Adventures in China

I did not go to China do to business and I'm really not sure how business is done in China. I am sure there are experts in this field who may or may not want to share what they know with you. I know that my experience was very peripheral and not very explicit, but I did pick up a little bit on how business is done in China.

The reason I know anything about how business is done is that I was a sort of business currency. Being foreign made me very valuable and a reason for my employers to have other business people over for banquets or get invited to functions. While I appreciated that I was being invited to this fantastic meals, it was rather frustrating for me, as a Westerner, to be treated only as a valuable object by my employers that I worked with daily, not a real person. These events weren't treated as a fun option for me, but as a requirement of my job.

I didn't get a good feel for business because I wasn't involved in day to day business activities and because I didn't speak very good Chinese. I did learn that the art of business in China is subtle. A large banquet will be hours long and filled with toasts, loud joking and laughing, drinking games . . . and no talk of business. But maybe a letter will be exchanged or someone will mention something in an off handed way. And that was the whole point of the meal. Most business doesn't happen by calling an office or directly asking for something. Not the real business deals. Of course, the details can be worked out later.

And in this system, connections are absolutely key (the technical term is guanxi). Nothing large gets done without a connection. For instance, the school I worked at was built out on a nice piece of land by the airport. Technically, the school shouldn't have been built because it was viable farm land, and supposed to be used for farming. However, the president of the school knew someone . . . who made it happen. Somehow. And I was never able to get a good explanation of how something like this happened, it was just the way things worked and something that even my co-workers couldn't explain to me.

What also struck me about China was the lack of lawyers. The jockeying of lawyers in the United States between businesses was replaced by the jockeying of powerful people and their connections, especially Party connections. I find lawyer positioning cryptic enough, but the sort of positioning that goes on in Chinese business was even more cryptic, to me, though it may be based on the same sorts of principles.