This is China! blog

Several Westerners I’ve talked with here in China seem to be sketching a trend in the way people perceive and act on work. Instead of just working at a “job” or taking another “job” or looking to get promoted in their “job” they are either moving from a part-time “job” or no “job” at all to a Portfolio of Work. The portfolio contains several activities that are projects and/or actual businesses. For instance, one American I know is leading the start-up of a new factory that will produce goods for the American market. He has American partners – and Chinese money. But he has still formed another contract manufacturing business here in China with other Western friends.

One of those Western friends has gone from being GM of a factory in Suzhou to becoming an on-call advisor to HQ, a consultant to the staff at the factory, and a troublshooter for the supply chain. In addition, he hopes to go on to do something a bit more creative with his life.

Meanwhile, a Danish friend who ran a sales and service operation in China until last week is now a “global troubleshooter” for other operations in the world. He is also in talks to set up an Extreme Tours business with a friend in Shanghai that takes people to exotic lands and gives them exotic adventures, while at the same time planning a sports equipment import company that supplies the Danish market.

The motivation for all these guys and others with whom I’ve chatted seems to be a profound dissatisfaction with the corporate world. They see the bosses of their and other companies as having lost a great deal of credibility of late: greed, arbitrary decision-making, cronyism and a lack of appreciation for what these guys have contributed to the company as managers that have built company operations in China overshadow any heart-felt feelings they once may have had for their former employers. The newly independent have chosen to diversify their personal economic models and move toward work they personally find more satisfying. It could all be summed up with a general disgust for the present-day institution of “the job”. Certainly, the global economic downturn has magnified the causes of these fellows’ discontent, exacerbating the impact of lousy and sometimes self-interested decisions their bosses have made. Another impact of the Downturn is to make these pretty bright go-getters feel less secure about the traditional role of “the job” in their lives. Though corporations demand one’s living-breathing existence in exchange for a stable income, these young men – mostly in their early thirties – seem to feel that there is no covent between the organization and the individual beyond what the individuals at the top decide. Of course, the latest information and communications technologies facilitated their new approach to work, making it easier to stay linked with coworkers no matter where in the world they are working.

Ironically, here in China, international influences have been attempting to focus bright young Chinese to commit their lives to the Organization. Standard Chinese operating procedure is to pick and choose work and jobs as though sitting at a Chinese banquet table with a pair of chopsticks picking and choosing what morsel to pluck from what dish.

Perhaps in time, once more Chinese have upgraded their skills and better defined their abilities and the contributions they can make in a modern marketplace they too will be managing Portfolios of Work – not fully entrepreneur, but not a grunt, either.

Reuters reported today that talks in Beijing between American and Chinese representatives had no substantive results, but that each country agreed it needed to set its houses in order:

China will rebalance toward domestic demand-led growth,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said, while the United States had already learned the “importance of living within our means as a country and at a household level.”

Cross our apple-pie-loving hearts and hope to die.

Economics overshadowed the high-level dialog, with the U.S. expressing “concerns” (!) about the situation in Xinjiang. Of course, China had its own criticism for the U.S.:

As a major reserve currency-issuing country in the world, the United States should properly balance and properly handle the impact of the dollar supply on the domestic economy and the world economy as a whole,” Vice Premier Wang Qishan said earlier on Tuesday. (Reuters)

In other words, USA, don’t put the country in hock. The United States, of course, has to listen, as China recently surpassed the US$2 trillion mark as the single largest investor in U.S. Treasury bonds.

However, since January this year, China has been reducing its purchases of T-bills. According to The New York Times:

All the key drivers of China’s Treasury purchases are disappearing — there’s a waning appetite for dollars and a waning appetite for Treasuries, and that complicates the outlook for interest rates,” said Ben Simpfendorfer, an economist in the Hong Kong office of the Royal Bank of Scotland.”

Indeed, Brad Setser at a Council on Foreign Relations blog calculates:

In February, China bought Treasuries. $4.64b by my count. It bought $5.61b of bills, while reducing its long-term Treasury holdings by $0.96 billion. But China also reduced its US bank deposits by $17.24 billion. Consequently, by my count, China’s total US holdings fell by $13 billion. Short-term claims fell by $11.3b, and long-term claims fell by $2b.”

