down to a relaxing lunch back in the Jin Jiang, we enjoyed a beer and started to think of a leisurely afternoon boat ride down the Huangpu before flying home tomorrow in time for Christmas. Some of us had been away from the UK for about three weeks and were ready for home.

  Negotiations

  I was sitting with a few others finishing my lunch when one of our guys came over. “Gordon, there is a group of Chinese downstairs asking for you. I think they are from the show.”

  “Go away, I have finished now and am off on my boat ride.” I thought it was a leg pull.

  “I am serious. They are the guys who were on the stand yesterday.” Oh Lord, I thought, what do they want? I went downstairs to the main lobby where sure enough there was a group of Chinese gentlemen. Instantly I saw our interpreter, Mr Wang. He saw me and smiled broadly as he came across.

  “Mr Gordon, No 4 Radio Factory want to discuss contract,” he said.

  “Well, that is great news! Please tell them that we are very pleased. As you know we are returning to the UK tomorrow, but will come back in early January with our commercial team,” I said.

  “No, no, Mr Gordon, you do not understand. They must do it now!”

  “But we fly home tomorrow!” I tried to stall as I could see what was coming.

  “There is no problem,” said Mr Wang. “Please give me air tickets and we can change flights.” This is where strong wills and diplomacy really came into the job. There was no way that I or Tony were about to hand our flight tickets over to No 4 Radio Factory. British Airways flights to the UK had been fully booked since early December and any chance of changing from the 22nd December to a flight nearer Christmas was a non-starter. As Tony and I had no intention of spending Christmas in Shanghai, there was no way we were going to miss tomorrow’s flight. I was also concerned that as Alan Carnell, our commercial director, had already left Shanghai for the UK, leaving just Tony and I still here, we were a bit weak on the commercial side to form a strong negotiating team – especially as we did not have our own interpreter and would have to depend on Mr Wang, who worked for them.

  We seemed to have an impasse. “Look, Mr Wang, it will be much better if we arrange to come back in January with our full commercial team and more technical experts. Mr Tuthill and I are the wrong people to discuss commercial contracts but we can start work on an MOU, a Memorandum of Understanding.” He interpreted all this to the No 4 Team. They frowned heavily and talked amongst themselves for a while. Mr Wang then turned and, with a serious face, said, “Mr Gray, No 4 Radio factory wish to discuss Memorandum of Understanding leading to a contract now. Our director understands that it will not be possible to complete all the official details but we must start now.”

  “A good idea!” I relented, perhaps there was a way out here. “Please let me find Mr Tuthill.” I dashed back to the restaurant and caught Tony as he headed for his boat ride. I explained to him what was going on and what I thought we should do: “We need to sit down with them now Tony and find out what they have in mind. You and I cannot sign anything, but we can get a clear idea of their plans. We can then say we must discuss it all in the UK with the directors and can return in January. I am afraid the boat trip will have to go without us though. This could be a long afternoon!”

  Tony was great and agreed, and we took the team up to Tony’s room as it was bigger than mine. By some sitting on the bed and with the three chairs in the room, we found seats for them all. We discussed radar, computing power and answered all sorts of questions that we had been over with them before. It becam
e clear that they were looking for guidance from us to formulate a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), or a Chinese equivalent.

  After a couple of hours, we still seemed to be getting nowhere. They clearly wanted to make our radars in Shanghai and buy the bits from us, but seemed to recognise that it was one huge jump in manufacturing skills from where they were now. We had seen their factory. There was no way it was equipped either mechanically or in people knowledge or skill terms to build such a radar, but we could not say that to their faces. Tony and I went out into the corridor for a chat. After a few minutes, we had our thoughts in tune and we went back in. Tony took the lead.

  “Look, what we think is that we should initially sell you a number of radars complete. We will teach you how to test and install them on the ships and then service them with a set of training courses both in the UK and here. You will not need any special manufacturing equipment for that. Then later, we will sell you the next batch of radars, but in a kit form so you can assemble them, then test and install them. Once that is complete, we will sell you the components and the special machines and test equipment you need to build the whole thing. After that, you just buy the parts from us. I suggest that if you agree to that idea we can sign an initial MOU now that we can take back to London and you can show to your directors.”