红旗下长大的台湾资本家
作者：英国《金融时报》彼得•马什(Peter Marsh)
2008年6月10日 星期二
当宣建生(Jason Hsuan)谈到未来几年实现公司销售额翻番的目标时，他开了一个玩笑。“我有一个5年计划，”他表示，“你看，我是共产党员。”
不经意间，这位66岁的冠捷科技有限公司(TPV Techonology)董事长兼首席执行官触及了关于他人生经历的一个引人注目的细节——他认为，这段经历帮助他创建了这家全球最大的电脑显示器生产商（去年销售额为84亿美元）。
6岁以前，宣建生的童年是在中国大陆的福清度过的。但在1949年，随着毛泽东领导的共产党夺取了政权，他的父母逃到了台湾，把他留在了大陆。
在那段动荡的岁月里，许多家庭背井离乡，千百万人生活在深重苦难之中。在祖父母的照顾下，少年时代的宣建生不得不尽其所能在中国大陆谋生。
他的家庭比较富有，在毛泽东时期属于重点“革命”对象。他的父亲曾是一位成功的纺织制造业者；在1927年至1949年的国内战争时期，他的叔叔曾是蒋介石军队的重要人物。当蒋介石逃往台湾后，宣建生的父母带着他的4个弟弟妹妹也逃到台湾。“我的叔叔杀害了许多共产党员，”在冠捷科技的北京工厂接受采访时，宣建生淡淡地说道。
由于被父母抛弃，而且是“走资派”家庭的一员，他在学校的日子很艰难。15岁时，他被编入“劳改队”，到中国偏远的西南地区安装发电设施。两年里，他一直住在帐篷和露天简易房内，外面经常是天寒地冻。而且一天只有一顿饭——“一个杂面馒头、一碗菜饭，”他回忆道。
18岁时，他患上肺结核，最终被允许离开那里，与他的父母在台湾团聚。两年前，当宣建生96岁的父亲在台湾垂危之时，谈到了关于他童年时代的话题。
“我父亲告诉我，他很后悔把我留在了大陆。当然，我当时对所发生的事情感到非常怨恨。但我告诉他，回首往事，我最大的财富就是我在大陆度过的11年少年时光。我了解了这个国家和民族，我学会了如何克服困难。”
如今，宣建生能够心平气和地回顾那段艰难时期。1988年，他与两位同事在香港创建了冠捷科技，现在正在着手进军电视机制造业，计划到2013年左右实现年收入200亿美元。
冠捷科技在全球设有8家工厂，其中5家位于中国大陆（共有员工约2.3万），两家位于巴西，一家位于波兰。该公司在香港和新加坡两地上市，宣建生及其家族持有公司3%的股权。
冠捷的名字并非家喻户晓。在该公司今年可能生产的5000万台电脑显示器中，多数将冠以戴尔(Dell)、惠普(HP)、联想(Lenovo)和宏碁(Acer)等电脑厂商的名字。然而，在去年全球生产的1.9亿台电脑显示器中，该公司占据了逾四分之一的份额。
宣建生拿的是台湾护照，但他的办公总部仍然在香港。他外表谦恭有礼，低调友善。尽管他对自己童年时期灼痛的经历有所回避，但他谈到其中的收获时颇为直率。
1961年来到台湾后，后来30年的时间奔波于台湾和美国之间。但他表示，如果没有中国大陆的背景，他永远不可能有信心于1991年在大陆开设冠捷科技的首家工厂。
这给予他十分宝贵的在大陆运营工厂的经验，并先于多数竞争对手利用大陆极低的成本。此外，当他试图提高工厂工人的效率和生产率时，他对大陆人心理的了解使他拥有一种优势。
宣建生表示：“如果你看看我们在电脑显示器领域的多数竞争对手，他们在大陆设厂方面远远落在我们后面。这使得我们拥有了巨大的领先优势，我们在这些产品上不断提高市场份额，就是利用这种领先地位。”该公司的竞争对手包括鸿海(Hon Hai)、华兴联昇科技(Qista)、纬创(Wistron)和群创(Innolux)等港台制造商。
有一种观点认为，显示器是一种大宗商品，没有什么科技创新。当记者向他提到这种观点时，宣建生似乎有些头痛。“不是每个人都能进入这项业务。你必须擅长很多事：不仅是制造及组装，还包括设计、成本、物流、仓库管理、售后服务。利润很薄（去年冠捷科技的税后利润是1.8亿美元，毛利润率仅为5%），这意味着控制成本极其重要。失之毫厘，谬以千里。”
他认为，成功与失败一线之差，使得激励员工的工作更为重要。他表示，近年来，他努力去了解和鼓励大陆的员工，使冠捷科技几家工厂的生产率每年提高了20%之多。
例如，宣建生谈到，他认为大陆人普遍存在的一个重要弱点，是缺乏自信心和团队精神。他表示，这与中国大陆近来的共产主义历史（或是微妙的反抗）没有关系，而是中国人心理的一个方面，他不知道该怎么解释。“我试图尽我所能地去解决这个问题。我对我们的员工说，如果你很好完成自己的工作，这将帮助你得到50分（满分是100分）。但如果你帮助公司的其他人，特别是其它部门的人，那么你很有可能拿到80分。”
宣建生还在冠捷科技的大陆工厂启动了一个名为“提高之夜”的项目，试图营造一种参与的感觉，并帮助员工获得通识教育。“我们将组织一个读书活动，总结管理一家公司的最佳方法。我们可能挑选杰克•韦尔奇(Jack Welch)的《赢》中的一个章节，以及另一篇有关（负责创造的）右脑如何与（负责逻辑的）左脑协作的文章。我发现，总体来说这有助于我们提高效率的目标，并逐渐使公司变得更加强大。”
