The long march

On the telephone from his hotel in South Africa, where he is attending the CIOB International's board meeting in Cape Town, Michael Brown describes a pile of over 100 applications for CIOB membership waiting to be processed in Beijing.

Demand for CIOB qualification is vast in China. For nearly 25 years the country has been shifting by degrees from a planned to a free-market economy. Since China joined the World Trade Organisation last December, the pace of change has become frantic. "If you returned from China 10 days ago, your perceptions are already out of date," said Tony Baldry MP, chair of the All-Party China Committee, at a recent conference.

Chinese legislators are churning out WTO-compatible laws, monolithic state organisations are privatising, and all the while China's GDP is growing between 7% and 9% year on year.

As China's economy booms, so must its construction industry. In 1978, there were 8.8 million construction workers. Now there are 34 million. The government has set stiff home-building targets for its vast population, and is clamping down on corruption.

If China's construction industry is to rise to the challenge of a free-market economy, construction managers are among the most crucial links. At the moment it's a missing link.

"It's well known that Chinese architects and engineers are at, or not too far from, an international standard of competence, but not construction managers," says Michael Brown, the CIOB's deputy chief executive and executive director of CIOB International.

The skills gap in Chinese construction management was created by the sharp withdrawal of the 'visible hand' – the planners and tweakers who direct affairs in a command economy. The free market ushered in a previously unheard-of requirement: the need to juggle time, cost and quality.

"In a planned economy there is no competition, no tendering. You don't have to think about risk. You're just given the task and you didn't lose your job in the old system," says Li Shirong, a professor in Chongqing University's faculty of construction management and real estate, and vice-chair of CIOB International in China. According to Li, site managers will typically have been trained in a technical discipline and are at sea when it comes to finance, supply chain management and procurement. "We've been in transition for 20 years but we are still weak," she says.

Andrew Gale, senior lecturer at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), has researched the interaction between Western and Chinese companies. He says that in China, job titles are very important, static hierarchies are strictly observed, and the flow of information is closely regulated. In short, it's a project-killing culture.

"They are engineers first, not managers," Gale says. "They're quite capable of achieving high quality but it takes a long time."

Gale believes it's an age thing. Young people in China soak up new methods avidly, and seem willing to rock the boat in a country famous for deferring to elders. It may be necessary to wait until new blood filters through the system.

Floodgates
The CIOB has jumped in quickly to grab an early position as the main supplier of construction management expertise in China. It started back in 1991 when Brown visited the Shanghai Institute of Construction and addressed a small group of students who sat in their coats to keep out the cold. They were bright and motivated despite the poor facilities and one of them now heads up a huge management consultancy.

Since then Brown has been to China 20 times, employing targeted diplomacy to win support from senior people in government, universities and construction companies.

Despite the popularity of the CIOB qualifications, there are currently only 225 Chinese members, although that's better than the RICS, which has 93 members in China. Brown says the growth rate, about 30 a year, has been kept low because CIOB China doesn't have the infrastructure to assess applicants any faster without compromising standards.

The potential is enormous. "We've only got to blow the whistle and say 'Go' for the applications to come flooding in," Brown says. His goal is for CIOB China to have 1,500 members in three years – equal to the Hong Kong membership.

they can’t say for sure when A project began, how much it has cost to date, and when it will be finished

Old boys' network
The challenge is to ramp up the assessment infrastructure while maintaining quality assurance. It was always going to be tough. To achieve anything in China, you need guangxi, the famous concept of "networks and deep friendships" – a kind of old boys' club that admits newcomers. At the moment only one major company, the China State Construction Engineering Corporation, runs a training course leading to CIOB membership. CSCEC, a huge mainland conglomerate whose president and vice-presidents are appointed by the state, made news last year by undercutting its nearest rival by $600m in its $2bn bid to build a Disneyland park in Hong Kong. In six years, CSCEC has cultivated more than 50 MCIOBs among its staff.

CSCEC is a valuable network, but CIOB China needs a broader resource to meet its three-year membership target. Fortunately, Brown's and others' guangxi efforts are about to bear fruit in Chongqing, China's fourth biggest city. There, plans are well advanced for a site manager training scheme at Chongqing University.

The centre will assess and train site managers to a senior UK-equivalent level, and this will lead to CIOB membership. It may sound like a simple achievement, but the big challenge has been to define the standards and help site managers achieve them. Once the training centre is rubber-stamped, 40 site managers will test the scheme. By the third year, the scheme is intended to turn out 200 trained managers each year.

There is also a training scheme for middle and senior management in place at Tongji University in Shanghai.

The real coup took place last month at the CIOB's quiet headquarters in Englemere, when the accreditation panel consented to a reciprocity arrangement with the Chinese Ministry of Construction, allowing graduates in eight Chinese universities to become incorporated members.

That rather simple-sounding event drew a great sigh of relief from Brown because it is the culmination of 10 years of hard work in which CIOB members and academics, supported by the British Council, helped China to develop a construction management curriculum to replace the old Russian one, and to help the Ministry of Construction build an accreditation process with teeth. It amounts to full recognition from the People's Republic of China, and means the cream of around 1,000 construction graduates a year will be well on the way to full CIOB membership.

China already has registering bodies for construction professionals, including site managers. But Li admits that these don't impress on the international stage, and that is what makes the CIOB trendy in China. Trendy? Yes, trendy. When the CIOB advertised last year for a country manager to staff CIOB China's office in Beijing, 400 people applied. The minimum requirement was an MBA.

"We have 35 million construction workers and 70% of them are agricultural workers," says Li. "With entry to the WTO, things changed overnight. Companies and individuals are under a lot of pressure to operate at international standards."

Foreign companies cannot yet take on projects without setting up Chinese branch organisations or forming joint ventures. The WTO made these concessions to help China manage the accelerated shift to a market economy, but in five years those concessions will dissolve, and Chinese construction companies will be left open to competition. Chinese companies will also want to take part in joint ventures to get access to other parts of the world. So both at home and abroad, Chinese construction managers will need to be world-class.

This need has allowed Brown to pitch the CIOB confidently and still respect China's honour. It's still called the CIOB, you've got to speak English, and subscription rates are quite dear for China. But Brown makes no apologies.

"We're not trying to set up a Chinese institution," he says. "We're providing a gateway to international standards of competence."

Post-colonial
There is a fine line between imposing British methods on one hand, and transferring skills on the other. Since 1991 Brown and the many CIOB-sponsored academic advisers have been sensitive to the charge of neo-colonialism. But it raises an interesting question: what exactly can be distilled out of the CIOB qualification and applied to China, with its legacy of command economics?

Plenty, according to the CIOB's immediate past president, John Bale. First, he says, you've got the 'hard', numerically oriented skills such as project planning, work study, cost planning and queuing theory. Then you've got the 'soft' skills of leading, negotiating, motivating, persuading and resolving disputes. Because of the free-market pressures, Chinese construction managers need help with the soft skills (they're hard to master, these soft skills).

Bale, who has visited China and observed European ex-communist economies, says the CIOB's standards of construction management are acutely applicable in such settings, where it's quite possible to find project managers who can't say for sure when the project began, how much it has cost to date, and when it will be finished. In China, former middle managers will now have to achieve targets with finite resources and please paying customers. In a way it never has before, the buck will stop at them. They're going to have to make friends and influence people.