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• First Person - Charles Cuddington
Charles Cuddington is astonished at the dramatic advances in communications that have taken place over the past two decades.
Twenty years ago, on one of my first visits to China, I went to the closed city of Zhuzhou in southern China with two colleagues from Rolls-Royce. We had been invited to visit an engine factory and, like Chinese visitors, needed special papers to enable us to travel.
There were very few Western joint venture hotels in China and in Zhuzhou there wasn't even an hotel, so we stayed at the factory guest house. Every morning would hear ‘wake-up propaganda' from loudspeakers on the streets.
Although Zhuzhou was a closed city, our movements were not restricted and we visited the local market. Clearly, Western visitors were extremely rare; indeed, we may well have been the first that many had seen, as a crowd followed us around, curious to see what we were doing.
The ease with which we can travel to and within China, and the dramatic advances in communication are the most fundamental changes over the past 20 years. As there was just one British Airways flight each week, a round-trip meant being in China for at least a fortnight. If you took an internal flight it was impossible to get return tickets, so the moment you arrived in, for example, Xi'an, you made sure you got a ticket for the return to Beijing. Virtually every aircraft used on internal flights was Russian, from the IL-18, TU-134, AN-24 and then to the ‘new' TU-154. I remember when Guangzhou acquired Boeing 737s; travelling on them was a real treat.
The difficulty in travelling around was matched by the lack of communications. Twenty years ago, international lines were few and far between and everyone had to book calls back to the UK.
Conversely, the difficulties posed by travel and communications actually made doing business more disciplined, as we had to agree everything before we left the UK, including having proposals written up and agreed internally. There was no chance to call back to the office during meetings. Everything had to be sorted out in-country but, if it couldn't, negotiations took longer because we had to return to the UK to plan the next stage.
Communicating was also difficult if you didn't speak Chinese, as very few spoke English. If you were on your own you tended to eat in the hotel, rather than try to find a restaurant because the menus were in Chinese and no-one spoke English.
Everyone has stories about eating out in the early days and it was a bit of a challenge if live snakes and sea slugs were on the menu. Sometimes I didn't ask what I was eating; sometimes I didn't want to know. But Chinese food has never made me ill.
Language problems also meant that hotels organised your taxis, made sure the driver knew where to go and that he waited for you, otherwise you could be stranded. And, if it was night-time, it would be dark. There were hardly any neon signs or billboards, no signs outside bars or restaurants and street lighting was either poor or non-existent. The cities were drab, everyone cycled and most wore Mao suits. Flying from Beijing to Hong Kong in those days was as dramatic as going from night into day.
China changed at a phenomenal rate in the 1980s and that was sustained in the 1990s. In Rolls-Royce we have seen that change translated into capable and efficient international and national airlines, many using Rolls-Royce engines, and also growth in our marine and energy businesses.
I suppose the best way to describe the change between the China of 1984 and 2004 is that if you go to Beijing it is not a step into an unknown world – it is a step into a world city.
Charles Cuddington is managing director, airlines, Rolls-Royce.
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