to see what Dr.Wang brings to the China table. Has she got the right friends in China?
Published on: 1/1/2007 Last Visited: 12/18/2007
Annie Wang was 9 when her parents vanished behind the Bamboo Curtain.
It was the start of China's "Cultural Revolution," a terrible time for anyone in that country with money or status.Communist Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung urged citizens to engage in "class struggle" and the overthrow of "capitalist roaders," encouraging the political persecutions, betrayal, torture, murder, public humiliations and paranoia that followed in the late 1960s and early 1970s.Among the first victims was Wang's father, the secretary of Beijing's municipal government.Like many high-ranking politicians, he went to prison as Mao consolidated power.Wang's mother, a doctor, was exiled to the vast Chinese countryside - a fate befalling many intellectuals.And so Wang lived alone through her pre-teen and teenage years, surviving on $10 per month from the government, not knowing if she would see her parents again.
Now the president of Asia Pacific operations for Oakdale gas detection equipment maker Industrial Scientific, Wang recalls attending school during the day and returning each night to a dark, empty house.Her "dream," she said, was that "I'd see a light."
Wang's journey from the loneliness of Mao's Cultural Revolution to a physics Ph.D. in the U.S. to her current role overseeing a Shanghai factory is one of many local links between what China was, what it is and what it someday could be - tangible evidence of Pittsburgh's participation in the greatest economic transformation of our time, in the resurrection of a nation that lost tens of millions to famine, abuse, civil unrest and pathological political campaigns.Wang is living proof that doing business in the world's most populous nation is no longer forbidden, nor is it a fad.
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Annie Wang is managing the design and engineering of Industrial Scientific's GasBadge Ex gas monitor, which will be used in mining in China, the biggest producer of coal in the world.
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No one in China will prosecute, said Wang, president of Asian operations, and nothing can be done about that.The manager responsible for the theft "is not a criminal," she said.
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Left alone as a child, Wang now has a husband and two children.Her mother is 82 and lives in Beijing.Her father, after his imprisonment, became Communist Party Secretary of Beijing University, the school that produced many of the students who participated in the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations inside Tiananmen Square.Wang was in her father's office that spring when a concerned central party official called about the growing discontent.
"I quickly got out," she said.After government tanks killed thousands in 1989, Wang decided not to return the following year for her father's funeral.Back home now, she notices some of her older friends still have "mental problems" from abuse suffered under Mao's reign.Wang was young enough to emerge from the Cultural Revolution just as the universities opened and opportunities emerged.She attributes her success to the fact that she stayed in school when her parents disappeared, studied physics in the U.S. and landed the job with Industrial Scientific.
"I was so lucky."
Now she is a participant in the rise of a new China.
