This is Part 2 of 2 of Sinopec. Part 1/2 here.
Inside Sinopec’s Get-Rich-Quick Scheme:
A shoe polish management style called 刷鞋 shuaxie
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Shoe shine management
Made in China, exported by Sinopec, imported by Hong Kong: The Eddie Ho 何蔭華 management 刷鞋 caat haai style is a Qing era managerial tool deployed by communist dinosaurs for neo-republican commerce in a 21st century world.
But whose shoes does Eddie polish if not commie Chinaman in double-breasted suits, eyes on the girls, thinking mistresses… in Dongguan. One would have thought that Mao had finished off this petty bourgeoisie class of assholes.
Small wonder Hong Kong is Coolie Capital of the world. Until Sinopec the Eddie Hos were polishing British shoes, today, they lick commie assholes. Which would be, of course, perfectly fine: how they live their lives, who they scrub, who cares. Therein, complications set in once the Eddies pretend their loyalty was never to themselves, first and last, and that they own Sinopec.
Such a conduct is treason against the People’s Republic for which there is only one verdict: the Eddies will be arrested, tried and executed, if not today, tomorrow then for the abuse of power and the resources of a nation to advance their personal agendas.
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Shell and Sinopec compared
Does that look like an AGM of entrepreneurs or of political party cadres and commie functionaries?
“Party, government, military, civilian and academic, east, west, south, north and centre,” Xi Jinping said in a speech at last month’s opening of the 19th National Congress, “the Party leads everything.”
If everything includes Sinopec, it should just de-list and cease all the pretense it’s a modern company run on clear corporate values and commercial goals.
Clearly, Xi hasn’t been reading Marx and so doesn’t get it: The Party does not lead, much less own. The People lead, Xi Jinping follows. In the life of a business, ownership doesn’t count for much, not even leadership; it’s the ideological system running it. Sinopec is run on hoodlum — village idiot thug — culture wherein its managers think power flows out of the barrel of a fuel gun. That, if they’d walk round the offices the whole day, threatening with a wrench, things will get done.
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What’s a Commie Corporate World Like?
Beneath China’s illusory face of meritocracy
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There are MNCs and there are SOEs. (MNC being multinational corporation, SOE state-owned enterprise, a term especially reserved for China’s companies.)
Shell is a MNC. But Sinopec is a SOE even though, like Shell, it is also global, publicly traded, and its worth can be found in the stock exchange digital boards of Hong Kong, London and New York.
Take London. There you will find Sinopec’s facade in all its MNC functionalities, forms and trappings. There, though, you won’t find managers like Eddie Ho Yam Wah 何蔭華 whose no idea of an MNC business, or any business, is to play coolie.
This idea draws from the decrepit, old alleyways of Wanchai: the sullen Father upstairs in a teak wood chair, smoking, hectoring (to no one in particular), concubine silently pouring tea; Wife #1 is in the kitchen. Downstairs, Eddie is behind a desk, on the phone, berating the supplier — ‘Fuck your mother, I don’t want to hear excuses‘ — while ignoring an incoming cell phone call from Shenzhen. Later, he thinks to himself, he will say sorry to the mistress. Immediately outside his timber and glass walled cubicle sits the wife, behind a column of desks. She is counting pennies beside ledgers stacked up to her neck, decked in a gold necklace as thick as your forefinger.
This isn’t resurrected Hong Kong. No, it’s the digitized, computerized (run on pirated Microsoft software) refurbished past. Sinopec is the relatively new arrival to Wanchai, the one with Chinese communist characteristic but all the same: Xi Jinping the Father, Dai Houlian counting pennies, Eddie Ho, wielding the wrench, charged with ‘corporate strategy’ when strategy is by means of a shoe polish with his mealy-mouth and chinky-slanted eyes beneath a new close cropped hair, mainland style. He is Sinopec’s chief street enforcer and underling VP. In Hong Kong, they dish out corporate titles as readily as they hand out product fliers on the streets.
