Blogs

Written by Qifei Zhu

June 4, 2010

Last week, I experience one of the most enjoyable moment in my life: winning the national champion of Ivey-CocaCola China Case Competition. My teammates and I outperformed other five finalists from top universities to be awarded the winner of this case study competition held by Richard Ivey School of Business in Canada.

This kind of “business competition” is not uncommon in China now. Indeed, a huge number of university students are choosing business, and they are thirst of testing their business sense and practical skills. In the same time, more and more multi-national firms and business schools are aware of the huge demand, and are happy to offer the chance to find the future business leaders.

My teammates and I learned the Ivey-CocaCola competition long before we applied, when last year Vic Wang and his team won the championship. At that time, I was amazed by the chance offered: an internship in Coca-Cola and a visit to Ivey Hong Kong campus. This is the very first motivation for me to participate. Of course, I have gained more than the prizes.

We are given the case at 8:30 in the morning, and from then to 6:00 in the afternoon, we have to read through the case, define the issues we need to address, analyze them and come out with a set of strategies. A well-elaborated PowerPoint presentation should also be done by the deadline. After that, the war has just begun. We have to prepare the presentation during the night, covering all the mistakes we made beforehand. It was really frustrated when you found your logic flow is questioned so that you could not even convince yourself. On the noon of the next, you will have to present in front of several professionals, by when you have even not got familiar with your words.

Anyway, this competition is not as scary. The fun part is, I can have chance to touch different business issues. I have learned the dual branding strategy of Best Buy in China, and also got familiar with Corporate Social Responsibility with the instance of New Balance. And what is more important is that real-world professionals will teach you something you will never know from text book. For example, DO put revenue growth forecast in the beginning of presentation if you want to persuade your boss to accept your whatever plan. Money is always a perfect reason. And the most thrilling part, surprisingly, is that the final is hosted at the Canada Pavilion in the World Expo. So when we were at hunger after winning the champion, we were so glad to see that the native Canadian chefs prepared traditional Canadian cuisines for us. Yummy!

Writer's information:

Qifei Zhu ("QFi") is a finance undergraduate in his penultimate year. He joined the Melton Foundation in 2008, and now serves as the China Symposium Coordinator together with Wei. He loves reading history and novels. He was eager to know how past events shaped today's world. He also enjoys travelling a lot, and have grand plans to travel around the world.

Written by Jie Zhou

June 4, 2010

This is my parents' love story.

At the age of his 20, my father became a worker in a huge state-owned factory. He was a young, smart and also handsome guy at that time. However, under the background of the Cultural Revolution, everybody stayed away from him. You may ask why. Is your father a bad guy? If I quote the criteria of "bad", the answer is yes because he was born in a "capitalist" family. According to the Cultural Revolution, all the capitalists are evil and should be treated with contempt, while only proletarians (workers) are great and the future of China society. How to be a capitalist? There were two criterions: ran a business and hired more than one worker. In order to make a living, my grandpa ran a small noodle restaurant and only hired one worker to help. As you can see, my grandpa could be easily clarified as “capitalist”. He got denounced in a public meeting every day. (Back to the Cultural Revolution, public meeting was hold everyday to denounce the capitalist) As a son of a capitalist, my father got unfair treatment in every little single thing.

This is a picture of 70's marriage, not my parents:-)

My mother was 16 when she met my father in the factory. She was born in a worker family. Others viewed her as a future star. In the factory, they worked in the same place. Unlike others, my mother smiled and said “hi” to my father every time they met. As time went by, you know, a beautiful feeling emerged. In the 1970s, ways of expressing love were that one person bought some food from home and sent to the other person, and that both communicated with eye contact. Later on, my father came to visit my mother's home (my mother lived with her parents), in the name of study the Party's policy together. They kept this kind of sweet relationship for three years, the biggest challenge came when they wanted to talk about marriage.

"Marry a capitalist's son?" Everybody thought my mother was crazy. My mother's parents objected their relationship strongly. As a result, my parents were even forced to break up. My father felt very depressed and hopeless, for he didn’t do anything wrong, just born in a so-called "capitalist family". One month later, my mother found and told my dad," I don't care about the capitalist stuff. I care about the people underneath. I will marry you no matter what others say. This whole country madness will end sometime. Let’s wait and believe." Until now, I feel so proud of my mother. Few people at that time could reach her courage level.

My mother was right. Two years later, in 1978, the 10 year country madness finally stopped. Such stupid "capitalist" viewpoint was totally abandoned. My parents got married and then made great contributions to the world: I was born.

Written by Wenrong Ji

May 21, 2010

Hello friends, welcome to China! 欢迎来到中国！
You may say, "How can we survive in China without knowing how to speak Chinese? We want to learn Chinese!" Yes, we hear you and we are going to introduce you this useful and free tool today for you to learn Chinese speaking: Google Translator.

