Text |Catnip is from Hangzhou.
On February 28, 2024, it was rainy at Wahaha's Xiasha base, and the crowded ** blocked the sidewalks on both sides of the factory, and wreaths and flowers spread all over the corners, stretching out for dozens of meters. These people come from all over the world, and some even drive from Sichuan to Hangzhou, covering more than 1,800 kilometers day and night. A song "Farewell" was heard from the noisy crowd, but it was quickly muffled by the sound of the police maintaining order - there were too many people.
The gate of Wahaha's Xiasha base was full of people who came to mourn Zong Qinghou, and Caijing Wuji filmed on the spot.
Today (February 28) is the day when Zong Qinghou, the founder of Wahaha, held a memorial service.
At 11:47 on February 25, Wahaha's official Weibo suddenly released the news of Zong Qinghou's death at the age of 79. The public was shocked at first, the first generation entrepreneur who was the richest man in China for three consecutive years, actually used this way to draw an end to his "never retire" career - and then caused the common memory of the whole society, offline Wahaha factory gates continue to have flowers, since the opening of the online condolence channel on the 26th, 250,000 people have offered flowers to him.
Even if we look back on the past 30 years or so frame by frame, it may be difficult to find a second entrepreneur like Zong Qinghou who can arouse the emotional resonance of the whole people. He fulfilled almost all the requirements of the Chinese for an entrepreneur -Patriotic, caring for employees, grassroots background, rooted in industrial ......
These traits are the result of his own tenacity and business acumen, as well as the shaping of the big times behind him.
Through the distant back of Zong Qinghou, those memories of people chanting "tomorrow will be better" and "getting rich first will lead the latter to get rich", an era of national entrepreneurship is also swaying into the smoke and dust of history.
"He's a sign of the times. As some people have concluded, when we mourn Zong Qinghou today, we are actually remembering that vibrant society.
"Elder Zong has gone all the way. ”
At 12:20 on the same day, the crowd of people who mourned Zong Qinghou suddenly rushed to the factory gate. Some people began to chant, and some even knelt on the damp and rough ground, kowtowed three times in the direction of the Zong Qinghou Mourning Hall, and then resolutely walked away through the layers of crowds.
The ** at the gate of the factory emerged, and the financial mowgli was filmed on the spot.
No one would have thought that Zong Qinghou's death would cause such a big shock in people's hearts.
In the initial obituary, Wahaha disclosed the time and place of the memorial service to the whole society, and made it public to the public.
However, due to the large number of people who came to mourn and the factory building of the Xiasha base has been some years, in order to avoid safety accidents, the funeral committee had to take control measures, and issued an announcement on February 26 that it was only open to those who were invited to the exhibition.
Wahaha's two announcements are from Weibo.
Most of the people present expressed their understanding of the committee's decision. They placed flowers and wreaths at the factory gate in silence, bowed deeply a few times, and then quietly left.
The flowers reveal the reason why they came from.
"I haven't heard of it, but I'm deeply gracious to it. I used to be a poor student, I was helped by the Spring Breeze Action initiated by Mr. Zong, and I was exempted from tuition for 4 years, and I am very grateful to Mr. Zong for his dedication to our people. A bouquet of flowers reads.
For some, though, being quiet isn't an easy thing to do.
Li Liling is the first batch of employees of Wahaha, she thinks she has no culture, but she got good treatment in Wahaha, and in the early 90s of the last century, she could get a salary of more than 100 yuan per month.
This figure does not simply mean the amount of income, but also the leap in social status. "If I hadn't worked at Wahaha, my husband would definitely not have looked down on me," she joked.
There was laughter, but more tears.
At the end of the year, he asked me to pick up something, but there was no one in the guild, and then I heard the news (Zong Qinghou died). "Every time the Chinese New Year is celebrated, Wahaha will send gifts to employees, but I didn't expect this year to usher in bad luck. Talking about the director of Zong, the 92-year-old retired employee burst into tears and kept repeating, "Others are very good." ”
Li Liling's joy also dissipated when the topic changed to Zong Qinghou, and was replaced by moist eyes and choked up. "He eats with us at least once a year, but we didn't expect to die at such a young age, and we always advised him to rest more. ”
But there are also some people who are reluctant to leave and stand on the side of the road from morning to night, day after day, except for eating and resting. Most of these people came by train, looked to be in their forties and fifties, their faces had been carved out by time, and they spoke with a thick local accent.
Is there a deadline for their wait?
Some people say "send Zong Qing off on his last journey", but more people don't have a specific timetable, just waiting dryly, as if they are watching Zong Qing go away, and as if they are waiting for him to come back.
swiped the news of Zong Qinghou's death on his mobile phone, and welder Wang Gang subconsciously thought it was a rumor. After verifying and confirming, he decided to come to Hangzhou from Sichuan to see Zong Qinghou on his last journey.
1,800 kilometres is not enough to describe the hardships of the journey, and when he passed through Hubei, he was stuck in traffic due to extreme weather and had to smoke to keep himself warm. After three days and two nights, he finally arrived in Hangzhou, and at this time he only had a few hundred yuan left.
"I never thought of giving up, I just wanted to send him off." Wang Gang said.
It may be difficult to understand why the public is so reluctant and saddened by the death of an entrepreneur. But if it is after Zong Qing, these behaviors seem reasonable, and even driving 1,800 kilometers has a commemorative meaning.
Being on the road is the most common state after Zong Qing.
He may spend 200 days running the market 365 days a year. From provinces, municipalities, autonomous regions, and municipalities directly under the Central Government, to highways, and urban and rural road networks, his maps are full of markers, and some of them are torn.
