Addressing a Chinese audience

I haven’t been in China long, but I’ve had the pleasure of seeing some great gaffes on the part of Westerners who are trying, in vain, to establish relationships with Chinese people in professional meetings. They hear that Chinese culture is strongly interested in ‘gifts’, so they fret over who they should give the golden pens they brought along from home. Then they try to provoke conversation across the table and end up just talking to fill the void of silence when they receive no response. Afterwards, they try to make conversation at lunch about how they decided to be vegans at age 19 ‘because eating another living creature is wrong’ and wonder why their Chinese colleagues are appalled.

Sitting in a particularly boring meeting like this the other day, I decided to write a list of suggestions for anyone contemplating a first time introduction into the Chinese professional world. The primary purpose of this list is to ensure I don’t forget my own learnings here, so if it happens to useful to anyone else … bonus!

• Don’t expect to be able to hold an informal dialogue about working topics. For some reason I can’t fathom, Chinese people expect the format of any professional meetings (aside from those over a meal) to be presentation party A - Q&A - presentation party B – Q&A and so on.
• At the end of any speech or presentation, there’s usually applause. Something niggled at me for a long time about this applause that I couldn’t quite pin down, and then it occurred to me … it’s too short! Chinese audiences only clap for maybe half the length of time that you would expect an audience at home to do. I didn’t even know we had applause rules, but there you go.
• Use a powerpoint presentation. Call it a ‘ppt’.
• Use pretty, simple pictures on your ‘ppt’, especially graphs.
• USE SIMPLE LANGUAGE. EVERYWHERE. I cannot stress this enough. Someone tried to use the word ‘Orwellian’ in a comic way and it met a lot of blank stares, obviously. Chinese people will not ask you to explain if they don’t understand your English, because it’s embarrassing for them. So don’t be an idiot, speak slowly and use words that are easy to understand rather than jargon. This also applies to any written documents and the ppt.
• Don’t assume your Chinese counterparts will have any background on your topic, even if it’s their field. Academia in China is … different to the West, and the differences are felt throughout the business world. I once saw a director of an institute with decades of academic research under his belt say that he couldn’t understand how agriculture produces greenhouse gas emissions.
• Assume that their views are China-centric (this is definitely not something that only occurs in China) and assume that they will repeat Government language/ideas.
• This should be self-evident, but avoid criticising (or appearing to criticise) the Chinese government, culture, food or popular ideologies in China.
• Use lots of figures and numbers to gain respect, while still trying to make a point.
• Ignore the people walking in and out of the room, sleeping on their desks or taking pictures with their huge Nikon cameras. They don’t realise you think this is rude.
• Bring some kind of sweet food if you can, even if you’re not the host, and make sure tea is available if you are.
• Always introduce important people at the start of a meeting and use highly respectful forms of address. An important Chinese guy I know once addressed a group of PhD candidates from another country as ‘your excellencies’ (ok, maybe this was a bit of Chinglish, but it gives you an idea of what is expected!).
• Use excessive language of thanks and imply prestige where you can.
• Gift giving is a part of Chinese culture, but you don’t have to give gifts if you don’t want to. It's much more important that you pick up the bill for the food if you are the ‘host’, although a small gesture (e.g. a trinket) will always be appreciated.
• Providing a lunch or dinner is necessary for almost any meeting. Try to arrange the meeting to be before lunch and then have a banquet – you’re likely to get more interest and appreciated feedback from participants. A dinner is even better, but there are a whole set of social rules you’ll have to navigate, and they are likely to try and get you ridiculously drunk.
• Avoid saying ‘no’ directly in response to a question. Instead, think like a politician and ignore the actual question by diverting the discussion onto a tangent.

Things I miss most about home

There are a whole range of things that I thought I would miss from home during my time in Beijing—I thought I would be frustrated with the bustle of big city living, and I thought I would get sick of Chinese food, I thought I’d miss the clean streets and sanitised toilets of the West. But really, none of these things have bothered me too much! Living overseas is a fantastic way to get down to the things that are important to you.