Personally speaking, I'm a big fan of Google and I have been using all kinds of Google products online. However, Google Translator rarely got my attention until recently. A new function called "Listen to this translation" has been implemented into the system and amazingly, it supports Chinese. So from any language you speak, English, German, Spanish and even Hindi, you can translate words and phrases into Chinese and let the computer speak them out.

Let me give you an example with the name our foundation. Click on this
http://translate.google.com/?hl=en#en|zh-CN|Melton%20Foundation and you will see the "Melton Foundation" already translated into Simplified Chinese. Remember: always translate into Simplified Chinese, not Traditional Chinese since the former is the one we officially use in China mainland. "梅尔顿基金会" shown below is how we write the MF in Chinese and right beside it, you will find a small button of a speaker to ask your computer to speak the Chinese out for you. Turn on your loud speaker and click...

I believe you will have fun playing it around with different words and phrases. I guess in order to survive in China, you might need to know how to speak "taxi", "toilet", "how much is it", "I am vegetarian", etc. But I bet there are a lot more words and phrases in your mind that you'd like to explore.

Finally, something has to be noted here. This tool is just for fun and cannot replace serious learning of Chinese language. Some of the translations are not correct and the voice the computer speaks is machine-generated, not human voice. So in order to learn authentic Chinese, again, welcome to China and we Fellows in ZU will be your best teachers!

Written by Jiayu Liu

May 21, 2010

I was born in the year 1990, a time when my parents were working in a tiny town 55 km away from Chengdu, a major city southwest of China. My family moved to an apartment when I was two and it needs to be mentioned here that this apartment was offered by the institution my mother worked with and it was built right near the office building, and thus all the colleagues and their family lived and worked together. I was quite happy with that, being accompanied by little fellows whose parents worked together. I can still remember the time when I was a kid, my family had an old black and white television, with eight buttons for eight different channels in the front panel, and a big dining table where my parents, grandparents, my cousin and I would eat together on it every day.

At the age of 6, just before I went to primary school, my happiest memories are playing around the town. My hometown is near the Ming River, a branch of Yangtze River, and the banks are full of pebbles, mud and grass. At that time, people had only a few entertainment activities, so my dad would sometimes take me to the riverbank, and watch me swim in the water. During that time one could see many people swimming in the water every day. However, after 1998, this scene was no more to be – partly because of the major flood that very year and partly because of a whole new swimming pool that was built with an entrance fee of five Yuan per person. The river bank that used to be muddy and grassy was paved and a lot of river-scene restaurants were opened along the banks, filling the place with the smell of hot-pot every night.

I used to have a ‘Legend’ computer that my father bought when I was ten, and it was such a major purchase at that time and I appreciated it a lot. I also showed off to the kids in my neighborhood, letting them watch me play ‘StarCraft' but I would never let them touch the mouse. I shed this glory soon after that because something called ‘computer-bar’ boomed throughout the town, and with only two Yuan one could play games in a public computer for an hour. Then the happy hours of my after-school time was spent in these computer-bars, where we played Counter-Strike against each other using the LAN. Those wonderful moments can never come back again as my friends are scattered around, and the company named ‘Legend' has changed its name to ‘Lenovo', and then bought IBM's PC stuff.

I went to a residential school in Chengdu for my high school studies. The very first time I saw a BMW Z4 Coupe, I thought: “How rich these Chengdu people are!” In my hometown, people went out by a kind of tricycle carriage pulled by one person, and you pay only one Yuan to get wherever you want. However, this feeling disappeared when I saw a ‘Range rover' in my hometown; people changed and got richer, but the good news is that even now you can go out by the tricycle carriage. Anyway, I still miss the time when my friends and I played around the whole town, in which the highest building had only eight floors.

I am writing these pieces of lost memory out of my own, and also there's not enough time for me to expand the whole story, but I hope you can get some true feeling about how China is growing and how my generation is growing.

Written by Wei Dai

May 3, 2010

(On my way back from a huge buffet with QFi, I feel like writing my China story on FOOD :D)

Despite all the variety, eating at the same dining halls on campus time and again can get a little boring. When our taste-buds are screaming for something new – some ZU Fellows invented this (‘the pig-out Friday’) – we head for restaurants which are at walking distance from campus and enjoy a big meal.

A popular choice is spicy food, which usually comes from Szechuan Cuisine and Hunan Cuisine, which are famous for their hot and spicy flavor among the typical ‘Eight Cuisines’ of China. Both Hunan and Szechuan cuisine extensively use chilies to cleanse the palate and to cope with the humidity. However, while Szechuan recipes frequently call for chili bean paste, Hunan dishes are normally made with fresh chili peppers, including the seeds and membranes which contain most of the heat. For us, a hot-pot will swipe away the coldness in winter, and in summer spicy dishes go just fine with a bottle of cool soft drink or beer. Trust me, they taste as impressive as they look in the pictures!