Shell’s strategic planning is as long term as British eyes can see through the London fog.
Sinopec, on the other hand, has “13th Five-year Plan outline for legal works and 7th Five-year Plan law popularization planning.” (Serious, we didn’t make this up; those are their exact words.) This — the planning — goes on and on and on, and like Mao’s Little Red Book stultifying in its scope, meaningless in its contents, and pointless in its abstractions. Nobody reads it beyond the title.
Corporate governance? Those are just words. Like the words employed to battle corporate corruption, its managers say they are adhering to — now take a deep breath — a policy of “deep going into ‘Four Styles’ regulation of formalism, bureaucratism, hedonism and extravagance“.
You get the point?
That, the above, is in a nutshell Sinopec corporate management today, identical not only in language but in content to some communist party ideologue, Long March style, from 80 years ago. Pity Sinopec, pity the people of China, pity the world.
The company as political ideology encapsulates Sinopec as a party of cadres steering a modern, computerized VLOC ship with sampan oars and jungle survival mentalities. And small wonder the results — USD270 billion in 2015 total sales — were so easy to attain. Those managers have only to squeeze the balls of Donald Tsang, Hong Kong’s disgraced ex-chief executive, and he’d capitulate and hand in all the keys of the government vehicles to Dai Houlian, Sinopec’s vice-chairman.
Those keys make up a market that ferries around more than 60,000 employees daily. No great strife needed, and no great innovation, no great thinking are necessary to get to those USD billion revenue numbers. Actually, all China is a captive market and this means all Chinese must bow to Dai Houlian.
It also means that beneath Sinopec’s stilted Orwellian language, parts plagiarized from Shell and Exxon, talking about ‘CSR’ and ‘social responsibility’, lies a pile of dead wood, political jungle creatures in suits and ties, performing guerilla skirmishes to win market shares.
No wonder there’s no talk of careers in Sinopec because, if you are fresh out of Hong Kong University, where do you want to go in the company? Indeed, where can you go? In Shell, they say ‘Join Us‘ and they talk of ‘Opportunities‘, ‘Diversity and Inclusion‘, ‘Understanding Local Concerns‘ and ‘Values‘. Sinopec? Nothing. There’s just absolute silence because all positions are taken up, by the Party, of course; nobody need apply.
Why the party?
Because, in Sinopec, power is the sole determining human and corporate value. You find this value extolled in the virtues of political verbiage of mind boggling abstractions — ‘formalism, bureaucratism, hedonism and extravagance‘ — as if the company is an extension of the CPC. And it is. When power is the sole arbiter of management tools, it invariably produces third rate, third world 刷鞋 shuaxie, brush shoe corporate practices. And you see its results in the following:
A roof dripping is now a water bucket four years on. Cracked and torn fuel hoses wait six months for replacements. It took three years to change a single forecourt overhead light because few technicians would work for Sinopec. Without their own technicians, Sinopec outsource the jobs. And these jobs typically go to the cheapest and, hence, the ones least competent. They, in turn, must curry favor with Eddie Ho who, of course, has his excuses, excuses and excuses for the delay.
Eddie’s use and reliance on shuaxie management style and practice is traceable all the way to Beijing and to the communist party structure imported and infused into Sinopec so that, outside of China, the company is, as they say, nothing. It exists as a tool of international political machinations between state and state, government and government, and president-to-president. That Sinopec is beholden to the CPC it is because Chinese political culture makes the Party equal to State and equal to Nation.
For that equation to hold requires nothing more than producing and nurturing the like Eddie Ho and Ng Chi Hun, Sinopec’s department head for Safety.
Ng Chi Hun is another Sinopec speciality: he urges its operators to stop using swear words with customers. But, on the phone, you hear him tyrannizing a subordinate: “You motherfucker! How many times have I said the service contract cannot be amended once the job is taken! You piece of motherfucking shit!“
Such a language — and Hong Kong is the swear capital of the world, after all — has nothing to do with the sub culture of taxi drivers and dockyard coolies that Hong Kong grew from. No. Instead it has to do with the use and abuse of power that monopolizes everything concerning Sinopec, from hiring and firing to outsourcing a light bulb.
