Chapter 11 Chapter 10: The Boss from Migrant Workers

"Let me take a picture of you," I suggested at the end of the interview. "How to take pictures?" Qiu Qiguang, who had been quite relaxed all this time, suddenly became stiff. "You should sit behind the chairman's desk." Qiu Qiguang obeyed, left the sofa he sat on during the interview, and sat down in the high-backed black leather swivel chair behind the desk, with his hands bent over the desk and his shoulders raised.On the wall behind him hung a banner with large characters in a glass frame: "Integrity is the foundation", below the big characters is a portrait of Mao Zedong also in a glass frame.

"Smile." I was about to press the shutter. Qiu Qiguang refused to laugh, but still sat upright with a pious expression on his face.He didn't think there was any disharmony between the "integrity-based" business management behind it and the portrait of Mao Zedong. Qiu Qiguang believes in the philosophy of "treat people with sincerity and do business with trust". But he didn't know that if he had completed the transformation from a rural wage earner to a billionaire during the Mao Zedong era, he would have been sent to the stage of criticism; If it were not for the movement of peasants into cities for business and business driven by the "spontaneous tendency of capitalism" that Mao Zedong criticized many times, he would not be the boss of a company with assets exceeding 100 million yuan in Dongguan, but a digger in the mountains of Fujian. Ordinary farmers who eat food.

No wonder, when the "Cultural Revolution" ended, Qiu Qiguang was just four years old; no wonder, when Qiu Qiguang went to the city to work and start a business, the portrait of Mao Zedong lost its ideological meaning and became an organic part of the Chinese people's culture of getting rich. Today, as the chairman and general manager of Yixin Steel Industry Co., Ltd., a first-class national qualification enterprise in China, Qiu Qiguang is an important celebrity in Qishi Town, Dongguan City: his company is one of the best "taxpayers" in Qishi Town. Big household”, the town party secretary and the mayor often come to his company to “inspect”; the newly built five-star hotel in the town has a restaurant named “Yixin Hall” named after his company; The legendary experience of a millionaire has just been broadcast grandly as the opening part of the "Entrepreneurship Story" column of Dongguan TV Station; I heard that "foreign media" sent reporters from the UK to interview "President Qiu", and Qishi Town TV station also sent a A strong TV reporting team intends to film the whole process of "President Qiu being interviewed by a foreign reporter"...

Although I politely thanked the TV reporting team of the Qishi Town TV station, thus avoiding the embarrassment of being interviewed by the interviewer, I still admire the large scale of Qiu Qiguang's enterprise, the magnificence of Qiu Qiguang's office, and the eloquence of Qiu Qiguang's deputy. Talk about impressed.However, what surprised me even more was that the person who created all the above-mentioned glamorous achievements was Qiu Qiguang, who was simple in appearance, clumsy in words, and sounded and looked more like a deputy farmer. Don't think that China's urbanization process is full of helplessness and sadness. Among the migrant workers, there are only "screws" on the assembly line, and only slave labor in Shanxi black kilns.During my one-month interview, I also met Lao Fan, a waste picker in Shenzhen, and Qiu Qiguang, an entrepreneur in Dongguan, who were also migrant farmers.If the “brothers” of peasants are regarded as the middle class of migrant farmers, then the bosses of migrant workers must belong to the upper class of migrant farmers, at least the elite among them who have most successfully realized their own urbanization.

The phrase "a person should not be judged by his appearance" is very appropriate for Qiu Qiguang.Although he is simple in appearance and clumsy in words, he is very ambitious and thoughtful. He is not only serious and sincere in his work, but also has a set of philosophy of dealing with people that combines the simplicity of farmers and the shrewdness of entrepreneurs. Qiu Qiguang was born in an ordinary peasant family in Shanghang County, Fujian Province in 1972. Because of his poor family, he dropped out of school before finishing his first year of junior high school.But Qiu Qiguang said that he never thought of being a farmer all his life like his parents.

He recalled: "When I was young, every summer vacation, my parents took me to do farm work. I didn't go. They said, you are so lazy at such a young age, and you are lazy. I said, I will do some small business and earn money. More, if you make money, you can hire people to do farm work." Qiu Qiguang, who wanted to start a business since he was a child, left his hometown in the countryside when he was 15 years old. At the age of 16, he sold watermelons and "knew the skills of doing business"; at the age of 18, he sold clothing again, but "lost in a mess".Because of his lack of experience and lack of capital, Qiu Qiguang in his teenage years was more likely to sell his physical strength and do odd jobs.In order to survive, he has done all kinds of work, but the job he worked for the longest time, which is why he got started later, was a plasterer in the construction industry.

