Dedication: To Mayer Lutheran High School, University of Minnesota, USA

I dedicate this book, RuDao: Beyond The Art of War (RuDao.org), to my beloved United States alma mater, Mayer Lutheran High School (MayerLutheran.org). This dedication honors my senior year as an exchange student during the 1986-1987 academic year under the PEACE-USA Scholarship Program.

To my American host families, the Harts and the Roger Lindemeier family, whose generosity and hospitality taught me an early lesson that trust, friendship, and human kindness transcend culture, language, religions, and geography. I also extend my deepest gratitude to my host brothers and classmates Eric and Matthew Lindemeier, Julie and Jessica Hart, and my classmates Chris and Erin Bode of Mayer Lutheran High School.

That 1986-1987 school year marked my very first time going abroad, flying halfway around the globe to the United States. I left behind my childhood home across Guilin, China, and Hong Kong. I still vividly remember my mother crying at the Hong Kong Airport departure hall, while my King's College classmates came to cheer and celebrate, as I was the first one in our class to study abroad.

Arriving in America, it was my first time experiencing a Western Christian culture. Living, studying, and playing alongside my American host families, I soon realized I was the only Chinese student in the school-and in the entire small town. The culture shock was profound as I traded Hong Kong's concrete forest of skyscrapers for the wide-open, corn-covered Great Plains of rural Midwest America.

Classwork quickly shaped my thinking. I took religious studies courses, attended daily chapel, and read classic Western literature. At the same time, athletics, fitness, and farm work built my character. As a member of the Mayer Lutheran Crusaders cross-country team, I trained intensely in the gym, wrestling, weight-lifting, basketball camp, and hockey, eventually earning awards in cross-country tournaments. Running across endless corn and alfalfa fields, I learned to bale hay, harvest alfalfa, and work on local dairy farms. This hands-on farm life strengthened my resilience.

We lived in Mayer and New Germany, Minnesota, a region populated mostly by hard-working, Protestant residents of German descent. My host families immersed me deeply in the rhythms of Midwestern farm life, assigning me plenty of chores like baling hay and mowing the lawns for our local church, Zion Lutheran, and its cemetery. Baling heavy square hay bales-averaging 40 to 75 pounds (18 to 34 kg)-in the brutal Minnesota summer was grueling, legendary work. Managing the church and cemetery grounds added another 10 acres of exhausting lawn to mow. Yet, pairing this tiring physical labor with caring for a community cornerstone captured the heart of the region's heritage and taught me the Christian way of hard work before pleasure. I still fondly remember resting after those long days, listening to Garrison Keillor's Minnesota Public Radio show, A Prairie Home Companion. I giggled at its famous sign-off about the fictional town of Lake Wobegon: "where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."

Minnesota winters brought entirely new adventures with my host families and classmates. I play-wrestled with the Lindemeier brothers in the backyard snowdrifts and played hockey on our homemade backyard rink, which we built by flooding the lawn and stacking left-over hay bales for walls. We also ventured out across the state for classic winter traditions, cross-country skiing, ice-fishing, and playing pond hockey on the frozen surfaces of local spots like Lake Waconia, the city's scenic Lake of the Isles, and even taking trips up to the frozen shores of Lake Superior.

Through this lifestyle, I experienced the Lutheran philosophy of "hard work before pleasure"-a practical living out of Martin Luther's concept of "The Calling" (Beruf). In this community, secular farm work was a religious duty and a way to serve God. It perfectly mirrored the spirit of worldly asceticism, where economic diligence and self-discipline are signs of faith, and personal pleasure is set aside for a higher purpose. This faith-driven resilience is precisely what communities supporting Mayer Lutheran High School continue to build today.

My time at Mayer Lutheran laid the foundational groundwork for my later thesis study of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In my RuDao book, I merge this Western Protestant view with the Eastern Ru-Shang (Confucian-Merchant) principle of righteousness and profit coexisting (义利合一), demonstrating how faith, ethics, and economic diligence unite across different cultures.

To this day, I hold warm memories of daily chapel, Sunday church services, and Bible study in English, Hebrew, and Latin. I recall reading great works like Beowulf, Shakespeare, Hemingway, S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders, and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. One of my brightest youthful memories remains touring with our school orchestra all the way from Minnesota down to Houston, Texas.

