First project in China in 1985 - Chinese contracting style
Electro-Acoustics on Projects in China, circa 1985
It was in 1985 that Ward did a big audio engineering job for Campbell & Shillinglaw at the new 900 room Garden Hotel in Guangzhou (Canton), which has a huge ballroom and many meeting rooms. This would be the first of many hotels that Ward would work on. This was a period very early in the opening up of China to the outside world. You needed to get a special visa to visit each city and use special money called Foreign Exchange Certificates that looked just like Monopoly money. There were armed police everywhere ‘checking your papers’, like those movies about East Germany and Russia. It was December 1985, and rather cold in Canton, probably 5 deg C, and the air was super thick with coal dust as every house and business cooked (and heated) with soft coal. Ward travelled by train to Guangzhou to present the finished design to the Chief Architect of the Guangzhou Design Institute, since all architectural work was state owned. This was the official architectural firm for the Hotel. Ward was invited to visit the site office to meet the Chief Architect and present the audio designs (there wasn’t really any video at this time besides regular TV’s), on rolled up blueprints. The site office was huge and the Chief Architects office was a massive suite of rooms, including a 1000 sq. foot office with many sofa’s and a large table. The Chief Architect was alone in the room and he invited me to sit at one of the sofa’s and an attendant quietly brought tea. He sat opposite me in a casual arrangement that I thought was odd. He was about 55 years old, greying hair and he spoke impeccable English. He said he had been trained in Shanghai in Jesuit schools and he obviously came from a well-connected family. He said he had done some of his Architectural studies in the UK and he had a slight British accent, although he wore the Mao suit and a Communist Party pin on his lapel. I was a little surprised that we were alone in the room, the reason’s becoming clear as we talked. He opened the roll of drawings, and I also gave him a diskette of the AutoCAD files. He had some technical questions about the mounting methods of some large speakers above the ceiling of the ballroom and some other questions that showed he was a skilled builder. I answered the questions as thoroughly as I could. He listened quietly, then put the drawings down and started talking about his life. He said that he was the Chief of the Guangzhou Design Bureau and he had 2000 architects, drafters and designers working for him. He said he had a car and a driver and that his children went to special schools, that he implied were only available to valuable party members. He then said that he earned US$250 per month from his job and that most of his staff earned less than $100 per month. He said that this was not enough to provide for books and medicines for his kids or for special foods or even imported cigarettes, and that he had to earn money outside of his regular job. Then he boldly said that he liked our design drawings but the work would not be competitively bid in the way I was used to. Instead, the work would be awarded to the contractor that gave them the biggest cash kick-back. He said, point blank, that his entire office was on the take, and that was how things worked in China. I guess he was trying to educate a naive ‘Gweilo’ (“White Devil”). He was ashamed of this, and said that this kind of corruption was not sustainable in the long run and that it would corrode the very soul of the country, however, it was how things were done. He longed for a time when he and his staff would be paid what they were worth and he wouldn’t have to depend on graft and corruption to have a few necessities of life. After a few minutes I left, but the whole episode was imprinted in my memory. Although my later work at SM&W would involve doing work in mainland China, I left all of these types of interactions to my local HK Chinese staff, as they knew the landscape and how to navigate it.