Wu Zhuozhi

Wu Zhuozhi was born in 1897; his native place was Taicang.⁠[1]

He was a younger brother of Zhong-Yi Wu and a paternal uncle of the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu. Zhong-Yi Wu was born in 1888 and died in 1959; he was an engineer by training who founded the Mingde school in the town of Liuhe and served as its headmaster. A biographical memoir published by the National Academy of Sciences states that Chien-Shiung Wu’s grandfather, Yi-Feng WuYi-Feng WuYi-Feng Wu was the father of the school founder Zhong-Yi Wu and the grandfather of the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu.Open the full entry, had been a junior scholar in the civil service examination system. An article in the magazine Mathematical Culture records that Chien-Shiung Wu had an elder brother, Wu Jianying, and two younger brothers, Wu Jianhao and Wu Jianjie, that the last characters of the four children’s names form in order the phrase yingxiong haojie (heroes and outstanding figures), and that the youngest, Wu Jianjie, died young; the National Academy of Sciences memoir gives her an older and a younger brother, and the National Park Service’s profile states that she had two brothers and was the middle child. The Mathematical Culture article states that Wu Jianying died of illness in 1958 and that Chien-Shiung Wu’s parents died in 1959 and 1962, and that by the time she returned to China in 1973 her parents’ graves had been destroyed, so that she could not pay her respects there. The New Dictionary of Scientific Biography states that after her own death her ashes were buried, in accordance with her will, in the courtyard of her father’s Mingde school.⁠[2][3][1][4][5][6]

His person record in the Chinese Engineers Relational Database (CERD), whose stated source is the Gongchengren minglu of 1941, lists him as a student of mechanical engineering at an institution entered as “Lyonnaise C. E.,” with the year 1924.⁠[1][7]

The same record lists a traineeship at an automobile factory in France (Bailian in the record’s Chinese rendering) and posts as a draftsman at an electrical machinery works in France (Huajinai) and at a locomotive works (Shijide).⁠[1]

After completing his studies in France he returned to China and first served as chief of mechanical affairs at Hutai Qiche Gongsi, a bus company in Shanghai, which the CERD record enters as Hutai Changtu Qiche Gongsi (changtu means long-distance).⁠[8][1]

He later held the posts of technical officer (jizheng) of the Zhejiang Construction Bureau, head of the traffic department and concurrently chief of mechanical affairs of the Zhejiang Highway Department, and head of the vehicle office of the Xiaoshan–Shaoxing section, and he also served as acting director of the Zhejiang Highway Department.⁠[8][1]

The CERD record also lists him, without a date, as a specialist member of the National Construction Commission.⁠[1]

He resigned as acting director and took more than 20 colleagues to Nanjing to found Jiangnan Qiche Gongsi (the Jiangnan motor company).⁠[8]

An article credited to Jinling Dang’an and carried by the Jiangsu channel of ifeng.com dates the founding of the company, under the name Jiangnan Qiche Gufen Youxian Gongsi (a joint-stock limited company), to May 5, 1931, and calls it the forerunner of Nanjing Gonggong Jiaotong Jituan, the city’s public transport group. An article in the newspaper Xiandai Kuaibao states that the company’s original full name was Jiangnan Changtu Qiche Gufen Youxian Gongsi, that it opened for business on that day on the Jiangsu section of the Nanjing–Hangzhou national highway, serving Nanjing, Jurong, Liyang, Yixing and other points, and that it soon dropped the word changtu from its name. The Jinling Dang’an article states that the company was created after buying up small bus operators scattered around Nanjing. Before that, the same article relates that motor vehicles were brought into China from abroad in 1906; that in 1918 the merchant Yu Heng and others raised share capital in Nanjing to found a passenger motor company, Jinling Qiche Gongsi, which bought eight vehicles and gave Nanjing its earliest buses; and that in 1921 Nanjing got its first bus route, 28 kilometers long, from Xiaguan railway station to Tangshan. The Xiandai Kuaibao article calls the Jiangnan company the forerunner of Nanjing Gongjiao Zong Gongsi, the city’s bus corporation, and states that from the mid-1930s it alone ran transport within the city.⁠[8][9]

