This is China! blog

Paul French recently interviewed me for a piece he was doing on the kick-back business culture in China. Paul is Chief Representative of Access Asia and author of several books on China, most recently Through the Looking Glass. He is also China Editor for the magazine Ethical Corporation, based in the UK. Ethical Corporation is “an independent company providing competitive intelligence for business sustainability.” They publish the leading Responsible business magazine. They also sponsor conferences on Corporate Social Responsibility. Paul saw my Eurobiz article titled “Kicking the Kick-back Habit”, in the April 2010 issue of the Magazine. Paul recorded our conversation and saved it as a podcast, which you can listen to or download at: Bribery and Corruption: Fighting kickbacks in China

Enjoy.

Related posts:

Kicking the Kick-back Habit

Corruption Rules

China’s Fantasy Football

Warlords in Suzhou

When Journalism Made a Difference

She wanted me to kill her. She told me the pain was unbearable. If I wasn’t going to kill her, she told me, at least allow the doctors to cut her open. She squeezed my hand until my knuckles turned white and my eyes squinted with muted tears; she wanted me to share what she was going through. I have to admit I didn’t like it much, even if it was just one-tenth of one-percent of the the pain a woman feels at labor. Eight hours later, at 8 o’clock Sunday evening, 16 May 2010, I witnessed my son born in a pool of blood and screams, wailing after the long journey he’d taken to come into our lives.

The doctors and nurses at the Suzhou No. 2 VIP maternity ward did an outstanding job supporting my wife during labor, and during the four days they stayed in the clinic caring for my family (though the sofa on which I slept most nights could have been more comfortable). A force of nature has entered my life, an infant boy named Ashley Xavier (already shortened to Asher; Chinese name: Zhou Si Cheng): both Chinese and Western blood intermingle in his veins. He as the first addition to our family will shape my life and my senses in ways I can barely imagine; much as China itself has.

I can’t wait.

Perhaps because I’m about to have my first child in a couple weeks, I’m a bit, well, sensitive. I’m sure most every would-be father feels the same way. (And the mothers even worse, I’ve found! ^_^) Everyone keeps talking about Ceasarian sections here in China. My wife told me a couple nights ago she met another Chinese woman in a local market who had just had a little girl. While the woman was in labor at the local maternity hospital the three or four nurses in attendance kept insisting the woman have a C-section. The woman refused. However painful the experience, the doctor had assured her before she had gone into labor that she would not require surgery. So why were the nurses so intent on the mother having an incision in her belly that would forever sever the muscles in her abdomen? “The nurses each get a paid a commission by the doctor who performs the surgery,” the woman in the market told my wife in a whisper. “Whatever you do,” the new mother advised my wife, “however painful it might be, don’t let them do a C-section on you if your doctor already told you you’ll deliver the baby alright without one.”

I told the story to two of my magazine editors in Shanghai, whereupon one of the Americans told me he had read somewhere (China Daily, he thought), that China has an obscene number of C-sections per capita compared to the rest of the world; about one-in-three, he seemed to recall.

So, while eating dinner and watching the local Chinese news just hours later, what report should air but one involving pregnant women who are having C-sections in Suzhou. “Preganancy is so painful,” one of the women exclaimed on-camera. Other women in the report nodded agreement and cackled something in the local dialect. A Chinese doctor thankfully came on and assured the viewing audience that however painful, natural birth was actually a better option for infants, if possible. Of course, the doctor was a guy, and hadn’t to my knowledge been through a pregnancy himself.

Still, this C-section fad reminds me very much of the “sinification” of ultrasound technology: a mis-application of technology in an attempt to trump Mother Nature herself.

It doesn’t take long when you live and work in China to realize that altruism seldom fits into Chinese business calculations. As far as the renewable energies manufacturing sector is concerned, the Chinese government and entrepreneurs see the potential for riches to be made from the manufacture of equipment that captures, transforms and distributes energy from sources other than coal and oil. One source with whom I talked at the recent SNEC Photovoltaic Conference and Exhibition in Shanghai said her company had commissioned a market study in 2008 on the largest manufacturers in China of photovoltaic cells, as used in solar panels. The study turned up 130 companies that matched their criteria. A year later 50 of those companies had simply disappeared. “It was clear many of the [Chinese] investors saw an opportunity, had some money from other businesses, and thought they’d try their luck.”

