再见，中国！Later, Chinagator! Selected Journal Entries

Zaijian! 再见！So long!

















So we bid a fond adieu to the great cities of China. Well, Shanghai and Beijing, at least. Everyone kept a journal of some kind or another, and here are a few tidbits.

Perhaps the most disturbing observation that was put forward by more than one of our speakers and many casual conversations was this: The majority of the population does not have the training or ability to innovate. I winced every time I heard this... how can this be true? Aren't there some universal attributes to humankind that include this innovative spark, even if hidden? So, back to the question: What is our hurry? Might our assessment of their innovative abilities be skewed by our western influence?
--T. James


The air is nice and cool, there is construction for a new station (I think) or something very large. I have never seen so much scaffolding in a single city in my life. The expensive jobs use steel scaffolding and the less expensive ones use bamboo. If you fell, it would take weeks for you to bounce off of all the bars and finally hit the ground the webbing of the scaffolding is soooooo tight. There are five huge cantilever cranes in the background on this job. I made the right decision to take this trip. I wish I would have planned better so I could see more. I am glad I didn’t plan better or I would have missed the adventure.
I have to wonder........
-- G. Brest


Where is the real China? not the fancy car dealerships, the pretty buildings, the fancy hotels. It's like the Stepford wives, sometimes it's too right? K. Cubbage

I could not see the China I read in books and news media. I saw a China, a capitalist society that is no different that the big western cities. Of course I did not visit the rural places where 800 million people still live.
-- R. Peru


Lastly, Mr. W with [mega-retailer from US in China] indicated that the Chinese are looking for companies that have a sense of social responsibility (i.e. give back to a support the local community – don’t be low profile about what you do “make some noise” per J. Wang with Wal-Mart). In addition, they are looking for companies that understand the environment and sustainability.
-- M O'Grady

The people there were amazing and so nice. I still have a hard time realizing that we were in a metropolitan area, but the people seemed like they were from a rural background and were glad to talk with you and ask you where you were from and what you were doing in China. --A. Jones

The wall itself is definitely one of those "bucket list" items of things to see - one of the man-made wonders of the world. The section we visited has been preserved, and attracts huge throngs of tourists. In fact while the wall itself was great to visit, the crowds actually took away from the experience. There were many times when walking portions of the wall, where the sea of people was so thick, that it was impossible to see anything, or for that matter do anything other than be shoved along with the crowd as it moved. Still, I can say I've 'been there, done that'. --E. Dzuik



There are other blogs, too! I don't have a decent catalogue (and can't figure out how blogspot catalogues the blogs that I follow: I should check that. Leave me a comment and I'll link to your China blog, too! Thanks for a memorable trip, gang!



And for the record, Per was not sharing beer with this migrant worker guy, but Ken did accept a cigarette from him. *cough*

Learning, Creating, and Laughter

I finished up our day with this little story, which seemed to fit the way the day (happily) felt here at UMKC.

Biologists, engineers, and even those fence-riders, those anthropologists, who sit on the line between the humanities and the sciences, like to parse the world into its component parts. We (and I include myself in the fence-sitting crowd) like to take things apart. It helps us see how things work. We sort out what the parts are, we try to understand what is the same and what is different. We taxonomize and typologize. And when things are set in motion, we try to isolate one moment from the next, we try to inspect, document, or (in Spanish) precisar, to make clarity out of the murky water of lived experience.

Which is all well and good. Except when it gets in the way.

I was on day three of a three-day workshop that aimed to link ethnography and design. I'm an anthropologist: I know how to do ethnography and I have a fair idea of how to teach parts of it. I even enjoy doing it. But I'm not a designer, not a card-carring one. I do badly trying to build things (though I can put together things and sometimes make them work). Creating new things is something I wish I could do more easily; I wish I could improvise on the piano better. Seems that creating, dreaming, and thinking about what might be is different from documenting and analyzing what is going on.

So there we were, day three. I had to pull the mini-ethnography practice work together and we had to have the group ideate, create, design, and dream. I had a template (partly borrowed, partly invented, but mostly borrowed) that seemed to make sense. I called Hai (thanks to Skype) and told him I was worried. How much time should I allocate? How should I structure the ideation? Should I pull forward the specifications drawn from the problems and desires that the fieldwork students had encountered in their mini-fieldwork? We kicked some ideas around, and came up with a format: start with ideas. Let them flow. Add the specs and documentation and stuff later.

That seemed fine.

But when it was time to explain the task to the group, I fell back on the analytic, parting and sorting and picking-apart mode of the ethnographer in the early stages of analysis. I was listing all the steps they might follow, specifying where to put this or that insight or fact, how to draw it on the page, and how the groups might organize themselves.

Then one of the students provided me with a teachable moment. A student from Potosí, that most colonial and traditional of Altiplano mining towns, a linguist and semiotician, raised his hand.

"There is something you might want to add to this process," he said.

I was nervous enough, already. What did this guy from the Altiplano have in mind, I wondered?

"It should be fun. There should be smiles and laughter." The student's face shone with Boddhisatva light as he smiled.

Giggles began to bubble up from members of the group. I had been too damn serious. Ideation should be fun, getting new, goofy ideas should be happy stuff, not serious data-crunching. And without that ludic element, the ideas would not be as interesting, nor would there be as many of them.

What followed was a rather riotous hour and a half of sketching and brainstorming an specifying, and—best of all—laughter.

The richness and complexity of the results told me all I needed to know. Relax more. Laugh more. Learning requires that one lower what linguists call the "affective barrier." You can't be uptight and learn much. You have to ease up and laugh to create.

Mandarin and Creativity and Rap: And Your Presentations

Language in China is about one written form and many spoken forms. Learning in China is—or at least has been—about repeating discrete bits of information. Painting and poetry in China follow traditional and rather narrow forms. But that is changing. You may have noticed. . .

