Citron verdâtre

This promotional advertising panel explains a little bit as to why it's so difficult to find limes in the PRC and why even upscale bars that try to appeal to western tastes and standards regardless put lemons in every drink.

Diaoyudao shi womende!

It must have been a very strong breeze that propelled this scaffolding bracket from a construction site near the Zhujiang metro station...

to float across an alleyway...

and then land atop this Japanese brand automobile,

  where it struck squarely in the middle of the sunroof.

Tatouage Chinois en Anglais

"Hey, what does your tattoo say, babe?"

 Because anything in an exotic language or artsy script is tattooable, universally, it seems.

White Mans' Broadening

Yesterday I was hired to be a caucasian. That was evidently my most sought after qualification for a job that I accepted on short notice for a Saturday. The agent hiring me is somehow involved in advising and facilitating students who want to study abroad. Initially I was asked to present the company's business plan with a PPT address. I hesitated and given that the PPT had not yet been translated from Chinese for me, the agent passively acquiesced. The job took place in Bengbu, Anhui, about an hour by Gaotie from Nanjing South station. The train left at 7 am so that I could be at the appointed location to deliver a 10 minute address at 9 am. It was a very early start of a long day. I had some idea what I would say. I've been tutoring foreign bound Chinese students for many years so I knew that I could translate that experience into something oratorical.
The venue turned out to be in meeting rooms on the third floor of a Citicbank. I was then approached by a young man who acted as though part of the same organization that hired me. He rattled off his Chinese name faster than I could catch and the advised me to call him Jean if his Chinese name was too difficult to say. He asked what I was going to talk about since he would be interpreting for me to the audience. I was a bit disoriented by this since, up until then, I was under the impression that I would be speaking to prospective students with moderately passable English language skills. He agreed but suggested that as a convenience he would repeat my words in Chinese. I proposed that I would elicit from the students some of the reasons that they wanted to study abroad rather than speaking at them for a full 10 minutes. He agreed that such interaction would be appropriate and useful.
There was a slight delay before I was called into the room to deliver my address. I had been imagining that I would be speaking while standing and able to interact as I would do so in a classroom. Instead, three of us were seated behind a very solid desk and on a dais that one finds in every traditional Chinese classroom. I looked out at the attendees and saw not the youthful faces that I was expecting but the faces of those who would be footing the bill for their children's expeditionary ventures, their middleclass parents. I counted only 3 students in the audience out of about 35. This was a very revealing ratio and hinted at the reason why Citicbank was sponsoring this event.
I stuck with the agreed upon plan but mindful of the time horizon I tried stretching out my own introduction, mentioning how I first met mainland Chinese students when I was an undergraduate and how as the conditions in China have changed so have the numbers and nature of overseas studies changed. I only knew graduate students who were sponsored by the central government. Now their children were getting similar advantages but as undergraduates. After being prompted to speak, three students stood in turn and mentioned why they wanted to study abroad. Their answers were surprisingly clear and focussed. I ended my address by mentioning that in my lifetime I was witness to a shift in the kinds of Chinese students that are able in such large numbers to study abroad.
I got a slight hint that I had underspoken according to the schedule, but since I was on stage, I was safe from reproach. I then sat through the next presenter, who appeared from Citibank, delivering her powerpoint, reading along with the same text that appeared on the screen behind and above our heads. I was led out of the next speaker's equally enthralling PPT presentation by Jean who was worried that I felt hot by sitting there and doing nothing. I was struck then by how good Jean was at getting people do what he wanted them to do without explaining his true motives. He wanted me off the stage, I reckoned, because I looked bored or I was depreciating my value as the caucasian in the room and distracting from the salespitch underway.
The next phase of the event for which I was specifically compensated for began soon thereafter. I sat at a table while the other ladies who travelled with me to Bengbu attempted to answer and convince anxious parents about how to navigate through academic application processes, visas, and other proffered services that can enhance a student's admission. I was there to lend some sort of credible appearance, but mainly I was expected to look white. I was especially glad that I had brought along a good book, Hessler's Country Driving, from a man who can, I suspect, empathize with my situation.