It’s important then, in this media-appointed “race” between China and the US in the renewable energy sector to look more precisely at the numbers being quoted, the sources and the time frames from which the numbers are being taken. Bruce Usher, an executive in residence at Columbia Business School, recently wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed piece that, “Bruce Usher, an executive in residence at Columbia Business School, in a 2004 analysis, the World Bank determined that China accounted for a mere 5 percent of clean-development projects globally. But by 2008, the most recent year for which annual data is available, the bank reported that China’s market share had climbed to an astounding 84 percent.” But the same can be said of so many other industries in which America once held predominance and manufacture shifted off-shore: sneakers, TV sets, video recorders, and the like.

Issues of quality are even more difficult to articulate. One maker of equipment that automates the transfer of silicon sliced into wafers told us one of the reasons for Chinese interest in his equipment is that the majority of Chinese production is done on manual lines that yield 16.3% efficiencies in the solar cells. Some American buyers require 16.7% efficiencies from makers, creating a hidden barrier to unfettered Chinese domination of the American market. Though non-renewable energy may not be a national policy on the order of China’s, I do believe American companies continue to refine energy technologies and invest in R&D that will turn up ever more efficient means of producing clean, renewable energy.

So, let China continue to churn out the solar equivalent of “cheap sneakers” for the world. By the time international buyers have to replace less efficient Chinese copy-cat technologies, more efficient products and perhaps even completely new approaches to powering the world will be available.

Further reading: NYT

I tend to be skeptical when it comes to just how “green” the Chinese revolution is in the renewable energy sector. Hundreds of makers of solar photovoltaic (PV) cells and attendant equipment manufacturers crowded the hallowed halls of the Shangahi International Exhibition center. The SNEC 4th International Photovoltaic Power Generation Conference & Exhibition ran from May 5 -7, with conference proceedings from May 7 – 9.

One of the more revealing exhibits was that of CRS Reprocessing Services, based in Louisville Kentucky. Since 2003 CRS has been cleaning up after PV makers in America, Europe and Japan, and is just breaking into China. The company builds the equipment and implements the processes needed to recycle chemical slurry for re-use. The company claims a 98% re-capture rate. The slurry is a combination of liquid chemicals and a fine dust that result from cutting silicon into the thin wafers that serve as the base for photovoltaic cells. Prospects for growth for the company in the China market are huge, as Chinese PV makers have until a recent  change in government policy been pouring a poisonous slurry into plastic bags they pile up in the back of their factory compounds.

Deborah Reese, Director of Marketing, told us of one potential Chinese customer who had so much of the slurry built up “you could actually see the dump from satellite photos, if you knew where to look.”

Of course, national government promotion of a sector looking to grow into a trillion dollar marketplace would prefer we look elsewhere.

My friend Scott Tong, Bureau Chief for Marketplace, a business program on the American radio network NPR, told me a couple days ago he was finally able to get his piece aired on the relationship between baby traffickers in south China and adoption agencies in the States. It took a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, he had told me weeks ago, since producers were concerned the article would rattle the cellophane sensitivities of NPR listeners who themselves had adopted children from China. As interesting as the radio report is Scott’s background article on the meetings he had – or didn’t have – with agency buyers, middlemen and government officials. It all makes for an insightful media treat. And reading from the comments on the page, listeners appreciated Scott’s effort in getting at the heart of an opaque bit of business in China.

Find the report here.

On my flight back from Singapore recently I sat next to a pleasant online travel manager who was born and raised in Singapore. I told her how much I enjoyed my nearly week-long visit to the city-state, and how impressed I was in general with the education level of many of the people I met and those with whom I would be working during the editorial, production and marketing of my book.

The agent screwed up her sun-tanned face as though she had smelled something bad. She said, “It’s so competitive. Look at the United States or Australia: they aren’t as competitive and yet their economies are so strong.”

“Well, I did see most students on the subway coming home around five o’clock. You mean, they have to study all the time.”

“Too much,” she said, shifting in the narrow seat. “It’s better now, but the system is so results oriented.” I took that students must study-to-the-tests, instead of studying to learn or to create.

“Is that a Singaporean thing or an Asian thing?” I asked. “Chinese students have to study really hard, too.”