The wall at left is actually a barrier hiding the ongoing work near the People's Stadium about three years ago, before the Olympics. The writing tells the story of the neighborhood. Parts of the text are highlighted: circled or lined-off on the side. The writing style is traditional and lovely. The topic is the change in the neighborhood. But what does this say about creativity and the strictures imposed by the more-or-less traditional teaching styles of China? We don't know enough about this particular written form. But we can say something about music.

In fact, Sexybeijing.tv has said it for us. Here goes!


By the way: project presentations will happen on Saturday this coming. We'll start with a bit of a group-review and exercise at 8am. Then move into 30 minute presentations (with an additional five minutes to allow set-up between groups). We'll carry this up until noon, then start again at 12:30. I may stretch things to 35 minutes; no more.

If you have questions about the presentations, give me a holler.

Workshop on Ethnography & Business in Bolivia

It isn't China. I isn't the United States. Its Bolivia.

I wanted to post here because there is such a high level of interest in Santa Cruz de la Sierra Bolivia in China and in ethnography.

There was so much interest that there were 30 participants in our workshop on ethnography, business, and design during the past three days. The results, this time, were design specifications for products or services linked to specific areas where teams conducted a brief ethnographic study: a market place, a sugar wholesaler, a pirate DVD street-vendor and associated formal retail store. (In the photo is Karime, associated with the Art Gallery that co-hosted the invent!)

The results were innovative, fun, and well documented. Rather like the projects this class is working on for China, no?

Thanks to all who have turned in their diaries. I look forward to seeing more of those, and look forward to getting home from this long Andean trip, in a week!

Suggestions for Group Reporting

Here is something I handed out to a few of you who were not going with the group on the noon bus, and which you on the noon bus did get. Hope it helps! And hope you are not too jet-lagged.

A Simple Four Part Outline for your Group's Presentations
Beijing, March 21 UMKC EMBA

Here is a suggestion for the four-plus-two groups, to help you organize your presentations to the class, and a note about your journals.

Presentations

The point of group-work is to leverage your individual learnings and take a broader view, to share what you have learned with one another in your group, and to make some synthetic statement that links your individual projects to wider questions about doing business in China.

It may be helpful for you to think in terms of the four dimensions of human experience as you look at this four-part outline. You may understand that to mean the past, the present and the future. China's daily life is lived in only one of those dimensions: the present. But ideas and stories about the past continue to live in the physical and social structure of Chinese business life. And ideas about the future are all around, often conflicting, sometimes contested, but always there nonetheless.

Here is a simple outline that I hope the groups will follow.

I. Introduction
Within your groups you may split up the reporting duties in any way you like, but I expect that you will not make of your presentations a simple repeating of your individual work. I would suggest instead the use of a single slide that lists the names of your group-members along with a single-sentence statement of that person's individual project. That's the introduction.

II. Opportunities
Here, you can discuss what you see as the major business opportunities. Where are they? What are they? How do you know that they are there? You may use some images if you have some, but please don't use video as we'll not have time to insure that all can hear and see it in our limited time.

III. Challenges
What are the barriers to achieving success in the opportunities that you found? Where are those barriers—at what level in the world of business are they: cultural, governmental, geographic, or what? If you find it helpful, you may combine this section with section IV, laying out strategies along with each challenge, or you may list them separate as:

IV. Strategies
What strategies can you imagine that will help a business overcome the challenges you mentioned? How might they be done? What is needed, what resources should be expended (time? people? money) to make them work? What cultural or ideological or mind-set strategies, if any, will help you move forward toward the opportunities.

V. What You Might Need to Know More About
Because our knowledge of reality is always, and always incomplete, what bits of information, skills, or knowledge do you wish you had to answer any questions that your strategy can not, so far, address? What more do you wish you knew? What are the conundrums or puzzles that remain, even after you apply some of your strategies.

The timing of presentations will be mention in the blog (and this document will be posted there, too). Good luck! And don't hesitate to send me an email if you have questions. Its up to you to get with your groups, determine a presenter or presenters, and organize your presentation.

Journals

I have not heard a question about this but I have not been explicit, either. I expect that everyone is keeping a journal of some kind. Some of you have written "scratch-notes." That counts as a journal. Some of you have kept a blog. That counts as a journal.. Others may want to write up their thoughts in a word-document. I will need to know that you have done these things, one way or another. If you keep a journal, it does not, by the way, need to be a complete day-by-day diary. That is asking too much. But it should contain the highlights, the important moments, the times when you learned some thing new or found something unexpected, or where something you had heard was confirmed by your own experience. That's the journaling!

Shanghai Beauty

Shanghai people are used to seeing foreigners but they only once in a while get a glimpse of real American 美丽的年轻姑娘. I'm sure that both these young women, our own Tusha and her daughter, Jasmine, were turning heads. But the young man in the subway was particularly interested in Jasmine. Jasmine, eagle-eye shopper, (in addition to killer-smile girl, as you can see) spotted just the right boutique in a subway shopping spot.

I don't know who had more fun, Jasmine or the shop-girls. The shop girls said they want hair just like Jasmine. Envy of a delightful kind in Shanghai, where fashion is the main thing (right after the food). Will Beijing have shops like that? Will the subway be quite as much fun? Will the young man in the subway start planning his college career in America, looking for a smile to match the one on the Line 2 地铁, the subway, just beyong the People's Square?

Rural Shanghai

Gordon can tell you more about our visit in his blog. But I could not resist a photo or two from our afternoon visit to the truck-farming area West of Shanghai.