Lunch was offered but not worthy of comment and then it was naptime. This amounted to finding a comfortable sleeping position somewhere and getting some shuteye for an hour. The Han Chinese are extremely adept at this. I have witnessed workmen take midday naps on concrete slabs with nothing more than a piece of cardboard for a pillow. While the other three women were able to make the most of the downtime, I struggled to sleep without throwing my cervical vertebrae out of alignment.
After our rest it was 2 pm and time for the second phase of my paid compensation. I was initially told that I would be giving some sort of practice speaking tests similar to IELTS and TOEFL. I offered to bring my IELTS testing materials but before embarking that morning I was told that I didn't need to do anything so formal, that I would be just chatting with students. At the appointed moment for the informal chats, Jean called me into another room and handed me the test forms, essentially shanzhai versions of IELTS speaking tests prompts, and told me to just mark the students on a scale of 1-9.
The first interviewee was a young woman not yet ready for study abroad for several reasons. She was still a few years away from graduation and very confused about how to answer simple questions. In many ways she was a typical girl of her age. She was being told by her mother that she would study abroad to learn accounting because her mother, an accountant, was certain that such a decision was the right thing to do. The young woman, on the other hand, wanted to learn about filmmaking. But she was so convinced that the only way to learn about filmmaking was to attend the Beijing Film Academy and so without the support of her mother, she was resigned to never be able to make films. I pointed out that a young man with a camera had been filming the day's events but she could not make a connection between the handheld camera and her personal goals. I gave her a score and awaited the next interviewee.
I recognized the next student from that morning's session, a bubbly, bright eyed, young woman who had changed her clothes in the interim. She was convinced that studying accounting abroad would ensure herself a bright future. It was fruitless to challenge her conclusions since she was both fairly articulate and her enthusiasm was disarming. But her main argument was that this is what everybody was doing so it was a good idea for her, too.
The third student was a younger man who would be involved in an exchange program in September. I heard him say Massachusetts and I thought I heard him say Medfield. It might be this school, Montrose, which fosters student exchange programs. Massachusetts is ahead of the curve when it comes accommodating middle class Chinese ambitions for their children. Generally Han Chinese look down on private schools as being less meritorious and more susceptible to corruption. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have gradually changed that perception, at least, of overseas schools. He spoke in a very reserved manner and was not able to engage in much of a conversation, but he acted matured and confident to be able to handle a few weeks abroad amongst his peers and to develop international guanxi.
The last student turned out to be the most memorable. I didn't recognize her from that morning but she told a common story. She wanted to continue her studies abroad after graduating from Nanjing University of Finance and Economics. Yes, she, too, wanted to study accounting, having decided that a master's degree from a foreign university would ensure her a bright future. And yet that is where her logic broke down, at least, a foreigner might see it so. I asked about why she felt it was necessary to study something as mundane as accounting in a foreign university. (I didn't even bother to get into the very different accounting standards between China and every other industrialized country.) Was it necessary for her parents to spend so much money when she was already ready trained to find employment? She explained that because it was so hard to get a job in China now, it was necessary to get an advanced degree. But then how does an advanced degree change the circumstances? She laughed, explaining that the Chinese government wants students to earn advanced degrees to reduce pressure on the labor market. It's what everybody is doing, she continued to chuckle at my naivete. Besides she insisted the Chinese economy is booming and all she needed was an advanced degree to ensure a bright future. I repeated my original question: why did she want to study abroad. Her answer stunned me. "To broaden my horizon." Where did that notion come from? Was she not just claiming that the motives were financial and based on job market pressures? Oh, she misspoke. Broadening her horizon was really the second reason. I was not going to get her to change her mind, certainly not in such a short time, but it was not even possible to get her to change how she thought about her rationale. I have encountered his kind of reasoning over and over again. Danwei has posted an essay from a Chinese student living abroad. The same nonsequiturs and logical fallacies are commonplace in Chinese academic writing. It dawned on me a short while afterwards that this young woman had no understanding what it meant to broaden her horizons. She had memorized that phrase and decided that it sounded impressive to toss it about in an admissions interview. To use the phrase: broaden one's horizon is evidently useful in helping Chinese students to remain students and postpone their adulthood as long as possible.