The Rise and Coming Fall of Sinopec
Sinopec is so fucked up from the top-down and from bottom-up that, with crude oil prices down, the only means to compete against MNCs is to cut prices. It competes the only way it knows how — cheap, cheap, cheap — like China sells cheap, branded imitation phones and cheap shoes. Management tools like meritocracy, innovation, services, and product marketing are just talk.
Being Sinopec, being a political party outfit that understands only power, raw, brazen and undiluted, that’s all Eddie Hos know and understand. Its managers and directors have degrees in engineering and chemicals that are useless for the purpose for which they are hired, that is, as extensions of political influences to reward and punish and to hire and fire. This is as opposed to building a business with entrepreneurship and distinct objectives.
Ng Chi Hun is, of course, right in his never-ending, 24/7 berating of people to produce results: He counts himself as one of the company’s hatchet men.
Sinopec managers meet its gas station operators on the first week of every month. There Ng holds court. Eddie almost never turns up; he’s the two-face man, outside a thug, inside a shoe shine coolie, hence invisible. He is emblematic of all that’s wrong with Sinopec’s Hong Kong, lavish and conspicuous in its show of wealth and, on the other side, bitter in its deprivation and poverty.
Sinopec’s offices occupy six floors of Wanchai’s Convention Office Plaza Tower. Immediately to the north is the Reunification Monument; beside the Plaza, to the east, is China’s quasi diplomatic liaison office. Chinese commies hurdle together for reasons of comfort and camaraderie. It reflects their isolation and strangeness from the rest of the world and in their way of doing things.
Ng is lambasting again for no reason other than it is the default of his character; he was, as Hong Kong people say, born out of his mother’s ass.
“Here’s a list of violations the previous month,” he said holding up typed sheets naming the gas station with their failures to comply. Ng has been enforcing safety standards at Sinopec for five years. And, given the strict discipline and enforcement, the list is queer — running to more than three dozen cases of non-compliance. It is queer because the tougher the company gets, the more there are violations. One case especially drew his ire and this was backed up by photos secretly shot in the night. They showed a truck unloading fuel with almost no safety safeguards: no safety cones, no ‘Keep Away’ signs, no fire extinguisher, no wire earthing.
Such safeguards are the responsibilities of the driver who truck in Singapore refined fuel stored at Sinopec’s harbor terminal. Again, the driver is a short-term, sub-contract hire without any incentive to follow the rules, to keep his job must less.
Marketing is next and the department head Jessica Chan wants the gas stations to promote and sell to drivers who never get out of their cars ‘Tibetan glacial water’. Before that it was Thailand fragrant rice.
Sinopec, a contradiction from beginning to end, is a disaster in the making precisely because its managers, egotists writ large, believe in their own invincibility. They believe power is a bottomless resource and the CPC is always there to supply it. With a near monopoly on China’s demand, Sinopec, own by the state, run by party apparatchiks, has everything to itself.
On the supply side, it exists on the strength of China’s foreign relations with other countries. If Sudan is overrun, an oil sourcing part of Sinopec collapses. If Gabon implodes under the weight of low crude prices, Sinopec suffers. If Venezuela goes, it takes Sinopec with it in South America. If Pakatan Harapan takes over, all contracts with China in Malaysia is potentially worthless.
There may be simply too many ‘ifs’ to witness the immediate fall of Sinopec. It is on that presumption that Sinopec is convinced that so long as it doesn’t place all its eggs in one basket, the company would be alright, it would prosper and its managers can do as they damn well please. But, the argument is so obtuse and fallacious its managers don’t see the possibility that Sinopec can simply run out of eggs one day. After which all the baskets in the world would be useless.
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