Taiichi Ohno, the former Toyota vice president regarded as the father of the Toyota Production System, published Toyota Seisan Hōshiki in 1978. In it he wrote that by asking why five times and answering each time, one can find the chain of cause and effect and the real cause hidden behind a problem.
Toyota employees are drilled in the method from their first days as new hires.
In March 2015, after the Spring Festival, a survey by the Guangzhou human resources service center found that the city’s companies were short of 123,300 workers. Some companies in Guangdong reported that fewer than 60 percent of their workers had come back. The report used the phrase 有去无回, gone without returning, for workers who did not come back.
In 2008, infant formula from the Sanlu Group and other dairies was found to contain melamine. According to Chinese Wikipedia, the main reason melamine entered the milk was that milk diluted with water could pass the protein test once melamine was added.
Melamine is rich in nitrogen. A Chinese food science journal wrote in 2009 that for this reason it had been added “to give a false impression of high protein content.”
Around 2005, the chip maker MediaTek introduced what it called a “turnkey solution” for mobile phones. It bundled the key parts of a phone, the chip, the operating system and some application software, into one package for the maker. The makers of cheap shanzhai phones only had to design the outside.
The tech site ifanr reported a joke. With MTK, three people could start a phone company. The first dealt with MTK, the second found a factory and the third did the marketing.
Shortly before the 2020 Beijing Auto Show, Geely released its SEA architecture, Haohan. By October 2020, seven brands had started developing more than sixteen models on it, for different parts of the market.
Geely’s chairman, Li Shufu, said: “Platforms and modules are the direction of the car’s future development.”
From 2004, China bought high-speed train technology from Bombardier, Kawasaki, Alstom and Siemens and built the trains at home under technology transfer. These trains carried the name Hexie, Harmony. The CRH2 was based on the Japanese Shinkansen E2-1000, and the CRH3C on the Siemens Velaro.
In 2008, a joint plan of the ministries of science and railways built on the “digestion, absorption and re-innovation” of the imported technology. On June 26, 2017, the first trains of a Chinese standard design ran between Beijing and Shanghai. The day before, they had been named Fuxing, Rejuvenation.
The online fashion seller Shein works with a model called xiaodan kuaifan, small orders and fast returns. Beijing News reported that a new style is first made in a batch of usually 100 to 200 pieces. If it sells well, more are ordered at once.
The news site Jiemian reports that a first order takes only half a month to produce.
The BYD F3 came off the line on April 16, 2005, and went on sale that December for 73,800 to 99,800 yuan. Its chief designer, Lian Yubo, said the car drew on the experience of Japan, Korea and other countries, absorbed a great deal of non-patented technology and digested international design elements. Its shape resembled the ninth-generation Toyota Corolla.
The first F3 used Mitsubishi engines. From 2009, all versions with manual gearboxes used BYD’s own engine. In 2011, the 2012 model brought an engine that Chinese Wikipedia describes as the first of a Chinese brand with variable valve lift. When production ended in 2021, more than 3 million F3 cars had been sold.
In February 2020, the carmaker SAIC-GM-Wuling began making face masks. Its first masks carried the slogan Renmin xuyao shenme, Wuling jiu zao shenme: Whatever the people need, Wuling makes.
The slogan stayed. In July 2020, a company representative described it as the shared slogan of Wuling Motors and SAIC-GM-Wuling.
On September 16, 2020, Alibaba presented Xiniu, its first project for a new kind of manufacturing. Hangzhou’s news site reported that its flexible system could take orders from 100 pieces and deliver them in seven days.