So these are the things I miss most about home:

1. (this one’s a given, but worth repeating anyway) My wonderful family and friends, the laughs we have together, sharing their lives and experiences

2. Wine.
Oh how I miss the sweet popping sound (or slightly less romantic but more pragmatic click of the screwcap) of a newly opened bottle, and the first whiff of a succulent savoury pinot noir when I swirl it in my prized Riedel glasses. I miss lounging on my couch with a good book and a glass of red after work, and I miss catching up with my girlfriends over a glass of the local riesling. And don’t even mention the prospect of wine and cheese together! My twitter feed is constantly reminding me of the degustation dinners, harvest festivals and wine tours I’m missing out on while I’m here.

3. Cooking.
No matter how hard I try, I cannot break the barrier of comfort in a Chinese supermarket, much less in a Chinese kitchen. The foods that are available are so foreign to me that even a translator would make no difference. Despite being exceptionally willing to try new things (I’m munching on a punnet of bayberries as I type this), actually cooking them is a whole new level of challenge. I feel like I’m grabbing at a cloud that keeps disappearing through my fingertips. So I miss so much the experience of cooking at home—from being able to look up new recipes on my iPhone, to being able to find the ingredients I want in a supermarket, to having an oven and sizeable kitchen in which to prepared the food, to serving up a heartfelt meal to my friends and family (cf #1).

4. Being unable to communicate.
This one at least I can do something about! My Chinese lessons are going very well and my tutor is a little scared by the ferocity of my commitment to study. But still, every now and then I wouldn’t mind going into a shop and understanding what the assistant is saying. Just once or twice …

5. The natural environment.
To be truthful, my time out bush is limited even when I’m in Australia, so this one is definitely not a constant longing. It’s more of a surprising twinge I didn’t expect. Yesterday I was walking into my apartment block when I heard what I thought was the sound of a large bird. More likely it was the sound of a bike squealing or a gate swinging shut, but for a millisecond I was transported home to being awoken by the squawk of a cockatoo (which I have always hated). This made me realise that, in fact, there are no birds in Beijing (except the ones kept as ‘pets’ in miniscule cages that resemble torture chambers), and for the last month I have been awoken by a constant drone of car horns on the busy street. 

 
I have managed to get out of the Beijing city bustle for a few short periods of time in the last month. And they have been wonderful! Luckily for me, next month I will be visiting the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Plenty of natural environment for me there :)

6. (and this is a very distant fifth place) Work.
Not enough to want to go back to it, but just a teensy little bit.

Well, that's hardly anything to complain about, is it?

One month down, five to go

Ok I'll admit it. I actually miss my Australian life. Not just my family and friends, or the familiarity of the food and the fact I can speak the local language ... I'm actually missing my routine.

My working hours in Beijing are 10am-4pm, at least three days per week. I have to be at work on Wednesdays, because Wednesday is the mandated day for everyone to be at work, otherwise nobody gets the job done. Other days I can 'work from home' if I wish, and that's certainly the approach everyone in the office takes. Oh, did I mention this is actually a full time job?

For anyone who comes from an Australian, UK or US background, these kinds of hours are the stuff dreams are made of. And the lack of productivity doesn't really seem to make sense, because at home the Chinese people I know work much harder than the majority of people born and raised in Australia. Like the old guy at the local Chinese restaurant who just keeps going and going even though he’s starting to look like those shrivelled mushrooms he serves up in your plate. Or the young eager Chinese kid in the office who just never bloody goes home even when you tell him three times that report doesn’t need to be finished today.

So it seems like kind of a paradox to me that I’d come here and find that the working hours are less than half of what I was doing in Australia before I left. At first, I was gleefully boasting that my time here is turning out to be more like a holiday than a work assignment. Everyone at home was jealous that I can sleep in as long as I like. I was making plans for all the things I could do with my newly flexible lifestyle—visits to Shanghai over the weekend, surprising my colleagues with a rapidly improving Mandarin-speaking skillset, hiking in the nearby mountains, steadily improving my fitness so I can compete in a half-marathon, embarking on my long-suppressed dream of studying oenology (each ambition a little less realistic than the last ...).

