China Business Blog and Podcast

Needless to say, the past week in China has been a difficult one in which to concentrate – the excitement of the Olympics and the deluge of media attention is too much to handle for me, the poster child for adult-ADD.  Between the blogs burning trails in the ether and the traditional media outlets trying to prove they are as hip as the iKids, the back-and-forth is like watching the Williams sisters playing each other at the net.  In a typhoon.  On speed.

The articles that most fascinate me are those by journalists who have never been here and are sitting in a sports venue for the most hyped-up event in the lives of modern day Chinese people – and they try to deduce “what the Chinese are like” by watching the participants.

I read one article that was critical of the cheer that everyone uses here – “Zhong Guo Jia You!” and insinuated that this was something mandated by the government authorities to show support for China.  Um … no.  It is not.  Jia You has been around here for ages and is shouted at every sporting event – directly translated it means “add oil” or, better, “step on the gas”.  Basically, it is just a way to say “Let’s Go!!”  I attended a warm up game with the U.S. Olympic basketball team last week and thousands of Chinese fans were screaming Mei Guo Jia You (“Let’s go USA!!”).  Not sure what the same journalist would make of that – probably would tell his editors that a revolution was brewing.  Alert the Neo-Cons!

Anywhere in the world, there is a danger in observing human behavior from afar and deducing complex, internal cultural motivations.  And the Olympics is, in some ways, the WORST place to do this.  Its like the last time the beloved and beleaguered Minnesota Twins baseball team played in the World Series – the stadium was filled with thousands of Minnesotans screaming their lungs out and waving “Homer Hankies”, white pieces of cloth that some marketing genius came up with (the fact that we were waving a symbol of surrender did not occur to many of us until much later).  A simple Jane-Goodall-among-the-apes observation of these event would deduce that Minnesotans are all turbo-charged extroverts hyped up on 3.2 beer and have odd fascination with white cotton.  OK, the 3.2 beer is correct…

But what else can we do?  A view from the outside is often the only way we have of learning about other people and cultures.  And being new to China, frankly, doesn’t make that much difference.  Even though I am “here” and have been for some time, I am not really here (starting to sound like a Bob Dylan lyric??).  I am not Chinese nor do I blend in all that well (six foot five and blue eyes stick out somehow …not sure why).  My view is still one of an outsider – maybe a bit more informed than a newbie journalist but not all that much.

Such knee-jerk observations in the press could be an opportunity for those of us, more enlightened, foreign residents of China to retreat smugly into our China-watcher cocoon and pontificate on the “real” China (some of us might even have the hubris to start Blogs and Podcasts … imagine that!).  It would be easy to do as some of these observations – like the Jia You editorial – are pretty easy to swat out of the air.

However, I think we all need to remind ourselves that, like any culture and country, China resists the iron-clad box of clear definition.  We need to monitor our descriptions of China, avoiding definitive statements that begin “China is…” in preference for more qualified ones: “China seems to be…” and “China is in the process of…”  Wimpy?  Maybe.  Wishy-washy?  Yea, probably.  True?  Definitely.

In these pages and Podcasts, we make a point to tease out the subtleties in China business that impact your investments here.  Guaranteed, we have made a couple of Jia You gaffes in the past and likely will do so in the future.  However, the speed and scale of change here has never been seen, at least in modern times, so we are all working without a net.  All we can do is observe, comment and learn.

China-Watchers Jia You!!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 5:25 pm and is filed under China, culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.