Today I attempted to order a tall cup of Chinese tea from Starbucks using zero English. I was doing fine at first, but ran into trouble when the barista asked me what kind of Chinese tea I wanted; in my ignorance I made the fatal error of forgetting there was more than one type of tea within the billion-person-strong nation of China.
Anyways, the somewhat awkward order gave the Chinese individual behind me pretense to ask, in perfect English, where I was from. I told him, and then learned that although he was born here, he had spent some years in New Zealand. I have actually spent some time in New Zealand myself, so we connected over that, and he asked to join me when I sat down and we had a quite interesting conversation.
Frank had spent a couple years in NZ studying, and then three or four working as an accountant. Recently, he has been given quite a bit more responsibility and is making more decisions for his company; he is also now located back here in Shanghai. So he had some interesting thoughts on being an international businessman in China.
For one, the government in China is indeed a bit of a nuisance to work with. Here, the government is large and in charge and they know it. Frank lamented that back in NZ if you had some legal question about business, you could just go on the government website and learn everything you need to know. And what you read would likely still apply in the near future. In China the rules are not only fluid from day to day, but also from official to official. If you have some question, you can hardly just find the answer in a conveniently made website; you really have to make an effort to hunt it down, and it sounds like there is a bit of strategy involved as far as gleaning the answer you are looking for.
This last summer I had read an article in the The Economist to that effect, so it was interesting to hear that what they reported matched up almost perfectly with the experience of a Chinese businessman. Of course The Economist took it a little farther, postulating that this jungle of regulations is putting downward pressure on the amount of foreign investment China receives. Frank said he was not sure about that, but it certainly makes sense that if a businessman knows he will be ceding a significant amount of control by entering a country, he will think twice about doing so.
So that was his complaint about the government, but he also had a praise: he loves how the Chinese government can just “get stuff done.” For example, the recent bullet train fiasco notwithstanding, the government has been able to efficiently develop a state-of-the-art transportation system in a remarkably small amount of time. He contrasted this with another example from NZ: a few years ago, he received a letter from the NZ government containing pictures of three different logos for the city of Auckland, asking him for his vote for the best. He later learned they spent over a million dollars involving the entire city in this decision. He thought this was absolutely silly—just pick a logo! Overall, he was bit frustrated with the general slowness of the western political process, a sentiment I think it’s safe to say is shared by many of us Americans.
During my time at Shanghai University, I will be taking a Chinese Business Issues class and a Chinese Government and Politics class, so this is definitely a subject I will be exploring more deeply in the coming months. I will be sure to take note of the most interesting insights we are taught, and do my best to remember to write them here!
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