After lunch, we walked a few blocks to a "wet market" on the Fudan University campus. A wet market, as you should know by now, is a vegetable and fresh-meat market (and other things too, often). Even the fancy housing developments always have a wet-market nearby. There, small-scale vegetable-stand owners cultivate long-term relationships with their urban clients. High-falootin' market research studies have demonstrated that Ikea and Walmart can't come near to the customer loyalty and client retention achieved by these mom and pop vegetable and meat vendors. They are personable, they know their product, they know their customer, and they know how to help strange American people who ask weird questions. They answer honestly, on terms that make sense to wet-market merchants.
We asked how we might get to the truck-farming area West of Shanghai, and we were told to take bus number 55, then the ferry boat, then another bus. We took the bus. Two RMB each for Gordon and for Carment and for me. Then, across the Wangpo river (that was 50fen, by purchasing a little yellow chit that we threw into a metal pan at the ferry-boat entrance). We crossed the river, dodging the barge traffic. (Or the young captain-in-training did, under the watchful eye of a more senior boatman). Rather than bump along in a bus for another half hour, we decided to negotiate a rate with a cab driver. He took us further west.

We passed the BioChip place that we had been to that morning, and about a mile away, the countryside began to open up. Flat, green, and fallow, with lots of little plots. There are plenty of canals (you see them from the air) and they are as much for water removal as for a place from which to pull water up in the dry summer months.

Here, flowers and ornamentals—nursery stock—seem to be replacing tomatoes and vegetables. But its all farming of a kind. The ponds have fish; there is burned fallow and mulch in piles, and a few folks working on a little ditch here, watering some late-season winter vegetables there, or kindly opening a gate for visiting gringos and answering a few questions.

Our patient cab driver took us to a little village, now about to be overwhelmed by Shanghai suburban sprawl, where we found a fertilizer shop, one of 100 such franchise shops, where we poked around the ammonium nitrate and sundry chemicals. The manager was cordial, but said that bio-char sounds rather expensive. Gordon has some thoughts about that.

Then, we ended up at "My House Restaurant," the sort of private-home turned eatery that has really fresh really local food. The jellyfish was crispy and sweet-sour, the duck tongue was fresh enough to quack, and the beer was cold enough.

It was a bit of what Dominique Desjeux calls the "product itinerary," a way for an ethnographer to grasp where things come from and how they change their meaning(s) as they move about in exchange systems. Here, we had fertilizer, water, plastic to cover the farm-plots, seed, herbicide (maybe), the vegetables, then the final product in the My House restaurant being cooked, then the results on a plate (with a nice sauce, by the way), then satisfied noises from tired, tour-weary gringos. Each step along the way, the things that were required to create what we ate took on new meaning, different value, passed through many hands. Global hands.

Fertilizer from Belgium, sold by a franchise store to private farm-ground tenants, who send the vegetables into town for the likes of us gringo visitors to enjoy. Its good, solid clay ground that needs some soil-building, but farmers are a conservative lot. What will they pay for? Can they make their own bio-char? Stay tuned, and ask Gordon.

Meanwhile, we remember the innumerable labors that brought us the food at My House restaurant, and wonder what sorts of exchanges, values, and relationships were generated by our sitting down to rest our tired bones and feed our hungry stomachs in Shanghai, one lucky afternoon in March.

No US Presence at the Shanghai Expo? What Gives?

I've mentioned this issue, here is a run-down on what is going on. Not a pretty picture when our Chinese hosts are offering to help support our presence at the Shanghai exposition. I'm not an employee of the State Department, so there is no harm in my asking folks to contact their representatives to find out why the United States has failed to deliver an effective pavilion for the Shanghai Expo. Of course, there is politics involved, but other countries are able to get this done. We should, too.

Welcome to China

Bon voyage!

As you are about to discover, the contemporary, the hypermodern, and the past all coexist in contemporary China. That is one of the things I hope you'll discover during your visit. What you think is contemporary may in fact be ancient; what you think is ancient may be a contemporary re-interpretation. Up above is a hutong in Beijing. A hutong is an alley way in a traditional neighborhood. The best restaurants are to be found here (and, these days, a lot of tourists. . . at least in some of the hutong). Hutong are just one way in which the old and the new coexist in Beijing.

Some of what the last presentation in class hinted at reflects this. The power point from the last session is posted to the right (session 4, 5.5 MB file). Please pay attention to the penultimate slide, the one that summarizes the automotive and mobile phone industries. You'll see the importance of government as a channel through which new tech products have been introduced into the wider Chinese market. What role will government play in future innovations? Think about it.

If you have any last-minute questions, I'm here to answer them. I've arrived in Hong Kong, its cloudy and cool and humid and the chicken soup is just the thing for jet-lag.

I'll join you all for the welcome dinner on Sunday. Drink lots of water, get some rest on the flight, and you'll be bright and bushy-tailed for Shanghai.

International Women's Day: Folk Sociology

The Chinese constitution, as amended, covers women's rights in some detail. (Our own constitution does not do so).

In China, women hold important positions in business and government. Same as here. In some professions like medicine, more than here. This is arguably less true in Japan and Korea. Arguably. Its easy to lean into stereotypes when you deal with big categories like gender, nationality, or even language and dialect. When a culture has a folklore about people that it encounters, that's folk-sociology

Different regions of China have different folk-sociology about women. We gringos do this too: you know the drill: "These Wyoming women are tough, mountain women!" "I wish they all could be California girls. . ." etc. What about 中国？

Girls from Anhui? Sexy!

Up in the north of China? Those women are hard-drinking and tough!


Shanghai? Those bossy Shanghai women, always focused on fashion and beauty, make their husbands do the cooking and cleaning while they shop!

(This is a great topic for discussion with cab drivers, by the way; you can keep track of the folk-sociology of gender, region, and nationality; and its okay to dispute and argue! Cab drivers seem to enjoy a good discussion. Just be sure to wear your seat belt as some drivers may turn and look at you and not the road.)

Famous singers like Na Yin are known for where they are from. Na Yin (那英) is from Liaoning Province in the Northwest of China. (The link is to her very famous song, one of many, called "Sharp.")

Na Ying taught me some drinking games one evening, with a bunch of her famous friends. She is sort of a Madonna-like famous singer figure: tough and independent. She married famous footballer, Gao Feng, but things didn't work out. When I tell people I met her and she taught me drinking games, folks always say, "Oh, yes, she's from the North of China! Those women are something tough!" Fun.






