Selflessly passing on his craftsmanship, Li creates miracle training programme

To give full play to the “effect of capable people,” in 2010, CRVC set up a group of chief operator workstations. As the “lead person” in manual welding at the company, Li Wanjun became director of the welders’ workstation. At that time, CRVC employed more than 400 college graduates as a supplement to the welder team. The problem of how to help these fledgling newcomers master the skills needed for their posts became a primary and difficult challenge for “Director Li.”

Li Wanjun considered his responsibilities often. While eating, he often held his chopsticks, lost in thought. He soon developed a set of quick training methods based on the different characteristics of each graduate, like their body weight, posture, and habits of carrying torches, and he set different training programmes for each of them. He taught them individually and demonstrated for the students, group by group. Afraid of losing time, he didn’t dare to drink too much water, lest it make him run to the toilet too often. He was sick from the heavy load, but he took some pills and kept working. He lost more than 10kg of weight. 

His hard work paid off. Through his wisdom and enterprising spirit, Li Wanjun created a miracle in the history of welder training. More than 400 trainees obtained international welder qualification certificates half a year ahead of schedule, with every trainee passing the test on their first attempt. Welders generally have to accumulate two years of practical experience before they can obtain such a certificate; it is very difficult to pass on the first attempt. 

The workshop director, Liu Bo, told the reporter, “As the training period was shortened greatly, this batch of fresh workers can take up their work and begin producing ahead of schedule. They have grown to be the new force in manufacturing high-speed EMUs. The company’s extremely urgent shortage of technical workers was solved!”

Actually, “Coach Wanjun” was known well before the 2010 programme. In 2003, the Provincial Foreign Affairs Office invited Li Wanjun to train 125 migrant workers. After teaching for only five days, 109 out of 125 trainees passed the foreign test and were smoothly sent to Japan as laborers. Since then, service companies in the province commonly exclaimed, “Don’t worry that the laborers have no skills.If you can enroll laborers and hire Li Wanjun as a coach, he can ensure every laborer will master the skill within five days!”

One day in 2005, when Li Wanjun saw that teachers at Sunjin Vocational School were teaching students to weld sheets at their base, he walked up to observe. He found some problems and then took a torch to demonstrate how to do it correctly. “Wow! He is a real master,” screamed the students. Unable to refuse the school’s kind invitation at that moment, Li Wanjun would go and guide the students during his free time. 

Li Wanjun is good at teaching and he loves being a teacher. He says, “Only with the support of numerous skilled technical workers can we realize “made in China” and “created in China.” So, the more apprentices I teach, the prouder I feel.”

More than 20 “direct disciples” brought up by Li Wanjun have become the workshop’s core technicians. They frequently win awards at provincial and municipal-level competitions. The top three winners of the 2013 welder contest in Changchun were Li Wanjun’s students. More than 10 of his disciples have become the chief technicians in Jilin province and some have also won the Locomotive Medal and City Labor Medal.

His disciples profess their master teaches his disciples carefully and devotedly. His teaching methods are lively, flexible, humorous, and interactive. They happily learn to master the skills. “My master teaches us not only his skills, but also his work ethic and life perspective. He is passionate, determined, and serious with his work. He respects his job. In the face of difficulties, he takes the lead, working overtime to solve them. He always works until a problem is resolved. Under the influence of his words and deeds, we strive to weld each seam perfectly,” attested another student. When mentioning the masterful Wanjun, all of his disciples express their admiration and respect.

In recent years, in order to meet the urgent production needs of more than 30 kinds of coaches, Li Wanjun has organized nearly 160 consecutive training. He has trained more than 10,000 welders for the company and helped welders earn more than 2,000 various international and domestic welders qualification certificates.

What especially touched people is that while passing on his technical skills in his own company, Li Wanjun also shared without reservation his “exclusive esoterica and comprehensive experience” which he had accumulated over many years, working with skilled masters from other companies. As a “High-skilled Talent Transferer,” as named by the local labour union, he has trained more than 2,000 high-skilled talents to date for brother enterprises in Jilin province, Changchun, and regions of Xinjiang, all of which are aided by the provincial and municipal labour unions. His fame for “turning a stone into gold” has spread across the country.

Once, the FAW Special Depot was contracted with an order of processing 60 Kato cars from Japan. But all of the welds were returned by the owners. The welding professor specially invited from a university couldn’t complete training in such a short time. Seeing only 20 hours were left to meet the delivery terms, the factory approached Li Wanjunin recognition of his name and admiration for him. He immediately rushed to the scene and explained in detail the operating essentials. He not only helped improve the technical level of the welders in the factory overnight, but also made all of the welds pass the Japanese experts’ inspection, which helped to preserve the factory’s access to the important market.

