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2007 Magnificent Ten Highlights "Made-in-China"

1.     Yuan Longping, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, father of hybrid rice

2.     Li Changjiang,director of China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine

3.     Bai Yunfeng, president and CEO of China Boqi Environmental Solutions Technology (Holding) Company, Limited

4.     Chen Zhilie, chairman of Shenzhen Yanxiang Group

5.     Ren Jianxin, general manager of China National Chemical Corporation

6.     Zhang Fangyou, chairman of Guangzhou Automobile Industry Group Company Limited

7.     Jin Zhiguo, president of Tsingtao Brewery Group

8.     Chen Shaopeng, senior vice-president and Great China region’s president of Lenovo

9.     Wang Jianzhou, chairman of China Mobile Limited

10.   Xiao Yaqing, chairman and CEO of Aluminum Corporation of China Limited

Given since 2000, the CCTV Magnificent Ten of the Chinese Economy Award each year highlights the most salient feature of the Chinese economy in the previous year and the roles played by the ten economic actors who have helped shape it. The theme for the 2007 Magnificent Ten was “Seeking the Pillars of Made-in-China.”

No one was more suited to the honour than Li Changjiang, director of China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), for the TOP Honour of the Magnificent Ten, given during a televised ceremony on January 30, 2008, for his devotion to defending the credibility of Chinese goods and the country’s honour.

At a time when criticism kept mounting in the United States and Europe of goods labelled “Made-in-China,” Li, as head of the country’s product quality watchdog, was compelled to fight back, often having to work “round the clock.” He masterminded China’s first white paper on food safety, which was published on August 17, 2007. Barely two weeks had passed before China published a landmark recall system for unsafe food products and toys, which was again his brainchild. Throughout the year he was busy with nationwide crackdown on production of substandard goods which, though accounting for only a fraction of China’s exports, had tarnished the nation’s image nonetheless.

Then came the High-level International Food Safety Forum in November, during which EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson alleged that “80 percent of the disqualified food products seized within the EU borders in 2006 were produced in China.” Li immediately refuted the allegation, saying: “I admit that a few food products exported from China to the EU have quality problems, but I don’t agree with him about the proportion. The European Union exported 50,000 batches of food products to China from January to September. Among them, nearly 500 batches were verified as below standard quality. That proportion is 0.8 percent. But the proportion of China’s disqualified food exports to the EU is only 0.2 percent.”

“The numbers tell the truth,” Li asserted.

Li’s perseverance in safeguarding the honour of “Made-in-China” with “numbers and facts” bore fruit. Mattel, the world’s largest toy maker, apologized on September 21, 2007, for tarnishing China’s reputation after massive recalls of its Chinese-made toys.

Mattel admitted that in the majority of cases, flaws in its own designs were accountable for high levels of lead paint and loose magnets which prompted safety scares. “Mattel takes full responsibility for these recalls and apologizes personally to you, the Chinese people and all of our customers who received the toys," Mattel’s executive vice-president of worldwide operations Thomas Debrowski told Li. Debrowski added that his company was committed to manufacturing in China and was investing US$30 million in a Barbie store in Shanghai.

“Believe in China and believe in Made-in-China,” Li said with full confidence at a speech on CCTV in late 2007. 

The CCTV Magnificent Ten Awards are given to ten people, chosen via online voting, for the contributions they have made to China’s economic development in the previous year. The selection has a key word for each year—“Responsibility” for 2006, “Innovation” for 2005 and “Auditing Storm” for 2004.

Both the words “Made-in-China” and the nomination of Li were natural choices for 2007, a time when a spate of incidents since March 2007 involving “unsafe Chinese products” ranging from toys, tires, seafood to toothpaste in EU and US markets prompted calls on both sides of the Atlantic for a ban on products “made in China” and concerns over product safety for 2008 Olympics.

The winners of the 2007 Magnificent Ten Awards were chosen from among several hundred candidates recommended by “people of all walks of life” on the CCTV Web site. A 100-member panel was created to guide the selection process. It was composed of 35 economic newspaper and magazine editors, 20 economists, 20 industrialists and 25 Chinese and foreign VIPs. Under standing rules for the award, no Party or governmental official may be involved in the selection process, and to ensure fairness, the names of the panel members are made known to the public only after the awards ceremony is held.

In addition to the “Top Honour,” a “Special Honour” was also given among the Ten. The winner, Yuan Longping, is truly special, for his achievement that helps feed 70 million more people each year. Yuan, 78, an agricultural scientist, is widely acknowledged as having discovered the genetic basis of heterosis in rice in the 1970s, a breakthrough that helped the development of hybrid rice. After three decades, hybrid rice is now grown on about half of China’ rice area and has been introduced in more than 20 countries, resulting in a 20 percent higher yields over previously grown varieties. That 20 percent increase translates into enough food to feed an additional 70 million people a year worldwide.

