Bei Jing-Washington

• 

Beijing-Washington, Inc. (1980-1982)

Upon graduation, my college internship/job transitioned into full-time employment at Bei Jing-Washington, Inc. with the lofty salary of $187.50 per week, or $4.69 per hour (above the minimum wage of $3.10, for those of you keeping track). My starting title was Assistant to the President, though ultimately I became the Director of Marketing. All these titles were bogus. There was only my boss, Neal, and one or two interns at a time. Eventually a few other folks were hired, including Ray Carey, Mike Bosworth, Lisa Cocks and Peter Barkanic (after I left) but I don’t think there were ever more than two of us salaried at a time.

Neal’s business strategy was to develop a roster of US and European manufacturing equipment clients who would pay us a retainer to help market their products and material in China. We also worked on identifying and contacting Chinese government and industrial entities, working to establish long-distance relationships with them. Theoretically, we would get commissions on equipment our clients sold into China, though it took nearly two years to sell our first item. Even more theoretically, we planned to eventually help the Chinese organizations market their finished products in the West.

• 

Neal traveled to China a few times in 1980-1981 but mainly focused on developing retainer-paying clients. It was much easier to sell US companies on China’s potential than it was to actually connect with, much less sell equipment to, the Chinese. The interns and I scoured US and Chinese publications to try to identify potential contacts at state and local ministries. We sent a lot of letters of introduction and questionnaires, got very little in return, but slowly built a (paper) data base of contacts in China which helped Neal make it sound like we had a great network of willing buyers.

Eventually, we cobbled together a hodgepodge roster of clients focused on electronics manufacturing equipment and materials. Two of the larger ones were GenRad, a semiconductor test equipment manufacturer from Waltham, MA, just outside Boston, and Hollis Engineering of Nashua, NH, which made wave soldering systems. In the latter part of 1981, we started to focus on a couple of large trade shows organized by the U.S. Department of Commerce in Beijing in February and April of 1982. We convinced GenRad and Hollis to send representatives and equipment to the April show, which were significant investments on their part. As a result, I had several solo trips to Boston and Nashua for training on their products and quite enjoyed both traveling for business (with a per diem) and feeling like I was learning something useful.

• 

• 

• 

• 

We developed contacts like Mr. Li Shifang at the Chinese embassy in DC. I can’t really remember the circumstances, but Neal, Barb and I took Mr. Li on a fall foliage trip to Charlottesville and the Skyline Drive in 1981. Barb was not involved in many Bei Jing-Washington activities but we have photo evidence of her on this trip. I think she came along to be UVA tour guide and add authenticity to our Chinese connections.

• 

• 

• 

First Trip to China (February 1982)

Related Post: February 1982 Beijing-Shanghai

In February, 1982, I finally made it to China for the first time to take part in an exhibition of US industry put on by the Department of Commerce (NY Times article). This was a 10-day event at the Beijing Exhibition Center and was ultimately attended by 80,000 people. Our trip continued to Shanghai for a few days of meetings and a quick exit through Hong Kong in early March. I’ve done a separate post on the tourist side of my first trip to China.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

We were provided two translators at the exhibition who were both very nice but whose names I’ve forgotten. Each day at the fair was a mob scene of Chinese ministry officials, factory managers, students and other invited guests trying to get their hands on any kind of giveaway or piece of paper we would offer. We gathered leads the best we could, but I really can’t say anything actually came of the event. I would be involved in many more trade shows over the course of my career but none where the attendees were so frantically hungry for any scrap of  information. The doors to China were opening and there was a palpable sense of anticipation of what might come and anxiety over getting caught doing something wrong.

• 

• 

• 

Second Trip to China, Hong Kong, Singapore (April-June, 1982)

Related Post: April 1982 Beijing-Shanghai-Hong Kong

We turned right around in April, 1982, to bring a delegation of folks to exhibit at another 10-day trade show, Internepcom, at the same exhibit hall in Beijing.

• 

• 

The focus for this show was on electronics manufacturing which aligned well with our client list. We brought representatives from GenRad (Roy Rondoe and Bob Leong) and Hollis Engineering (Chris Hill). This time we also convinced the two companies to ship actual demo pieces of equipment which included semiconductor tester from GenRad and a large wave solder system from Hollis. We had at least learned that the Chinese really desperately wanted to see actual pieces of equipment, not just pictures and literature.

The show was, if anything, even more busy than our first exhibition. I can’t find attendance numbers but the fact that we had equipment in the booth made for near constant traffic crowding around us. It was exhilarating but exhausting, especially for Roy and Chris repeating the same demos over and over.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

My job was trying to gather and qualify leads before giving out all of our literature.

• 

• 

We were assigned (one still didn’t choose at that point) to a hotel on the campus of Peking University, about a half-hour from the exhibition center and very isolated. It felt even older and dingier than our first hotel in Beijing. I remember feeling stranded there with nothing to do but consume beer each night, trying to keep our clients more or less entertained. Fortunately, Wuxing beer came in large green bottles (we called them “big green ones”) and was a reasonable knockoff of a German lager, sort of a domestic cousin of Tsingtao.

• 

Roy, Bob and Chris were road warriors for their companies, traveled all over Asia, and were used to a much higher quality of hotel, food and entertainment (and, frankly, level of business opportunity). Their patience with China wore thin pretty quickly and made for a long exhibition, though it was fun to hear their stories about travels in other countries. Similar to the first exhibition, we were given a day off and had a tour to the Ming Tombs and Great Wall. This time the Wall was more crowded (it was also April vs. February) and Roy and Chris had perhaps had their fill. Here is my more complete post on the tourist side of this trip.

