Chapter 4 difficult teenage years

Ren Zhengfei was born in a poor village in Zhenning County, Guizhou Province in 1944. He has 7 brothers and sisters, and he is the eldest.Ren Zhengfei's grandfather, Ren Sanhe, was a master cook of Jinhua ham and was very famous in Pujiang County, Zhejiang Province at that time.Ren Zhengfei's father is Ren Moxun and his mother is Cheng Yuanzhao.Ren Moxun, born in 1910, is the only cultural member of the Ren family who has studied at a university. In 1931, Ren Moxun entered the Economics Department of Peking University. During his studies, Japan invaded the Northeast and the national salvation movement was on the rise. He joined many passionate young people in the peripheral organizations of the Communist Party.Due to the successive death of his parents, Ren Moxun returned to his hometown in 1934, taught in a junior college, and served as the principal for many years.

During the Anti-Japanese War, Ren Moxun worked as an accountant in an arsenal in Guangzhou that produced gas masks.Because he supported the Communist Party, actively promoted the anti-Japanese war, and organized reading clubs, he attracted the attention of Kuomintang secret agents.Due to the war, the factory moved through Guangxi to Tongzi, Guizhou. In 1944, Ren Moxun evaded the pursuit of spies and quietly returned to Guizhou to settle down.Although Ren Moxun participated in the progressive activities of the Communist Party very early, he was not trusted by the party organization because he had worked in the Kuomintang arsenal. He had to undergo reform in every political movement and repeatedly explained his ideological problems. He was not accepted until 1958. Approved to join the party. In 1995, Ren Moxun returned to his hometown after an absence of half a century, and died soon after.

Ren Zhengfei's mother, Cheng Yuanzhao, has a high school education. Under the influence of Ren Moxun, she became self-taught and later became an excellent teacher. She accompanied her husband all her life in education in impoverished mountainous areas.In order to teach and educate people, Ren Moxun and Cheng Yuanzhao's husband and wife are cautious in their words and deeds, and they are so absorbed in their work that they have no time to take care of their children.They have cultivated many outstanding talents, some of whom later became provincial and prefectural cadres and outstanding experts and scholars.

Ren Zhengfei spent his teenage years in extreme poverty. His family of nine depended on his parents' meager income, and Ren Moxun had to send living expenses to family members in his hometown.In addition, the national economy was in a difficult period at that time, and there was a severe shortage of food. The whole family was often hungry. Several members of the family covered a quilt and cooked in the pit. The poverty scene even stunned the rebels who later came to search the house.Ren Zhengfei didn't wear a new dress before the age of 19. Because there are many children in school, every new semester, the mother starts to worry about the children's tuition fees. She often has to borrow money from people everywhere to maintain it, and sometimes she can't borrow it. Because others are just as difficult.

Even in such an environment, Ren Zhengfei's parents still insisted that all seven children go to school, and did not let them give up their studies to help support the family.His father has always encouraged Ren Zhengfei to study hard, and he has developed a mentality of being diligent, indifferent to fame and wealth, and advocating knowledge. Ren Zhengfei's parents were ordinary teachers who were at the bottom of the society at the time. Moreover, at that time, the teachers were all "smelly old nines", not to mention being despised by others, and their wages were very small, so they could not give the children material and career help. , what is left to his son is only the love of knowledge and the love of being a parent.

In such a special age, the most unbearable thing is hunger.Hunger left an unforgettable impression on Ren Zhengfei who was in high school.He was so hungry that he didn't want to study, and his biggest wish was to eat a white flour steamed bun.Although tortured by hunger, Ren Zhengfei, the eldest, did not dare to touch the food stored at home, because he knew that his parents were also starving, and the stored food would be left for his younger siblings to eat. During the days when Ren Zhengfei was in his third year of high school, sometimes he was too hungry to review his homework at home, so he kneaded it with rice bran and vegetables, and fried it in a pot to eat.I was discovered by my father several times. Although the father felt sorry for his son, there was nothing he could do.Forced to survive, the whole family tried every means to find food, planted pumpkins, picked wild fruits, boiled vegetable roots, and implemented a strict meal sharing system to tide over the difficulties together.Two months before Ren Zhengfei's college entrance examination, his mother gave him an extra small cornbread every morning to support him in going to school.

