Chapter 6 Chapter Two Accumulation and Growth: The Bitter and Happy Years Before Entrepreneurship

Many people's innocent youth was carefree, full of childishness, full of beautiful fantasies, and left many good memories.However, Ren Zhengfei's boyhood was gray. Ren Zhengfei was born in a remote mountain village in Guizhou Province. There are seven brothers and sisters in his family. He lives on the meager income from his parents’ teaching. In the difficult period after the founding of New China, the life of the Ren family who had no savings was even more difficult. up. Ren Zhengfei was born in Rendian Village, Zhiping Pian, Huangzhai Town, Pujiang County, Zhejiang Province.His grandfather Ren Sanhe was a master chef of cured ham and was well-known in Pujiang at that time.Ren Zhengfei's father's name is Ren Moxun, and his mother's name is Cheng Yuanzhao.

When his father, Ren Moxun, was a passionate young man when he was in college in Beijing, he actively participated in the student movement, gave anti-Japanese speeches, and joined the Communist Youth League.Because his grandfather and grandmother died of illness one after another, he dropped out of school and returned home before finishing college for a year.At that time, at the beginning of the cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, and the national anti-Japanese wave was raging, my father, under the introduction of the fellow countrymen's association, went to work as an accountant in a KMT military factory in Guangzhou where a fellow villager was the factory director.Due to the advance of the war, the factory was moved to Rongshui, Guangxi, and then to Tongzi, Guizhou.In Guizhou, Ren Zhengfei's parents knew each other well and got married.

In 1944, in a small village in a poor mountainous area in Zhenning County, Anshun Prefecture, Guizhou Province, the eldest son of the Ren family, Ren Zhengfei, was born. Both father and mother are ordinary teachers.In the 1950s and 1960s, intellectuals were all "smelly old nines". Not only did they receive meager wages, but they were also despised, which was very different from the treatment of intellectuals in modern society. Ren Zhengfei has seven brothers and sisters, plus nine parents.The whole family lived on their parents' meager wages and had no other source of income.At that time, the country's economy was struggling and there was a serious shortage of food. The little food stored was not enough to feed the whole family.

At that time, two or three people in his family shared one quilt, and straw was spread under the worn-out quilt.Life is very difficult at first, but the children are growing up day by day, the clothes are getting shorter day by day, and the children have to study, the expenses are very high, each semester pays 2 to 3 yuan in tuition fees, and when the school starts to pay the tuition fees , the mother was worried. At that time, the country implemented a strict rationing system, and everything was based on tickets. At the least, each person was only issued 0.5 meters of cloth tickets a year. How could seven brothers and sisters use it!Therefore, until he graduated from high school, Ren Zhengfei did not wear a shirt, even in the hot summer, he wore a thick coat.When he was in college, his mother gave him two shirts at a time. He knew that this was hard won, and he was so excited that tears filled his eyes.When he was admitted to university, he needed to bring his own bedding, which stumped his parents.Later, my mother thought of an idea. At that time, just in time for the students to graduate, my mother picked up the torn sheets discarded by the graduates, sewed them up, cleaned them, and let him wear them to spend five years of college life.

In the last three months of the college entrance examination, his mother often secretly slipped him a small tortilla in the morning, so that he could review his homework and be admitted to college with peace of mind.Ren Zhengfei later said with emotion: "If it weren't for this, maybe I wouldn't be able to start a company like Huawei. There might be one more pig-raising expert in the society, or one more skilled craftsman on the street. This small cornbread is from I picked it out of the mouths of my parents and younger siblings, and I can't repay them." When Ren Zhengfei was in high school, it was during the three years of economic difficulties in the country. Hunger and death threatened people. They were hungry every day. How could they have the heart to study?In his second year of high school, he took the make-up exam.

Ren Zhengfei was about to take the college entrance examination, and sometimes he would review his homework at home, and he was so hungry that he couldn't hold it anymore, so he mixed rice bran with vegetables and ate it baked. His father bumped into him a few times, and they felt distressed.At that time, the family was so poor that there was not even a lockable cabinet, and the food was stored in earthen jars, but he would never grab a handful casually, otherwise his brothers and sisters would all starve. When he was a teenager, he had no great ambitions, and his ideal for three years in high school was to be able to eat a white flour steamed bun.I am much hungry, and there are many ways to go up the mountain to pick some red thorn fruits (the kind used for greening), grind the bracken root into pulp, and the green sticks into powder as food.Sometimes my younger sister picked a few castor beans and fried them as peanuts, and she would get diarrhea when she ate them.Later, some pumpkins were planted in the wasteland on the mountain, and the roots of the canna were cooked and eaten...

Father sometimes goes out to attend meetings, and he still has the opportunity to make some improvements; while mother has a heavy burden, besides her own work, she also has to live, cook, wash clothes, repair coal stoves, and educate seven children... Doing everything, consuming It's so big, but I never eat more than one bite.At that time, the Ren family implemented a strict distribution system for each meal. Only in this way can the whole family survive. If this is not the case, one or two children will not survive. This life experience of starvation and starvation has taught Ren Zhengfei to develop a good habit of hard work, simplicity, thrift and thrift. He got rid of extravagance and ostentation and developed a simple and unpretentious mentality.

Ren Zhengfei's parents are both intellectuals.Ren's father studied in a university in Beijing in his early years. He was diligent and studious, with a solid foundation in knowledge.Mother's high school education, self-taught under the influence of father. After liberation, my father wore the cotton-padded clothes of the land reform team and went to the ethnic minority mountainous area of ​​Guizhou with the PLA's anti-bandit troops to build a middle school for ethnic minorities. Before the "Cultural Revolution", my father was the principal of a junior college.Regardless of gains and losses, he worked hard and devoted himself to it. He quickly improved the quality of teaching, and the enrollment rate reached more than 90%.He devoted himself wholeheartedly to education, and he worked for decades, training many outstanding cadres, and his own status was still humble, but he never cared about anything.

My mother has a high school education. In addition to completing teaching tasks on time, she also insisted on self-study, and was finally rated as a senior middle school teacher.Many of her students are provincial and prefecture-level cadres and outstanding experts, and they are deeply impressed by Ren's mother's sense of responsibility in teaching. My father is very fond of reading and thinking independently. When he has a little spare time, he tells the children some stories about scientists and cultural celebrities, and encourages the children to study hard so that they can become the pillars of the country in the future.Ren Zhengfei also sowed the seeds of knowledge in his little heart.He studied hard and worked tirelessly. From elementary school to middle school, his grades were excellent.

Influenced by his family, he developed a down-to-earth mentality of being progressive and indifferent to fame and fortune, and formed a character of loving reading and pursuing knowledge.This also laid the foundation for him to establish Huawei later, to be a low-key man, and to resolutely follow the road of technology.