So where did the US bank deposits go? Another New York Times articles cites:

China’s goals vary by commodity. Chinese companies have bought iron ore heavily on the spot market in anticipation of higher prices in annual contract talks now nearing completion. The Chinese government has been stockpiling oil and some metals for strategic reasons, and bought huge quantities of aluminum and canola to insulate domestic producers of these goods from falling global prices over the winter”

China also has another concern: its economy’s sagging performance. As recently as last autumn – when the Chinese economy was still on a roll – China’s central government ordered its state-owned banks to fork over as much as 20% their deposits to China’s central bank. The deposits came from all the revenues from its export-driven companies, the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flowing into the country to set up new factories and other operations; as well as the speculative flows from overseas Chinese that want to catch the China wave. China’s central bank would then re-invest the money in U.S. Treasuries. With China’s US$600 billion stimulus package, though, China’s central government needs to reduce state-bank requirements so the local banks can make loans to local governments and State-owned Enterprises (SOEs). Recall, the powers that be have committed China to 8% growth in its wealth, or GDP.

In addition to the diversion of funds from buying T-bills to investing domestically, China has the additional challenges of seeing FDI into the country decrease for the last three years running, and of the slowest compounded growth in its trade surplus with America and Europe in years. The Chinese government is trying to be more prudent with its cash surpluses.

Despite a substantial proportion of that money re-inflating the country’s real estate and stock market bubbles, China is unlikely to clamp down on its stimulus program any time soon: call the bubbles “collateral damage”, if you will. The central authority believes it has to prime its economy through a fiscal stimulus effort that may be springing leaks throughout its economy and society (see my post, Thee Doth Protest Too Much ); however, it needs to buy time to “re-balance” its economy from being export-driven to more internal-consumption driven.

The Chinese central government is committed to ensuring the American economy’s success by continuing to buy T-bills to help keep American interest rates low. Higher costs for the American government to pay down its debt will ripple through the economy to make the cost of borrowing for companies and individuals more expensive overall as well as ramp up inflation – a surefire way to stall a restart. Inflation will also devalue all those hundreds of billions of dollars of T-bills the Chinese have invested in.

Besides, as one of the Chinese government’s top monetary economists, Yu Yongding, replied in a New York Times interview – quoting John Maynard Keynes, “…If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at your mercy.”

So, it ain’t over till the Fat Lady re-balances – uh, sings.

It’s tough being precise in an imprecise language, especially where the media is concerned. Such was Xie Lingli’s lesson this past weekend when the Xinhua News Agency quoted her as saying Shanghai was going to be changing it’s One Child Policy. Of course, such a unilateral move on any city’s part in China would cause quite a stir in Beijing’s inner sanctum, where the One Child Policy is still considered a pillar – albeit an unpopular one – of society.

Time Magazine noted:

“Apparently reacting to numerous overseas media reports of a change in city birth-control regulations, which was portrayed as being the first sign of a reversal, Xie Lingli was quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency as saying that a citywide policy of allowing couples in which each partner is an only child to have two children had been in place for many years.”

Xie is director of the Shanghai Population and Family Planning Commission. Shanghai, in particular, believes its economy is suffering from a dearth of young people of working age that will help the city support its aging population. Under the One Child Policy, couples in which both partners are single-children are can legally have two children of their own.

The Guardian newspaper writes:

We just hope more people can have a second child because for Shanghai, as a city which started family planning quite early, the process of ageing is fast,” said Zhang Meixin of the Shanghai population and family planning commission. “If eligible couples have two children, it might help to relieve the pressure.”

I wrote about the issues young people in China are having dealing with a rapidly aging population in my post a few weeks ago, One For the Money, Two for the Show. The changing demographics are putting inexorable pressure on the offspring of the One Child Policy children in what is called in China the 1-2-4 problem: one child has two parents and four grandparents to support in Chinese society. Indeed, it is actually against the law in China to NOT support your parents.