The company’s chairman was Zhang Jingjiang, and its directors included Wu Zhihui and other senior figures of the Nationalist government. The article calls the two men elders of the Kuomintang and prints a group photograph of the company’s shareholders; its caption identifies the fourth person from the right in the front row as the chairman, Zhang Jingjiang, and the first from the right in the back row as Xu Tailai, who served as the company’s chief secretary.⁠[9]

The company paid 30,000 yuan, described as a road-maintenance fee, for the exclusive right to run motor services in Nanjing’s suburbs, and opened a long-distance route from Nanjing to Jurong and the Nanjing–Hangzhou route.⁠[8]

The company went on to buy 150 new German diesel buses of a make the article writes as Pengchi and cut its fares by half. The Xiandai Kuaibao article dates the fare cut to 1932 and gives the Nanjing–Tangshan route as its example: a one-way ticket had cost one yuan, and after the cut one yuan paid for a round trip. The article adds that the bus trade was slack in 1932 when the company decided on the cut, that the Nanjing–Tangshan route was 50 li long (a li is half a kilometer), that after the cut more passengers went to bathe at the Tangshan hot springs on Sundays, and that the company put on extra buses running to Tangshan and back, which became Sunday excursion buses for government employees; with this, the article states, the company’s name began to be known.⁠[8][9]

Xinghua Qiche Gongsi, a bus company set up in 1928 with capital from returned overseas Chinese, held a ten-year exclusive contract for city bus services with Nanjing’s municipal works bureau, and the bureau at first rejected the Jiangnan company’s application to run routes inside the city. The Xiandai Kuaibao article states that the contract gave Xinghua sole rights to run city bus services in Nanjing from 1928 to 1938.⁠[9]

The Jinling Dang’an article states that in 1932 the company opened a sightseeing service from the city to the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum. The Xiandai Kuaibao article states that in April 1933 Ma Xiang, the head of the management committee of the mausoleum area, asked the company to run sightseeing buses to the mausoleum area, and that the company advised him to ask the works bureau to permit stops at Xinjiekou and Daxinggong. The article gives Ma Xiang’s reason as the wish of visitors from all parts of the country to pay their respects at the mausoleum and the lack of transport to it; it states that he agreed to the company’s suggestion and approached the works bureau in the name of Lin Sen, the chairman of the mausoleum management committee, that the bureau did not dare refuse, and that the company’s foothold inside the city thus reached the center. Fares on the sightseeing buses were still reckoned from Yixianqiao, the company’s terminus on the eastern side of the city, with no surcharge. The article adds that passengers who had ridden the Jiangnan company’s buses found them far better than Xinghua’s in outward appearance, in inner quality and in service.⁠[8][9]

In October 1933 the Fifth National Games were held in Nanjing. After Xinghua said that it could not supply vehicles for the Games, the works bureau asked the Jiangnan company to take on the task, and the company agreed. Wu Zhuozhi, then its manager, went to Shanghai and bought 30 new buses together with 50 used chassis of British and French makes from the foreign concessions, having judged their mechanical parts to be in sound condition. Once the chassis reached Nanjing the company’s own repair shop built the bodies day and night and finished them just as the Games opened. The Xiandai Kuaibao article states that the company feigned great reluctance when it agreed; that the 30 new buses were of a make it writes as Lihe and the used chassis were British-built ones of a make it writes as Aerping and French-built ones of a make it writes as Lannu; and that the authorities of Shanghai’s British and French concessions had used them to carry their own countries’ marines ashore and sold them cheaply because they were old and due for replacement. During the Games the whole staff turned out to sell tickets on the buses, and the company completed the task of carrying people to and from the Games.⁠[9]

The Jiangnan company decided to put pressure on the works bureau, and Zhang Jingjiang wrote a personal letter to the mayor of Nanjing, Shi Ying. After the Games ended the company paid tens of thousands of yuan toward municipal construction funds and was allowed to operate on the same routes as Xinghua. The Xiandai Kuaibao article states that Nanjing’s population was growing fast under the capital plan (Shoudu Jihua), that Xinghua, short of funds, could not add vehicles, and that the works bureau could do nothing because of the ten-year contract; that the director Wu Zhihui argued before the bureau’s staff with quotations from the classics and talk of past and present until they were lost in the clouds; and it quotes Chiang Kai-shek as having said at the time that Nanjing was the seat of the capital, that its buses must be run well, and that friendly nations must be given no cause to laugh. The city government asked Xinghua to add 40 more buses and open two more routes, which Xinghua could not do. The routes that the two companies shared ran from Fuzimiao to Xiaguan station and from Zhonghuamen to the riverside.⁠[9]