Recently I have been attracted to Cantonese (Yuet) Cuisine, also a major genre in the 'Eight Cuisines'. Cantonese cooking is somewhat lighter than most regional Chinese cuisine. Preparation methods usually involve stir-frying in shallow water or oil in a wok. As cooking time is short, the flavors and nutrition of the food is preserved. What I like most is the dim sum, which is without doubt, a trademark food in Cantonese cuisine. Dim sum is a delectable palate of little snacks, and some most popular items are: shrimp dumpling, steamed spareribs, and steamed barbecued pork buns.

Apart from the most influential Chinese 'Eight Cuisines', Dongbei Cuisine from Northeast China is very popular among students and thus often seen around campus. The dishes in Dongbei restaurants are likely to be served in large containers, and you will find them really sizeable and inexpensive. This already gives us a good reason to visit Dongbei restaurants regularly. Furthermore, wheat, rather than rice, is the mainstay starch, so noodles, dumplings, and breads are a big part of the Dongbei diet.

There are also some foreign cuisines available nearby, such as Korean restaurants serving bibimbop (bowl of warm white rice topped with vegetables, egg and chili pepper paste) and BBQ, Italian restaurants serving pizza and lasagna, no matter how authentic they are.

Though it is not the best idea to look at the rich Chinese Cuisine from merely restaurants around campus which seem too ‘grass-root’, I hope you have seen the tip-of-the-iceberg of Chinese food culture. With a last picture of Manhan Quanxi (literally Manchu Han Imperial Feast, one of the grandest meals ever documented in Chinese cuisine), I want to welcome you, especially food lovers, to come enjoy China with a pleasant dining experience.

Writer's information:

Wei Dai, ZU Melton Fellow is currently a senior student of applied mathematics in ZU. Soon, she will go to the US for graduate studies. She loves painting and traveling. She now serves as 2010 China Symposium coordinator.

Written by Yujing Zhang

April 25, 2010

During holidays, it is natural and pleasant to travel to places that interest you. But most Chinese hesitate to even think about travel. The reasons are simple: the crowds and the rocketing prices.

The statutory holiday is always a hotly debated topic in China, because it often gives rise to some trouble. About two years ago, apart from every weekend, people in China had three long holidays annually – the Spring festival, International Labor Day and National Day. Usually we could have a five-day holiday, for a good purpose no doubt. On one side, the holiday could satisfy people's need for rest and travel. On the other, this is also a method to boost domestic consumption. As you know, domestic consumption is always a weakness of China's economy. Such long holidays usually have a nice name, the Golden Week, which is a great opportunity to tempt the RMB in our pockets. This also brings along with it some problems. During the Golden Week, nearly all the scenic spots, no matter if they are popular or not, will take on the challenge of roaring tourist flow. It is common to see the tourists waiting in long lines for restrooms, taxis, and so on. Sometimes the huge crowds may befall something miserable. So for this reason, my parents often persuade me not to travel a lot, but remain at home during the Golden Week. But I always know that the real reason is they miss me a lot! =P.

So, to counter such a problem, the government decided to call off the Golden Week. Instead, they have decided to have several short holidays with duration of three days and they are set around the Chinese traditional days in order to keep alive the tradition. So now, we can also have three-day holidays on the Tomb-sweeping Day, Mid-Autumn Day, etc. The previous Golden Week around Labor Day has been shortened to three days as well. The enthusiasm for travelling has not been cooled down though. Things are same as in the past. In Hangzhou, I have to say, it is not a tourist flow that comes on holidays, but a "flood flow"! If you visit the West Lake at this time, I'm afraid the only thing you can see is the crowd. Travelling like this will definitely not be an enjoyment for me, so I prefer to stay in the campus, do some exercise, watch movie with my friends on holidays.

Now, the Labor Day holiday is coming. Many of my friends have finished their travel plan and seem ready to start at any time. It is worth mentioning that the Shanghai EXPO will also start during this coming holiday. I'm sure the EXPO experience will make the holiday special. But perhaps you can imagine how crowded Shanghai will be. Here comes my sincere suggestion. When you make your travel plan in China, try your best to avoid the holiday season.

Anyway, safety counts first. Good luck to Shanghai! Good luck to all of travelers in China.

Here is a list of statutory holiday in China, 2010 (usually merged with the weekend):
1st, Jan--- 3rd Jan: New Year's Day
13th, Feb---19th, Feb: the Spring Festival
3rd, Apr---5th, Apr: Tomb-sweeping Day
1st, May---3rd, May: International Labor Day
14th, Jun---16th, Jun: the Dragon Boat festival
22nd, Sep---24th, Sep: Mid-Autumn Day
1st, Oct---7th, Oct: National Day