Small-scale Family Agriculture in Village China 2013: Introduction

(Ken Erickson, Ezhou, July 2013)  Everyone loves to talk about pollution in China. They don't talk about sustainable small farming, which is how much of the country lives. 

Wheat- straw powers the cookstove. Greywater runs from the shower to an infiltration pond, supporting frogs and bugs  Frogs and bugs support ducks and other birds, and bats. Pesticides are too expensive, here, so night time fairly sings with avian and winged mammal life.  

Below the house is a small orchard.  Next to the orchard, a  big kitchen garden.

Below the orchard, terraced fields of row-crops and rice.  First, row-crops of peppers, some tomatoes and pole beans below those.  A rice nursury is at the top level and below that, more rice fields.  As you move down in elevation, a drainage-fed pool supports lotus for lotus root.  And more water for ducks.

A burial mound for the family ancestors is to one side of the families' fields.  

The household earns about $6,000 in a year from the farm. (Since some family members work outside the farm it is not very sensible to talk about farm income in isolation from the wider network of family who can contribute cash resources when needed—that's certainly a longer post, or even a book.  Anyhow, other extended famiy membershave other sources of cash: one is a lawyer, one has a rather wealthy boyfriend, another is a small shopkeeper. 

The house is built of concrete and one room in the house has A/C. There's a television, and afternoon MahJohng. 

Most of the farming is done by the brother of the woman who built the house and his wife.  They works a few hours each morning and afternoon weeding and watering. (Noon time is lunch and a nap).  Next: domestic spaces, and a better description of the micro-vertical zonation of the cropland.

We Are All Coal Miners: Anthropology about Miners, Packers, Bankers

Today, we are all coal miners.

You turn on the stove. It lights up. You turn on the heat. The house gets warm. You turn on the lights. You can see where you misplaced your wallet. You go down in the mines, or you ride out to the offshore rig in the rig-tender, and you risk your life. Turn on the stove, turn on the heat, turn on the lights; you are involved.

If you aren't clear on the long term global climatological impact of the irresponsible overuse of fossil fuels (and you should be, by now), at least it should be clear that the hydrocarbon industry takes an immediate toll on human lives. But is it the industry? Is it irresponsible mine or oil rig managers? Wasteful consumers? Lame regulation? Crappy technology? Is it "culture"?

Sure it is; all of these things. But even old-school anthropologists should know that studying what's happened in the past and what is happening now are windows to see possible scenarios of what might be. Too few in my discipline take this view, but this is changing.

I've read a damn big pile of monographs and articles by anthropologists, good ones, insightful ones, that end with something like, "until structural contradictions are resolved," or "as long as powerful forces disregard the long-term consequences of (fill in the blank)", without exploring just how this is to be done. I won't point fingers; I'm guilty, too. Its not just a political question. Its an empirical one. What the hell can all this study, all this theory, do for anybody if it can't suggest where, exactly, the levers might be to re-direct our attention from unseen hands and hidden mechanics of power, and move them to influence real people whose views and actions must become, shall we say, more enlightened?

So this is a call for more ethnographic work focused on specific industries, studies set in clearly demarcated temporal and political contexts, studies that can point to where things are broken, and how human suffering may be reduced. There is an anthropological literature on mining, and Godoy summarized it twenty years ago. Historians like Colin Davis at the University of Alabama at Birmingham do this with mining history. Anthropologists like Donald D. Stull and Michael Broadway (and team) at Kansas University (and elsewhere) do this with poultry and beef-factory workers. And Gillian Tett, whose Ph.D. in Anthropology afforded her the methodological and theoretical tools to study of bankers, has done it for the recent fiscal collapse.

If I hear another potential client (or student) ask, "But what are some products that anthropologists have helped to design?" I think I'll answer by referencing not only anthropologists but careful scholars from any discipline, and journalists and pundits too, who provide detailed and clear descriptions of the reasons for corporate failure and government inaction. Reasons that can be unpacked, explored, discussed, and acted upon. We need more of this. And we need it now.

To say that in China, workplace safety generally and mine safety in particular is a problem, is putting it mildly. Thousands of miners are killed there every year in the service of the economic growth the country needs to keep factories running and to lower the already high levels of disorder and conflict between everyday folk and the government. And government there is responding with inspections and new regulations. (The nature of the response to disorder in China may look different, but too often when China takes dramatic action like removing a party-poss from a horribly troubled province, as they've done recently, it is lost in the maelstrom of red-carpet movie journalism and the momentary politics of the day). Will China's actions be enough? Probably not. Beijing doesn't have all the regulatory reach, nor the technical resources—yet. But it is a step in the right direction.