However, the One Child Policy consistently arises as the single greatest contributor to the stress younger individuals and society at large have to bear as the Chinese grey. The Guardian writes:

Earlier this year the US-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies warned that China would have more than 438 million over-60s by 2050. Each would have just 1.6 working-age adults to support them, compared with 7.7 in 1975.”

Indeed, Time Magazine cites that the number of young people entering the workforce between the ages of 20 and 24 will drop by half in the next decade.

Global Voices follows a debate amongst Chinese netizens about the appropriateness of Shanghai – and Chinese cities in general – having amendments to the One Child Policy.

One Chinese writer commented:

“If we allow parents to have second children, then all the couples in the country should have this right. Why do they set up so many restrictions and rules for people around this country but Shanghai. My husband has a brother, but I’m the single child of my parents. We live and work far from home with our only son. We’re plaining to have another daughter!”

Others rail against Shanghai’s exceptionalism:

Why the privilege only belongs to Shanghai? Isn’t it a part of China? They already have the economic privilege and now they want to ask for birth privilege. I firmly protest the idea that we can relax the residence restriction because of the aging process.”

Of course, many parents in Shanghai are discovering what many in the post-industrial world have already discovered, which is contributing mightily to the reduction in their populations: kids ain’t cheap!

Thousands protesting are big numbers, even by China’s reckoning. Especially if the protests occur in two separate regions in as many days, are violent, and have essentially the same reason: the rich getting richer in China by unashamedly gaming the system.

The Financial Times reports:

“The privatisation of a state steel group has been scrapped after an executive was beaten to death by workers angry at the threat to their jobs from a takeover of their company…The violent riot in north-east China late last week involved up to 30,000 workers, a reminder of the ongoing sensitivity about lay-offs from state companies in industries targeted for consolidation.”

Certainly, it doesn’t help when people become self- or otherwise-anointed emperors and treat co-workers like crap. I can certainly see from whence their anger stems:

The interim general manager sent by Jianlong to run Tonghua, Chen Guojun, had infuriated the workers with his high-handed attitude, according to comments posted on internet bulletin boards in China.

He had reportedly said that he would re-establish Tonghua “under the name of Chen” and lay off almost all the employees.

“With Tonghua Steel’s retired workers each receiving only Rmb200 ($29) a month for living expenses, Chen Guojun was paid an annual salary of Rmb3m,” the rights group reported.”

AP reported yesterday that just a couple hours drive from Suzhou, in Zhejiang province, 3,000 townsfolk went berserk at the local authority’s purportedly giving them the shaft in a land-for-spit deal the residents found wholly unfair:

More than 3,000 villagers in eastern China blocked a highway and clashed with police while protesting alleged official corruption in a land compensation deal…Ten residents of Shipu town, in Zhejiang province, were injured in the clash with more than 300 riot police Saturday…Another resident said thousands of people had been staging a sit-in on the land for nearly a week.

Without credible avenues for complaint and decision, local governments will continue to place citizens in positions in which residents must explode en masse to gain any kind of fair hearing at a supra-local level.

“The employee, who refused to give his name, said the villagers believed the land was worth three times the price the local government had set — 20,000 yuan (US$2,900) per mu. A mu is a Chinese measure of land equal to about 0.15 acres (0.06 hectares).

“The villagers want the local authorities to address the corruption and the central government to intervene in this case, but some local officials have been preventing this information from getting to the relevant authorities…”

So what set off this latest round of high-volume, high-action drama that has nothing to do with ethnic differences? In a word: stimulus package (ok, that’s two words). China’s stimulus package of some US$560 billion kicked off at the beginning of the year with the Central government ordering the banks to open the offers. Hundreds of millions of dollars have already been loaned out, re-inflating the stock market and property bubbles the government had worked to flatten two years ago. Now, local governments, State-owned enterprises and large privately-owned corporations with “special relationships” with bank lenders (read guanxi) are redistributing wealth in preferential ways. Indeed, the FT writes about the steel protests in the northeast:

The privately held Jianlong Group, one of China’s largest private steel companies, had first proposed taking over Tonghua in 2005, backed out of the deal when the economy slowed last year, but re-entered negotiations recently when industrial demand picked up.