All those plans were put on hold towards the end of last week, when I contracted the dreaded Beijing lurgy, and it sure as hell won't budge despite my doing everything possible to convince my body to get better. This morning I woke up again feeling like someone had punched my sinuses in, filled my nostrils with lava and crammed my head full of cotton wool. So I dutifully got out my iPhone, logged into my mail and went to write my boss an email to say I wouldn't be in today. Then I realised that my boss wouldn't be at work, and would never even know I wasn't in. The worst thing is, there would be no rush tomorrow to catch up on everything that happened yesterday, because, if I'm honest with myself, I actually have no purpose in this organisation.

I caught myself in the middle of a very unfamiliar feeling: I actually miss work. I miss being busy, stressed out, tired and feeling unable to finish everything I need to do. I miss having a purpose. For the first time in my adult life it doesn't really matter to anyone whether I get out of bed or not. I miss being useful!

Surely this strange sensation won't last too long. Tomorrow, after I've had my 10 hours' sleep and rolled up to work at 10am, pockets filled with freshly steamed baozi (dumplings), everything will be back to normal and this odd desire to be back in the rat race will have gone as quickly as it came.

Illegal aliens and soft power

I want to pick up on a thread that's been weaving it's way through my intellectual life here in Beijing (which is somewhat confined due to my lack of Mandarin)—the Chinese sense of self identity and how that affects foreigners like me.

I posted earlier an extract from Simon Winchester about the self confidence of Chinese people as a society. Winchester's hypothesis is that the Chinese have so long and deep a history as a people that they exude a self-assuredness that is, at its most benign, unexpected for the unwary Westerner. Winchester describes this cultural phenomenon as 'frustrating' for visitors to the Middle Kingdom, but his tone leads to something slightly more sinister—self confidence can quickly become a kind of xenophobia in the wrong circumstances.

[beware inflammatory juxtaposition!] Beijing recently announced an action plan to 'Clamp Down on Illegal Aliens'—i.e. foreigners living in the city without appropriate documents. You might think this is an unintentional slight that really comes down to a simple misunderstanding of the negative connotations of the term 'illegal aliens'—surely it's just Chinglish? Yes, you might think that, except for the more detailed account provided by state television broadcaster CCTV's Yang Rui on national television:

The Ministry of Public Security is getting rid of foreign trash right now, arresting foreign scum and protecting innocent Chinese girls from them; but in order to do that, we need to focus on Sanlitun and Wudaokou, and target those who frequent the areas and its event organizers. Foreigners who can't find a job in their home country come to China and get involved in illegal business activities such as human trafficking and espionage; they also like to distribute lies which discredit China to persuade locals to move abroad. A lot of them look for Chinese women to live with as a disguise to further their espionage efforts. They pretend to be tourists traveling around the country while actually helping Japan and Korea make maps and collect GPS data for military purposes. We need to take action, first kick that crazy foreign journalist from Al Jazeera out of the country and close their Beijing office, and then shut everybody up, all the members of the foreign press who demonize China.

(The reference to 'protecting innocent Chinese girls', by the way, appears to be a thinly veiled allusion to either the recent attempted molestation of a Chinese local by a white male, or the ongoing rumour that foreign men are 'taking' many of the local eligible young women, or perhaps both.)

I'm not going to get into the political reasons for this move, as there has been a lot of commentary on the subject of why the Government is taking this action, and why now. But I am interested in what this tells us about the Chinese worldview and how I should behave in response.

Obviously, and I want to make this plain, nobody should be making any kind of extreme generalisations that attempt to confront racism with racism. Even on the China Daily website, underneath the publication of the above quote from Yang Rui, there are a few comments that allude to the fierce debate that rages constantly among Chinese locals about whether foreigners are to be welcomed or despised. It's certainly true that Yang is not representative of the opinions of all Chinese people. But it presents an interesting question that has been intriguing me since before I arrived here—how do Chinese people see foreigners? How do they see Australians? What should I be aware of in my interactions with Beijingers so that I can treat them with respect and humility?

