From constructing “China’s bridges”, building “China’s roads”, and driving “China’s cars”, to the construction of “China’s ports” and the “China’s Internet”, China has made great achievements that the rest of the world cannot attain in just a few decades. The grand picture of the “Chinese dream” is gradually becoming a reality.

Behind the praise and wonder of “infrastructure maniac”, the efficient, standardized, rigorous and meticulous project management can be said to play the role of “mainstay”. Professor SHEN Rongfang from Tongji University is such a “trailblazer” who is good at devising strategies within a command tent.

First Guide

Reporter: Is your ambition to be an architect since your childhood?

 SHEN Rongfang: There are seven brothers and sisters in my family, and I am the only one who has applied for the College of Civil Engineering, Tongji University. The reason why I applied for this university is easy to explain.

As early as when I was studying in Yucai Middle School, my family planned to buy a new house. I became more and more interested in architecture when I followed adults to choose a house. Therefore, I chose to apply for the College of Civil Engineering, Tongji University.

Reporter: It can be said that your parents are your “first guide”.

 SHEN Rongfang: My father was a merchant who imported pigments and often did business with foreigners. To improve his English, he even went to night school. Although his spoken English was not good, my father seemed to be able to do business with people from any country who could speak English. Under the influence of my father, I also learned some spoken English.

My parents’ views on education are different from many people. Maybe it was because my sister dropped out of school with lung disease, they never pushed us to study at home. My parents thought that as long as we were healthy, it didn’t matter if we didn’t do well in the exam. Therefore, my brothers and sisters were not very hard-working students, let alone like some of the children now desperately brush questions. However, they must listen carefully in class and understand what the teacher has explained.

After all, it wasn’t so hard to get into college in my day. I remember that four or five of my classmates were admitted to Tongji University together.

Switch to Operations Research

Reporter: Later, you are engaged in Operations Research, and I have heard that it is related to Mr. QIAN Xuesen?

 SHEN Rongfang: After graduation, I was appointed to work in the Teaching and Research Office of “Architectural Construction Organization and Planning” in Tongji University. It is a narrative course, and to be honest, I don’t like it very much.

My teacher Mr. ZHAI Lilin, knew me very well. Later, he once heard a report on Operations Research given by Mr. QIAN Xuesen. Mr. QIAN said that China should carry out the study and research on Operations Research and apply it to the practical work in China. For this, Mr. ZHAI agreed and supported it.

At that time, we mainly learned from the Soviet Union, but there was no Operations Research in the Soviet Union. In 1958, I was sent to the Operations Research Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for further study for two years to open the Operations Research course at Tongji University. Therefore, I switched from “Architectural Construction Organization and Planning” to Operations Research.

Reporter: To carry out the teaching research on Operations Research on “a blank sheet of paper”, have you encountered some difficulties?

 SHEN Rongfang: Yes, I have. For example, there are no Chinese books, only English materials. To engage in Operations Research, I needed to reach the level of undergraduate education of mathematics major, but I only had the level of mathematics courses in engineering colleges.

I remember that we took about 360 credit hours to study Advanced Mathematics, but the students from the Maths Department took four full years to study this course, so they had more credit hours.

The first task I faced was to compile a systematic and comprehensive textbook of Operations Research on the basis of the mathematical foundation that general engineering college students had in order to set up a new course of Operations Research for Tongji students.

Although the task was difficult, I had to rise to the challenge. At that time, the director of the Operations Research Office was Professor XU Guozhi, the founder of Chinese Operations Research. When I didn’t understand something, I asked him for advice. He sometimes spent half an hour or more trying to teach me the difficult points in the process of mathematical derivation.

Other teachers and researchers in the lab also gave me a lot of guidance and help. The experience they taught me, to a large extent, became my guiding light in my later teaching and scientific research.

Reporter: How does the textbook about Operations Research start from scratch?

 SHEN Rongfang: I have edited several textbooks on Operations Research. What has impressed me most is that, in 1997, the Operations Research, of which I was the chief editor, was published by the China Machine Press and used by undergraduate students across the country. The textbook was co-written by teachers from seven universities in China. Over the next 10 years, the textbook has been reprinted 11 times. After a major supplement, revision and update to its original manuscript in 2008, the second edition was published in 2009. Until now, the second edition has also been reprinted many times.

I once had an exchange with Salvendi, a renowned ergonomics expert and professor at Purdue University. He told me that, science and technology were developing rapidly, which needed to be constantly updated. Therefore, the idea of a book editor is to put together the content of various experts, and it is up to the expert who knows the most about the new research to write the part of the content.

In fact, that’s exactly what our unified compilation of teaching materials has done. For example, the content of large-scale linear programming has been written by Professor ZHANG Jianzhong from Shanghai Normal University; and the content of the system simulation has been written by professor HU Yunquan from Harbin Institute of Technology.

Establish the School of Economics and Management（SEM）

Reporter: Tongji University has taken the lead in proposing the establishment of the School of Management when there was no precedent, how do you think about it?