So, in a couple days, China will celebrate 3/8; SanBa day. Its International Woman's Day. What? You never heard of that? Everyone celebrates it, right? Its a United Nations Recognized special day, isn't it?

And, of course, there is very interesting folk-sociology about men in China, according to where they are from. Who is tall? Who is henpecked? Where are the shuai ge (good looking) men? Where are the philosophers from; the artists? And, if you want, there are plenty of goofy stereotypes about 老外 (lao wai, foreigners), too. Check this article from The New Yorker for African immigrant's daily live in Guangzhou, if you have a moment. Its a good read. And a reminder that Americans are not the only folks who fall victim to stereotyping and, sometimes, much worse.

Groups for Teamwork

Here are your (updated) groupings, at last.

My thinking had been that groups were needed in China, and not before. But I learn that your work in groups is part of your overall program in the EMBA. You need your groupings sooner, not later.

There will be four times during the visit in SH and BJ during which I will need to meet with groups, in many cases over a working lunch at or near our hotel. That schedule will be on the blog and I'll have it for you this weekend. The Health Group will meet as a large group (not split into groups I and II).

The point of the groups (from my POV) is to share related learning with one another and build a more general vision of the theme or themes of the respective groups for presentation to the while class at the end of this unit.

The other (and formerly out of my blinkered view) value of these groups: to provide a setting for sharing pre-trip, as a reality check, and a general support for this excursion. Dr. Gallos, who has your collective back on these matters, deserves thanks for pointing this out to me. Without further ado:

CULTURE/ The value of meanings
Christy Cubbage
Tayro Christiano
Ron Coker
Steve Evans
Ravi Peru
Per Stromhaug
Scott West

FINANCE/ The meaning of value & values
Montira Clippard
Laurel Harbour
Julie Kempker
Jolene Jefferies
Melissa Walton
Eddie Dziuk
Jon Roos

HEALTH/ Group I: Health & healing
John Sallis
Chet Jackson
Patricia Beatty
Corlis Panis
Angela Connelly

Health/ Group II: Health & healing
Timothy James
Melanie Morris
Becky Sandring
Dan Soliday

INDUSTRY/TECH: Making & marketing things of value
Gordon Brest • Natasha Clark
Tom Burke • Michael O’Grady
John McClelland • Girish
Andrew Jones • Brad Peak
John Miller • Mark Amick

Ethnography in Business Research

Your research plan should, in all but a very few cases, stick with the idea of just a little fieldwork during your China visit. (A few of you have some very special needs, or a bit more time in China, and you may do a bit more business-related fieldwork and interviewing while in China, and that's fine). This limitation makes sense because our time in China is quite short. Anyway, as you know by now, China demands a long-term commitment. A short visit will not allow you time to do a great deal of in-country field research.

But when you launch into a little fieldwork, you can borrow an idea from Intel, where anthropologists like Ken Anderson (that's Ken in the photo) are using anthropological techniques for research that drives business strategy.

So while I recognize that much of your China visit is a chance to smell the culture and not a full-on field research experience, there may be a few handy hints in the field-research department that I can offer.

These days, more and more businesses recognize the value of an anthropological approach not only for discovering what consumers do with products and services, but for building strategy, too. You can visit my colleague Ken Anderson's short article in the on-line version of the Harvard Business review, here, for a taste of what I mean. The rather more open-ended approach that anthropologists usually take to fieldwork may be just the ticket for an exploratory visit to China. I hope you'll find a few methodological (and theoretical) hints interesting and useful.

Health Sector China: A Video & Your Workgroups

Thanks to Angela Connelly for flagging this useful video about the current new health care plan in China. Angela noticed that the wife of the author of one of our books, Roberta Lipson, is one of the health care experts on the panel discussion.

I think you'll find the video useful, whether or not you are interested in health care, so give it a look. It contains mention of the new policy efforts by government, and even a bit on accreditation--a topic of interest to several of your colleagues. Give it a look!

Your Work Groups
Many of you have related interests so I'm working with Tusha and with Dr. Gallos to group you into affinity teams. These teams will meet together in China, with me, to discuss strategies for presenting a broad-based report to the group. This way, the report-outs will not be a collection of individual reports so much as they will be high-level reviews of what you all have learned, more generally, within the frame your group's theme. Watch for a trial grouping soon, along with a preliminary schedule for some informal meetings while in China.

You will recall Dr. Gallos' important instruction that applies to everyone: the China visit is primarily a way to get a taste of the culture, to experience first-hand some of the problems and delights in doing a bit of work in the Middle Kingdom. In all but a very few cases, we expect that most of your research work will be done here at home, in the library and on the Internet.

Revised Proposals: Thursday March 5th Deadline

There are plenty of great ideas out there for projects; all of them a great start. And all of them are more ambitious than they need to be, when you consider the short time we have together as a class and the short time we have on the ground in 中国。

What My Comments Suggest
I assigned a "thumbnail" score to the idea and the work plan, but please know that this is not a grade: just a way for me to keep track of how your project is progressing. Don't be dismayed or worried if you received a 5/5. That means you have an acceptable, even a good idea; it also means that you need to make some clarifications and some revisions.

When Revisions Are Due and What I Expect
I don't expect a wholesale re-write (except perhaps in one or two cases). Nearly all the topics are appropriate. What I would like to see is a one—or possibly two-page—revision in which you narrow down your topic and lay out, in bullet points if you like, what steps you plan to take to address your now more narrow problem or question.

If you have not received comments from me by Thursday of this week, please do let me know and I"ll re-send! Do not hesitate to write me at ken.paceth@gmail.com . I appreciate your requests for feedback and I nearly always get back to you within 48 hours, so don't be shy.

China Market Watch

Bloomberg reports that some very wealthy Chinese entrepreneurs are in hot water. The article is worth a read, especially if you are interested in transparency, the Chinese stock market, and the way that guanxi works.

Here is William Mellor's article.