Fetal Tissue, Pulled Thread

It's not very often that a Chinese English speaker first brings to my attention an international news event from mainland China. She came to my office, having requested an appointment in the late afternoon. The sun was setting as she started telling me about something that had upset her. It didn't take me long to confirm whether this was a blip in the media horizon. I first came across a short API piece posted on NPR.  So a discussion began in which she tried to understand how a public official could do such a terrible act to a pregnant mother. As I listened, I thought back to an essay that another student had been working on with my assistance. Her essay was ostensibly about the pressures on health care in China, but she focussed on the strained relationships between Chinese doctors on their patients. A CNN article from 2011 covers a particular stabbing.

"Doctors are frequently attacked and the professional morale is very low."

After reading her essay's first draft, I asked her to include the notion of professional ethics in the rewrite. The rewrite was better organized but she had failed to include ethics in her analysis. She instead explained the increasing violence against doctors on the shortage of hospitals, on doctors' low pay, on the superstitions of Chinese families, and the practice of using bribes to ensure the highest quality care. All of these elements play a role, but solving any one of them will likely do little to decrease the outright hostility that can erupt between patients and doctors. The factor that is the main cause of the violence directed against them is that Chinese doctors do not abide by their own ethical code of conduct.
Economic development and subsequent disparity have been the main drivers of change in China since the zeitgeist changed from 'serve the people', to the phrase, misattributed or not to Deng Xiaoping, 致富光荣, 'It is glorious to get rich'. He steered the country on a pathway that no longer guaranteed medical care as a right of the people and instead it became another commodity. As a result doctors have gotten very rich along with pharmaceutical salesmen, hospital administrators, and anybody who functions as a gatekeeper between patients and medical treatments.
As the young woman sat in my office, trying to make sense of violence against a woman close to her own age, I drew a diagram of what I perceived to be the three main players in this tragedy: a public official, a doctor, and a patient. In her narrative and in most of the news accounts, there has in fact been little mention of any medical staff's involvement. I asked her the question as to which of the three has the most power. She responded that the public official has all the power. And then my Socratic method kicked in.

"But it was a doctor who performed the abortion, correct?"
"Yes, but if he had not done that, the hospital would have fired him?"
"Ok, and then what would have happened?"
"Another doctor would be told to abort the baby."
"And if he had said no, do you think the hospital would have fired all the doctors?"

A doctor who abuses his skills to perform a procedure on a resisting patient under orders from a third party betrays the most essential ethics of his profession and yet this contradiction doesn't enter into the discussion in China. Her first thought was to see the doctor as just somebody like her, obliged to obey any government official. She felt that his interest in protecting his job prospects trumped his role of protecting his patients. And not surprisingly accounts of the event and its aftermath also fail to mention any doctors by name. We can read about the suspension of family planning officials as though a chemically induced abortion occurred all on its own after the order was given.
A few bureaucrats who are willing to comply with and enforce party guidelines are easily replaced. This could be an opportunity for the members of the medical profession to ask themselves whether they want to hold themselves accountable for not carrying out forced medical procedures. It seems to me that they are the lynchpin in the chain of command and hold the ultimate power if they choose to recognize it. 

The fallout of this event is still determining its own course. My first reaction to hearing about this story was: Why does this one case matter so much more than the other routine, and numerous instances of violence against the poor? The Marxist in me is the main source of my cynicism. It would not surprise me to hear an apologist for this practice point out how the family is the cause of their own suffering and that law must be obeyed by saying:

"Of course, if the family had just paid the 40,000 yuan fine, they could have had a second baby." 

Is this recent and broad discussion in some way connected to the greater awareness of the Chen Guangcheng legal efforts in rural Shandong? Is it evidence of the power of Weibo and a few visuals to drive home what is easier to ponder as an abstraction? Or is it a signal that the Party or a faction wants to modify the one child policy? (I doubt the last.)

Tom at Seeing Red in China has his own interpretation and also wonders as to why now this event has catalyzed the public discussion. He cites medical professionals who also feel that they are better off keeping their jobs than doing what they think is right. For those who want to see some of the images that started this all and learn how glorious it is to get rich by working in the Chinese medical field, here is a link.