“Considering Wanjun’s new teaching methods and significant training results, I’m afraid that even the ‘Coach of the 800,000 strong garrison,’ Lin Chong, if revived, would feel shameful,”expressed Mu Xiaodong, the general deputy inspector who led teams to aid Xinjiang. Mu continued that Li Wanjun,“having students everywhere and making great efforts in teaching” has not only produced countless welding masters, but also interpreted the meaning of being a teacher from the position of a simple and kind worker in an entirely new way.

Lead the research team and keep moving forward

In February 2011, the accomplished Li Wanjun was awarded with the China Grand Skill Award for the highest level of welding of the vehicle bogie frames in the world. The prize is the highest award for outstanding skilled personnel in the country, the winners of which are known as Academicians of Workers. During the 16 years between the award’s establishment and 2011, there were only 140 people who won the highest honor for front-line workers.

Li Wanjun never expected he would be honoured with the award. He said, "I was only insisting on the most fundamental things for a skilled worker. To earn a salary in this position, I have to practise my skills and produce good products, and try to perfect the work. It’s very simple. I hadn’t expected that the more I tried, the bigger the project would become. If there is an achievement for me, it is because of the development of the enterprises, the rise of the high-speed railway lines."

"To do a good thing in one day is easy. But it is difficult to do a good job every day for a lifetime." The gap between people is gradually widened like this. This is the key reason for Li Wanjun to finally stand out among China's tens of millions of skilled workers.

It is precisely because of this quality of the eternal pursuit of excellence that Li Wanjun did not stop after receiving honours. At the end of 2011, the Chief Welder Operation workstation headed by him was named the "National Skills Master Studio" by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security. Through this platform, Li Wanjun carefully implemented the triad of "passing on the skills, building a competitive team, and tackling key problems with collective wisdom,"leading a team he had trained to aspire to ever higher goals. He played a song of victory.

"In 4 years, Li Wanjun led 41 members in his studio to troubleshoot more than 150 problems. They earned five Small Achievements, 104 awards, 32 items for summarizing the advanced operations, 21 national patents, and had five more patents in the application process." Secretary of the Party Branch of the Workshop Wang Zhuo told the reporter that when the workshop receives any urgent, difficult, and heavy tasks, Li Wanjun voluntarily leads his team on the task, without any conditions or caring about personal gains and losses. With such an innovative, pioneering team, his workshop’s five Small Achievements, achievements in small changes and reforms, accounted for more than 50% of the whole bogie manufacturing centre’s.

At the beginning of 2015, domestically manufactured High-speed Railway Trains traveling at 350 km/h designed by CRVC had a challenging manufacturing problem. The connector on the base of the torsion bar at the side beam of the bogie is designed to be a distinctive arc shape, which results in great difficulty for welding. Workers’s even attempted welds all proved unsatisfactory by radiographic inspection. It seemed that production would be impeded, but Li Wanjun once again led his apprentices on the task. They immersed themselves in researching workable methods for more than two months, foregoing food and sleep until they had finally created a new operating method by adjusting the welding sequence and specifications, a breakthrough in the bottleneck on the batch production of localized EMUs. They successfully won orders for the complicated and irregular welding product.

On Sunday, April 12th, when the reporter met Li Wanjun in the workshop, he was busy guiding a group of more than 20 new apprentices born in the 1990s. They were using highly difficult vertical welding technology to repair 96 brake cylinder frame cranes brought by the CCRV that were unable to be assembled due to quality defects from the manufacturer, and they were seriously affecting the production schedule. “We took over the task two days ago. I figured out a repair plan in the same day. By working extra shifts, only the last 6 cranes are not finished. Finally, we can guarantee the normal operation of production!" exclaimed a pleased Li Wanjun.

On April 17th, Li Wanjun's name appeared on the list of candidates of national labourer models to be commended, which means that he will achieve a grand slam of professional honours for a technical worker. “Happy, of course!” At the mentioning of this, the 47 year-old Li Wanjun smiled to the reporter, saying: “I think some day when I see the high-speed trains we manufacture head out of the country, I will be happier than now. I believe that as long as our high speed railway workers always step forward and innovate, the day will be not far away!"

Reproduced from the Workers Daily   

Text by Li Ning  Photography by Yang Yang