他表示，其中许多想法的灵感直接来自于他成长时期面临的种种困难。更为传统的成长经历，可能使人避免遭遇很大的苦难。但宣建生在自由市场的现代中国的成功，无疑在一定程度上归结于他在毛泽东的革命动荡时期学到的生存经验。
译者/何黎
阅读本文章英文,请点击 A CAPITALIST CHILD OF MAO'S CHINA
A CAPITALIST CHILD OF MAO'S CHINA
By Peter Marsh
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
As Jason Hsuan discusses his efforts to double his company's sales over the next few years, he allows himself a joke. “I have a five-year plan,” he says. “You see, I am a communist.”
The throw-away comment from the 66-year-old chairman and chief executive of TPV Technology touches on a remarkable detail about his past, one that he believes has been instrumental in his creation of the world's biggest maker of computer screens, with sales last year of .4bn.
Until the age of six, Mr Hsuan was brought up in Fuqing in mainland China. But during Mao Zedong's communist takeover in 1949, his parents fled to Taiwan, leaving him behind.
In a story redolent of a turbulent period during which many families were uprooted and millions lived through extraordinary hardship, the young Jason had to cope with life in China as best he could, cared for by his grandparents.
His wealthy family was high on Mao's list of hate figures. His father had been a successful textile manufacturer, while his uncle was a leading light in the army of Chiang Kai-shek during the latter's fight against Mao in the murderous civil war of 1927-49. When Chiang pulled out to Taiwan, Mr Hsuan's parents, his four younger brothers and sisters followed in his wake. “My uncle killed a lot of communists,” Mr Hsuan observes drily in an interview at one of his company's plants in Beijing.
Abandoned by his mother and father and, as part of a family of “capitalist roaders”, he did not have an easy time at school. At the age of 15 he was drafted into a mobile “work camp”, a team that travelled around China's remote south-western regions installing electricity generation infrastructure. For two years he lived in a series of tents and rudimentary shacks out in the open, often in freezing conditions, and had one meal a day – “a multigrain bun and a bowl of rice and vegetables”, he recalls.