Will the US revamp the regulatory framework that keeps miners and rig workers safe? Will they do enough? Probably not. And no one will until mine and rig safety, indeed, workplace safety generally, are part of a broader empirical exploration that goes beyond bromides from left and right about "the market." Generalizations don't hold water when workers are killed and injured and when families and whole communities are devastated by an unwillingness to confront the specifics behind the broader structural drivers that push managers and operators to consider short-term gain ahead of global responsibilities. Not that doing that is easy. It ain't. But the conversation better ramp up pretty damn soon.

We're all miners, today.

Photo credit: from Michael Coyne's blog at Black Star.

Flowers for Google-China

As usual, things are more complicated than our USA news reporters would have us believe. True enough, Google has not done enough to make itself relevant in China. But for many Chinese people, particularly graduate students and people in Tech, Google has offered things that others either don't do or don't do well. Like their translation service, for example.

Yesterday, flowers were laid on the Google sign at Google's Beijing offices. Here in Hai Dian, a neighborhood through which all of us part-time Beijingren have visited many times on trips to Universities or to shop for electronics in the big IT shopping centers, Google is being memorialized. Gao Ming, a very well known Mainland video blogger, documented some of the reactions on his youku video-page.

Flowers. A cup. Chocolates. Looks just like traditional offerings to departed or departing ancestors.

The video is of course in Mandarin, but click here and you can see [updated link 09/13] how people reacted. You'll hear references to Baidu "Oh, I use Baidu and I use Google. . ." and of particular interest is the range of written comments made to Gao Ming's post. There are fifteen pages of them and growing.

The comments range from reminders that Hong Kong is still China (or, wrote one commentator, "has Hong Kong not returned [to China]?" to a suggestion that China is headed back to the Qing dynasty, that China is once again falling behind, that Google will be missed, and several that essentially say "don't let the screen door hit you in the butt on your way out."

One of my favorites noted that it is impossible to get a sandwich without going into a KFC or into a McDonalds, and that with so much "red meat" to be had for foreign companies in the Chinese market, we should not be surprised to find battles over the rules that govern commerce on Chinese turf. In all, a healthy and lively discourse, arguably more civil than the stuff that has appeared on US blogs about our own recent struggles over health-care policy turf.

So Google's leaving by not leaving does not prevent the Great Firewall from censoring search results. It does send a signal that Google is not willing to self-censor. But it should also be a reminder that Chinese people are actively engaged in discussions about the nature of foreign company presence in China, that Google is appreciated by many, and that doing business in China means confronting difficult questions about local and national policy in an environment of growing local pride.

And before we cast stones at the PRC, its wise to remember that we have our own, very serious problems with Internet access, Internet security, and Internet privacy. Good luck, Google! No more delicious hot-pot around the corner from the HaiDian headquarters for the search-engine engineers. But Hong Kong food isn't so bad, either.

Google in China: Hubris, A Bad Fit, Or What?

Lower-income Chinese people—perhaps one should say "lower-income students and their families"—care deeply about access to the Internet. (The photo is from a lower-income home of a student and her parents in a small town in the Southeast of China). But it seems Google is not a core part of the desire to be connected, to learn, and participate in the Internet. Google has not met its potential in China, and now, after an encounter with some security "problems" (to put it mildly) they are making noises about packing up and moving out.

The recent flap about Google's presence in China is, indeed, more than a flap. Google claims that their servers were violated, along with some others. The idea that some official entity got to mucking about not only with Google but with some US corporate property in cyberspace seems not to be part of the Chinese discussion, but news about Google's unhappiness with Chinese censorship certainly is.. To be sure, the security issue is an important one, and censorship is, too. But another issue is the difference bewteen Internet use in China and in the US (and elsewhere).

Google is not, presently, a good fit for China. By now, most folks who are interested in Internet in China are aware of the power of MSN and QQ. Not everyone sees this as a basic difference in communication practice. It might be easy to pin the difference on "cultural difference," but this begs the question of where that difference comes from. Tricia Wang lays out the issues in a lengthy and important post on her blog. Her comments neatly summarize the experience of our research teams (and my personal experience living from time to time in Beijing and here and there) over the past ten or so years. Tyler Rooker at his 中关村 blog has some pithy remaks about Google's hubris that are worth a read, too). Chinese sites like Baidu (for search) and TuDou (for video) are simply more relevant in China.