Despite his age, Yuan continues to work in his experimental fields in southern China’s Hainan Province on a three-phase programme aimed at producing “super hybrids” to increase rice yields in China and the rest of the world. Yuan knows that with China’s population now over 1.3 billion and expected to grow to 1.6 billion by 2030, food production will always be a top priority.

His team of scientists at the China National Hybrid Rice Research and Development Center in Changsha, Hunan Province, met its first goal of 10.5 metric tons of rice per hectare (9,352 pounds per acre) in 2000.

“We achieved the first plan by the year 2000, and the second goal of 12 metric tons per hectare (10,688 pounds per acre) in 2004,” said Yuan, speaking to a group of American rice researchers at a meeting in Houston, Texas. “After this, in the third phase, the target is 13.5 tons per hectare (12,024 pounds per acre) by 2010.”

Because of the cascading effect of the heads on the “super hybrids,” some have compared it to a waterfall in appearance. “This is our vision and our dream,” said Yuan. “It’s the kind of rice we need to feed our population.”

“Who Will Feed China?”

American environmental analyst Lester Brown asked this question 13 years ago, which inspired fright that China’s population would create food supply problems for the entire world.

“The Chinese people are not only able to feed ourselves, but also able to help feed many other developing countries,” said Yuan last June in an interview with CCTV’s Face to Face programme, answering Brown’s doubt.

“I had a dream once: rice plants in our fields are as tall as Chinese sorghum, with ears as big as a brooms and grains as huge as a peanuts,” said Yuan in a speech given in the People’s Hall of China. “I am resting in the waterfall of the rice crops with my associates. I wish this dream would have come true in my lifetime.”

Also honoured were Jin Zhiguo, president of Tsingtao Brewery Group; Wang Jianzhou, chairman of China Mobile Limited; Chen Shaopeng, senior vice-president and Great China region’s president of Lenovo; Chen Zhilie, chairman of Shenzhen Yanxiang Group; Zhang Fangyou, chairman of Guangzhou Automobile Industry Group Company Limited (GAIG); Xiao Yaqing, chairman and CEO of Aluminum Corporation of China Limited (Chalco); Ren Jianxin, general manager of China National Chemical Corporation (ChemChina); Bai Yunfeng, president and CEO of China Boqi Environmental Solutions Technology (Holding) Company, Limited. Chen Zhilie was also awarded the “Honour of Innovation” and Bai Yunfeng, 33, became the youngest winner of the awards in its eight-year history.

Each year a Public Good award is given along with the Magnificent Ten. The 2007 honour was given to Li Jincheng, chief designer of construction on the QinghaiñTibet Railway. The QinghaiñTibet Railway, which starts in Xining, capital of Northwest China’s Qinghai Province, and ends in Lhasa, capital of Southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, is the first railway ever leading to Tibet. Frozen soil, a lack of oxygen and a fragile environment and ecology were considered the three major difficulties in building the QinghaiñTibet railway, but chief designer Li walked on foot widely over the QianhaiñTibet Plateau, measuring and surveying, and together with his team, surmounted all the difficulties. About 550 kilometres of the 1,956-kilometre, history-making railway are built on frozen earth, yet the construction is described worldwide as the world’s most “environmentally friendly.” 

Also remarkable in this year’s awards was a new honour established to recognize the contributions of foreign friends who have made unusual contributions to China’s economy, the Invest-China Contribution Award. The first was awarded to Patrick J. McGovern, founder and chairman of International Data Group (IDG), the world’s leading technology publishing, research and event-management company. In 1980, McGovern established one of the first joint ventures between a US company and the People’s Republic of China and began to publish the Computerworld weekly, which many believe to be the first mentor of the first group of IT people in China. Today, McGovern’s IDG has more than 40 publications in China, holds more than 18 expositions on computer, electronics and telecommunications in China every year and runs R&D centres in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. By 2004, IDG Technology Venture Investment Fund has invested more than US$200 million in China, helped to create over 140 medium- and small-sized high-tech enterprises, and more than 13,500 jobs.

  On his 102nd visit to China, McGovern told participants at the awards ceremony, “The world’s future is being shaped in China. China provides the best environment for investors.

“China is growing to become the world’s largest economy by 2030 or 2035. In the next 10 years, great changes will take place in China. In the past, China had more trade from processing customers’ materials,” said McGovern in an interview with a Chinese magazine. “The major transition in the future will be that China will have more new products and technologies designed and invented by it. So the products that the world will benefit from will be products made in China as well as products designed and made in China.”

2007，他们擎起中国制造的脊梁

--CCTV中国经济年度人物评选巡礼

文/薛京晶