Propelled by the government’s stimulus package, China produced steel at an annualised rate of 545m tonnes in June, a record level of output.”

AP writes of the Zhejiang protests that the land was recently sold to be developed into a science and technology park. In Shipu, Ningbo district. In the middle of nowheresville? Local administrators would be able to access bank loans for infrastructure development as well as the national level subsidies for new-and-high-tech projects. Clever.

Of course, the communications and information infrastructure the national government is putting in place will only enable citizens to band together more easily when it comes to voicing grievances. And as long as the powers-that-be continue to find it difficult to kick their millennia-old bad habits, encouraged by the prospect of untold wealth, more of these industrial actions will occur, with greater frequency and with groups in numbers that may one day mark the Ides of March on the Chinese calendar.

The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Article IV Consultation with the People’s Republic of China came out a couple days ago. It’s a “30,000-foot” view of the direction of the Chinese economy during 2009. Frankly, there’s not much that’s revelatory in the report. The brief survey rather strikes me as a group of IMF bigwigs sitting at a dinner banquet with a group of Chinese government bigwigs making small talk, hoping the Chinese really will invest big in IMF bonds. The Chinese have been quite vocal this year about the long-term wisdom of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, given the huge debts the U.S. government is running up and the difficulty China is having in getting some of their savings back into the country.

As the Financial Times reports on the RMB valuation topic:

IMF directors were divided over that issue, according to the report. Some thought the renminbi remained “substantially undervalued” and should be strengthened as part of a “comprehensive strategy to rebalance the economy”. Others said it was difficult to make exchange rate assessments and the currency would only play a “supplementary role”.

I fall squarely in the “supplementary role” camp as China already has a raft of economic issues it has to deal with. And though the powers that be can be heavy-handed in dealing with dissent, stability of the society as it drives Mach-3 to modernization is not a bad thesis.

So I’m tickled when I read in the IMF report that:

Directors recognized that, over the near term, rebalancing the economy could raise unemployment as jobs are shed in export-oriented sectors…Directors believed that, over a longer horizon, the employment gains from rebalancing towards domestic consumption and an increase in service sector employment should outweigh short-term losses. “

Hmph… easy for an economist to say. Just try running a country.

The many identities of China are increasingly playing out their dramas first in the digital realm of cyberspace then in the more traditional media channels such as television and print newspapers – if the stories get that far. Some of the dramatis personae that Chinese are trying out include the gallant nationalist, who assassinates any suggestion that China is resuming its role as world leader; the lone rebel, who fights the government censors and the 50-cent bloggers using his blog as his sword and the proxy server as his shield; the Communist Party apparatchik – or technochik, as I prefer to call them – for whom control of perceptions and exercise of complete control over the society is paramount; and the wangbaixing , another term I’ve coined – that is, the average Zhang – or laobaixing, who simply wants to get on with his life and who uses the internet to play games and chat with family, friends and classmates, and – if he’s an average guy – check out the porn sites. (Lao means “old” and is indicative of the Old Hundred Names, which is what Chinese call themselves; wang means “net” and is used to connote the Internet). Indeed, the “Young Digital Mavens” survey published in November 2007 by IAC, an internet brands company, and JWT, an advertising agency, states “More than twice as many Chinese respondents agreed that “I have experimented with how I present myself online” (69 percent vs. 28 percent of Americans). And in fact, more than half the Chinese sample (51 percent) said they have adopted a completely different persona in some of their online interactions, compared with only 17 percent of Americans.”

