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<\/a>to a former student who is the General Manager of Cargill China. I hope that Confucius\u2019 saying, \u201cIt is a great pleasure to welcome guests who come from afar\u201d applies to him, because I was certainly glad to visit with him.\u00a0 Omar Sadeque graduated IWU in 1992, got an MBA from Baylor, and went to work for Cargill.\u00a0 Though I\u2019ve followed his career, it\u2019s been mostly from a distance.\u00a0 The last time I visited him, it was May of 1997 or so, and he had just been sent to China, where, reasonably fresh from the MBA program, he\u2019d been given around $30 million and told to \u201cstart a chicken feed plant.\u201d\u00a0 I remember being impressed by his responsibilities, and by his expat life style, which included car\/driver\/apartment\/cook and maid.\u00a0 He successfully established that plant, and has spent most of his career in the East\u2014in Indonesia and Thailand, among other locations, helping grow the 12% of Cargill\u2019s business that is in Asia.\u00a0 I\u2019ve heard good things about him from his coworkers in Malaysia, Viet Nam, and Singapore, where I have\u00a0 visited Cargill operations courtesy of the University of Wisconsin Faculty Development Trips.<\/p>\n<\/a>His current assignment is a major one\u2014to build a chicken processing plant in Anhui province that will eventually employ 4500 people, and perhaps supply chicken, as Cargill does elsewhere, to McDonalds and KFC.\u00a0 The company kind of flies under the radar; although it\u2019s a $120 billion corporation, and would rank in the top 15 of the Fortune 500, it\u2019s still family held, and in a business far less glamorous than Infosys, which has comparable revenues.\u00a0 Its motto is nourishing people and nourishing ideas, and I\u2019ve been impressed with what I know about its social responsibility.\u00a0 When we were in Viet Nam, for example, the plant manager took us to a school that Cargill and its suppliers built and maintain for youth in an area where the government cannot afford to build schools.<\/p>\n
Omar\u2019s task was not only to do the right thing, as he put it, but to do it in the right way.\u00a0 He helped the company negotiate the purchase of land rights (only the government owns land in China) from 1500 farmers, promising them not just a fair price, but an annuity, and moving them elsewhere.\u00a0 A similar operation in India would probably cause (as it has) a farm protest, and indeed, similar displacements in China (the Yangtze Gorges project displaced over 1.5 million people) have provoked riots and unrest. But not many agreements contain the annuity.\u00a0 It is an impressive company, and I\u2019m certain that a number of students present will consider applying to the Minneapolis-based corporation.<\/p>\n
Before our 21 hour train ride to Xi\u2019an, we had an afternoon free to browse in Shanghai.\u00a0 The bus took us to a market that houses mostly knockoff goods.\u00a0 It used to be a big open air market for fake North Face, Rolex, etc., but the intellectual property negotiations have made the knockoff market become\u00a0 less obvious in China.<\/p>\n
For me, the building was a short walk from People\u2019s Park, and there were a few sites there that I would much rather have seen\u2014and did. People\u2019s Park occupied what had once been the racetrack in Shanghai, and I have postcards of it from the 1920s and 1930s.\u00a0 The Chinese government\u00a0 The 21 hour train ride (I almost typed \u201cstrain ride\u201d) was kind of a shock to the students.\u00a0 On the Hong Kong-Shanghai train, being an international train, there was a baggage car; hence, the four-bed compartment (the so-called soft sleeper) was fairly comfortable with our day packs and us.\u00a0 On the Xi\u2019an train, we had to take our luggage into the compartment, and find a way to store it and us together.\u00a0 I think our students understood why Chinese travel light.\u00a0 After the visit to the knockoff market, several students had to buy additional suitcases!<\/p>\n Well, we are here in Xi’an which means Western Peace.\u00a0 It was also called Chang an, which means long peace.\u00a0 I\u2019d hoped to write more, but I\u2019ll save it for after our tour tomorrow (when we visit the terra cotta warriors) or Saturday, where we tour before another train ride.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We\u2019re in Xi\u2019an, a city of 8 million, but one, as I\u2019m fond of writing, that was the capital of China for over 1000 years (thirteen dynasties, our guide reminds us; can you name more than 3? Qin, Han, and Tang?), but most recently 1000 years ago.\u00a0 It\u2019s a reminder that China was once THE … Continue reading “Xi\u2019an, the road to Western Peace”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mayterm-india"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=981"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9098,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981\/revisions\/9098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>converted the clock tower and grandstand into a Museum of Modern Art, and it\u2019s story, as well as the planned growth of Shanghai, were related in a nearby museum; on visiting it, I was able to check it off my bucket list.<\/p>\n