Falling ill with tuberculosis, he was eventually allowed to leave, to be reunited with his mother and father in Taiwan at the age of 18. Two years ago, as Mr Hsuan's father lay dying in Taiwan at the age of 96, the topic of his childhood cropped up.
“My father told me he felt guilty about leaving me behind. Of course I felt very bitter at the time about what had happened. But I told him that, looking back at my life, my biggest asset was the 11 years I spent in China as a child. I got to know the country and its people, and I learnt how to overcome adversity.”
Today Mr Hsuan can look back at his travails with equanimity. His company, which he founded in 1988 in Hong Kong with two colleagues, is aiming for annual revenues of bn by about 2013, with the help of a foray into TV set manufacturing.
TPV makes its goods in eight factories around the world, of which five are in China (together employing some 23,000 people), while two are in Brazil and one in Poland. The company – in which Mr Hsuan and his family have a stake of 3 per cent – is listed on the Hong Kong and Singapore stock exchanges.
TPV is no household name. Most of the 50m computer monitors it is likely to make this year will be sold under badges of producers such as Dell, HP, Lenovo and Acer. Yet out of worldwide production of 190m monitors last year, it claimed a market share of over a quarter.
Mr Hsuan, who has a Taiwanese passport but whose head office remains in Hong Kong, appears polite, low-key and friendly. While he is laid back about the searing experience of his childhood, he is forthright about what he gained from it.
After entering Taiwan in 1961, he divided his time over the next 30 years between the island and the US. Yet without his background in mainland China, he says, he would never have had the confidence to set up the first of TPV's plants in China in 1991.
This gave him highly valuable experience in running Chinese factories, exploiting the benefits of the economy's ultra-low costs well before most of his competitors. More than this, his understanding of the Chinese psyche gave him a head-start when trying to boost efficiency and productivity among his factory workers.
“If you look at most of our computer monitor rivals [which include Hong Kong or Taiwanese manufacturers such as Hon Hai, Qista, Wistron and Innolux], they were well behind us in setting up in China. This has given us a big lead, which we've been able to exploit through pushing up our market share in these products,” Mr Hsuan says.
Asked about the view that monitors are a commodity product involving little in the way of technological innovation, Mr Hsuan looks slightly pained. “Not everyone is capable of being in this business. You have to be good at a lot of things: not just manufacturing and assembly but design, costs, logistics, managing the warehouse, after-sales service. Margins are very thin [last year TPV had after-tax profits of 0m, with a gross margin of just 5 per cent], which means that control of costs is extremely important. If you get even the smallest thing wrong you will end up making a loss.”
This thin line between success and failure makes employee motivation all the more important, he believes. And he says that his efforts to understand and encourage Chinese employees has raised productivity in several of TPV's plants by as much as 20 per cent a year in recent years.
By way of example, Mr Hsuan talks about what he believes to be a big weakness in the average Chinese person, a lack of assertiveness coupled with a lack of team spirit. He says this is nothing to do with the country's recent communist past – or a subtle resistance to it – but it is an aspect of the Chinese mentality that he is at a loss to explain. “I try to address this as much as I can. I say to our employees that if you do your job well, this will help you get a score of 50 [out of 100]. But if you go out of your way to help other people in the company, particularly from another department, then you are liable to get a score of 80.”
Mr Hsuan has also started a programme of “improvement evenings” at TPV's Chinese plants to try to create a sense of participation and help with general education. “We will organise a programme of readings from books, which will bring together the best things about managing a company. We might include a chapter on ‘how to win' from Jack Welch alongside another text that is all about how the right [creative] side of the brain engages with the left [logical] side. I find this helps generally with our goal of improving efficiencies and gradually making the company stronger.”
He says that many of these ideas are inspired directly by the difficulties he faced when he was growing up. A more orthodox upbringing may have spared great hardship. But part of Mr Hsuan's prosperity in a modern, free-market China is undoubtedly down to the survival lessons he learnt in the tumult of Mao's revolution.经济观察,红旗下长大的台湾资本家
