This is China! blog

Revelations come in all sorts of packages here in China. The latest one for me had absolutely nothing to do with business, but with family: the Chinese family and its militant emphasis on education. The very American Tiger Mother would have us believe that all Asians revel in straight-jacketing their children so they will attain a social stratum that will bring great adulation to family elders.

A recent coffee break with a Chinese mother named Mimi led me to understand there is a nascent trend among Chinese parents to the contrary.

Mimi’s ten year old son is – how to put it delicately – average. Of course, to his mother, he’s precious; but to his teachers at school his scores are abysmally second-rate – and therefore he is second-rate, too. Mimi is a very mature and dignified manager of a foreign firm with offices in China. She is in her mid-thirties. Mimi sees her ten year old son suffering within an education system that emphasizes rote learning and endless memorization over creativity and initiative.

Her son developed a low opinion of himself, as a result. Mimi explained to me, “Chinese people at an individual level do not really know what they want. Their entire lives they are told what to think, what to say, what to desire.” Last year, though, Mimi decided to get to the bottom of herself., of her own values and desires.

For several months Mimi has been attending an evening program led by a Chinese woman that helps parents re-evaluate their lives, learn what’s really important to them, and basically realize there’s more to their lives than meeting the expectations of others. About sixty adults participate in the program, she told me. During the late winter last year she took her son to a camp on the island of Hainan where mother and son could get to know each other better and he could explore parts of his personality and expression he never knew he had.

“He was very happy to discover that he could contribute things to the children in his group that none of them could. We had a wonderful time together,” she told me. I asked her what her husband thought of her efforts.

“Well, he doesn’t criticize me, but he doesnt’ participate, either.” She explained to me, “Chinese fathers believe they have nothing to improve in themselves. Whatever they learned from their fathers was good enough for them.” She told me 90-percent of the participants in the relationship programs are women. “Chinese men,” she said, “believe the child’s education is the mother’s responsibility.”

Thank goodness for little Zhou.

Frank Langfitt, the Shanghai correspondent for the America’s National Public Radio, assured me a couple days ago the weekly radio program “This American Life” had expanded its profiles from – as called it – old white guys with gravelly voices (usually doing some sort of manual labor or intensive craft, I might add) to a younger set, Americans in their twenties and thirties. Apparently, the demographic of the listening audience (1.7 million, at last count) had shifted dramatically, predominantly to a younger age range with university educations and relatively liberal views. Good, I told him, pointing at myself: I hardly fit the OWGGV image (nor am I in my twenties or thirties … keep counting). Nevertheless, the two-hour long interview in a Shanghai bistro was great fun.

We ranged over topics that involved the shift in China’s industrial policy for foreign investors over the last ten years, with peppered with personal stories; the change in attitudes in Chinese society toward expats; innovation with Chinese characteristics; whether the ascendance of China means the descent of America; as well as my own plans for my future in China.

I’m not sure if and when the program will air to the million-seven that apparently listen to the weekly profiles on American radio; however, it was indeed an honor to have been asked to interview nonetheless.

Technorati Tags: china, expat life

David Pilling writes in his column in the Financial Times about the confusion China’s policy of “non-interference” in the affairs of nations – including its own – is beginning to create both at home and abroad. It’s workers in other lands are increasingly becoming marks for disgruntled guerrilla fighters, greedy warlords and merciless pirates. Keeping out of the domestic frays that are typically the cause of the seizures is becoming difficult for China’s leadership. One day, the country may just have to send in the marines, as an increasingly vocal citizenry is demanding.

Life outside the Great Firewall is about to become a lot more complicated than two thousand years of collecting tribute from neighbors ever prepared it for.

Technorati Tags: globalization

The recent squabbles between Hong Kong citizens and mainland political and media commentators reminds me of a story a Hong Kong lady told me about what angers HK people so much about their over-bearing cousin. The Wall Street Journal has written several articles about the incidents, which seem so far to have been more vocal than violent. Of late, protesting Hong Kong residents are raising placards branding the Mainlanders visiting HK as locusts.

The Hong Kong woman told me that Mainlanders gather at any of a handful of towns at MTR metro stations on the Mainland side of the border. The MTR is the Hong-Kong company that runs the city’s subway system. Just after their water has broken, and while in labor, the Mainland mothers-to-be rush to the metro line to the emergency rooms of hospitals on the HK side of the border. Talk about an uncomfortable – and possibly, unsightly – ride for other passengers on the unfortunate carriage. The emergency rooms of publicly funded hospitals are obligated to accept all-comers. The result for the newborn? Instant HK passport, education and social services.

Private HK clinics are not so keen to see the flow of Mainland birthing-tourists restricted, as they apparently make a huge amount of money from the business, according to the woman. Still, it’s the social welfare that finds itself under yet more pressure with each additional birth from a Mainlander, whether the infant is born in a public hospital or private clinic.

Locusts should be so clever.