• 

• 

• 

• 

After the Internepcon show, the first shift of visitors left and a second crew from different companies arrived. These included representatives from Steinerfilm, Globe Tool and Toledo Commutator. At one point I actually more or less knew what these companies did, but no longer.  We shifted to a different, better hotel for a series of meetings with various ministries and agencies.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

I’m not sure which hotel we were in, but by this point the Jianguo Hotel had just opened in Beijing and was a revelation for foreign travelers. It was clean, new, and managed by Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotels which owned the Peninsula and many other great hotels (and was run by Michael Kadoorie whose father, Lawrence, was among other things, Chairman of China Light and Power and my Dad’s boss/colleague/friend). Here is a decent article by Gilbert Van Kerckhove (another profile), a Belgian businessman in Beijing since the early 1980s, giving a sense of the city that is pretty close to what I recall and highlights the Jianguo’s impact.

In early May, Neal and I headed to Shanghai where we had several days of meetings together. We ping-ponged back to Beijing for more meetings, then I headed back to Shanghai where I stayed about three more weeks on my own. I set up shop in the Jinjiang Hotel again and came to know the surroundings pretty well. I worked out of my hotel room; we investigated getting an actual office space but it was too expensive for the time being.

• 

• 

• 

• 

I could only communicate back to the US with Neal via telex, a very cumbersome and expensive process. It was barely a step up from a telegraph and a little bit like early text messaging. I would write out short messages, skimping on every letter and abbreviating where I could because you paid for every character. Then I would take the message down the the telex office at the hotel and type the message onto a punch tape. I’d give the punch tape over to the operator who would send the message, then I would typically have to wait a day or two for a reply. It felt like jumping back to the 1920s.

I was able to set up a number of meetings and factory visits with the help of assigned interpreter/minder contacts, including Yin Maolin and Dong Song Nian. It was not so much that they were working for me, more like I was working for them, trying to respond to their wishlists. I was the go-between to the Western companies; they were the go-betweens to the actual Chinese factories that were our target customers. Neither of us could make decisions on our own, per se, so everything was a dance of asking questions of others and waiting for responses.

It became increasingly clear that, on the whole, the Chinese were really interested in acquiring the very latest technology possible, leapfrogging generations of technical development. They could sniff if you were trying to sell them older technology, which frankly had been part of our strategy — our idea of helping them walk before running. They wanted to get running as fast as possible as quickly as possible. That called into play a labyrinth of US government restrictions on what could be sold to Communist countries and China in particular.

We eventually actually sold a GenRad semiconductor test unit to the Shanghai #5 Component Factory for more than $50,000, my first sale and by far our company’s largest at that point. It took many more months to get US government approval of the sale as it was restricted technology; eventually it shipped, but long after I left Bei Jing-Washington. 

After roughly three increasingly lonely weeks in Shanghai, I was given a reprieve of a few days in Hong Kong. From there I headed to Singapore to participate in GenRad’s Far East Sales Conference for several days. It’s an indicator of my state of mind at that point that I don’t have any pictures or real recollections of that meeting or time in Singapore other than notes of the airfare.

Lessons and Leaving Bei Jing-Washington

I finally returned home in June 1982, having spent the better part of five months on the road. I came back with some real doubts about building a career in China. In no particular order, they included:

• My Chinese language skills were barely adequate and I was a long way from fluency.
• It became clear to me that there was a clear preference within China to work with overseas Chinese rather than “foreigners” like me and Neal. I would be forever handicapped by my race and be an outsider in China, which was very different to how I felt in Hong Kong.
• China was a very, very poor country. While it was clear there was interest in moving forward quickly, there was no telling at that point how long that acceleration would take. In the meantime, while it was exotic and interesting, China in 1982 was a very difficult environment in which to live and work.
• I was not really cut out to be a salesman. The basic skills of schmoozing and building relationships were not my strengths or interests, nor did I have a killer instinct to cut the hardest bargain. I was more tuned to finding mutual benefit and finding ground to settle on something satisfactory. This was not a recipe for success when dealing with sharks, as many of the Chinese counterparts and even our Western clients were.
• I felt greatly out of my depth on a technical level with the equipment we were representing. I wanted to learn a lot more about the technology and be able to actually answer some questions on my own and add some value to discussions with customers.
• I missed Barb greatly and decided while I was away that I wanted to get married and build a life with her. It was clear that meant I should not and could not be traveling all the time. The life of a road warrior was interesting but it was not conducive to strong relationships at home.
• I hoped I could build a career that would have an international focus and allow for travel, especially in Asia, but I concluded that I didn’t want to be an international sales representative always on the road. 

In July, just after returning from China, Barb and I went to St. Croix for what was supposed to have been a Bei Jing-Washington board meeting. Neal had planned the meeting for quite a while, and I had actually researched resorts and selected the Buccaneer because of its golf course. The Bei Jing-Washington board at that point was just Neal and Bruce Enz, and for whatever reason, the meeting didn’t happen. Neal let the two of us go anyway as a sort of bonus which he could expense. We didn’t say no.

All of these things conspired to send me in a different direction. The straw that broke the camel’s back was returning home and finding that Neal had engaged in some shady finances, impacting my expense reimbursements and my personal credit rating. Within a couple of months I abruptly resigned from Bei Jing-Washington and embarked on new chapters in my life and career.

Bei Jing-Washington, Inc. continued for a number of years under Neal. I did not stay in close touch. On a very sad note, in January, 1985, one of my successors with the company, fellow Georgetown graduate Peter Barkanik, was killed along with an engineer from Hollis when their CAAC flight crashed. I’ve always thought that could have been me and was grateful it was not.

---

Next job: Atlantic Research Corporation

Previous job: College Jobs

Work page: My Brilliant Careers