Karen Christensen: China-related insights into the power of social networks

I love it when a Google search takes me to a colleague’s writing. Frank Mulligan’s blog came up on the first page of a search on “aggregated china data.” Frank has a wonderful piece, “Winning the War for Talent in China,” coming out soon in Guanxi. Here’s a quick preview:

Step 4. Hire for Attitude

Everyone has heard of the mythical creature called the Perfect Candidate, but none of us have ever actually seen one. McKinsey’s original report on the war for talent recommended hiring only top people, but in China, like anywhere else, you need worker bees as well as queen bees.

The best course of action is to hire for attitude, not skills, even though in China the temptation is to do the exact opposite. When a company is new to the China market, it seems logical to hire experienced people directly from competitors. That way the factory or hotel opens on time, and the competitor is compromised. It’s called hiring to hurt, but the downside is that competitors bite back.

And why was I looking up “aggregated china data”? People are continually asking me about data sources, and I also saw a couple of companies exhibiting at the Special Libraries Association with large quantities of China data. What I’m curious about it how data is being organized, edited, and normalized for convenience use by professionals and researchers.

In the last few days, I’ve seen Chinese agents overtake Islamic terrorists as the villains on the TV show “24” and heard a woman at the fish counter at Guido’s, our local gourmet market, say, “It’s not from China, is it? I don’t want anything from China!” With the press surrounding the Vice Premier Wu Yi meetings in Washington DC last week with U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Americans’ worries about China are becoming much more visible — though not necessarily reasonable. But that’s often because we get only half the information we need from the press, and most of us just don’t know enough ourselves about China. (After all, how much did you learn in school about China? Can you visualize a map with London, Paris, and Berlin? How about Beijing, Xi’an, and Urumqi? How many Americans have heard of the Pearl River Delta? And that’s just geography.)

This makes it all the more important that Americans get the facts, before politicians’ rhetoric and media sensationalism lead us onto a confrontational path that won’t help us economically or build a more peaceful world for our children.

A perfectly timed and much-needed event is taking place this week, on 31 May, that deals with just this challenge. The National Committee on U.S.-China Relations is sponsoring, with World Affairs Councils across the country, a 30-venue CHINA Town Hall, a “national day of programming that gives Americans in 30 cities the opportunity to hear directly from policy-makers and specialists about these issues and the implications for U.S. policy and their own communities.” There is a great roster of speakers. This is a wonderful chance to stimulate informed discussion across the country, and I’m especially looking forward to seeing the kinds of questions raised in different places.

Here’s a related op-ed from Sunday’s St Louis Post-Dispatch, “China trade benefits our national, and St. Louis, economy”:

One widespread myth is that China is a major economic threat to the U.S. While the movement of some manufacturing to China has created economic dislocations in some U.S. communities, the Chinese economy is also providing extraordinary opportunities for American businesses and workers and lowering the cost of living for all Americans.

I’m getting lots of book recommendations from the China hands I meet and will be sharing them here. For starters, an intriguing one from contributor Frank Kehl:

Arthur Miller’s “Salesman” in Beijing, circa 1984, is a great read by a great writer; a subtle observation of general Chinese culture, post-Cultural Revolution culture, Chinese Western-style actors’ culture; and a guide for authentic cross cultural exchange that is neither know-it-all arrogant nor laissez-faire cultural relativist. It’s Miller’s daily journal of the trials and tribulations of mounting the play in China. Miller knows the artistic vision, the conflicts, the dramas of “Salesman,” he knows how it needs to be staged and acted. His close friend and translator, Ying Ruocheng — it was he who played the prison warden in “The Last Emperor” –knows the strengths and weaknesses of his Beijing Fine Arts Troupe. He knows they tend toward melodrama and broadness. They come to learn under Miller’s direction and Ying’s urgings, what their characters are really about.

And the audience? As I said last night, they made it a hit. The Chinese, who at the time hardly had an inkling of what life insurance — or the American Dream — was about, apparently were gripped by the dynamic between the family members, especially between father and sons.

It doesn’t matter where I am these days. Every conversation leads to China. Here’s a story that was brought to my attention by a colleague in New York, who is outraged by the fact that the new memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. is being carved in China, with Chinese granite. As a rule I’m not as against outsourcing as many people, but in this case I immediately agreed. Here’s the article that comes out No. 1 at Google via Digg (the first time I’ve landed at Digg so quickly): “King sculptor meets stony resistance.” There’s the economic argument, but what really matters here, I think, is the symbolic importance of this memorial. The Chinese understand this, probably better than we do, and perhaps in the spirit of Feng Shui would also believe this statue should be made of the right material, and sited in a harmonious way.

But here’s Chinese coverage last summer, “Chinese Artist to Sculpt Statue of Martin Luther King.”

A Chinese sculptor from central China’s Hunan Province has been chosen to sculpt a stone statue of Martin Luther King, which will be unveiled in the Martin Luther King Square in Washington in 2008.

Lei Yixin, the 53-year-old director of the Hunan Sculpture Institute, received the contract from the Sculpture Committee of the Martin Luther Square (SCMLS) on Sunday, as well as video, photographs and reading materials of the American hero. “This is a recognition of Chinese sculptors,” said the excited Lei, who has worked in sculpting for over 20 years.

The SCMLS approached Lei in July after he had made a 2.3-meter-tall sculpture at the International Stone Sculpture Conference.

Amazing it took so long for the story to pick up steam here.
Lei has won several prizes in China and his works are on display in Changsha Square.