As an amusing yet relevant anecdotal pause, I was recently discussing with my coworkers their travels overseas, what they enjoyed and what they didn't, and how these experiences compared to my own. Firstly, their experiences were much more limited than mine. I have been lucky enough to travel through many parts of Europe on a number of occasions, live and study for a short time in western Europe, see the US and parts of southeast Asia and travel a fair bit within Australia and New Zealand. That's not outside of the normal range of experiences among my peer group. My coworkers, on the other hand, have seldom travelled even within China. Some have been overseas with work for short (week-long) conferences, and very few have had the chance to study overseas. But none have been anywhere outside China for pleasure. I try to be conscious of my privileged upbringing and suggest that maybe this is because Chinese people have not been as wealthy as some Western countries, and therefore lack the opportunity to travel. My colleagues agree in part, but in general, they cannot understand how you could possibly exist outside China, where the food is so repulsive! Why would you want to go somewhere you have to travel all the way to Chinatown to get a decent feed?

Now I can attest to the fact that Chinese people have a lot to be proud of with regard to their food. It is, as mentioned previously, AMAZING. But I still like other types of food, too. What would the world be like without pizza, croissant, borscht, hummous or hamburgers? Food is not like an exclusive covenant, where you can only choose one cuisine and you're holed up in one type of food hall for the rest of your life.

What surprised me the most, though was their remorseless attack on the food of other countries. Foreign food was, according to my coworkers, 'disgusting'. On the few occasions they travelled internationally, they lost weight because they 'couldn't find anything edible'. Maybe food is just one of those issues that gets Chinese people really riled up. Or maybe it's a sign of a broader disinterest in different cultures that results from Winchester's self-assured 'Chineseness'. I certainly don't think my coworkers meant any harm, and they probably didn't anticipate that my reaction could be to take offence. Luckily for them, I come from a country without a strong identifying cuisine (unless you count Vegemite as a cuisine ...), so I found the whole thing more amusing than offensive.

Whatever the reason behind Chinese people not travelling much, the broader impact of this phenomenon is that locals, even in Beijing, which is incredibly globalised these days, don't expect me to have a different cultural background. They don't anticipate that I may not know how to eat a whole fish with chopsticks, and they can't see why I wouldn't know the etiquette rules of Chinese business meetings. This obviously leads to some hilarious situations as per my previous post. One thing they do know for sure is that I'm immeasurably rich. Rich enough to buy anything I want and rich enough to pay three times the locals' price at the markets. And they are right in some ways. I try to say that I'm on an allowance that just covers my living expenses with little to spare, and that things in Australia actually cost a lot more than China, or even than the US. But truth be told, i know I'm incredibly privileged to be educated and able to travel. My salary in Australia is many multiples of the most extravagant pay packets here. 

This brings me to the conclusion of my long and winding meanderings that began at 4am this morning. My insomnia led me to James Fallows' recent blog on the rise of China (a somewhat larger and deeper topic than this one!):

Soft power becomes powerful when people imagine themselves transformed, improved, by adopting a new style. Koreans and Armenians imagine they will be freer or more successful if they become Americans -- or Australians or Canadians. Young men and women from the provinces imagine they will be more glamorous if they look and act like people in Paris, London, or New York. If a society thinks it is unique because of its system, or its style, or its standards, it can easily exert soft power, because outsiders can imagine themselves taking part in that same system and adopting those same styles. But if it thinks it is unique because of its identity -- "China is successful because we are Chinese" -- the appeal to anyone else is self-limiting.

Fallows is clearly talking about China's ability to influence on the international geopolitical stage, but it makes me wonder: will I always, regardless of how hard I study my Mandarin textbook, be an outsider here? No matter how much I come to enjoy pork dumpling for breakfast, is it actually impossible for me to be a part of this incredibly exhilarating, stimulating and vivacious Chinese world?