Provinces and Administrative Regions of China

China is organized into 23 provinces (which of course include Taiwan), four autonomous regions, (Tibet, Xinjiang, Ningxia Hui, Inner Mongolia, and Guangxi Zhuang), and two Special Administrative Regions (Hong Kong SAR and Macau SAR).



It pays to be familiar with the capitals of each province, the history of the two SARs, and each Autonomous Region. The Western, and Southwestern provinces are targeted in the present five-year plan for extensive development. These are the areas experiencing rapid urban growth. How many provincial capitals can you name? Can you name a few key characteristics of a few of them? Dig around in Wikepedia, and be ready to ask people in China where they are from and what their city is famous for.

Guanxi, Leadership, & Making Connections

Only by focusing on building relationships with your Chinese business partners will you achieve economic and cultural success in China. You have to develop real depth in your relationships. I believe this starts first by challenging your own assumptions and stepping outside your own frame of reference - and most of all listening. Listening leads to understanding and that leads to trust. --Ed Gilligan, Harvard Biz Weekly

Guanxi: Its the Relationship and More
Guanxi was among the words in our lexicon recently. As you are all trying to build new relationships in China, its time to unpack that word. It really is more than "relationship." Its about a particular kind of relationship.

Dr. Gallos shared a link to a short piece by Ed Gilligan yesterday that hints at the re-thinking we need to do when we consider the importance of relationships in business, in leadership, and in strategy. Reading the article left me wondering if we shouldn't apply the same ideas to all our business relationships and not just those in China.

Take the picture of Mr. Ming, above, who is showing his video camera to a group of rural middle school students from Sichuan Province. These are Yi kids from up in the highlands; our team was able to visit after two years of getting-to-know-you meetings, on and off, in Chengdu. Students of friends, colleagues of colleagues made the connections for us. And we'll be back--we aim to, and if we want our China practice to be sustainable we have to be back. That's because the guanxi we established in Sichuan runs all the way to Beijing and the National Academy of Social Sciences. Guanxi is no short-term networking meeting. It isn't speed-dating. Its a lot more than that.

So what about here in the USA? We need some re-thinking of what we mean by business relationships, and I think we should start using the word guanxi. Makes sense to me. Give the article a look!

Making Contacts in China & So Long for Now

Using Guanxi (关系)

Several folks have said they are worried about making connections in China. One way to lower anxiety (aside from Xanax) is to use your guanxi. (Once you are in China, everything from bulletin boards to chance meetings in restaurants and on the street are very productive ways for lao wai people to meet Chinese people--Chinese people are generally quite interested in what you are doing in China, especially if you step a few hundred yards off of the main tourist pathways). And often, just standing in front of a public bulletin board will arouse the question, "ni shi nali ren?" where are you from, and you can take it from there.

We know it as 'networking' but it is more than that, of course. As you engage with the required materials for that class, you'll get the idea. What better way to learn about guanxi than to begin building up your own? Here are some hints.

Friends of friends can help you. If you don't ask, you won't ever know who knows who in China. Ask and you shall receive, right? How often have you forgotten about a resource that's right under your nose? Ask around. You'll know someone who knows someone.

Check the bibliography in Plafker, and browse around on the websites here in this blog. They often point out names of people--authors, friends of authors, blog postings that mention this or that person of interest. Track them down. Get their phone number or their email address and holler at 'em. Don't be shy.

Connecting on the Web
Then there's Google, and the (better) Chinese variety, BaiDu. BaiDu allows you to search in English, and many Chinese websites (certainly not all of them, and that is a challenge) have English sections. The Internet is an interesting way to build some basic "reading" skills (I should say "decoding" rather than reading, since reading usually means speaking and saying what you see but decoding is more direct: moving from the symbol 首 页 directly to the idea of a home page--but I digress yet again). Here are some Chinese websites that may have resources for you. You can build a better list of your own using BaiDU. These sites all have some English on them: the search sites have been tested by entering "engineering services." Some older sites returned nothing at all, so I left them off this list.

AliBaba. For industrial (and service) outsourcing of all types, this is the biggest website in China and one of the most popular B2B websites in the world: AliBaba, http://www.alibaba.com. From mandolins to engineering services, you'll find it here.

Other Sites
The China Economic Information Network seems mainly to aggregate (and translate) economic news stories from Chinese publications. http://www.cei.gov.cn/ Worth a look (you'll need to find the link to the English section).

The State Council Information Office publishes a site called the China Internet Information Center http://www.china.org.cn. I've not used it before but like most Chinese sites, you'll find contact information for the agency that operates it, and even a phone number.

Health? Lets start with something that's very Chinese, the Institute of Information on Traditional Chinese Medicine (IITCM), China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences(CACMS) http://www.cintcm.ac.cn/opencms/opencms/en/index.html. China operates parallel medical regulatory and research bureaucracies, one for so-called traditional medicine, and one for so-called Western medicine. Physicians may be trained in both traditions and research in the efficacy of traditional medicine seems to be getting better and better. I'll blog about my visit to a Chinese hospital sometime (it was a traditional medicine hospital, and I got better, by the way).

Education? How about the Ministry of Education website: http://www.edu.cn/english_1369/index.shtml.

Securities? Here's one that is mainly in Chinese: The China Securities Journal. But it has an English home-page. If you link to "e-papers" you will find a long listing of white papers, all listed in Chinese. If you mess about with google-translate, you may be able to pick out some things of interest. Then, you have to find a way to read these things. Are you getting the idea that it will be important to have some literacy skills here? At least, it helps to know how to translate little bits of text using the Internet, and you may need a helper who can translate text for you if you get serious about China.

Other stuff? The Chinese government's main portal is a great English-language resource. The links all seem to work and there is plenty in English for you to peruse. That's more than a start. That should keep you browsing for a while.

Check the other web resources which have already been listed in this blog for a few newspapers and other resources that will help you start some connections in China.