Just what the Doctoroff ordered

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So much is written about China today for the typical western capitalist who mainly wants to know just enough about the Middle Kingdom in order to exploit its growing middle class of consumers that it can be a challenge to separate the hot air from the hard sell. The increasing volume of this kind of writing demands that it be considered its own genre. It is, therefore, often interesting to take note of the development and form of this increasingly pervasive literary phenomenon.
Tom Doctoroff, whose looks and career path might be the model for Don Draper, if Don Draper had gone red and dared to work for the Commies, likes to write books while he is not trying to convince western consumer brand merchants how to make lots more money selling in mainland Chinese. And when he is not pitching ad campaigns to marketing execs who are itching to get a piece of the Middle class Chinese pie, he is writing articles to promote his books and, by extension, himself.
A recent piece that he managed to get positioned in Forbes looks and reads like a powerpoint presentation that was quickly reworked by the journalist/contributor/columnist/freelancer, Kenneth Rapoza, to meet an impending deadline. I suppose I ought to cut him some slack. He covers Brazil, Russia, India, AND China. That has to be exhausting while based in New York City.
*Look, the article even retains the 10 bullet points from the original PPT! Which is double cool if the writer is paid by the column inch.But to Doctoroff's credit, it is so much more convincing to get somebody else to spout a salespitch on the pages of a prestigious publication than to directly shill on assorted media outlets. Or as they say in the  boardrooms: Booyeah ^5! I bet incidental product placement never felt so good.
After Rapoza makes note of how the market insiders play off the blips and flips of composite shares, he goes through the list of Doctoroff's factlets and morsels of wisdom based on his stint in China, the purpose of which is mainly to continue to persuade potentially wary international brands to set up shop in China and consequently to seek out the services of his advertising agency.
The 10 points that he ticks off are vague platitudes that seldom put Doctoroff into a corner that he won't have to weasel his way out later. In the first example, we are told:

Myth No. 1: Popular anger means the party’s power is weakening
The communist party, despite its heavy hand, “has street cred.” Unless growth collapses, citizens will grudgingly support national leaders. The Chinese people crave order. Stability is the platform on which progress will continually be built. In the future, a more Singaporian model may take hold but one thing is certain, the future of China’s political system will not be made in America…or Europe.

Singaporian?  How far into the future is Doctoroff willing to assert that mainland China may imitate the high end retail mecca, education hub, and tax haven that Singapore represents? But he boldly avers that it won't be similar to models from two other areas. (Singapore is a parliamentary republic with a legal system based on English common law.) Because everybody knows that to build on something it only needs to be stable and well understood, maybe. After his first insight, we learn that Beijing is creating a pathway to the world wide web with Chinese characteristics.

Myth No. 4: The internet will revolutionize China
The internet is changing China and mostly for the good, but revolution is too strong a word.  China’s digital era remains uniquely Chinese. Beijing allows for a blank canvas of self expression and material gratification, but retains the veto power to control public discourse as it did when it threatened to shut down the Sina Weibo microblogging service over theories about the political dramas surrounding politician Bo Xilai and later with Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng. Internet users may grumble, but they’re not ready to rumble.

But the online revolutionaries will still be eager to buy diamond tennis bracelets and Heineken in cans. Doctoroff assures his intended readers of marketplace stability by so narrowing defining revolution. In spite of how the internet has revolutionized every other society through greater access to information, news media, business connectivity, and so forth, Doctoroff is certain that the PTB in Beijing are still ready to crackdown if anything starts smelling of jasmine tea.

Myth No. 5: The Chinese market is too much like Europe 

(Is this a myth that he just pulled out of his ass so he can shoot it down as a talkingpoint?) The rest of the quote is:

China is as unified a country as is the U.S., despite its wide geographical and political differences. The challenges of unifying distribution networks, sales channels, retail presence and sourcing standards “remain monumental”.  But it is operational hurdles that make China a Balkanized economy, not cultural or political differences.

So China is unified (in some undefined sense of the word) in spite of it political differences but the political differences are not what make China Balkanized. So does he really mean to say that it is a myth that China is too much like the former Yugoslavia? But how does he explain how the monumental challenges of unifying (but isn't China already unified?) all the necessary operational elements that international retailers want in a large, say, common market with a single currency, which China is not too much like, have come about? Could they possibly have been put in place and maintained by provincial level politicians, you know, due to differing political motives?
And in describing his astute observations of the particularities of the Chinese consumer we get this nugget:

Myth No. 6: The Chinese consumer is inscrutable

 Women want to reconcile achievement and traditional feminine grace and therefore prefer to buy diamonds that sparkle, but don’t have too much bling. 

