Ich Bin Ein Beijinger

China's Instant Cities

More beautiful, insightful writing on China from Pete Hessler, author of Rivertown and Oracle Bones, in this month's issue of National Geographic. In this article, with excellent photography by Mark Leong. I joke with Mark that he's got the best eye for squalor of any photographer I've ever met: On a Time assignment in Inner Mongolia during the SARS epidemic, I swear he had the driver stop when he saw particularly squalid roadside scene so he could snap a few shots. Check out his book China Obscura if you can. Mark lives in Beijing with his wife Sharon and twin toddlers Boris and Oscar in a decidedly non-squalid part of Beijing--a development called, get this, "Upper East Side." But I digress.

Pete's NatGeo piece deals heavily with Wenzhou. I've always been fascinated by Wenzhou and how its entrepreneurial culture has just taken off. My wife has a Wenzhou friend Qingqing whose siblings are in the shoe business, and in the last few years she's watched her business grow from a humble retail stall in the Alien Street market in Beijing's Russian zone to a massive footware empire spanning several provinces. I remember how a few years ago we discovered that they were early adopters of camera phones and MMS: they'd snap pictures of shoes that were moving quickly in Beijing and order inventory from down South. They divided up foreign languages commonly spoken by their customers and suppliers among them--Cantonese, English, Russian, Mongolian--and each learned business rudiments of at least one of them.

From Pete's piece:

The Wenzhou airport bookstore stocks a volume titled, Actually, You Don't Understand the Wenzhou People. It shares a shelf with The Feared Wenzhou People, The Collected Secrets of How Wenzhou People Make Money, and The Jews of the East: The Commercial Stories of Fifty Wenzhou Businessmen. For the Chinese, this part of Zhejiang Province has become a source of fascination, and the local press contributes to the legend. Recently, Wenzhou's Fortune Weekly conducted a survey of local millionaires. One question was: If forced to choose between your business and your family, which would it be? Of the respondents, 60 percent chose business, and 20 percent chose family. The other 20 percent couldn't make up their minds.

At least in Qingqing's case, the business is the family.

China Dirt: Ain't it the truth, though?

Jeremy at Danwei alerts us to a blog of recent vintage called Fuck! (tagline: Could the men living in China get any more retarded? Here are the horror stories from the front lines). It's collectively authored by women writing under the name "Chinadirt," and if you're an Anglophone Beijinger of either gender, it'll certainly get you thinking. The writing's very good, the subject matter juicy and controversial, and the point of view--well, as far as I can tell, it's pretty much spot-on.

Let's face it: Beijing--hell, any city in China--tends to ruin men. Not just expat men but just about any man with a little spending power and too little will power. How many of us does that exempt? The loser-back-home is transformed into an Adonis by the adulation of the kang yang qiang contingent--Chinese women who "shoulder foreign rifles." It's hard not to lose your soul here. Temptations abound. Morals are very lax. One guy I knew who'd spent a couple of years in Chengdu told me that after he'd gone back to the States, he "couldn't walk past a barber pole without getting a hard-on."

I look forward to the reaction from men to the Fuck! posts. My suspicion is that most of them will only make pigs of themselves and confirm the authors' opinions--as one "Ousted" already has in the comments to Jeremy's post.

Foreign Media Want Red Envelopes Too?

Just finished a training session I volunteered to do for the PR team at Ogilvy Beijing on dealing with the foreign media, since I used to be part of it. I was asked about basic differences between foreign reporters and Chinese reporters, and with some equivocation spoke of the "ethics gap," citing as a mild example the "travel money" any business throwing a press conference is expected to cough up to attending Chinese reporters--usually 300 RMB. Foreign reporters, of course, have rigid ethical standards: most won't even let you buy 'em lunch, and will certainly refuse the hongbao, right?

Wrong. A couple of the women in session piped up: "What do we do when the foreign media demand red envelopes?" Apparently, in more than one instance, reporters from western television news stations (who I'll prudently avoid naming) hounded these poor PR women for money at press events."Why do they get them and we don't?" they demanded. The women were pretty worked up as we discussed this.

What to do? I told them they should politely tell them that it's our understanding that your boss would fire your greedy ass just for asking.

Full disclosure: Occasionally, there's schwag that's just too good to pass up. I'm only human. Never taken a hongbao but I was at the launch party for Google in Beijing when they revealed their new Chines name, Guge (谷歌), and they were giving the Chinese press these awesome Google Lava Lamps. I had to have one. Fortunately, some Chinese reporter left his, so I snagged it. But then, in the small session with Eric Schmidt that followed,  I had to endure the disapproving glances of the likes of Phil Pan (Washington Post), Joe McDonald (AP), Jason Dean (WSJ) and Mure Dickie (FT). Those guys just wanted a Lava Lamp too, I'm sure.