Connecting in Person
Here is my own favorite. . . its the. . .no. Wait. This one is a proprietary learning that belongs to the Pacific Rim research and design firm that I manage, PacEth. We use this resource to meet and make friends with people in China for interviews, and it is too valuable for me to post it here. I'll talk about this one in class. Don't worry: it won't do you any good until you are actually on the ground in China. Stay tuned. I'll let you all in on these secret. Lets put it on Free Parking for now.

So Long, Saddle Pals
I'll be observing blog-silence for the next few weeks. You all have other work to do and there is plenty here to dig through and learn from. I will be in contact regarding your papers via email. I'll see you guys in early March!

Chinese Culture Vulture: Music and Film

String Quartet
Dr. Gallows writes to remind us about:

[The] Shanghai Strong Quartet concert on January 17 at the Folly: Those interested in attending can purchase discounted tickets at $15 a piece by calling the Friends of Chamber Music ticket office at 816-561-9999 and mentioning “UMKC” to receive the discount.

FYI, there will also be a free pre-concert reception, coincidently hosted by the UMKC Alumnae Association, in the Folly Theater’s Shareholders Room (go into the theater lobby and you’ll be directed to the reception) from 7-7:45 pm for ticket holders. The concert starts at 8:00 pm.

The artists will not be able to be at the reception, but they will be available after the concert to talk briefly and to sign autographs. Enjoy!

Another Film: This One Online!
While we are thinking and talking about generational change, why not spend a few minutes with another film, 立春, And the Spring Comes. Jo Yung, my colleague in Hong Kong, suggested it.

Its an evocative film; you'll get a real feeling for pre-economic growth days in China (though the time is contemporary, the small-town feeling seems pre-opening-up), a story of not fitting in, and trying to, from the director of Peacock who was also the cinematographer on Farewell My Concubine (for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for best cinematography).

A version with (usually legible) English subtitles is available for viewing on TuDou.com (and you should use a fast connection to do this). In your "spare time. . . ". . .

A Few Notes from Saturday, January 10

Review of Course Expectations
Stay tuned for options in getting copies of the two required DVDs, as it appears that there are several options, including NetFlicks, local DVD rental shops, and options for shared viewing in teams. Thanks to Tusha, the two required books should be available quite soon. We have a suggested way of grouping individuals into teams for the final presentation, but there may be some changes to this plan in during the next several weeks (see below).

Ask Smacker: Culture or Structure?
We watched an episode of SexyBeijing.tv, Long Johns and Cabbages. The questions it raised for the group included the problem of sorting out a cultural difference from a structural difference. A structural difference might be the availability and management of power and heat. A cultural difference might be something about how people act, what their practices are given a set of structural constraints.

So, what did Smacker do, back in the days when she lived in a courtyard house in a traditional neighborhood, a hutong (胡同)? They were supposed to start heating only after mid October, but if it was cold, they started heating sooner. Heat in those days was provided by small charcoal stoves (still present in Beijing, and still smokey!). Now, most people live in apartment buildings, often provided with heat from central neighborhood steam-plants--more "agency" (more individual wiggle-room) if you live in a hutong, one would think.

But what do people do if it gets cold and if the heat is not on? What would you do? Bundle up? Make sure you have on your long johns? Go out and buy a space-heater? The answer has implications for how we explain what people do, implications for energy use and management, and implications for how warm--or cold--you may be when you visit Beijing in the winter time.

Generations in China
Our primary interest is in contemporary China, so we are limiting our exploration to post-revolutionary China. We reviewed three generational categories,
• Children of the liberation
• Children of the cultural revolution
• Children of economic growth
and it was suggested that there is a third group, the children born in the past ten or fifteen years, who are often called the little emperors (see Feeding China's little emperors: food, children, and social change/ edited by Jun Jing. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2000.)

Consider how the experience of each group may be reshaping business practice, marketing, and public policy in China. What will remain the same? What will change?

Here's a link to a recent story about McDonald's in China, with plenty of implications for generational changes in eating practices. What are the business, marketing, and health implications, here?

Finding Affinity Groups for Team Presentations
We posted a 'mind map' of project themes, and made a first go at grouping those into related themes. Some of you have an idea of how you might already form teams, but be aware that you may be assigned to different groups in the future. The precise duration of your presentations may change a bit from what is indicated in the syllabus, and some of your groups may be re-formed and people reassigned a bit to make sure that your teams create the most synergy possible to help the whole group's learning and practical objectives. Please understand that team composition may change in the next month or two. Stay tuned.

A few notes from Friday Jan 9

Great meeting you all in class.

First, there were a lot of questions about guidance regarding proposals. We will cover some of that in class on Saturday 10 January and your best best for feedback is email through my gmail account (which I won't put here on the blog--its hidden up in the syllabus to avoid spam-spiders). I think the best trick is the oldest trick: ask your friends, find a network, use your guanxi, your 关系, your relationships. Find a friend of a friend of a friend; check the Internet, check at work, etc.

Map and observational exercise
So what the heck did you NOTICE about the map of China? (take NOTE of?) (Asterisks denote things that more than one group noticed, so the most salient things have more ***s)
*** Shared boundaries with a lot of countries
*** Mountain range splits the country
** China is LARGE, surrounding countries are small
** Close to the ocean is where people are
** Geographical diversity: west seems open, less population mtns & desert
** Lots of provinces (can you name four, right now?)
* Lot of opportunity (someone was reading into the map)
and my personal favorite
* China is shaped like a chicken

In each class, we'll post two things on the white board: Free Parking (issues we don't have time to discuss but that we may get to later, if you hound me enough. . . ) and Lexicon, important terms and concepts we'll often return to that may or may not be new to you.

Free Parking:
Chinese Business Hours

Lexicon:
Guanxi 关系(pronounced guan-shee)
Zhongguo (middle kingdom, China, 中国) (pronounced chong guə)
Lao Wai （老外） ("old foreigner," a gringo, a non-Chinese person, not at all pejorative)
Culture(s): as a relational concept

On this last bit, the problematic and often uncritical use of the idea of culture, go to http://www.ethknowworks.com and find the article by Mike Agar called Culture: Can You Take It With You. Hardly required reading unless you dig the theory and are wondering what the heck is wrong with me when my face gets all grouchy looking when I hear the term tossed around (as people, me included, so often do!).