Interestingly, Qiu Qiguang has at least one thing in common with Lao Fan, the waste picker I interviewed in Shenzhen: they both once worked as plasterers.But then, they took two very different paths.Lao Fan is more eloquent and knowledgeable than Qiu Qiguang, but there is an important difference between the two: in terms of speech, Lao Fan is talkative, but there is a kind of fatalistic helplessness in his words, while Qiu Qiguang is clumsy in words, But his tone was very stubborn, and he never accepted his fate; From the perspective of experience, Lao Fan has been passively letting the hand of fate push and pull, but Qiu Qiguang has been trying to be the master of his own destiny since he was 15 years old.

But before the age of 20, Qiu Qiguang was losing money in buying and selling retail businesses in Fujian, and he could only rely on sporadically doing some masonry work in the construction industry to make ends meet.The "turning point" that really turned his destiny around was after he came to Dongguan, Guangdong; the "stepping stone" that really made him step into the ranks of entrepreneurs was his means of livelihood when he was helpless: plaster, Not his tried and failed retail business. More importantly, Qiu Qiguang met a Taiwanese boss in Qishi Town, Dongguan, who gave him business opportunities and taught him how to operate. " Arrived.But in Qiu Qiguang's view, the Taiwanese boss also helped him "scourch" the invisible "gold" in business marketing and dealing with people.

Qiu Qiguang recalled how he turned from construction mud and water engineering to steel structure production: In 1998, the Taiwanese boss "needed to build an iron shed passage between the two factory buildings. Let me do it. I made a passage of thousands of square meters. Then It inspired me, and I came into contact with steel structures for the first time. It is convenient, fast, and advanced to use steel structures to make passages, and no one in China has done this before. In that factory, after I finished the passages, The Taiwanese boss also encouraged me, saying, Xiaoqiu, you have a good character and a sense of enterprise. I advise you that you will finish the work in my factory sooner or later. You should find a way to continue to expand your business. I I am very grateful to this Taiwanese boss. I learned a lot of ideas about life, work, and business from him. Later, I applied the knowledge of steel structure I learned in his factory through the passage of tin sheds to my own business. In development..."

Peng Xiongbing is the same age as Qiu Qiguang, and he has always tried to be the master of his own destiny.Peng Xiongbing, who is from the countryside by Poyang Lake in Jiangxi, originally wanted to get out of the farm by taking the college entrance examination, but because of his poor family, he could not afford the tuition fees for the two of them to go to college, so he gave up the opportunity of the college entrance examination to his younger brother and stayed away from his hometown. Came to work in Wenzhou, Zhejiang. Peng Xiongbing, who currently runs his own residential electrical equipment company in Beijing, received me in a client's office in Beijing.