The Jinling Dang’an article states that in 1933 the company obtained the right to carry passengers within the city of Nanjing and opened Routes 1 and 2.⁠[8]

After 1934 the company designed and built its own buses, replacing the horseshoe seating plan with forward-facing rows and painting the bodies a light lake blue, which remained the main color of Nanjing’s buses for the next 50 years.⁠[8]

In April 1935 the two companies opened negotiations. Xinghua’s shareholders decided to cease operations and hoped that the Jiangnan company would absorb the firm; Jiangnan took over Xinghua’s resources and its staff.⁠[9][8]

In this period the company carried more than 200,000 long-distance passengers a month and no fewer than 100,000 passengers a day within the city. The Jinling Dang’an article calls it the largest motor company in China’s commercially run transport sector in the 1930s and states that Wu Zhuozhi needed only five years to give the company sole possession of Nanjing’s passenger market.⁠[8]

In 1936 Chien-Shiung Wu left for graduate study in the United States with his financial help. The article in the magazine Mathematical Culture states that her uncle Wu Zhuozhi, who ran his own company, was willing to pay her tuition and living expenses. A profile on the website of the college at Southeast University that bears her name (Wu Jianxiong Xueyuan) states that she left home for the United States with the support and financial help of her father, Zhong-Yi Wu, and her uncle Wu Zhuozhi. The New Dictionary of Scientific Biography dates her departure to August 1936 and names her ship as the President Hoover; the Mathematical Culture article states that she took leave of her parents on the bank of the Huangpu River in Shanghai. The same article states that, coming from a comfortable family and helped by an uncle who was very fond of her, she was much better off as a student abroad than Luke Chia-Liu YuanLuke Chia-Liu YuanLuke Chia-Liu Yuan (1912–2003) was a Chinese-born American experimental physicist and the husband of the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu; he worked mainly at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he was a senior physicist. He was elected an academician of Academia Sinica in 1959 and chaired the steering committee of Taiwan’s Synchrotron Radiation Research Center from 1983 to 2002.Open the full entry.⁠[4][5][2][10][6]

The New Dictionary of Scientific Biography describes the uncle as a businessman, and the entry in Women in World History states that the uncle who financed the trip “had made a fortune establishing China’s first long-distance bus company.” An article by Zhang Chengning on the website of Nanjing University’s archives sets out, field by field, the contents of the visa file that she completed at the U.S. consulate general in Shanghai in 1936: the entry on financial guarantee states that she was fully financed by her father, Zhong-Yi Wu, whom it describes as manager of the traffic department of a Wuxi–Shanghai motor transport company in Shanghai; the consul’s note records that she submitted a letter from her father promising full support; and the ship is entered as the President Hoover, sailing on August 11, 1936. The contents listed in the article do not mention her uncle.⁠[6][3][11]

After the outbreak of the war with Japan in 1937 most of the company’s vehicles were requisitioned. He led the remaining 80-odd vehicles and a small number of staff by stages through Jiangxi, Hunan, Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan, carrying passengers and freight. The Jinling Dang’an article states that during the war the company moved to the southwest and crossed the national border and that it kept a transport line to the front running under enemy fire; it does not say which border was crossed. The Xiandai Kuaibao article dates the company’s departure from Nanjing to about 1937.⁠[8][9]

The CERD record lists him as general manager of Jiangnan Qiche Gongsi, with 1937 as the starting year. The CERD organization record for the company gives its location as Nanjing and lists, besides him, Rao Jingqun as manager from 1937 and Lu Kunyuan as a trainee.⁠[1][12]

In 1946 he returned to Nanjing and restored the company’s business. As the economy deteriorated during the civil war the company ran short of working capital, and its daily takings came to less than half the value of the gasoline. The Jinling Dang’an article describes the period as one of economic collapse and soaring prices.⁠[8]

In mid-February 1949 the company announced that it was suspending operations.⁠[9]

In 1949, shortly after the People’s Liberation Army took over Nanjing, he put three proposals to the Nanjing Military Control Commission, which adopted his proposal that the company resume service on loans.⁠[8]

