Social change

Here is a great post from Andre Gentry explaining his experience with arguably the top university in China (Fudan) and the "management" of a frighteningly simple registration process. His experience is in no way unique and is emblematic of the frequantly bizarre work culture that is propogated by dullard managers and that employees mindlessly endure day after day. Alas, it is not just the government organizations that are "managed" with such contempt for effectiveness but it is common in the "private" enterprises fattened on a diet of (what they believe is never ending) free capital flowing from the government - money is simply handed out like candy to almost anyone with the words "High Technology" in thier business proposal and a free dinner voucher for building a government relationship, ensuring that concepts such as efficiency and effectiveness are practically guarenteed not to flower in the minds of the management for some time.

7 people + 4.5 hours + 5 minutes = 1 registration

I would like to thank the staff at Fudan University's International Cultural Exchange School for making this post possible.  Without their fulsome and inefficient method of registering folks for the HSK this coming May there would be nothing to write about.

Yesterday some friends and I made the trek from Shanghai University to Fudan to register for the HSK.  We started out at 8:30a, arrived at 10:00a, and finished the registration process at 2:30p.  The actual registration took only about five minutes, but it was necessary to wait four and a half hours to do it even though there was almost no one ahead of us in line.

Originally the registration for the May test was supposed to be from April 4 to April 14 (something which their web site still says).  That was changed for unexplained reasons to March 22 to March 30, but we were told we could give our money and documents to Shanghai University and they would send them over to Fudan.  Unfortunately, for reasons ungiven this service stopped on March 27 and so on March 29 the four of us bussed and taxied ourselves to Fudan.

The morning registration was supposed to last until 11:00a, so we figured that arriving at 10:00a we'd have no problem getting through the process and returning to Shanghai University in time for lunch.  Lo, such hopes were misplaced!

Upon arriving we inquired as to how we could register.  We were told we couldn't and that we should come back the next day at 7:00a or 7:30a to stand in line for numbered tickets that determine the order in which everyone is served.  Good thing no one told us about that.

For a little while we thought Shanghai University had forgotten to tell us about this important little fact, but the Fudan students we spoke with quickly disabused of us that notion: Fudan had not even explained to its own students that you had to come early to get numbered tickets if you had any hope of getting served.  Nor had it told its own students that there were just 100 numbered tickets available each morning, so if you came before the registration period ended you wouldn't get served even if those 100 people had been registered before 11:00a.  That's putting the customer first!

After failing to badger ourselves into getting registered in the morning we were told we could wait until 1:30a when the afternoon batch of 100 numbered tickets was disbursed.  We resigned ourselves to this situation with three of us going to lunch and one of us staying behind to wait in line.  At 12:00p we returned to the line and sat around talking until 1:30p, when we received our numbered tickets.

So we get our tickets and a little before 2:00p the registration process starts moving, supposedly to last until 4:00p.  At around 2:15p my number comes up, so...

1. One man has the responsibility of disbursing the numbered tickets and then standing in front of the door to the office and grunting when it's your turn to go through the door.
2. One woman inside the office is responsible for watching you fill out the application and watching you sign your name to the HSK examination folder that will be handed out to you in May.  That's all she does: watch.
3. You then go to the office next door where: one person takes your money and makes change...
4. And another person writes out your receipt by hand.  Why two people to do the work of one person?  Why not!
5. You then return to the original office and give your receipt to a woman whose job is to receive receipts and hand back an HSK handbook.  It's hard work: reach out your hand, take receipt, put receipts in a pile, hand back handbook, repeat.
6. Another woman takes one of your passport photos and pastes it into a photo album that somehow insures that I will really be who I say I am when I arrive at the testing center in May.  Pasting, that's all she does.  Why that photo is a more fool-proof method of finding false identities than the passport I have to bring anyways neither I, nor I suspect anyone really, is at liberty to understand.
7. And lastly is the woman sitting in front of the computer typing your registration information into a computer.

From start to finish the process took five minutes.  So, to recap, we waited four and a half hours for a registration which took five minutes to complete.  In addition, seven (seven!) people were necessary to do those five minutes of work.

The inefficiency of the process, the lack of publicity and confusion surrounding both the dates for registration and the method of registration, and the fact that in spite of facing the same problems every day of the registration period nothing was improved, well, I just marvel at the managerial incompetence.

It's not difficult to run a registration process, especially one that lasts only a week.  Just have three people working in the morning, change shifts at noon and have another three in the afternoon, and you still have an extra person available all day if too many people come.  Voila!  No one is terribly overworked and all the customers are served in a timely fashion.  This is not rocket science, but like too many things in China, the process was intentionally set up to be difficult, cumbersome, and to waste as much time of as many people as possible.

While I veered between laughter and anger yesterday at the nonsense of having to wait four and a half hours even though we arrived well within the appointed time, and it's difficult to decide how to react when you know that the bulk of your time waiting is taken up by office workers on an extended lunch break, ultimately I think it just makes me a bit sad that the worth of everyone involved, both the office workers who were wasting their own time doing tasks of such mind-numbing simple-mindedness and the students who must waste hours of their day waiting to finish a five-minute process, was so unvalued.

Yesterday's experience in inefficiency was, I believe, hardly unique.  Most everyone who has lived in China for a long period of time can come up with countless others: trying to get certificates for your business from myriad government offices that do nearly nothing, the multitudes of shop assistants in nearly every department store who do the work that far fewer could, the armies of people vainly trying to clean dust off the streets, the farm fields divided into ridiculously small plots that simply scream inefficieny.  Labor is cheap and so labor is wasted.  Labor consists of humans though and wasting humans is a depressing commentary on the value of being a human in China.

That's the thing really: if you make work inefficient then the clear implication is that you don't want to fully use the human talent at your disposal.  You are content wasting your workers' time and skills doing things (like separating the two people needed to take your money) far below what they are capable.  The effects of not valuing people in this situation extend past those office workers to the hundreds of students who have had the misfortune to go through the disorganization of Fudan's HSK registration process.  No one in the line that I spoke with was impressed with how things were arranged and in the end all we could do was shake our heads and say, �ñ�í����, Very China.

- Posted by James Nash - 12:03:35 PM - Comment? Rules: Criticize ideas? Yes. Criticize people for holding those ideas? No. []