Guess I'll have to wait to find out.

3 days in the life of a Chinese workplace

DAY 1: Asked counterpart if 9am meeting was acceptable. She says "10am is better, 9am too earlier". Then night before she texts me:

 "I'm in the suburb of Beijing .maybe I can't arrive at our office on time in tomorrow morning .could we meet at half past 11.I would like to treat you a welcome lunch first ,after that , we can talk about our working.how about that?"

I think this is a good situation. Plus I need to register myself at Big Brother foreigner registration in the morning, which takes 1.5 hours longer than anticipated of painful language barrier-ridden queuing. Arrive at 11.30, counterpart is running 15 minutes late. Meet counterpart at 12 midday and head to lunch. Yes! More fabulous food - this time salad (surprisingly similar to how Mum makes it), silken tofu soup, eggplant fabulousness and red bean sticky rice that is like crack cocaine on my palette. No of course I cannot pay, this is a welcome lunch! Counterpart takes me for a tour of the office, fills out a form in Chinese and realises she should have told me to bring my laptop. She tells me to go home and enjoy the lovely—only moderately smoggy—afternoon. Also to pack my bags for a work trip to nearby Shandong province starting tomorrow. Sum total 2.5 hours of 'work'. 

DAY 2: Supervisor rings my mobile a 4.56am. We are flying out to Dongying and he will pick me up in 20 minutes. Sleepy ride to the airport ends in breakky at the airport of Hong Kong style soup with dumplings and noodles. First chopstickful lands on my nice clean skirt, to my supervisor's immense amusement, then I realise my cup of water is freshly boiled only after pouring down my throat (reminder this is an indecent hour of the morning). After a very pleasant flight, we arrive in Dongying at a chandelier-laden hotel with the biggest rooms I’ve ever seen. I'm told that today is for xiuxi (rest) in the king-sized bed. Ok, resting it is! Fresh pair of clean men's underwear is in the bathroom but no iron? 

Phone call at 11.30 announces someone is taking us to lunch ... now. Ok! Clothes back on. Drive into a gated series of caul-de-sacs. What? Double storey houses with white picket fences? Are we in country USA? No it's a Chinese Western-style community, which apparently is a sign of wealth. Hauled into someone's living room, eat something that tastes like peanut and sugar but looks like a spider web wound into a little ball with chunks of tasty dead fly. Not too bad, actually. 

Get up again, we are going to pick caomei (strawberries) in the garden … I’m not sure why. Then back in the car (aha! We are not eating at the obsessive gardener's East-meets-West house) to a local restaurant. A man who looks like Santa crossed with Genghis Khan motions to us with his long stick. I realise there is a big plastic pool of fish next to him—this is a nice one? He's asking me. I smile politely and then the next minute BAM he's clubbing the fish with a rolling pin. Surprise surprise, carp for lunch. It's cooked in a hotpot in the middle of the table, boiled in front of us with Chinese cabbage and tofu. The waitress comes to stir the soup and carries a bowl of yellow dough. She is rolling it up into balls and slapping it to the side of the pot so that they become lovely carp-scented steamed maize breads. My suspicion is the hot pot is actually supposed to be spicy and they have left out the chilli (as a token gesture for the foreigner) which is why it's kind of bland. Two men eat almost a whole 40cm fish while I have a whole one piece before it becomes too much. Then back to hotel to xiuxi some more. 

Another phone call heralds dinner time! Walk into a private room hoping this will be a nice cosy end to a rather strange day. Instead, we find eight men already at the table standing, smiling, and waving us into three special seats they have allocated to us. I realise my boss is the distinguished guest of a group of local politicians. Wishing I read over that chapter on Chinese banquets! Oh memory, why do you only store useless pieces of information? Let's think: host faces door, 2nd most VIP to his right, 3rd to his left. Sit where told. Don't eat or drink until the host does. Only drink when toasted. Be careful of the dreaded baijiu. Cheers with lip of glass lower than the other person's. 