The commission placed the company under military trusteeship and sent military representatives and staff of the municipal federation of trade unions to help it restart; over seven months the state lent the company more than 100 million yuan in total, which paid wages and bought repair materials and fuel. The Jinling Dang’an article states that the state made the loans at a time of extreme financial difficulty in order to keep the city’s transport running and to steady public order.⁠[8]

On May 31, 1949, the company began preparing to resume service, and its workers repaired 20 buses within three days. By 1951 the company had moved from loss to profit. The article states that the workers proposed cuts in their own pay and gave up some benefits, adopted the slogan of carrying seven or eight more passengers on each run so as to earn back the cost of the fuel for one trip, and coordinated the time that buses spent at stops so as to speed up their running.⁠[8]

In February 1950 he and the shareholders’ meeting asked the government to invest in the company and convert it into a joint state–private enterprise. The financial and economic committee of the people’s government approved the request in October 1951, and the joint-enterprise license was issued on January 31, 1953.⁠[8]

By the end of the First Five-Year Plan in 1957 the company had 215 buses, 12 routes with a combined length of 126.75 kilometers, and 1,407 employees, and it carried nearly 240,000 passengers a day.⁠[8]

In February 1959 the Jiangnan company merged with the municipal motor transport company to form Nanjing Qiche Gongsi (Nanjing motor company), on the basis of which Nanjing Shi Gonggong Jiaotong Gongsi, the municipal public transport company, was established in April 1960.⁠[8]

The Jinling Dang’an article states that after 1949 he continued to make major contributions to the development of public transport in Nanjing.⁠[8]

In 1965 he and Chien-Shiung Wu’s younger brother Wu Jianhao traveled to Hong Kong and met her and her husband, Luke Chia-Liu Yuan. An article in China Science Daily states that the meeting was arranged by the authorities concerned and took place in secret. The Mathematical Culture article calls Wu Jianhao her only surviving brother at the time and remarks that the mixture of sorrow and joy at the meeting can be imagined. The China Science Daily article places the meeting in its account of the efforts of China’s scientific community to bring her back: in 1957 the government had asked her father, Zhong-Yi Wu, to write to her inviting her to return, and the article states that with the outbreak of the “ten years of turmoil” (the Cultural Revolution) in the year after the meeting everything came to nothing and that she first returned on a visit in 1973. A column by Chen Siyi on the China Times news site (Zhongshi Xinwen Wang) states that she was reunited with her uncle and her younger brother while visiting Hong Kong in 1965. The New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, by contrast, states that she never got to see her parents and brothers again before they died in the 1950s and 1960s.⁠[2][13][14][6]

The Jinling Dang’an article states that he died of illness in Nanjing in 1967.⁠[8]

The Mathematical Culture article states that the uncle and the younger brother whom Chien-Shiung Wu had met in Hong Kong were persecuted to death, one after the other, during the Cultural Revolution, and the National Park Service’s profile states that her uncle and a brother were “killed in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” A column by Chen Siyi on the China Times news site states that by the time she visited China in 1973 her uncle and her younger brother had died after being persecuted in the Cultural Revolution. The entry in Women in World History states that when she returned to China in 1973 her parents were dead and her brothers “had been killed during the Cultural Revolution”; that sentence does not mention the uncle.⁠[2][5][14][3]

In running the company he drew on European management methods and laid down a body of rules: drivers and conductors wore a uniform and the company badge, an eight-hour working day was introduced, attention was paid to cost accounting, body designs were steadily improved, and weight was placed on the upkeep of the vehicles. The Jinling Dang’an article calls the rules strict and the badge the Jiangnan badge.⁠[8]

He stressed that what a transport enterprise produces is not a material commodity but a spiritual one, namely a spirit of good service. The Jinling Dang’an article states that he not only attached weight to the organization and management of the enterprise but was also good at running a business, and it credits his shrewd head for business with giving the company sole possession of Nanjing’s passenger market.⁠[8]

The Xiandai Kuaibao article calls him an expert in automobile manufacturing, and one of its photo captions states that most of the company’s buses were bought as chassis and given their bodies in its own repair shop. The article quotes Xu Yin, a son of Xu Tailai, the company’s former chief secretary, as saying that the company had its own repair shop, that its buses were in good condition and did not let passengers down, that its drivers and conductors were courteous, and that townspeople would rather wait for a Jiangnan bus than ride one of Xinghua’s.⁠[9]