Quixotic political winds, cultural shearing forces, rapid economic change, and pulverized social mores have made the internet the only safe place for Chinese to explore themselves as individuals. The wangbaixing in particular experiment with online personae – called avatars – the same way a debutante tries on wardrobes before her coming out to meet the public. Avatars, though, socialize, build entire families and homes and neighborhoods into which they can escape from the super-human stresses of keeping it all together in modernizing China. Occassionally, the virtual societies coalesce and rise up as Human Flesh Search Engines against which they define themselves and their value systems. Popular Human Flesh Searches involve corrupt government officials, individuals who run counter to nationalistic mythologies, and concubines of the rich or officious (though concubines seem to suffer a mix of hatred and envy from their tormentors). At every turn these groups and individuals ask the question, “Who am I now?” and wait for the response and the echo of the question. Perhaps because there is no fixed answer, they ask the question repeatedly until the powers that be consider asking too many questions of identity are unhealthy for a society with one party rule.

The most dramatic online performances, of course, are those that reach the threshold of the political, where the technochiks have drawn the boundaries of their own domain of control. Anyone – whether individual or mob – who crosses into that territory with any agenda other than the one technochiks have allowed, risks being filtered out of existence – literally.

The Financial Times last week published an absolutely brilliant and lengthy article on just how censorship of the internet works in China. Interestingly, much of the interviewer’s content for the article came from a government official in Yunnan province who works for the propaganda department. He invited the FT reporter to Yunnan to talk more about the government’s internet surveillance and control structure. Must have taken a helluva lot of permissions from the powers-that-be for the techno-chik Mr. Wu to be able to give an interview to a foreign newspaper, on-the-record.

The Hydra has many heads:

But day-to-day surveillance and control of the population are carried out by a far greater number of departments: the double structure of censorship institutions is duplicated at the provincial, county and city level; in addition, every government department operates its own internet surveillance. “Every ministry has special departments for collecting and surveying information from the internet,” said Wu, “including the police, the telecom departments, the departments for foreign affairs and the development and research commission [the top economic policy planning body].” Together, the authorities keep a 24-hour watch on what is said online.

What I found enlightening, though, was that the government enrolls netizens it pays to spy on each other and to tilt public opinion in the direction that suits the governments’ agenda of the day:

Now, however, “50-cent bloggers” – named after the price paid per posting when these freelancers first appeared – sign up to chatrooms or bulletin boards and speak up for the government, or against its critics.

“Maybe you imagine things as a battle between good and evil, between the good netizens and the evil censors. It’s not that simple,” says the editor of a Chinese magazine focusing on culture and society. “As a Chinese, you are always automatically part of ‘them’.”

Everything in moderation, goes the saying, and moderating public emotions is the whole point of the Censorship 2.0 movement:

An executive working at one of China’s leading internet portals tells me: “The task [for the Communist party] has been to allow enough noise in the system for people to let off steam and make them feel that they are living kind of a free life, but at the same time to maintain a sense of fear and respect that keeps them from demanding big change.”

But there is another disruption afoot that will severely test the Chinese techno-chiks:

…Already, by the end of 2008, 117 million people, or more than one-third of the country’s web users, could access the internet on their mobile phones. A rapidly growing number use QQ, China’s largest online messaging tool, on their handsets wherever they go. That means that the vast rural hinterland, where about 70 per cent of the population still live, is getting a fast-track link-up to a network via which they can voice their dissatisfaction: about corrupt and despotic officials, unsolved problems of pollution and social security, land grabs and income disparity.

Expect 3G in China to be loaded with “features” not found in other countries.

I write about the Discontent of General Managers in China in my column for the August issue of EuroBiz Magazine. From the beginning of the year through Spring of this year I had talked with a number of high-level managers of foreign-invested companies in China who felt their Headquarters back in the West no longer appreciated the managers’ capabilities, energy and commitment in getting the China operations up and running and smoothly operating. The managers were exploring options beyond the company, having felt they had exhausted avenues for greater opportunity inside their companies. Further, they felt the extraordinary efforts they had put in their companies were not appreciated. Instead, as one senior British manager put it to me, “The guys back in Headquarters believe the effort and the success [in getting China operations up and running] was all theirs.” Not much for expats to dine on after that.

Interestingly, the summer has seen younger people join the trend toward starting their own ventures. Western and Chinese men and women in their mid-twenties through early thirties have been inviting me out for lunch and espresso (mmm…espresso) to ask my thinking about business models they have in mind.

