This is China! blog

I sat through most of a segment on the BBC’s Hard Talk during a conversation with the Tigger Mother last week. It was an excruciating experience for me. There’s only one other Yale law professor I’ve ever seen in the spotlight who vacilated and qualified their statements as much as she in the five minute segment.

My reading is she is of the school “Spare the rod; spoil the child,” which certainly describes the upbringing of children in a great many immigrant and minority households in the States. Also common among immigrants is a eulogizing of the Old Country and the “ways of our ancestors.” Even Taiwanese and Hong Kong people agree they can be “more Chinese than the Mainland Chinese”. I just wish this Mother could return to her mother’s land and see how cartoonish obeisance to fluid mythologies like Confucianism is creating sad and tragic family dramas of a frequency and drama that shock me to my core.

When I read the Annalects back in University, I had no idea just how many schools and characters have revised and adapted the few fragments of his teachings there really were. Now, Tigger Mama has added her own contortions, which haven’t helped cross-cultural understanding between Chinese and Westerners one wit. All this vacillation and qualification confuses matters.

Which makes me wonder about those Yale law professors. Are they all as equivocating as Tigger Mama and the President of the United States?

The Global Supply Chain Council, headquartered in Shanghai, has been extraordinarily generous in hosting a book launch luncheon for my book, China Inside Out: 10 Irreversible Trends Reshaping China and its Relationship with the World. The announcement for the luncheon just went out yesterday. The book is available, well, everywhere, it seems now. Print distribution this past week finally crossed the Pacific Ocean to North America and from there to the UK and Europe.

If you’re based in Shanghai and are a reader of This is China!, I hope to meet you at the event. The announcement reads:

When: Wednesday, March 2. Starts from 12:00 noon (lunch will be served)
Fees: RMB 100 for Council Member, RMB 200 for Non-Council Members
Venue: Shanghai, Puxi, restaurant to be confirmed.

Join us for a chance to meet, mingle and discuss doing business in China with the author of this book. Seats are limited, RSVP at http://www.supplychains.com/en/cev/587.

Books will be on sale at the event and I’ll be signing copies, as well.

>> About the Council
The Global Supply Chain Council is leading professional organization working to increase awareness and promote the value of supply chain management in Asia. Visit http://www.supplychains.com for more information. Council HQ: 10F, Block 2, 543 Xin Hua Road, Shanghai, China 200052.

Technorati Tags: china, china inside out

A statement a Chinese plant manager of a Western factory made during a meeting with Western managers of the company became a light-hearted joke later in the evening over hot pot. During the afternoon meeting one of the Western managers had made a point about the central government’s internet censorship policy. The plant manager replied, without missing a beat, “You have been mislead by the foreign press”. The Western manager paused a moment, off-balanced by the remark. He had only been in China a couple days, and so was not used to the bluntness with which Chinese can address friends and coworkers. The Western GM, a long-time resident of China, laughed. The plant manager was serious; however, he quickly lightened up because of his travels outside the country and his work over the years with Western colleagues.

I have recently been struck by the number of such conversations with well-educated Chinese who may work in Western companies and who have traveled outside the country. Most of the Chinese professionals with whom I’ve talked are in their mid-thirties. They are stunningly conservative about the government and issues such as censorship (“Well, the government wants to protect the people from the bullying of foreign countries,” one manager told me).

The conversations remind of the first time I met an elderly Communist Party member, a professor at the Foreign Language University in Beijing. Tears came to her eyes as she recalled how the Communist Party in 1950 had realized she was a gifted student and whisked her from the dire conditions of the countryside of Tianjin to the hallowed halls of the Beijing university system for the highest level education. Years later, she would be sent to the countryside for something she had written during the 100 Flowers Blooming period, a perceived slight of Party leadership; and then again during the Cultural Revolution.

Today’s Chinese young professionals seem just as much attached to the country’s leadership as past generations – despite hardships – no matter how progressive they may seem at work.

Technorati Tags: china, chinese middle class, education, middle class, social trends

It looks like food prices will skyrocket even further here in China, with Xinhua announcing the worst drought to strike Shandong province in 200 years. Shandong is a part of China’s wheat basket, in the northeast of China.

While south China has just over half the population of the country, it has nearly 85-percent of the nation’s water resources. The south supports 40-percent of China’s croplands. The north, by contrast, has only about 15% of the country’s water, 55-percent of its population and 60-percent of its cropland. For instance, the citizens of the sea port city of Tianjin, which faces the Korean peninsula, can only provide its population of 10 million with one-tenth the amount of water of the average citizen in the world.

Modernization has only exacerbated the historically drought-like conditions in the north: industrialization, certainly; but agricultural, overwhelmingly. The low price of water connected with the lack of education of farmers in sustainability and the government’s lack of regulation and enforcement of irrigation has made a bad situation even worse, very quickly (see photo).

Technorati Tags: china, environment, natural resources, water

One of the most interesting classes I took in University was about the Peloponnesian War, during which Athens and Sparta went after one another throats with a vengeance (yes, it was ONE course). Great stuff; really got the imaginative juices roiling.

Well, how about a New York Times article in which one of my favorite wars is actually used as a parallel with China’s rise within the context of a world dominated by a single superpower: the USA. David Sanger makes the point that

“What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”

Sanger called the misconceptions both sides nursed The Thucydides Trap, after the author of the history of the Peloponnesian War. The length of the conflict, the casualties on both sides, and the economic toll, it could be argued, made it easier decades later for a true outsider – Philip II of Macedon – to pick up all of Greece.

Technorati Tags: china, economic trends, globalization

I just found out today from the program coordinator of a conference at which I’ll be delivering the closing (rousing) presentation in March in Shanghai that she just downloaded my book China Inside Out onto her Kindle in the States. Another friend in America told me today that her print order for the book on Amazon just went out.

It seems book distribution has finally leaped over the Pacific Ocean from Asia to North America, where you should be able to find the book at a book shop near you.

Shop for the book on: Kindle( USA), Kindle (UK).

Technorati Tags: china, china inside out, publication