Language Resources: Updated

Melissa wrote:
Can you reccomend any language resources. A classmate and myself are interested in purchasing Rosetta Stone software.

Rosetta Stone?

Computer says "NO"

Rosetta stone is oversold, overpriced, overpromised. Others may disagree, but this is the opinion of an old linguist and language acquisition geek.

Here are THREE (plus one) other approaches for you:

FIRST
I recommend instead the Routledge "colloquial" series. Make sure you get the Mandarin, not the Cantonese.

http://www.amazon.com/Colloquial-Chinese-Complete-Routledge-Colloquials/dp/0415155304

SECOND
Here are two lovely FREE resources that will get you a quick start on the spoken language with free podcasts you can download to your MP3, your iPod, or your computer:

1. Chinese Pod
http://www.chinesepod.com

I thought they were the first to offer podcast lessons for free in Chinese: their offering is (as I said before)very, very good and for a small fee you get written materials as well. Their work is based on best practices in language acquisition--whole phrases, not single words as Rosetta Stone too often does. (I have since learned that Popup Chinese, noted below, appears to have been offering "free dictionary and audio materials" for a while before Chinese Pod began their service: see below.)

2. Popup Chinese
I had written that they were a "new entry in that field," but I was wrong! I got a gentle nudge from David Lancashire, the founder of Popup Chinese, who found my post through his Google Alert! (Anyone who thinks the web is unmoderated should take note--there is some self-correction on the Internet!). I wrote, incorrectly, that Popup Chinese "seems to have stolen the chinesepod model." This was an unkind turn of phrase. What I meant was, the models look somewhat the same, and as far as I knew, Chinese Pod had been around longer. Guess what. I was wrong (thank you, David, for pointing this out.).

Nevertheless, (and since I know David will read this post), it is certainly the case that the PopupChinese website offers downloadable lessons, and plenty more. However, the beginner will find the homepage a bit daunting. It talks about the HSK Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì (汉语水平考试), which more experienced Putonghua language learners know about, but which is completely opaque to beginners. (HSK is the official Mandarin langauge examination). The PopupChinese website may have more advanced learners in mind, and for my money, ChinesePod offers more clarity for the beginning language learner in their initial homepage. I've just begun exploring ChinesePod, I appreciate David's correction, and hope they'll signal the value (and originality) of their site and their tools to users who, like me, may not be aware of all they have to offer.

http://popupchinese.com/


THIRD
If you are really serious, and willing to spend a little time every day with book, paper, and pen, then I recommend Joel Bellassen and Zhang Pengpeng
A Key to Chinese Speech and Writing, Vol. I (Paperback)

IMHO they revolutionized Chinese language learning by going back to basics and recognizing the importance of the written form as a key to understanding both spoken and written language. They make a very convincing case, born out by millions of Chinese children over the centuries, that you really can not learn to read the language without writing it. Thus you get at the deep cultural (there's that word!) business that underlies Chinese thinking and acting in the world. Writing characteres is beautiful and fun. So this is really the greatest book ever, for a lao wai (老外) to really grasp the written form. Sadly, it has been nearly impossible to find the tapes that go with it, hence the suggestion that you may start with Routledge. . . though Bellassen and Zhang are my personal favorite.

LAST
Browse Borders for other phrase-book style learning aids that you can listen to in the car. There are plenty of good ones out there: make sure they are fairly new. A combination of a podcast with Bellassen would be a very strong choice; Routledge gives you a solid, if somewhat "traditional" audio/lingual approach with the audio tapes/CDs included

Happy language learning!

The Draft Syllabus, and Jo Yung's Comments

The draft syllabus is up (see the link to the right).

My colleague Jo Yung, a veteran of many research projects among middle-class, working-class, rural, and even upper-income Chinese people has offered some suggestions. They are so good that I reproduce them, here. I think there are some readings here that I'll offer up in class as we move ahead.


Jo is here, doing research with migrant workers. That's the young woman's bedroom--pretty simple living, right? But there's a big range of living styles in China. However, our little encounter will just scratch the surface. The syllabus is just such a surface-scratch.

It contains blocks that may be re-arranged a bit, but the course expectations, readings, and so on are set. Our first meeting will be a working lunch—and we have to stay on time to avoid conflicts with the instructors who will use the room before and after. See you there!

Jo Yung, anthropologist, Hong Kong, writes:

History

-The contemporary history (from 1912, the set up of Republic of China onwards) would be easier to understand, easier to articulate those (civil war, Cultural Revolution, Open Door Policy, etc.) with how China looks today.

-One thing could be interesting to learn, the etic and emic perspectives. I actually learned it from Ming. When it comes to Cultural Revolution, the whole period is always portrait as emotional, bloody, crazy, dramatic and cruel somehow. Yet, Ming gave me a film, Peacock, to watch and he said it was close to Chinese thoughts about Cultural Revolution – suppressed and quiet.

Peacock/ Kong Que (2005), directed by Gu Chang-wei.

DVD: http://sensasian.com/catalog.php//movies/1

Plot summary: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0445506/plotsummary

Family and kinship

-While 70% of the total population is still in the rural area, extended family still carries weight when we talk about family structure. When we did fieldwork in China, children are always taken care by their aunts and uncles. Our respondent, Faustina, from Dell project, always refers her elder cousin as 'sister'. She has close connection with that cousin as they are the only two persons in the family who left their hometown, Sichuan. They both work in Beijing. The close relationship in a family definitely gives mutual support to both girls. Another interesting thing is the psudo-family style, it's like you and your younger brother, Xiao Shang. The family network, be they in extended mode, quasi or psudo mode, they do have some pragmatic and utilitarianistic implications to some extent. And I think the 'family' network becomes more important as the in-migration is getting more common.