Food keeps coming out and I don't get a chance to eat because I have to stand up every 3.5 seconds for another toast. And for some reason I have to drink baijiu while everyone else gets wine. No fair! Ok so finished toasting, now I can eat ... oh everybody is getting up. What? We're leaving? It's only 7.30 and after all those shots I'm slightly more than tipsy. Back to dark room. 

DAY 3: 1am get to sleep dehydrated—turns out baijiu is not easy on the stomach. 2am wake to sounds of excited or angry female voice through the wall. Think my colleague may have a mistress ... struggling to accept cross-cultural difference while half asleep and suffering from hangover. Alarms screams breakfast. Then we meet last night's guests in the foyer and three black cars turn up. Incidentally, black is a bad choice in the most polluted country in the world, but it's a national obsession. The local politicians and their buddies get in the black cars in a fluid organised motion according to a set of rules that is plainly obvious to everyone but me. 

An usher quickly shoves a small flower onto my lapel before I get shuffled into a large lecture hall. My boss is on the panel in front of me, and I am seated in the front row. In the middle. By myself. Nobody seems to care that I can't actually read or understand anything the panel is saying. I don't even know the name of this conference or what it's about. Each panel member gets up and says about 30 seconds worth of (what seems like) stirring but serious speech. Then the audience claps for barely a few seconds after each speaker—for some reason this makes me uncomfortable, as if there were some international standard for applause that is not being met.

My boss is urgently motioning for me to get up and leave. I realise the introductory speeches are over, or there has been some hiatus. I leave the lecture hall but my boss stays in there to give his lecture. Now I'm stuck with a group of local officials who do not speak English and can't really understand why I'm there. Or maybe they do, but I don't? I find out shortly that we are doing a tour of some buildings—a university dorm, a LED light factory, a 'software park', a real public park, and some government offices. Each place has a dedicated officer with a headset and speaker to provide the tour. The head honcho seems to be disinterested, and I don't really blame him. He likes the 3D televisions, though. Then we are abruptly sitting at a conference table drinking lü cha (green tea). The two sides of the table—one side with local Dongying officials, and the other side with officials from somewhere else nearby—take turns in giving epic speeches while everybody else sits in silence, trying not to fall asleep. My boss (returned from the abyss) tells me they are listing their city's achievements. What the?

Then to lunch. By this time I'm savvy. Not the stunned mullet I was yesterday. Oh yes, you can't fool me, I know what to expect. I can do this whole banquet thing, you just watch me.

Walk into the most ornately furnished dining room I've ever been inside. A whole new set of people here. Head honcho from this morning is not sitting in the host seat—he is number 2 on the table this time. The host from last night's banquet is not even in a position of honour here, he's just one of the participants. Realise there is no lazy susan to distribute the meals like any other banquet in which I have participated. Waitresses start bringing out individual meals and Mr Host turns up. Lots of standing and bowing and chasing others' glasses to the floor trying to get my glass lower than theirs. Mr Host is apparently the 2IC for the whole city, which is why everybody is suddenly silent, solemnly listening to his ranting. More individual dishes come out—soups, sea cucumbers, things that look like prawns but are only a centimetre long, vegetables, fruit, unidentifiable pieces of fish. I lose count when the whole crabs start coming out. I have to ask my boss how to eat it—how embarrassing! Luckily you don't have to do that one with chopsticks.

Then Mr Host gets up and moves to a non-honoured guest seat. What's going on? Boss seems edgy, he tells me the 'most important man' in the whole city is coming to dine with us! More toasting, more standing up and sitting down, more listening to long rants from slightly tipsy politicians in Chinese. I wonder whether it's acceptable to just get up and go to the bathroom? Nobody else seems to be doing it, or maybe they're just subtle. Where is the bathroom, anyway? Did I ever learn how to ask it in Chinese? Maybe that waitress will tell me. Oh! Everybody is up again. Time to go. Shake hands with the 'most important man' and get shuffled into a car, belly aching and head reeling with new information.

What the hell just happened?