She thought for a moment, then said, “In Singapore we have no choice. We don’t have anything worth selling on to anyone else except our people. We export our people.”

There are worse exports for a service economy, I suppose.

Scott Tong and I recently had a spirited discussion while speeding back to his office in Shanghai in a taxi late one hot afternoon. Scott is China bureau chief of National Public Radio (USA). We talked about how the bride price in China is increasing all out of proportion to reason. The bride price is the increasingly gratuitous dowry young men are expected to give to young ladies with whom the men would like to wed. Now, on top of cash amounts upwards of tens of thousands of US dollars, men in the countryside are expected to also have a flat already bought; some women even expect their mate-in-waiting to already have invested in a car. Scott told me about the research of Columbia University economist Shang-Jin Wei. Wei found a direct correlation between higher rates of savings in families with young men who needed marrying off compared to those without.

Other Chinese have confirmed the dismal state of being an average Chinese family – or, more challenging, a family in the country-side – when it comes to paying a bride’s family off. One Suzhou taxi driver, already married to a woman from Shanghai – lamented that, “Chinese men have only one chance at happiness, while Chinese women have at least two.” I asked him what he meant. He explained, “Chinese men have to pay the dowry to the woman’s family and buy an apartment before they marry. Afterward, the man has no money. The woman, though, has the man’s money and then, if they divorce, can get another dowry. The man, though, can only afford to get married once. After that, never again.”

Pity the Chinese suitor.

Further reading: WSJ

Related posts:

The Market Value of a Daughter

“Straying Cows” Still Unable to Meet Bachelor Demands

Divorce, Chinese Style

Chinese forums and blogs last week were abuzz about the latest spate of violence in children’s elementary schools here in China. Much of the anguish and anger seem to be targeted at the accelerating income gap in the society, exacerbated by corruption and nonchalance by local government officials. I have my own theory: China has become high-strung.

Just a couple days ago I experienced a perfect example of the degree to which the society has become anxious to the point of breaking, this past Sunday, during the May Holiday festival. Most countries take time off in the first week of May to celebrate May Day. Theoretically, the Chinese masses are supposed to relax during the three day weekend. (translation: shop till you drop, and eat and drink with abandon). Instead, I found myself awoken at 6am on the second day – a Sunday – by the incessant construction of a new collection of high-rises next door to my own. The construction went on until 8pm that evening. (and started up again the third day of the holiday). A bit sleepy during the afternoon, I sought to take a snooze – half-hour would do it, I figured. Instead, fifteen minutes into the nap the canon-booms of fireworks launched me from the comfy sofa. Newlyweds were arriving at their freshly appointed home, and felt the need to frighten away the same evil spirits that had apparently been be-deviling a different set of newlyweds at noon, just a couple hours before.

Literally minutes later a hydraulic drill began carving into the cement walls in the apartment the floor above our own, a common enough occurrence most days of the week. But this was a Sunday afternoon! We called the compound guards to apprehend the offenders, but they were unable to find the culprits, whose timing was immaculate: they stopped when the guards came into the building, and started up again minutes later. I bade my wife farewell in the hopes of spending a couple hours outdoors with mates over a few pints of beer.

While waiting for a taxi at the entrance to the complex of apartments I witnessed a fender-bender between two cars – a small bump, with nary a scrape – after which the drivers of the two cars emerged to begin punching each other. The twenty cars waiting to get past them on the road were not impressed with the display of misplaced testosterone, and blared their horns. The stalled chain of cars were immobilized by the raised barrier along the median, and by the tall wall keeping the cars out of one of the multitude of new construction sites that sliced the thoroughfare into a single lane. Most residents in most cities throughout China find traffic daily frustrated by construction that literally appears overnight, but takes weeks to evaporate.

The rate and massiveness of modernization in China is fraying nerves and sensibilities. Mainland Chinese are stressed beyond comprehension: stressed with change, with catching up with the rest of the world – with each other – and with simply staying in place in a world of accelerating reformation. A culture that for four thousand years has trundled along, metaphorically, at the speed of an ox cart suddenly finds itself ripping through time and space at supersonic speeds. Few individuals or groups can withstand such inhuman stresses without the occasional gripe. Or grisly deed.