 SHEN Rongfang: In May 1979, at the professional adjustment conference of engineering colleges and universities under the Ministry of Education, there were six universities such as Tianjin University, Tongji University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Dalian University of Technology, and Tsinghua University that have decided to establish management engineering major.

As Tongji University had 10 years of experience in running management engineering major, the “Cooperation Group for Management Engineering Major of Engineering Colleges and Universities directly under the Ministry of Education” was established in Tongji University. In addition to the above colleges and universities, there were Harbin Institute of Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, East China University of Science and Technology, and Shanghai Institute of Mechanical Engineering. The collaborative team was led by Tsinghua University and Tongji University. Not long after, the Industrial Management Engineering major of Tongji University began to resume enrolling undergraduate and graduate students.

In early 1984, I learned that several brother universities were preparing for the School of Management, and our conditions were as good as theirs. Therefore, as the director of the Department of Management Engineering at that time, I put forward the idea of establishing the School of Management at the Middle-level Cadres Conference convened by the university.

At that time, Tongji University had no precedent of establishing the School of Management, so the proposal was a bit of a surprise. Sitting in the audience, Comrade WANG Ling, the Secretary of the Party Committee of Tongji University, listened to my speech and was deep in thought. After about 20 minutes, he walked to my seat and said, “Please sort out your speech into a written document and report it to our university. Then our university will make a report to the State Education Commission and apply for the establishment of the School of Management”. As a result, on August 29, 1984, the reply from the State Education Commission was that “the establishment of the School of Management in your university has been approved.”

Reporter: Is Tongji the first university in China to establish the School of Management?

 SHEN Rongfang: I haven’t checked which university is the first to establish the School of Management, but Tongji University is definitely one of the first batch of universities to establish the School of Management in China.

In response to the official document from the State Education Commission, Mr. ZHAI Lilin, who was later served as the honorary president of the School of Management, suggested whether the School of Management of Tongji University could be renamed as “the School of Economics and Management, Tongji University”, in order to adapt to the new situation of China’s transformation from a planned economy to a socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics.

Then, we reported this idea and proposal to the State Education Commission, which agreed to our proposal. Therefore, our School was officially renamed as “the School of Economics and Management”, which was later changed to “Tongji SEM”.

Reporter: What are the difficulties you have encountered while establishing Tongji SEM?

 SHEN Rongfang: One of the conditions for the State Education Commission to approve the establishment of the School of Management is that the number of students enrolled must reach more than 1000 students. At that time, it was not easy to maintain 1000 students enrolled.

According to the general foreign experience, there were at least three departments in a School, so we set up the Department of Industrial Management and Engineering, the Department of Technical Economics, and later added the Department of Management Information System. At that time, the social understanding of management was relatively backward, and there was a lack of cadres with management knowledge and experience, so we set up Adult Education and Training Center, which not only jointly organized the training courses for the Chief Engineers and the training courses for Directors of Urban Construction Bureau with the Ministry of Urban-Rural Development, but also organized training programs with the World Bank and others. With the students in graduate classes and so on, the total number of all the students added up was about 1000.

At that time, I felt that it was not easy to maintain the size of 1000 students enrolled. Who would have thought that after a period of time, the number of only graduate students in our School exceeded 1000.

Reporter: How does Tongji SEM develop its characteristics?

 SHEN Rongfang: In terms of cultivating students, it is required that the students should know both technology and economy. The students from many universities can be cultivated as management talents, but the students cultivated by Tongji SEM can understand both technology and economics.

At the same time, we should pay attention to the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis. Qualitative analysis is carried out on the basis of general economic theory, while quantitative analysis is carried out by using Operations Research, which are characteristics of Tongji SEM.

Civil engineering major from Tongji University is a dominant and characteristic major, so the College of Civil Engineering should focus on cultivating talents who are proficient in architecture. Because Tongji University is a university that mainly contacts with Germany, so we should pay attention to learning experiences from Germany.

Reporter: You have been a teacher all your life, what do you want to say to the young students?

 SHEN Rongfang: First of all, we must firmly grasp the basic knowledge. When I was in Canada, I read about a course in actuarial science and it was easy to get a job after learning it. In fact, actuarial science is a science that can analyze and predict economic activities by using probabilistic mathematical theories and a variety of financial instruments. Look carefully, isn’t one of the important foundations in actuarial science major mathematical statistics? If you learn mathematical statistics well, you won’t have much difficulty in learning actuarial science.

There is a student in Tongji SEM named GU Zonghao who has developed some general software for Operations Research in the United States. These software programs are popular all over the world. The software for Operations Research compiled by GU Zonghao shall require you that: 1) understand Operations Research; 2) understand Computational Mathematics, and 3) understand the stock market.

When GU Zonghao studied at Tongji University, his academic performance was outstanding with a solid foundation, and some very difficult points could be understood by him one by one. Obviously, our basic knowledge must be solid.

Secondly, we should learn some cutting-edge knowledge, such as big data. At the outbreak of COVID-19, health codes, travel codes and so on all involve big data. We must learn artificial intelligence and the forward-looking things which are closely related to our future life.