The differences among Google and other web tools in China extends to mobile phone use, too. It is is related to the pragmatic constraints of access, charges for phone and Internet use, and the services Google offers. Here are some of the issues (covered well by Tricia; I add a bit to her list, here):

• Google doesn't provide access to the rich media content that other sites do.
• The name "Google" is not well understood people aren't sure how to spell it.
• Google has not tapped into the sense of national pride as other domestic IT products have done. Consider the line of peripherals and monitors made by the "aigo" company. Aigo sounds just like "aiguo," which means love of country or patriotism (爱国).
• Google is not a player in instant messaging. QQ, the biggest player in instant messaging in China (and, probably, in the world) is much more than an instant messaging system. Its a game platform, it is always integrated in Chinese mobile phones, and it has brand exensions into cute, cuddly products in QQ stores. It has lent its name to a small automobile, the QQ car, which is, by the way, very 可爱的, very "cute" (sounds like QQ). Nothing wrong with a little alliterative fun in IT.
• Google is not really a player in the mobile space in China, where asynchronous communication is cheaper and preferred. Mobile phones are nearly ubiquitous regardless of income. Few people talk much on their mobile phones. People get their business done quickly on the phone, unless they are rich. Ordinary people text plenty, but minutes are expensive. Text and QQ are not. Where is Google?
• The competition is working in another space in which Google is inactive: buying and selling little low-cost goodies related to games, identity, and just plain fun. QQ has developed Q coin, a virtual currency that is so successful that the Chinese government is stepping in to regulate folks who trade in it. (QQ says Qcoin is a commodity, not a currency, btw).
• Google makes sense for richer, post-graduate people; there is enormous interest in the Internet as an educational resource but for lower-income people Google is off the map. A decent desktop is certainly not off the map, even for folks of humble means (like the household in the photograph). IT matters to families who care about their children's future; Google is not seen as a partner in that regard. Why not?

Google has plenty of creative dreamers, but it seems they don't look into the deeper nexus of constraints and incentives that shape and direct practices in different national contexts. I'm sure there are plenty of people at Google who "get it," but it has been my experience that too few in the IT community have a clear understanding of the broadly cultural (and structural) differences in IT practices. A few years ago I met a high-level executive of a very large IT firm who was completely unaware of QQ, of how MSN and QQ are the preferred way of communicating on the Internet in China. How many in Silicon Valley are similarly uninformed?

Tricia Wang is quite correct. It would be a pity if Google were to give up on China, and it would help neither China nor Google nor the future of the conversation about Internet freedom and privacy if they were to give up the ship in the Middle Kingdom.

Travels to Tier X Cities

When marketers (and other lao wai) talk about China, they often speak of Tier I, Tier II, and Tier III Cities. There is no standard definition, really, for what makes a Tier II City. Generally speaking, Tier I means Beijing, Shanghai, and probably Chongching. It could include Tianjin, too, since that is a municipality like the other two, and so does not have a province around it.

Anyhow, a client interested in an aspect of personal care has asked us to visit Lin 'An and another smaller city in Henan. They call them "Tier III" Cities. Fair enough. Yet Lin'An is quite close to the richest city in China. Contrary to popular opinion, the richest city is probably not Shanghai. It is Hangzhou, the ancient city by the lake (these days, pretty much surrounding the whole of the lake!).

Marketers often look for a certain income group when they are doing consumer research. This makes sense. Manufacturers of consumer goods know that it pays to target their products and their messages to people who can afford them, or whose tastes or desires or daily life practices push (or pull) them to use their products. Why waste time trying to sell a Chevrolet to someone who is only interested in a Bugatti? Or why try to sell a Bugatti to someone really needs a used Dodge Dart?

But sometimes, a company will get the idea that there is a magical cutoff, some category of person that exists in reality who can be identified by income alone. This is rarely the case. So someone in Lin'An who is, in local terms, a "low income" person, may seem pretty well off in a small county town in Henan Province.

Jo Yung is on her way to Lin'An now. And she has some consumer research planned for the client. No doubt she'll be hanging around in streets like these.

(Thanks to Ben Ross, whose photographic and written documentary work is worth finding on the web, and who we have the pleasure of working with from time to time).

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.