from EuroBiz Magazine

November 2008

by Bill Dodson

A couple years ago I brought from the States to Suzhou a Chinese national I had been working with for several years abroad. The idea was that the native Beijinger would run the operations of the Suzhou office of the company with which I was then working. Unfortunately, the posting proved a disaster: the Beijinger was instead intent on doing the kind of “Big Deals” that Beijing people like to associate themselves with. It seemed that any sort of Western business sensibilities she had applied outside China were immediately dumped when she returned to the country in favor of proving that her time spent living outside China was not a complete waste. She explained to me that Chinese people thought she and many other Sea Turtles were stupid living outside China for so long, when so much money could be made by staying in China.

Kevin, a British national with fifteen years experience managing companies in China offered over lunch one day, “A young Chinese woman we hired two years ago lived and studied in Germany for nearly five years.” Kevin works for a German company. “When she first started with us, she did things the German way: direct, professional, precise. Now, it’s tough to get any sort of meaningful information out of her,” he said. “So I had to take more time this morning than I had planned to find out what she was on about.”

Kevin suggested social pressure and social acceptance and the mere fact that one just has to eventually adapt to the environment in which one finds oneself as major drivers in the behavior of many Chinese returnees. Kevin told me how when the young lady comes out onto the shop floor to discuss something with him, the Chinese operators look sideways at her. When she returns to the office, they begin chattering away amongst themselves. Though he doesn’t understand exactly what they are saying, he knows they are talking about her. He believes they don’t see her as Chinese; she is more German to them, he is sure. And then, to compound their perceptions, they consider her – or at least her family – to be of the elite in the city. He told me he explained it to his GM this way: “Seven years ago for a young Chinese to be able to study in Germany – to be able to get there and to be able to pay for it – was almost unheard of. That means her family had connections and they had money. The average Chinese actually resents that fact, though they’ll never say directly. They’ll just work toward and wait for the day when they or one of their family can show off in like fashion.”

“One of the problems a returnee has,” Kevin continued, “is the expectations from her family once she has returned from overseas. The family has probably pooled resources to get their child abroad, and now they expect a payback. Right there is an expectation to conform that’s pretty difficult for returnees to deny.”

A Shanghai Chinese, Jeff, had lived in Japan nine years and then in Canada for two years before returning to China. He once explained to me, “When you live outside the country you have all these experiences that no one cares about when you return to China. When you’re back in China it’s like you have this big hole in your life. And strangely, you feel like you simply paused your life in China while you were abroad. When you return, all the old requirements and expectations that you had and others had for you come back into play, as if you took the ‘pause button’ off. The problem is,though, you have less time to do what you’re expected than you had before. The pressure to show off why you were away for such a long time makes you impatient for results.”

I recalled a situation in which a Chinese manager of a Western plant that had lived in America twenty years was so heavy-handed with his Suzhou staff that employees began quitting en masse. One Chinese employee sued the company after he abruptly terminated her because he did not like what she had to tell him about his management style. She subsequently won the case against the company. Ironically, she too was a Sea Turtle – from Changzhou – that had lived in the States ten years before returning to China.
Companies hiring Chinese returnees need to qualify candidates carefully, especially for temperament. Oddly, Western companies tend to remove the very controls they typically place on operations when a Chinese returnee is at the helm of their Chinese business. Any sort of entitlement bubbles returnees may have about their role or their degrees of freedom in China need to be managed immediately through systems and policies that make corporate activities in the China office transparent to Home Office executives. Indeed, when a returnee pursues activities in a manner that is opaque to Western managers, Western managers should be alarmed if they hear as a rationale, “That’s the Way things are done in China.”! The home office HR department as well needs to independently monitor returnee relations with local Chinese on a regular basis, providing the returnee counseling when necessary, with frequent updates to Home Office executives about any fractures in returnee relations with local staff for immediate remediation.

In some ways, though, placing a Chinese returnee in China is more stressful to the returnee than to a Westerner in the same posting: social, familial, and personal expectations as well as the expectations of local Chinese staff often work to refract the returnees’ experience in China. Indeed, returnees should have the same sorts of cross-cultural training that many Westerners receive before and during their China posting: China is changing too much too quickly for anyone outside the country for an extended period to be a “China expert” -  even if she has a Chinese face.

Copyright ©William R. Dodson, 2009