-If you want to talk about women in a family, it would be interesting, too. In a rural family, women's community is developed through their ties to their in-law families. While a girl is in their own family, she is supposed to be married out. She cannot inherit property or land in the family. When she is married, she is still a stranger, a new comer to her husband's family. She has to learn to be a good daughter-in-law from her mother-in-law. Her status is the lowest in her husband's family. Yet, her status and power changed when she gives birth to her first baby. If the baby is a boy, her status has automatically elevated just because she gave birth to a baby who can continue the blood of her husband and the family. And that girl's status can climb further when she herself becomes a mother-in-law. So, the children, especially, sons, are women's assets in a rural family. It is exactly this practice reinforces and stabilizes patriarchy in rural China.

Reading: Wolf, Margery, 1972. Uterine Families and Women's Community. In Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

However, when we did the study on Migrant Workers, we learned that capitalism and globalization do help women in rural areas defer their conventional obligations. They went all the way from countryside to big cities like Beijing and Shanghai to work as factory workers when they finish junior high.

In the city, after the one-child policy in the early eighties, it changes not just demographic structure but also consumer market, social policies and education system related to that. I think Jing Jun's book on little emperors do reflect consequence of that one-child policy.

Reading: Feeding China's little emperors: food, children, and social change/ edited by Jun Jing. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2000.

A lot of vehement debates on BBS/ newsgroups in China on one-child-policy can be seen after the earthquake in Sichuan. "死了就未了" (if the child dies, it's (the family) is over).

Stratification

-Some interesting, residual socialistic mentalities can be found by questions like 'how much money do you make?', 'how much is your apartment?' even in first meeting. It was legitimate to ask in the past as everybody is working for the government or working in a Danwei. Everybody should earn pretty much the same. And everyone should not hold secret from each other, too.

-Middle class: it's interesting. I think we talked a lot about them. I have to read more to understand them and especially the impact of the middle class in China. But the Omnicom videos (Qi-ling from Sichuan and Wang-mi from Shanghai) well reflect the mentality of today's middle class.

Education

-It's still the only path to climb the way up to the social ladder. That's why 新東方 (xīndōngfāng ) are still the cathedrals for most students preparing for public exams and who plan for studying abroad.

Language

There are some interesting meanings in today's Chinese expressions that we have come across when doing fieldwork.

1. 沒辦法

2. 發展 (develop) – while the migrant workers working 12 hours a day in a factory, they still consider working in a city is a kind of 'development'.

3. 查資料 (search for information) – when we ask people what they do on the Internet, they always answer searching information although they are doing QQ, playing CS and reading BBS only!

4. Phatic communications over the phone calls with family

Globalization and China

How about food culture? While it seems China is embracing the global market, there is localization happening as well.

Reading: Golden arches east: McDonald's in East Asia/ Edited by James L. Watson. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Consumerism

How about the example of Ikea? How middle class spends loads of money in renovating their houses?

Reading: Urban consumer culture by Deborah Davis, The China Quarterly, 2005

Cultural Geography of China: Three Gorges

Check out how mountainous this place is. Then look at precipitation and population, and you'll see that people don't live where the water is. As Mark Twain noted for the the American West, water in much of China is for fighting, and Wiskey (make that Baijiu, 白酒, or rice liquor) is for drinking. (Maps from U. Texas Library http://lib.utexas.edu).

One begins to understand that water, water pollution, flood control and emergency response, community resettlement and development, transportation, and even tourism in the context of the Three Gorges Dam along the Chang Jiang （长江 aka Yangtze in the west) presents enormous technical and management problems for China. The dam was born of an American engineer's dream.

Preventing the dream from creating a series of nightmares will depend on the sort of shared and global effort that is, in fact, forging new links between China and the rest of the world as we all wrestle with enormous environmental challenges—and opportunities, too. Channel 4 in the UK produced a short documentary on the dam. It is worth a look.

Meanwhile, Chinese cinema offers its own documentary and dramatic treatment of the human and environmental issues along the Yangtze. Still Life, the 2006 film by Jia Zhangke, is the most recent (and famously beautiful and troubling) example. The Chinese government is well aware of the issues—so much so that they have encouraged documentary filmmaking about this mega-project and its consequences.

The great western desert is encroaching on the urban centers of the northeast, partly due to formerly uncontrolled grazing in Inner Mongolia, partly due to climate change; massive tree-planting and land reclamation seem to be helping. But winter-time dust-storms in Beijing are famous for their breathtaking grit and intensity. Fresh water is a problem here as it has always been. The need for water control is as old as the Chinese state.

Recall that the worlds largest ancient canal in the world, the Dà Yùnhé or Grand Canal, dates to the 5th century. Water control like the canal—and like the three gorges dam—became the seminal model for German historian (and one-time communist) Karl Whittfogel as he linked water control to the Marxist concept of an Asiatic Mode of Production. (In so doing, Whittfogel got himself drummed out of the first communist international—he later decided communism was not such a great idea; his book, Oriental Despotism is still considered historically and epistemologically suspect, as is the notion 'Asiatic Mode of Production', but that's another story.)

The point is that part of China is very dry and part of it is very wet. It is a country that runs on water—water for cities, for transportation, for agriculture—and a country that suffers every year from too much water in the wrong places at the wrong times. Floods kill a lot of people every year in China (though their emergency response to flooding is among the best in the world by some accounts).

So water control is always complex business: the people upstream can turn off the water on the people downstream (or flood the daylights out of them). That fact alone means that complex irrigation or water-control projects, when operated by complex state systems, does indeed go along with complex systems of power. In that respect, the Los Angeles Aqueduct in California is not much different than the Grand Canal. Born of the infelicitous combination of a dry geography and big, urban populations, both the Grand Canal and the California water systems have spawned political and hand-to-hand fighting as well as cinema like Chinatown and one of the recommended films for this class, Still Life.