JEAN Jacques Verdun, a Frenchman who is widely known as JJ, has lived in Zhuhai for 13 years and is the founder of www.deltabridges.com. Wearing a warm, sincere smile and ready to help anyone around him, JJ has become a pivotal figure connecting people from Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macao and even across the world by organising business events, operating websites, publishing Zhuhai orientation books and helping Chinese and western governments to communicate.
Seeing a job vacancy promotion online, JJ quit his job as a teacher at the office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo in 2001, and came to Zhuhai to work as a teacher of French at Royal Language School in Gongbei.
He signed a one-year work contract, and didn’t expect to have stayed here for more than a dozen years. He has married a Chinese woman, Zhang, who was born in Beishan Village in Nanping town.
Founding websites
Stationed in Zhuhai, JJ soon began to make an increasing number of friends online and replied to their emailed inquiries about how to eat, drink, live, go shopping, play around or rent an apartment in the city. The number of inquiries almost doubled from 20 or 30 a week when his wife opened a small art gallery in Macao and they commuted between the two areas. As a result, he opened www.zhuhaimacau.com, which provided information concerning traffic, restaurants, parks, tourist attractions and so on in the two venues. He and friends collected most of the information in person.
They walked along the streets, despite the hot sun or rain, and pushed open the doors of pubs, hotels, boutiques, hospitals, theatres, cinemas, post offices, 4S shops and many more to talk with the owners or shop assistants. They took with them the address and telephone cards when they left. They sat down to eat in restaurants and wrote brief comments about the signature dishes afterwards.
The website gained great popularity among Chinese and westerners. One day, a successful French businessman living in Hong Kong came up and strongly suggested that JJ open a new website to cover Zhuhai, Macao and Hong Kong. Immensely inspired by the fellow Frenchman and the bright prospects of the three areas, JJ began to design a new website www.expat9.com -- “expat” referring to westerners whereas “9” means supremacy in Chinese culture, he explained later.
The new website became a success and immediately drew thousands of netisens from the three areas when it hit the ground in late 2007. People made good use of it surfing for information, making friends, posting events or advertisements and making comments. Gradually they began to use strong words to argue with each other, and JJ sat in front of the computer every night, censoring and hesitating to make decisions: remove or leave it.
“I’m not interested in that, and I don’t want to be a monitor. When it went crazy, I told myself I don’t want to do it anymore,” said JJ.
JJ still remembered that his very first aim to establish a website was to provide useful information for serious people, and such a social, interactive network was not serious enough. After having considered for months and taken suggestions from his friends all over the Pearl River Delta and even the world, he began to design and programme a brand-new website, deltabridges.com, which came into being in October 2008.
Covering 11 cities in the Delta including Hong Kong and Macao, the website presents various information, news, events, advertisements, business services and much more. It has become the preferred option for people far away to know about the PRD and has even drawn some overseas investors, revealed JJ.
Organising events
Growing up in a remote small village in South France, JJ loved family gatherings and parties his parents organised at weekends when he was a little boy. He knew how to treat people and meet their different needs with hospitality.
Groups of foreign enterprises came to Zhuhai in succession to make investment at the end of 2002, and senior executives’ wives followed, knowing nothing about the city. Working at Royal School then, JJ specially organised a Chinese language department to teach the western wives to go shopping, order dishes, and take a taxi to where they wanted to go with simple Mandarin.
In 2004, JJ founded the Zhuhai Expats Club, or Zhuhai International Association (ZIA), whose members soared from 20 to more than 180 a year later. The club showed progressing presence in the community: Zhuhai Charity Federation received a donation of 14,000 yuan ($2,284) that year as financial aid for needy students in the West Wing. In the few years followed, around 80,000 yuan ($13,051) was donated and presented to poverty-stricken students in the area. In addition to this, the western wives initiated volunteer teaching at Hongqi Middle School in Jinwan district and stuck to it for several years, having benefitted hundreds of rural-area students in English learning.
Later, JJ organised or co-organised business, networking or charity events with the Beishan Music Festival Organising Committee, Huafa New Land, European Chamber of Commerce, German or French Chamber of Commerce and other associations in Zhuhai, Guangzhou, Foshan, Shenzhen, Macao, Dongguan and other PRD areas. His name has become a passport to successful events, and an increasing number of businesses are coming to him, asking for programming and organising of business events and related tailored services.
“My nature is very sociable. I like to talk to people. If you genuinely like people, they’ll feel that,” JJ said. “For me, in a room with many people, it’s my best and most comfortable environment.”
Given one room with 60 people, JJ would probably get to meet 40 of them, have meaningful conversations and manage to establish relationship with them rather than merely saying “Hi” and “Goodbye.”
“Networking is sensitive. You meet a lot of people, and if they’re forgotten, their ego is not happy. We have to make sure we’re polite and nice with them, so in the future they will be happy to come back,” he explained in earnest.
Apart from programming every detail before each event, he would make notes about who wants to meet whom, which group of people should be brought together or what kind of guests would be interested in what kind of people. As a result, the events he has been involved in organising over the years all went quite well with nobody feeling left out.
Not only this, he told his counterparts all he knew about event organisation without reservation, and used the know-how he had accumulated to settle disputes between Chinese and westerners. His integrity and clemency won him numerous friends: Chinese and western business executives, entrepreneurs, government officials, civil servants, corporate staff, the self-employed, news people and many more.
“If you’re a happy person, if you have passion about what you do, when it really comes from inside and when you do something positive and good, that’s contagious with people,” he asserted.
JJ has just got new business projects from Tianjin and Chongqing to help companies there with their image, and some of his old customers have asked more for public relation services than pure promotion. Having a high reputation in dealing with western and Chinese people and government, maintaining good relations with the media, making people happy, being helpful to everyone, boasting a talented Portuguese designer based in Macao and many other rare resources, JJ felt confident when he said: “I think it’s the best job for me -- putting people in contact.”
Founded five years ago, his company, Delta Bridges Media ltd, is growing firmly with the number of customers on a steady rise. It has Zhuhai and Macao offices, and soon the Guangzhou office will also be set up. It’s a kind of success.
“But success is dangerous. I know on the contrary I need to be very careful, because this is critical turning point. I need to work even harder. We’re not allowed to make mistakes. So the stress is higher for that,” he said.
No matter how big his company will grow, one of its major missions is to promote Zhuhai, first in the PRD and Macao, and once the city is well established in the area, it will be promoted to the whole world.
“I like Zhuhai. It has given me a lot over the past 13 years, and so I want to support Zhuhai in a way I’m really good at,” JJ continued, with great sincerity in his eyes.
-By Betty Lin, Zhuhai Daily
Zhuhai
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