Peng Xiongbing recalled that when he first arrived in Wenzhou, he brought 200 yuan with him. Because he couldn’t find a job for a while, he had to sleep in the wild. “The climate in Wenzhou is different from our hometown. When we were working, we had no place to live. We lived on the road and under the bridge, and the mosquitoes bit us. After the mosquitoes bit us, we got blisters all over our bodies, and after being washed in sea water, our bodies rotted." The two fellow villagers who went to Wenzhou to seek luck with Peng Xiongbing couldn't bear the physical and mental suffering, so they fled back to their hometown and told his father about his situation, "My father called me on the Mid-Autumn Festival and said, don't worry about it." I’ve got a part-time job, come back, you can do whatever you want. I said I won’t go back. Since I’ve come out and won’t be famous, I definitely don’t want to go back.” Peng Xiongbing did "get his name out of it" later on.The young "old cousin" in Jiangxi's rural areas who was looking for a job in Wenzhou's labor market "pulls a pair of slippers" has experienced all kinds of hardships and humiliations in the world. I jumped back and forth between working for others and being my own small boss many times, and finally resigned from a job as the supervisor of the engineering department of a hotel with a good income and guaranteed income in drought and flood. Bottom"'s electrical sales work... If Qiu Qiguang, who has already become a billionaire, still has obvious peasant simplicity, then I can't find any trace of rural origin in the words and deeds of Peng Xiongbing, who is still in the ascending stage.Although Peng Xiongbing has never been to university, although he does not shy away from talking about the predicament when he first came to Wenzhou to find a job, when he talked about his experience of "working hard" in Beijing for seven years and his current leisure life , When talking about his understanding of the concept of business marketing and his analysis of various "circles" in the capital, his choice of words and sentences and his expression of feelings are almost the same as those of the "petty bourgeoisie" or "middle class" in the capital. In a word, Peng Xiongbing has been completely "urbanized" from head to toe, from the inside to the outside. There are many differences between Peng Xiongbing and Qiu Qiguang: Qiu Qiguang is clumsy with words, Peng Xiongbing talks eloquently; Do not accept fate; also met a "noble man" at the most critical moment in life. The "noble man" that Qiu Qiguang met was the Taiwanese boss, and the "noble man" that Peng Xiongbing met was "China's first bold and famous farmer entrepreneur who chartered a plane for the sky" Wang Junyao and his professional manager Huang Yao. According to Peng Xiongbing, as an electrician of the company, he often went to the homes of senior executives to repair electrical appliances, so he had a lot of contacts with each other, and "the relationship was very close". Peng Xiongbing also learned a lot of marketing concepts and experience in dealing with people. After entering Beijing, Peng Xiongbing carefully observed and studied diligently in product sales work and social activities. In the process of improving his career step by step, he also gradually completed his self-cultivation in all aspects such as speech and manners, hospitality, and demeanor. "Urbanization". Peng Xiongbing currently runs his own electrical equipment company in Beijing. Peng Xiongbing described his own difficult process of inner "urbanization" in this way—— "I just arrived in Beijing in 2000. When I went to the design institute to do sales, I didn't dare to knock on the door. I saw people working and drawing pictures on the computer. I was always afraid of delaying their work, so I had to walk in the corridor alone. In the end, someone asked: Who are you looking for? At that time, when looking for someone to talk to, I had to think about how to say it in my mind, and I always wanted to express it better. But when your environment gradually improves, you Don’t think about it, you can express it naturally. If you think about it before you speak, you will speak incoherently and unnaturally. A friend of mine once said to me, Peng Xiongbing, you can do this now Look, you can't relax, you have to step up step by step, you have to try to get in touch with people who are higher than you in your circle, from his speech and behavior, from his ability to express, from his ideas and knowledge , you can learn a lot." Both Qiu Qiguang and Peng Xiongbing came from the countryside, and they were very ordinary migrant workers when they left their hometowns. What enlightenment does their success have for other urban farmers who are still struggling at the bottom of society? I don't know the exact proportion of "successful people" like Qiu Qiguang and Peng Xiongbing among the hundreds of millions of peasants who have migrated to cities. Maybe they are a rare lucky few, and maybe not all peasants who have migrated to cities can meet them at critical moments in their lives. The "noble person" who points out the confusion, maybe being a boss is not a path that most migrant workers can follow (because there are a small number of people who are bosses in any society), and maybe a more demonstrative example is what I wrote in "A Different Land". Wu Shengfa, who was promoted to an engineer through step-by-step efforts, even took a step back in the "Insects Again", maybe the main body of farmers who went to the city could neither become Qiu Qiguang and Peng Xiongbing, nor Wu Shengfa, and could only sell their physical strength. Doing the cheapest, hardest, dirtiest and most tiring work may be the ruthless but helpless economic reality, but as long as China gradually breaks down the man-made barriers between urban and rural areas and creates justice, equality, relaxation and tolerance in legal, social and cultural aspects In a competitive environment, even those ordinary migrant workers who have no hope of climbing the social ladder in their lifetime can change from an obvious surplus of agricultural workers to a self-supporting non-agricultural worker in the city with relative satisfaction, or like those migrant workers who sailed across the ocean. Just like the first generation of immigrants who crossed the sea, they transferred their unrealized dreams of rebirth to their children to realize them... However, even under today’s far-from-satisfactory external conditions, there are still many “country people” like Qiu Qiguang and Peng Xiongbing in China who, through their hard work, have created miracles: The children of peasant families strive to become the bosses who control their own destiny. Although their successful experience does not seem to be of "guiding significance" to thousands of migrant workers, at least their "restlessness and refusal to accept their fate" His fighting spirit is worth learning and learning from all the farmers who are pursuing a better life in the cities. When Qiu Qiguang answered my last question, he once said a sentence, which is probably the motto he gave to all dream seekers who also came from the countryside—— "I think, there is an idea first, and then there is a way out. Without a 'dream', how can it 'come true'?"