Guanxi Master

As I sat backstage discussing tea with two Chinese opera singers at the television studio yesterday, I thought about tea and its unique impact on Chinese culture and guanxi…

This is the season that all Chinese anticipate with rapture. The year’s best tea, in its “new” and “white” varieties, is coming out in the next few weeks, and the expectation has been a nagging thought in the minds of tea fanatics all over China. We have been looking forward to this moment since last year’s crop ran out in October, and cannot wait for the arrival of a new harvest of China’s finest beverage.

The reason for the excitement is because the best tea leaves are those harvested from the earliest spring growth. They must be picked by hand when only a day old, and then processed immediately the same day. Each tea plant will only give about five pickings of these delicate leaves, yet they yield the freshest and most fragrant tea known to man. Read the rest of this entry »

China’s foray into the Indian automotive world

The finalization of Chinese auto-manufacturer SAIC’s joint venture with General Motors has cemented its claim that it is going to sell cars to the Indian market. Bad idea…

India’s Tata is already doing the impossible by selling their Nano for $2,500. How do you compete with that? Let alone overcome the nationalistic furor of the Indian people defending their “plastic answer to the bourgeois class”. Indian news sources claim that the people of India see Chinese border disputes as a “secret war against the Indian people,” and many last week viewed SAIC’s latest expansion as “trespassing into India.” Read the rest of this entry »

The charge that usually makes the AAS go into fits of self-criticism

A rather long-winded and pompous article “Asia, Faraway or Next Door?” was posted on The China Beat this week, written by Samuel Y. Liang, post-AAS Conference 2010 in Philly.

While discussing the Chinatowns of Philadelphia and various other cities, he engages in some finger-wagging at his fellow colleagues in the AAS for not paying sufficient attention to the Chinese areas of America’s own front yards, saying that few during the conference had been to Chinatown for anything other than food. He assures them, “I don’t want to say that we Asianists are still somewhat like the Orientalists” (hint-hint, nudge-nudge). But the very word inspires fear and loathing for academic Westerners studying the East, and by “not saying” it, Liang nevertheless exhumes it from the graveyard of jargon, and displays its ugly corpse in his article. Read the rest of this entry »

How the Chinese Ideal of Virtue Transmits to an Ethereal View of Business

On a delightful fall day a few years ago, while with my family on a Sunday jaunt in the rural Songjiang area of Shanghai, we pulled over to look at a roadside stall selling beautiful flowers in narrow pots, hanging from a rack. I was intrigued by the elaborate rig for these simple-looking, grassy plants, and was even more captivated by the smell of their little green flowers. I was hooked. I bought two pots and brought them home, and it was the start of my two-year, love-hate relationship with Chinese orchids.

Doing some preliminary research, I found that the cymbidium (our Latin name for the Chinese orchid) was one of the “Four Sacred Flowers” of Chinese tradition. One of the original features of the “Crystal Palace” of the first World Expo in 1851, it was notoriously hard to grow in hothouses in Victorian England, but its flowers are regarded as one of the most rewarding of the orchid species. Its delightful fragrance fills a room for weeks at a time.

And then, by chance, I stumbled upon an even more interesting fact. After seeing the orchids in my office, a painter friend immediately commented that I was “becoming a Chinese scholar”. “There is no flower that represents the scholar and his life better than the orchid”, he said with a wistful smile on his ancient face. “Why?” I asked innocently. “For that, you must look to Confucius!” he replied, in a mysterious way, and then changed the subject. This peaked my interest, and I started looking into it more. Read the rest of this entry »

Playing the Game – Understanding How It’s Done

This is the second of a two-part series exploring the Chinese use of Western philosophy as a basis for negotiation with the outside world. The first article detailed how Chinese utilize postmodernism to undermine the West’s position. The second part discusses practical applications for negotiation.

With an awesome reputation for getting a deal, the Chinese are globally acknowledged masters of negotiation. As our first article explained, much of their talent lies in identifying the other party’s values and priorities, and then using those same priorities to control the agenda. At a philosophic and political level, this means China effectively takes the language and values of Western postmodernism, and uses them to its advantage. At an individual level, a Chinese negotiator will identify something that the foreigner wants, and then use it, as it were, “against him.” Read the rest of this entry »