 Yeah, that's totally right. Chinese women want the diamonds that sparkle. They certainly don't want the diamonds that don't sparkle and they must have just the right amount of bling. Say, around 10 bling per carat. And as for the men and their bling quotient, we learn in the rest of the myth's knockdown:

Men want to show they’ve clawed their way to the top without showing off so prefer an Audi or BMW to a Maserati. Once foreigners appreciate China’s unique characteristics, their tastes become easier to understand.

Because the only way to explain why more Chinese men buy an Audi, or BMW, instead of an equally affordable Maserati is that only those brands have the unique characteristics that Chinese drivers want. Don't you get that, foreigners?
Other myths are equally vapid and stand for easily knocked down strawmen.

Myth No. 8: China Inc. will kill U.S. jobs

Doctoroff can assert this with some degree of impunity because he is only talking about the future of job killing by China Inc. The US jobs that were moved from North America to be filled mainly by Chinese peasant women willing to work under sweatshop conditions so that corporate balance sheets and executive bonuses could go stratospheric, those jobs were roundly killed and buried in the past. But killing still might bother the few remaining corporate decisionmakers who aren't complete sociopaths. Some of them might have misgivings about China's militarism and how it might affect profit loss statements. Doctoroff is the charmer with a homespun folksiness that he might have learned from a Booth School of Business seminar on feigned rustic sincerity.

Myth No. 9: China will be the lone world superpower
China does not inspire hearts and minds like America does.  American dignity for the common good touches hearts. China is chauvinistic by comparison. In ways large and small, its instinct to narrowly defend its self interest is off putting and isolating. China will be an economic power, but not a culture or political power. There will be more than one tiger on this mountain, and the other will be the good ole U.S. of A.

Doctoroff could have mentioned the efforts by Beijing's Politburo to launch a softpower campaign and how its effectiveness has been negated by the overall lack of appeal for authoritarian regimes. Beijing had big hopes on bankrolling a film that they were convinced would get an Oscar due to the undeniable tragedy of its theme. When the film failed to entice moviegoers to the cinema or to garner an Oscar nomination, the response was in some quarters to insist that it was proof of antiChinese bias in western media.
There is an odd theme in the last three of Doctoroff's myths. He is constantly assuaging that his readership has nothing to fear from a wealthier China with a stronger industrial base and a strong desire to acquire more things to kill citizens of other countries with. Lastly he points out:

Myth No. 10:  China is militarily aggressive
China is ramping up its military, but will never use it to challenge the U.S. or invade its neighbors.  For a credible analysis of China’s modern fighting force, scour Pentagon briefs. But to get a sense of Beijing’s pacifist instincts, come for a visit. The Chinese shield themselves from danger, both real and imagined. This is not a culture itching for war.

Given how incredibly wrong this last statement is, I think it is not so much that Doctoroff is in slick salesman mode, using glib euphemisms to pepper his pitch. He (as much as Rapoza equally buys into these memes) sees China in the same light that many neocon hawks regard US imperialist actions as blameless regardless of the negative results. It's the kind of thinking that can allow Bush 43 to declare himself a wartime president but never admit that he was the aggressor in those wars, or as he put it himself so succinctly:

"I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace."