The contexts from which the young entrepreneurs are coming has broadened since the beginning of the year, as well: not just Western guys with knuckle-head HQs, but young Chinese women whose companies are foreign-owned in China have also felt the need to break out. Actually, whether Western or Chinese, male or female, they all seem to me to be realizing something the self-styled Western geniuses in their foreign companies have overlooked: the Chinese domestic market is expanding at the rate of the Big Bang, while international markets are shrinking and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

In every instance in which the Bright Young Things – whether Western or Chinese – have asked my thoughts I’ve answered the same: shed any of the boxed-in thinking you absorbed from your Western bosses at your previous job, identify your strengths – hire to fill out your weaknesses – and find the market that could use those unique capabilities that has the least amount of competition in the Yangtze River Delta, with the most amount of potential for eye-popping sales. Use only what’s useful, I tell them, and forget the tiny boxes your bosses had you in during your years of service to shareholders.

China is open for business. And don’t look back!

On May 10, 2009 Ms Deng Yu Jiao, a pleasant looking 21-year old waitress, greeted guests in the private room Dream City entertainment venue in Badong, Hubei province. Her only responsibility was to see to the beverages and snacks Chinese customers enjoy eating during singing and drinking sessions. The three government officials who sat waiting for Mr Deng had greater requirements than Ms Deng was prepared to provide, however. The incident ended with one of the officials slashed with a fruit knife Ms Deng wielded in self-defense, while the other official – Deng Guida, the chief of the county investment promotion office – lay on the floor, bleeding to death from a wound to the throat Ms Deng inflicted on him as he and one of his colleagues was pushing her onto to the sofa ( a second time) to rape her. Of course, he considered as his life drained away onto the well-trod carpet, it was his right to have her as he pleased: he was a Communist Party member, a high-ranking local government official, and rich. After all, he had thrown a wad of cash at the girl’s head to knock sense into her that he was someone of rank and power. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Local police arrested Ms Deng for murder.

Chinese internet users around the country were up in arms about the arrest. Immediately, BBS forums on Sina.com, Tianya.com and Netease.com as well as countless bloggers flooded the internet with thousands of threads of arguments and condemnations of the government officials’ behavior.

The uproar of hundreds of thousands of internet users was heard all the way in Beijing. Local police, in a preemptive move to forestall any edicts from high-level Beijing officials, reduced the charges against Ms. Deng to “excessive use of force”. Still, the reduction in charges was not enough to satisfy Chinese netizens. Nearly every commentator responded it was clear Ms. Deng was defending herself against the officials, and that she should be released. Eventually, the police dropped the charges and released her at the end of May 2009, to much fanfare.

China’s government officials at national and local levels are both thrilled and petrified at the potential the internet holds for them. They are excited at the possibilities for greater monitoring and control of information, as well as the new avenues for government propaganda that shapes Chinese views on domestic and international issues. Indeed, China’s internet user population jumped nearly 42% to 298 million by the end of 2008 according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). But they are also deeply concerned about the new channels of expression of discontent and of being cyber-lynched by “human flesh searches.” Human flesh searches ferret out and publicize personal information about individuals targeted on the internet as having wronged Chinese people at large. Armed with the private data, people pulverize a person’s life in cyberspace and in the real world to make them absolutely miserable. The last year in particular has seen an increase in human flesh searches aimed at overweening government officials.

In December 2008 a Nanjing government official in the Real estate properties department in the southern district of Jiangning had a photo of him posted on the internet. Jiangning is a lovely, forested township just south of the metropolis of bustling Nanjing, with gentle rolling hills, small quiet lakes and newly booming real estate market. The official in the outdoor photo was middle-aged, with the sagging jowls and puffy, red-rimmed eyes of so many of the kinds of Chinese officials that spend their evenings in “private meetings.” The post cited that the brand of cigarettes the official was smoking in the outdoor shot were amongst the most expensive available in China, named 9-5 Cigarettes among the most expensive sold in Nanjing at nearly USD$22 per pack; while his Vacheron Constantin was valued at many times his annual income. The post asked the pointed question, “How is it that a public servant can afford such luxuries?” The Chinese internet was again abuzz with conversations and condemnations, as well as additional insights into the official’s lifestyle. For instance, it was soon revealed, his name was Zhou-jiugeng, Commissioner of Nanjing Housing Administration Bureau. He drove a Cadillac to work. How, netizens asked, was this possible if there was not corruption involved? The district government immediately launched an enquiry into Zhou’s finances to reveal that he had taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in kick-backs from real estate developers investing in the region. The leader of the government for the district announced during a press conference that Zhou had been removed from his post, thanks to the good works of the thousands of Netizens who pursued the issue.