Ren Zhengfei once said with emotion: "If it weren't for this, maybe I wouldn't be able to start a company like Huawei, and there might be one more pig-raising expert in the society, or one more skilled craftsman on the street. This little cornbread was born from my father. It was picked out of the mouths of my mother and siblings, and I can't repay them." In 1963, 19-year-old Ren Zhengfei was admitted to Chongqing Institute of Architecture and Engineering (now merged into Chongqing University), but at this time the family's financial situation was even more difficult, and the situation of his younger siblings was even more difficult.The mother tried her best to prepare two shirts and a spliced ​​quilt for her son, which accompanied him through four years of hard college life.

When Ren Zhengfei was in his sophomore year, the "Cultural Revolution" broke out, and his father was imprisoned in a cowshed.Ren Zhengfei took the train and secretly went home to visit his parents.Because he didn't have a ticket, he was beaten by the Shanghai rebels on the train, and he couldn't get a replacement ticket, so he just pushed him off the train.Because he didn't buy a ticket, he was pushed off the train and was beaten and scolded by the station staff. Later, he walked more than ten miles back home in the middle of the night.When the parents saw that he was back, they didn't have time to feel sorry for him, so they asked him to leave early in the morning, for fear that people would find out that he would be implicated and affect his son's future.Ren Zhengfei rushed back to school early the next morning. Before leaving, his father warned: "Remember, knowledge is power. If others don't learn it, you should learn it. Don't follow the crowd. In the future, you have the ability to help your younger siblings." Father also took off his own pair of old leather shoes for him to wear.

According to Ren Zhengfei's recollection, he carried his father's heavy trust, and after returning to Chongqing, it was already "a hail of bullets".But he still calmed down and finished all the courses of electronic computer, digital technology, automatic control and so on by himself. In school, Ren Zhengfei got acquainted with several teachers from Xi'an Jiaotong University, and these teachers often gave him some mimeographed books to read.Ren Zhengfei also taught himself 3 foreign languages. At that time, he could already read foreign language textbooks in universities.He is now going to Europe and the United States for inspections, and he can negotiate business without an interpreter.

Such a poor family of teachers had a profound impact on Ren Zhengfei's values.Poverty is a teacher, it teaches people how to survive.Many successful people in China have experienced poverty, so they have developed a good character of hard work and perseverance, and this is often where their explosive power lies in their entrepreneurial period. Poverty is therefore called the "wealth" of successful people ".This also laid a good foundation for him to establish Huawei and bring Huawei on the road of independent industry. Ren Zhengfei believes that it is the selflessness of parents that ensures the survival of all children.He said: "Huawei's success has a certain relationship with me not being selfish, and this is learned from my parents."

In 1997, my country reformed the higher education system and began to charge students, but the matching student loans did not keep up. Ren Zhengfei donated 25 million yuan to the Ministry of Education and established the "Underprivileged Students Fund" to help poor students.Respect for knowledge is the educational tradition of the Chinese intellectuals. It is also the revision of distorted cultural concepts by a generation of intellectuals who have experienced the "Cultural Revolution". Developing countries and people experiencing poverty can feel more Respect the importance of knowledge.From this perspective, Ren Zhengfei's "Underprivileged Students Fund" is equivalent to the "Hope Project".At that time, someone asked whether the name of the fund should be called "Excellent XX Fund". Ren Zhengfei said disapprovingly: "It is not shameful to be born in poverty, and it is not honorable to be noble without knowledge." He also instructed Huawei's human resources department to give priority to recruiting poor college students.He said: "Poor students are more able to endure hardships and stand hard work, and are more able to withstand setbacks and hardships at work." Although he experienced hardships in his youth, it also cultivated Ren Zhengfei's excellent character of hard work, hard work, plain living and diligence. For more than 20 years, he has maintained the tradition of diligence and frugality, and his personal life is very simple.He has no bodyguards, no special car, no personal secretary, and he drives to and from get off work on time every day.He uses a Huawei-brand mobile phone produced by his own company; he self-dilutes his shares and lets the company's employees hold shares; he is approachable and unpretentious, and he often goes to the cafeteria to have working meals with his employees. You can't find a little bit of a big boss in Ren Zhengfei style.These character factors unknowingly contributed to Huawei's rapid rise and development into a great enterprise.