This last myth also contains one of the few examples when Doctoroff is unqualified in limiting his pronouncements about China. He says never will China use it military to challenge the USA or invade it neighbors. Never can mean two things when it is used by salesmen. It can mean not until he, at least, is dead, or more typically, not until after he has moved on to a higher paying job. We can all hope Mr. Doctoroff enjoys a long life, but we can still have reason to doubt his credibility. It was only only 1979 that Beijing saw fit to punish the nation of Vietnam in retaliation for ousting the Khmer Rouge, China's ally at the time. (On a personal note, if there were ever an argument to be made for using military force to oust a foreign regime, I think this is a strong one.) Tensions have continued with occasional border incursions, occupation of disputed territory, and very renewed tensions accompanying Chinese increase in naval capacity over the Spratly Islands. As many right thinking thinkers who claim citizenship from the good ole USA, it is not considered aggression when the nation is bad. So attacks against Vietnam by China can be overlooked just as the USA can define terrorism down whenever it seems to promote the US foreign policy agenda.
Yet it is still harder to reconcile Doctoroff's claim of Beijing's pacifist tendencies with the country's history of territorial expansion and border incursions. It's not at all useful to visit the Forbidden City to get a sense of this because that is precisely not where the evidence of Beijing unpacificistic actions are occurring. Even if some want to ignore what Beijing does against Vietnam, it's harder to ignore its bellicosity when it bumps up against putative US allies like Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan and other Asian nations regarding the Spratly islands. The BBC has produced the most eyecatching map that reveals the extent of Beijing's desire to avoid war close to home soil by extending a really broad shield as far from the mainland coast as possible.
One possible interpretations of Doctoroff's myth busting strategy is that he simply does not want anybody to look behind the curtain of the all powerful Oz. Much of salesmanship is helping potential customers to forget about what they ought to be mindful of. The audience for his books, and his well placed interviews, and articles are those brand name executive marketers who have yet to infiltrate the mainland Chinese brand awareness. The more they don't know plays into Doctoroff's strategy of reassuring them that he above all other admen knows everything that needs to be known about the Chinese consumer. Doctoroff is on a roll with his latest literary oeuvre and if he manages to win over even one high end brand that he can represent in mainland China, then his job skills and sales acumen speak for themselves.  

The Chinese 1%ers and Those Who Fawn over Them

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I think Damien Ma grants Eric X. Li (李世默, Li Shimo. I have no idea where the X. comes from.) far too much credibility with his analysis of his editorial in the NYT.  (Does every venture capitalist get invited to post whatever he wants on the pages of the newspaper of record? Has the old gray lady sunk to the level of the steadily sinking Huffpo?) Even as Ma rightly concludes that Eric Li's ideas are "unformulated and inchoate", he asserts "Li, and other emerging voices like his, deserve to be watched." And I suppose that I can equally assert that an approaching train wreck merits watching, too. But I would only say that in order that we learn how to avoid further trainwrecks, not because there is anything of value in trainwrecks.

I come from a different perspective, having been tasked with teaching composition to young Chinese students whose parents' greatest ambition is to send their progeny abroad to earn a diploma from a western university. I have slogged through so many similarly written essays that I find nothing in the style nor content worthy of comment on other than perhaps to point out that Eric X. Li has managed to parlay his way through a western education without it improving his writing style in any way. His daddy's dream was afterall that his son get a diploma, not strictly get an education.

The lack of logical coherency, the unsupported claims, and the exaggerated sense of importance are fully on display in his essay. As Stanford maintains its mandate to open its doors to privileged offspring of all races, creeds, and private clubs, we witness more the growing similarities between the Chinese 1% with their American prototypes. And just as in the same way that a man who habitually insists on eponymously christening every building he classes up with gilding and mirrors can get a gaggle of reporters to quote him and seem interested, "the Eric" has his own cheerleaders and sycophants who act as though they can comprehend whatever deep thought he pronounces: here, here, and this guy.

I am not going to pick apart Eric Li's essay here. Somebody else at Chroniclinghate with more idle time on his hands than I has already gotten down into that gutter. I never saw much value in redeeming such essays even when I was paid to do so. Just to be clear, the arguments of the essay are far less important than their placement. Acknowledgement by the NYT is what every venture capitalist needs to grease the wheels of China's bureaucratic institutions and sell whatever business plan he and his cronies can cook up. That's for the Chinese readership.

What those without any interest guanxi can gain from this piece is unclear. The essay reads like a piece of satire, intentional or not. There is always doubt in my mind whether conservative thinkers understand when they are the object of satire. Stephen Colbert's viewership, for example,  is full of the types whose ideas and sacred cows he regularly gores, but for them it's all a hoot. So I was pleased that James Fallows tipped me off to this bit of pointed skewering. I suspect that the elder Mr. Li will enjoy learning about yet an example of how much attention his bilingual son gets in the international press. Gan bei!