(Xinhua News Agency August 16, 2006)

“The Trustful Business in Respect of Price and Measuring,” says the sign. I’m not posting this because the English translation isn’t good, but because I loved the phrase, “trustful business.” This echoes so well what a colleague told me last week, kindly calling from Moscow to give me some tips for my Hong Kong presentation, that we Westerners think too much about “being professional” and following fixed protocol, especially when it comes to contracts, instead of using our instincts about whether we can trust our prospective partners. He explained that the Chinese he deals with are likely to say, “If we have good trust, we will make good business together.” So it’s a worthwhile idea, to have a Trustful Business. That’s certainly how we will be successful in making guanxi, and in developing stable long-term partnerships in China.

I can now recommend the mobile phone unlocking service at The Travel Insider. This worked smoothly and quickly (even though I had to be without my phone for a few days, sending it to Washington State–some phones can be unlocked remotely but not mine), and I now have a Chinese mobile number, in my own mobile phone. All this required was purchasing a Chinese SIM card for 98 yuan, and I can do the same in other countries. It’s convenient for me, but more importantly makes it cheap for colleagues here to telephone me.

Buying a SIM card taught me something else: the importance of numbers. I had been told that 4 is considered bad luck, because the word for four sounds like the word for death, and that 8 is good luck. The reality of this belief struck home when I saw the sheets tacked to the wall showing China Mobile phone numbers available. There was a whole sheet with numbers predominantly 4, and I could perhaps have acquired a mobile number consisting of nothing but 4s. But I chose something similar to my US mobile, except, fortunately, ending in 8.

Resources for travel are a mixed bag. I was looking at the US Embassy website this morning and saw a box reading “Map of Beijing.” That sounded good. Then I read the fine print, “Here is an easy and interactive PDF map of Beijing (though be forewarned this is from 1993 and not up to date).” 1993? It is a great looking map, but people who return to Beijing after a year say they don’t recognize anything! This reminds me of the time elderly friends brought us their collection of guidebooks because we were making our first trip to Greece. “Things will have changed a little,” said our friend. The guidebooks were from 1955.

Europeans joke about the way Americans drink milk, and there are a lot of ads for adult milk drinking (all those white mustaches on celebritities). But no one I know, except my teenage daughter, drinks milk by the glass on a regular basis, except as an occasional comfort treat with a hot brownie or fresh bread. (I encourage my daughter, because of the calcium, and because we have such good milk available.) What a surprise to find the Chinese drinking glasses of milk with their evening meals! I’ve seen this twice already.

The other thing I’m trying to work out about eating out is that when I go to a restaurant with Chinese friends, they are often offered a private room. This isn’t as much fun, and I’d like to discourage it but don’t know how. Especially because I don’t know what the motivation is: to honor the foreigners, or to get us out of sight?

1. Make it easier for foreigners to spend money.
2. Improve English signage.

Make it easier for foreigners to spend money
Very few places, apart from hotels and big tourist restaurants and stores, take credit cards. This would not be too bad if the ATMs were much easier to find and if they worked with our cards. Last night Tom and I had along and frustrating time trying to get some cash. So far, we have found two ATMs we could use, while none of the rest connected(and we must have tried more than a dozen others in various places. In the course of this, we did find out that Beijing has people in place, though, for good customer service. A hostess at the restaurant we’d planned to go to, which was booked solid for the evening, ran after us because we’d gone the wrong direction and said her manager had told her take us to another branch, five minutes’ walk away. But that branch did not take credit cards and we were short of cash. So she asked one of the waiters there to walk with us to try the ATMs in the area. We were unsuccessful, but it was awfully nice of them.

Improve English signage
It’s great that there are English words on so many billboards and shop signs, but too bad that the English is so execrable. At first it’s funny, but on second thought it’s really not good business, and would be so simple to clean up. All business owners need is to rely on an English speaker. The simpler the enterprise, the simpler the language needed. Big developers selling off expensive homes ought to be able to pay for sophisticated slogans that work in English. Here are a few examples:

“pearl adornments with our warmth welcome”

“Taste tea │ Fallow │ Disport”

And on huge billboards for expensive residential space, first an awful example and then one that is perfectly correct, if still meaningless:

Oneself │ Territorism

Life should be like this │ The future is here

Our February issue on “Small Business” highlights the fact that Chinese firms are competing with Western firms in every area, but it still came as a surprise to me to learn that China was by 2003 “the world’s sixth most important grower of vines and tenth most important producer of wine.” Given China’s trajectory in other areas, one wonders what this statistic will be at the end of 2007. This information comes from “A light dusting of wine in Davos,” by Jancis Robinson, the well-known British wine writer, who gathered top vintages for the world leaders gathered at Davos last week (among whom was C.S. Kiang, the dean of the new environmental science program at Peking University, whom I’m meeting next week):

None of the participants at this second tasting, who this time included a high proportion of Kuwaitis, came anywhere near to guessing that even by 2003, the last year for which we have official statistics, China had become the world’s sixth most important grower of vines and tenth most important producer of wine.

I have to say that this bodes well for those of us working in China!

When I arrived in Guangzhou (Canton) last September, it took me only a few minutes to notice how many Black people there were at the airport. My first thought had been that they were Western tourists, like the ones I’d met several years ago in Xi’an, and I wondered how they were received. But there were far too many, and as I soon learned Guangzhou is a trading center, not a major tourist destination.

Africa’s importance to China is growing, as a result the United States is paying more attention, too: “The US president has approved plans to create a US military command for Africa, a move that reflects increasing US strategic interests in the continent.” Read more in “US to have Africa military command” from Al Jazeera.

I was talking to an African American professor from Williams College over the weekend about this, and he said that there is concern in Africa (he knows Malawi) about the Chinese as possible new colonialists. Let’s hope that the result of this focus on Africa will result in good for that continent, not just turn it into an economic and political battleground.