The two highlights of
this day were our visit to Peking University and our first company visit which
was to COFCO, a state owned enterprise. Peking University is a very prestigious
school in China. It is pretty much similar to their Harvard. Over ten million
people take China’s college entrance exam, the Gao Kao, every year and Peking
University only accepts around 2600 of them. I was able to get some nice photos
of the campus before cold weather caused our walking tour to be cut short.
Once inside, we listened to 2 PKU students talk about
their senior design project. Their goal was to make a self-driving car and they
collaborated with University of Toronto and University of California-Irvine. We
then listened to a lecture from Professor Guo, PKU’s professor of modern
Chinese History. He couldn’t English, so Ivy, one of our Asia Institute guides,
translated for us. He gave a brief history of PKU from its founding in 1898 to
the present. After the lecture, we were escorted to PKU’s dining hall and there
were some similarities and differences I noticed between this dining hall and
Market Central back at Pitt. Like Pitt, the dining hall had multiple food
options and you can add as many items as you want to your plate, however,
before you sit down, you have to swipe your ID and pay for the cost of the
food, which is more like our Dining Dollar system. Also, while Pitt students
tend to have an even distribution of when people eat at Market Central, PKU
students and most other Chinese Universities have a central lunch hour (anywhere
from 11am-1pm) when practically everyone eats, which explains how packed the
PKU dining hall was so packed! We ended the visit at the school book store and
I bought a couple of souvenirs. One thing I will say is that compared to Pitt,
PKU’s security was extra tight. There were armed guards at the front gates of
the school and only students, faculty and authorized visitors could enter. At
Pitt, just about anyone can walk on our campus and the only places that have
constant security are the security desks to the dorm rooms.
We then travelled to COFCO, where a Pitt alum greeted us
and showed us around. Like I said earlier, COFCO is a state-owned enterprise.
They are also the biggest and most successful food processing and distributing
company in China. We saw how they use technology such as facial analysis and
analysis of eye movement when consumers look at their product in order to
examine what the consumers want in a product. We also emphasized COFCO’s use of
their entire industry chain strategy. They want to lead the journey from ‘field
to fork’. They want to be in charge of food production and agriculture, food
processing and testing and marketing. Now, the person in charge of operations
in this building said that being an SOE means that they can be less urgent
about business choices. I will talk about this later when we visit our first
privately-owned company.
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