This is China! blog

If he was my employee I would have fired him on the spot. Of course, if I was Japanese, as was the factory worker’s boss, I would only have created an international incident, as one European friend reminded me (who’s own family once suffered under Nazi occupation – and who’s family got over it generations ago). The local Suzhou news service rushed to the scene of an unhappy twenty-something’s tearful brush with an unhappy boss who shouted at him in Japanese during the morning line-up Asian companies are so fond of organizing at the start of each work day. The line worker, a moon-faced post-adolescent still in his neatly pressed powder-blue work uniform and train-engineer’s cap, recalled the Japanese occupation of China – 70 years ago! – in the boss’es cross excortiation of the employee. Meanwhile, the news station spliced grainy black-and-white film footage of Japanese soldiers at war with headshots of the disgruntled operator.

Frankly, as many of us expat managers can relate with, Chinese employees have a habit at times of stretching the credulity – and the imagination – of their managers with their stunts. What surprised me as much as the report itself was the absolute religiousity with which one young Chinese with whom I’m acquainted took in what the boneless Chinese employee had to say; she believed the news release was warranted precisely because of the Japanese occupation of China.

Anyway, I suppose, if you can’t criticize the real bosses in your own society, always reach for a bogey man.

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Service with a Cheer

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There’s No Place Like Home: Worker Shortages

I was recently sitting in a Starbucks cafe one morning, sipping a ritual espresso, when I heard shouting outdoors. The raucous startled service staff, too. One of the barristas went outside to see what was the clatter. He returned to report it was the staff of the Taiwanese Chamate restaurant/tea house exercising and chanting before the start of work. The cheer leading went on for several minutes more, during which I just had to see for myself. A single line of green-uniformed staff faced a huddle of employees in which members were trying to outshout each other. Dark-suited big bosses watched on in pride. Eventually, winded, exhausted the huddle broke with a great “hurumph!” and applause.

I returned to the Starbucks, where staff was still talking about the din. I told them that despite not doing calisthenics every morning, chanting and marching, I believed Starbucks still had amongst the highest, most consistent service delivery across the dozen or so Chinese cities in which I had sipped a demitasse of their espresso. I left the last Chamate – in fact, the very one in front of which staff had been gleefully cheering – in disgust after being chased out by six year old kids who were literally dancing on the tables, nary a mother nor service staff to set limits on behavior and ambiance. The Chamate staff simply waited for a big boss to say or do something, which one never did. In Starbucks, on the other hand, on numerous occasions in numerous locations, staff have directly and politely and assertively told ignorant customers they couldn’t smoke in the place.

One day Asian business will figure out that treating staff like grunts will only elicit the same level of guttural thinking and service.

Pretty much every expat GM I’ve talked with this year in China agrees they’ve felt a sea change in Chinese government policy toward Foreign Direct Investment(FDI): “They’ll allow us to stay here until they’ve got everything they want, then it’s bye bye!” one Danish GM told me. Everything they want now is technology to copy, manufacturing processes to ape.

Now, Chinese policy is reflecting a sophomoric sensibility it’s got it all figured out and doesn’t need to remain unctuous to foreigners any longer. American companies, of course, are not impressed with the business climate change. “I don’t think the Chinese government can count on the American business community to be able to push back and block action [on Capitol Hill],” Myron Brilliant told the Financial Times recently. Brilliant issenior vice-president for international affairs. He used to shield Beijing from the Capitol Hill gang that wanted to extract its pound of flesh from Chinese protectionist measures, especially the currency revalutation issue.

Beijing has seen it’s pushed US business and government interests as far as it can since the global economic downturn, and is trying to make nice to policy makers who are pushing for tariffs on Chinese goods to signal American displeasure with China’s currency controls and other export subsidies. The powers that be just might find that adolescent muscle flexing is only winning them the world’s annoyance.