One of the most daring and brazen wiki-style detective efforts on the Chinese internet involved the search for the identity of a government official from Shandong province, in China’s north, who tried to push a little girl into the men’s washroom of a Shenzhen restaurant on October 28, 2008. Shenzhen is in China’s deep south, near Hong Kong, a large frontier city that has grown from a seaside village to one of the four largest cities in China in a mere twenty years. Though the closed-caption video recorder in the restaurant did not actually show the official coercing the 11-year old into the loo, it did show the rotund apparatchik asking the girl where the bathroom was, followed by the girl showing him the way. Footage then shows the man gripping the girl at the nape of her neck near the entrance of the men’s room, quickly followed by the girl rounding the wall hot-footing it back to the restaurant lobby, sobbing. Her parents find her crying, whereupon the little girl explains how the official had tried to force her into the washroom. The next scene has the government official striding out to the lobby to confront the parents and sobbing girl. The official shouts that sure he tried to get the little girl into the loo: “I did it, so what? How much money do you want, give me a price. I will pay it!” He pushes at the father.“Do you know who I am? I was sent here by the Beijing Ministry of Transportation, my level is the same as your mayor. So what if I pinched a little child’s neck? Who the fuck are you people to me?! You dare fuck with me? Just watch how I am going to deal with you!”

Within a short time of the video footage being posted Chinese internet users mobilized a “human flesh search” to determine the government official’s name, address, position and current whereabouts. Thousands of users participated, bringing the issue to national attention and to the desks of the official’s supervisors in Shandong province. The official was summarily censured and demoted for his actions.

One of the odd claims to fame Suzhou holds, though, is as the home of the first government officials humanly flesh-searched. In 2005, Zheng Dashui, a procurement official from Suzhou was the first to be made known to prosecutors via an online tip-off. He was later sentenced to seven years’ jail for taking bribes of almost 500,000 yuan, according to China Daily.

A couple days ago in Shanghai I delivered a presentation to a group of Executive MBA students out of the UK (though 16 countries represented in the session) on the implications of 10 irreversible trends in China’s development:

• a growing (anxiously) middle class
• mass urbanization
• aging population
• increasing tension between livability and waste management
• rise of the consumer society and dwindling natural resources
• the economic development of China’s interior
• the country’s increasing integration with the global economy
• the modernization and build-up of China’s national security apparatus
• the increasing pervasiveness of electronic media

One of the slides I presented during the hour-and-a-half long presentation involved a brief history of colonial aspirations in China from about 1840 until 1945.

After the talk, one of the participants asked me if the Chinese really do dislike the West (and Japan) for that bit of unfortunate history. I answered, “Yes, right along side of its admiration of the technological and economic strides the West – especially America – has made.”

And then I added, “But mind you, as much discussion as there’s been about what the West has done in recent past to China, China’s had no discussion of what it’s done to itself in its more recent past – especially from about 1958 through 1978. A lot of terrible things happened that no one talks about. And until they talk about that period, it’s most convenient to whip the West and Japan for its injustices.”

The British gentleman said, “Not very good at introspection, eh?

He continued, “Well, you know, British society until recently was similar. Until a generation ago we were taught not to discuss certain embarrassing issues in public, not to cry out loud and the like. Now, we’re talking in our media about pedophile Catholic priests and so on – things we would never have dreamed of talking out loud about not long before.”

It takes more than construction equipment to build a civil society, I suppose.