Wahaha's sales channels sinking to the township were gradually built up in the process of Zongqing's journey of thousands of miles. This drink, which can be bought no matter how remote the township is, is the greatest common divisor of countless people's childhood today, and has even become the spiritual link between Zong Qinghou and consumersAs a testimony and recognition of people's history of struggle, it is used as a memorial along with the wreath.
Many people use Wahaha to commemorate Zong Qinghou, and Caijing Wuji shoots on the spot.
It is difficult for ordinary people to understand why Zong Qinghou fought so hard. Many people who were far less wealthy than him had long since retired and began to enjoy life, but he had been working hard for decades, and insisted on a simple style - wearing cloth shoes, drawing eighteen yuan of profit, and spending no more than 50,000 yuan a year.
"For you workers. Zong Qinghou once replied to his driver.
That's true. Even today, Wahaha's benefits are second to none in the industry. Zong Qinghou not only provided tuition fees for employees' children before graduating from junior high school, paid for medical expenses, and provided housing subsidies, but even built a 1,300-room talent apartment for young workers who intend to settle in Hangzhou.
Zong Qinghou's employees introduced the experience of room sharing, the source network.
This is the other side of Zong Qinghou, although he is thrifty, he is never stingy with his family.
As the "patriarch" of Wahaha, in addition to managing the small family of employees and everyone in the group, he also has the heart of serving the country, and has invested in Chongqing, Sichuan, Xinjiang, Qinghai, Yunnan and other provinces and autonomous regions ......A total of 8.6 billion yuan has been invested in the western region and in the marginal and poor areas.
And this information is often not hyped up. In the final analysis, for Zong Qinghou, the wealth from the society should be returned to the society, which is the promise of the times that the first rich will lead the latter to become rich.
"He's a sign of the times. In countless reports, people use this sentence to summarize Zong Qinghou's magnificent life.
The merger of canneries, the creation of joint ventures, and the Dawa dispute ......In the scale of more than 30 years, most of the companies that set off with him have disappeared from people's vision, and only a few miraculously have weathered every storm.
It is also thanks to the pioneering spirit of these entrepreneurs who have opened the way in the mountains and built bridges in the water, that in the history of Chinese business, a national belief in "tomorrow will be better" and "more work and more rewards" have been carved out of the world.
In fact, when we miss Zong Qinghou, we are nostalgic for the era when hard work would pay off and a farmer could become the richest man in China. And those who stood at the gate of the factory for a long time and were reluctant to leave were waiting for Zong Qinghou to return with that era.
Before being admitted to the hospital due to illness during the Spring Festival, Zong Qinghou issued an open letter to all employees for the last time, calling on all Wahaha employees to "be down-to-earth and work hard". These 8 words, which are similar to his dying will, are a true portrayal of his life, and they are also the most valuable wealth he left to this world.
However, can Zong Qinghou's story be replicated? Is the entrepreneurial spirit they once demonstrated still valuable today?
These two questions may be out of place, but they are on the minds of many. Times have obviously changed, and when Zong Qinghou started his business, everyone sang "tomorrow will be better". And today, the rhetoric that "this year will be the best year for the next 5 years" is endless.
Many memorial couplets of Zong Qinghou mention his experience of starting a business at the age of 40, but at a time when employees will be forcibly dismissed by some companies at the age of 35, starting again at the age of 40 and succeeding may be just a beautiful but unrealistic vision for most people.
The window of opportunity left for ordinary people is indeed shrinking.
On the commercial battlefield, as large enterprises become more and more skilled in capital play, they embezzle each other's market share through first-class warfare and massive marketing, and it is becoming more and more difficult for small and micro businesses in the middle to survive. For example, in Coffee 9$9 ** A personal coffee shop that fell in the war.
It is true that there will be new opportunities and challenges in every era, and today's positioning of the private economy has not changed, and the "outlet" of the economic field is everywhere. But those new business opportunities may not be very accessible to people.
Live broadcast e-commerce used to be the hope of many people to get rich, and live broadcast villages and live broadcast streets have even emerged across the country. However, as the cost of traffic has continued to rise in recent years, it has also become a sky-high gamble that ordinary people cannot get involved in at all.
Even with the vigorous development of the e-commerce economy, the living space of offline entities is becoming narrower and narrower, and even small businesses such as canteens and restaurants can only live with their fingers crossed.
When the mourning crowd commented on Zong Qinghou, they always liked to add "China" or "nation" before his series of titles.
Behind these two words is their dissatisfaction with some of those who have broken their promises of "getting rich first and getting rich later". After amassing wealth from society, these people began to do everything they could to transfer their wealth to other countries, and the most despised of them were unwilling to pay the wages of their employees, so they left the burden to the state and walked away.
The above pains were finally transformed into the memory of Zong Qinghou in the psychology of the people.
From this point of view, we miss Zong Qinghou, and we are also calling for Zong Qinghou. People shouted at the door of Wahaha, "Zong Lao goes all the way", and they are also looking forward to the next Zong Qing to appear soon, and to expect more and more enterprises like Wahaha to get rich with hundreds of thousands of people in the industrial chain.
Obviously, Zong Qinghou will not come back.
Those who stopped at the factory gate did not make it to the auditorium and had to brave the heavy rain to leave. The flowers at the factory gate were later stuffed into large plastic bags and mixed with the soup oozing from some lunch boxes, and the people at the gate didn't know where they would end up.
Did this journey bring them anything? Wang Gang said that he was going to Jiaxing to find some work and save some money for the trip home. It's like a metaphor that everyone has to return to the cold and hard reality after hoping for the future.
Perhaps that sentence in "The Great Gatsby" is the truth of most people's lives
"We struggled to move forward, and the boat went up the river, constantly being pushed back in time by the waves. ”
Kunpeng Project