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Google’s decision to pull back to Hong Kong to stage Chinese queries on its search engine has highlighted an unsettling sentiment: American companies are finding China a frostier place in which to do business. The American Chamber of Commerce in Guangzhou recently released the results of its latest investor survey to reveal American enterprises have found that having investment opportunities restricted in various industries, a business environment still thick with intellectual property theft, domestic

Further reading: FT

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Why Google will Remain Number 1 in the World

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Pulling a “Google” on China

Linda Jaivin, one of the most prolific writers I’ve ever met, is a bubbly, charming Australian who’s been involved with China for thirty years. During the Suzhou Bookworm Literary Festival held during the first two weeks of March she introduced her two latest books, The Monkey and the Dragon, and An Immoral Woman. The Monkey and the Dragon is about her close friend Hou Dejian, and her own life in Taiwan in the 1980s, when paranoia and intrigue were thick in the air on the island nation. Hou Dejian was a legend in his own time in the late seventies and early eighties when he penned and sang the song “Descendants of the Dragon,” which became an anthem of sorts for young Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Mainland. Hou also created a stir in 1986 when he defected from Taiwan to Communist China, more out of curiosity and ignorance, as far as I could tell, than for any reasons of idelogy. The Taiwanese government subequently barred Linda from entering the country, believing she facilitated the high profile defection. She did not, which the Kuomintang government eventually understood and accepted when the Mainland government kicked Hou out of China just after the Tiananmen incident.

An Immoral Woman sounds even more intriguing to me: an historical novel set in the early twentieth century, built on the lives of two extraordinary personalities against one of the most dramatic backdrops in modern history: the end of the Qing dynasty and the subsequent battles between warlords for domination of the country. George Morrison was a larger-than-life journalist for the Times of London, based in Beijing, who loved two things: boasting and seducing women. The woman who turned the tables on him most successfully was Mae Perkins, a young American heiress given to nymphomania. China, revolution, sex? What more can a sinophile ask for in a book?

The young Chinese man was tall, thin and fair-skinned. His smile was unsure, perplexed, even. The peach-fuzz just over his lip indicated to me he was 18 – maybe 19 – years old. I was off by ten years: he later told me he was 28. He had been completely captivated by the foreign author’s discussion of the long-ago events still swirling around Tiananmen Square. “I don’t know anything about it,” he told the writer, and later parroted to me. “How do I find out about it?” The author suggested the young man try to find a documentary about the event. “But you won’t able to see it here,” the writer said fatalistically. He turned to me, and asked if I knew how he could get past the Great Firewall of China. It seemed to me he had found a new mission in life, to learn more about something that was simply not in the spoon-fed mythology of modern Chinese history everyone of his age is. “No one knows anything about this,” he said. “I want to find out more.” I told him about proxies and vpn’s, and bid him and the writer good evening.

I considered, if the young man was one of those in a million in China who was genuinely trying to expand his worldview, then there were nearly 1,500 more out there throughout the country who were going to be creating there own interesting times.

Companies exist to make money for their shareholders. After 1971 that became the corporate mantra. Companies are able to exist at all, however, because of their stakeholders: employees, supply chains, communities and shareholders. The shift in focus from stakeholders to shareholders has justified many corporations forgoing doing what is right for what is expedient.

Google is an exception. It’s the reason, too, why Google will remain one of the most innovative companies of the 21st-century. It dared to do differently.

Related posts:

What’s Your Plan B?

Pulling a “Google” on China

The Power of the Twenty-somethings

Is China Still a Risk Worth Taking?

Cyber-kerfuffle

Call me a nerd, but I absolutely love the Financial Times latest interactive map of China. The map illustrates in inflatable balloons the scale of China’s Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into other countries from 2003-2008: slide the register along the timescale and watch the balloons inflate across the United States, Australia, and Africa (especially South Africa). A pop-up menu enables users to also look at the size of exports into China as a percentage of China’s GDP, and another in absolute terms.

My friend Andrew Hupert recently wrote in his monthly online Chinese negotiation column for the China Economic Review lessons foreign businesses can learn from Google’s brush with death dealing with the powers that be. It’s well worth the read:

• You can’t always get what you want
• Sometimes “no” has to mean “no.”
• Don’t sacrifice your own core values for empty promises.
• Walk away slowly and leave the door open to come back later.

Who says companies cannot seek redemption?

One of the few non-infrastructure related industries whose earnings have continued higher without interruption is Pharmaceuticals, despite the global economic downturn last year. By 2011 China will have the third largest pharmaceuticals market in the world, according to the Shanghai Business Review. SBR says a market study by pharma research firm IMS Health cited that China’s market for prescription drugs could double by 2013 to up US$40 billion. China’s health care policy reforms and infrastructure improvements will expand the market markedly.