The records of Jiangnan Qiche Gongsi are held by the Nanjing Municipal Archives; the Jinling Dang’an article reproduces Wu Zhuozhi’s household registration card from the archives’ holdings and a specimen of his handwriting. The article states that these records reflect the development of public transport in Nanjing and are an important miniature of the city’s modern history, and it also prints a photograph of the company’s office building in the 1930s. Much of what the Xiandai Kuaibao article relates about the company’s past comes from Xu Yin; its two photographs, one of them a group photograph of the company’s shareholders, are credited as reproductions made by a reporter of the newspaper.⁠[8][9]

The 2011 article in Xiandai Kuaibao reports Xu Yin as telling its reporter that of the business wars between bus companies in Republican-era Nanjing the most classic was probably the contest between the Jiangnan company and Xinghua. Much of its account comes from Xu Yin, whose father, Xu Tailai, had been the Jiangnan company’s chief secretary, a post that the article equates with head of the general office.⁠[9]

The article states that the company’s terminus in Nanjing was at Yixianqiao, on the eastern side of the city and three li from the central district. The company rented two rooms on the ground floor of a hotel, the Xicheng Lüguan, beside Shengping Bridge on Baixia Road as a transfer station for long-distance passengers: passengers bought their tickets there and were taken to Yixianqiao in a company vehicle. No extra fare was charged in either direction between Yixianqiao and Baixia Road, which the article says won passengers’ goodwill, and because the transfers were a free service at no added fare the municipal works bureau could not object.⁠[9]

The article states that every Jiangnan bus that stopped at Yixianqiao had to be washed clean before it could go on to Baixia Road, so that the buses stood out against the dust-covered bodies of the buses of Xinghua, which then had sole charge of the city routes.⁠[9]

Xu Yin is quoted as saying that, as his father later recalled, the Jiangnan company used three devices to squeeze Xinghua out. The first was the press: Xu Tailai, a former newspaper reporter, often wrote articles attacking Xinghua for having too few buses, for long waits and for breakdowns that made passengers late for official business or for work, and the pieces appeared by turns in the newspapers Minsheng Bao, Chao Bao and Nanjing Renbao; he goes on to say that fabricated readers’ opinions drew genuine townspeople into agreeing and so served to manufacture public opinion. The same pieces publicized the Jiangnan company, for example how many new buses it had put into service and that it had put up a new company building on Zhongyang Road.⁠[9]

The second was competition for passengers on the shared routes. The article states that when the company’s staff saw Xinghua sending out a bus every six minutes they knew that it had 20 buses on the line and at once telephoned the company, which put 27 or 28 buses on the line and ran one every three or four minutes; when Xinghua ran a bus every five minutes, the Jiangnan company timed its own to leave in the third minute after Xinghua’s bus had gone and carried off all the passengers waiting at the stop. Xinghua’s business fell sharply as a result.⁠[9]

The third was to weaken the rival from within: a few members of Xinghua came from the same native place as managers of the Jiangnan company, and the company paid such a man an allowance to draw away Xinghua’s capable employees. The article goes on to state that Xinghua was at times short of spare parts, with buses out of service and money tight, and that shops would make no allowances; that when its dealings with the gasoline company went badly the dealers stopped or reduced deliveries; and that the compradors of foreign firms and the hardware shops, seeing how poorly Xinghua was doing and fearing losses, insisted on cash. Xinghua’s shareholders concluded that to go on in this way would bring no profit and might bring losses.⁠[9]

The Xiandai Kuaibao article states that Republican-era Nanjing had six motor bus companies in succession: Ningyuan, Guanmiao, Xinghua, Zhenyu, Jiangnan and Shoudu. Its closing notes record that Ningyuan Changtu Qiche Gongsi was founded in 1921, was obstructed by the rickshaw and horse-carriage trades and did not open for business until April 1924, and closed in August 1927; that Guanmiao Qiche Gongsi opened its line from Xiaguan to Fuzimiao in 1928 and closed a year later because business was poor; that Zhenyu Qiche Gongsi opened in 1929, caused an uproar by hiring women as conductors and later closed through poor management; and that Shoudu Gonggong Qiche Gongsi was started in 1945 by the mayor of Nanjing at the time, Ma Chaojun, with vehicles taken over from the Japanese occupation forces and the collaborationist regime, and they carry its history down to April 23, 1949. The list does not include Jinling Qiche Gongsi.⁠[9]