I am deeply grateful for Mayer Lutheran's academic guidance and spiritual mentorship. These gifts have stayed with me across decades, and I am proud to pay tribute to my alma mater, my host families, and my MLHS friends and classmates in this book.

1987-1991: University of Minnesota and the Dawn of Web 0.9

Following my time at Mayer Lutheran, I attended the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, where I pursued a Mechanical-Industrial Engineering major paired with dual minors in Computer Science and Business Management, graduating in 1991.

It was during this monumental transition at the turn of the decade that the architecture of the modern digital landscape first began to take shape. Following Tim Berners-Lee's initial 1989 CERN proposal, I was fortunate to be among the absolute earliest technophiles to dive deep into the raw HTTP v0.9 protocol documentation. Poring over those original technical manuals gave me a deep understanding of stateless hypertext transfers over TCP/IP. This early architectural clarity proved invaluable, allowing me to quickly master the emergence of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) specification when it debuted in 1993, and providing the precise structural mechanics needed to engineer pioneering web-to-database connections directly with SQL backends.

My journey in Minnesota also paved the way for my family. My brother, Victor Tong (唐滔), enrolled at the University of Minnesota in 1989, joining me on campus. Embracing our family's shared spirit of dedication, he excelled deeply in his academic pursuits, officially graduating with Cum Laude honors in 1993 with a Bachelor of Science in Physics. His hard work and leadership culminated in winning the prestigious Student Commencement Speaker Award. Standing before his fellow graduates as the UMN Class of 1993 graduation speaker, he delivered a moving commencement address inspired by the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.-a proud milestone that beautifully bridged my parents' engineering heritage with the Protestant values of hard work and social responsibility.

Following his graduation, Victor and I both entered the corporate ranks of Andersen Consulting, a premier global IT consulting heavyweight that later rebranded as Accenture. This was a highly prestigious launchpad for our careers, allowing us to combine our technical IT background with high-stakes enterprise systems for America's top Fortune 500 corporations. Operating under the direct supervision of Managing Director Michael Gaard, we spearheaded complex IT system integration and corporate consulting projects for powerhouse Midwestern clients, including U.S. Bank (USBank.com), Northwest Airlines, Best Buy, and Target (Target.com). This intensive corporate exposure served as our practical introduction to the engine of modern American commerce, providing the precise operational discipline that would later fuel our own international ventures.

1993-2000: From Minnesota Ice to the Nasdaq DotCom Boom

1999-2000: The Pacificnet Ecommerce Nasdaq Listing

The years between 1999 and 2000 marked a historic transition for our entrepreneurial journey, as Pacificnet evolved from a Minneapolis startup into a premier cross-border e-commerce CRM portal bridging the United States and Hong Kong.

I owe an immense debt of gratitude to my cousin-in-law, Andrew "Andy" Mullin, and the wonderful Mullin family. Andy, who began serving as the Mayor of Wayzata, Minnesota in 2025, played a pivotal role in my early career. He welcomed me into his competitive young business hockey team, introducing me to the unique camaraderie of Minnesota's corporate ice leagues, and graciously brought me into his extensive family gatherings within prominent Minneapolis business circles. I am incredibly proud of Andy for becoming such a trusted business and political leader for the City of Wayzata.

It was through Andy's robust network that I met his close friend Ted Farrell at Haskells, a venerable Twin Cities institution. They became one of our very first internet web design clients when we helped design the Haskells.com e-commerce website-the first-of-its-kind wine e-commerce platform in town! As our relationship grew into deep mutual trust, the leadership at Haskell's transitioned from clients to believers, becoming one of the earliest angel investors in my first internet enterprise, Pacificnet.

Pacificnet started its roots in Minneapolis before strategically moving its core operations to Hong Kong to capture the booming international trade highway. That early foundation of trust, local networking, and collaborative capital eventually propelled Pacificnet all the way to a successful public listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange in June 2000.

To Andy Mullin, the Mullin family, and the Farrell family, whose trust, friendship, and early support made possible some of the first steps of an entrepreneurial journey that continues to this day. Long before others could see what might be built, you offered your trust, your support, and your belief. Mr. Mullin gave us his invaluable contributions of time, effort, and early funding in our founding days in the dawn of Web 1.0. It remains a powerful, real-world lesson in how strong personal ethics, local networks, and mutual respect build truly sustainable global enterprises. Those early acts of confidence became part of the foundation upon which everything that followed was built.