About Richard Burger

Recent Posts by Richard Burger

Financial Crisis Hurting Foreign Businesses in China

I think it’s safe to say that with it’s huge leaps and bounds China is always at some sort of crossroads, whether it’s dealing with organized labor, promising national health insurance, launching a soft power campaign or what have you. One of the smartest China hands, David Wolf, has an excellent piece in Ad Age China on perhaps the most important crossroads of all, the economic one, and on what it means for foreign companies doing business there.

Suddenly, just as people in China were starting to wonder if they still needed foreign capital and know-how, we went and proved to the Chinese that we were greedy, dumb, and actually needed China’s help to pull us out of our own mess…

Not only did that that gave the government the opportunity to put an end to policies that favored foreign companies in China, it was also a signal to the Chinese people that they could no longer take for granted that foreign brands were better than their local counterparts. Maybe they were just overpriced.

China, in other words, is starting to say “no” to our employers and our clients, and the above trends suggests that this is likely to get worse. Smart Chinese competitors are figuring out that they have an opportunity to take back some of their home turf, and they are refocusing their efforts on domestic operations.

This doesn’t mean, however, that China has all the answers, and is gliding through the crisis. Wolf spells out why China isn’t out of the woods, and why the current economic crossroads is so critical, and tenuous.

The global financial crisis has revealed the fundamental weakness of the nation’s export-driven economy: even in a healthy financial environment, the world cannot buy all of the goods China needs to sell to sustain 8-10% growth indefinitely. With no social safety net, Chinese consumers are focused on saving, and industrial productivity is so embarrassingly bad that nobody even talks about it.

Political stability in China is built on an unspoken social contract: the government delivers constant improvements in opportunities and lifestyle, and the people accept single-party rule, warts and all. Delivering on that promise is getting harder as China’s export engine sputters, as inflation grows, and may become impossible if the stock-market and real estate bubbles burst and the middle class demands that the government cover personal losses.

A thought of my own that popped up while I was reading it: The “Chinese financial crisis” is a phrase we don’t hear much anymore. I think we’ve been almost hypnotized into believing there is no economic crisis in China, that it was all about the US, and then Europe, with Asia remaining largely invulnerable. Indeed, a powerful meme took hold among financial writers over the past year, portraying China’s authoritarian system as superior in many ways to democracy because the party can make things happen fast without getting tied up in lawsuits and hearings and protests (usually). And this one-party system protected China from the crisis, allowing the government to launch a massive government spending program that kept the country afloat and free of the misery faced by weak democracies.

Wolf reminds, however, that the Chinese economy right now is quite tenuous, and that the shock absorbers that have seen it through so far – namely, government spending – may not be enough to hold everything together when the economy sours (and all economies sour).

21 Years Ago, the “Goddess of Democracy”

Associated Press photographer Jeff Widener’s photo of two amateur photographers taking shots of the “goddess of democracy” in Tiananmen Square on June 3, 1989, the day before the massacre.

Later in the week Widner would take the most famous photo to ever come out of China.

I have to admit, I want to move back to China. It’s always in my heart, and sometimes I feel like dropping everything and heading back. But no matter how much I love China, I will never forget what the government there is capable of, the good and the bad. The government can bulldoze over the old Gulou hutong (and do check that link), they can scrub uncomfortable references from the Internet, but they cannot delete what happened that day, and no story of modern China is complete without including it. Never forget.

Media Bias Against China

I do hope everyone who points approvingly to Anticnn and insists the US media are hopelessly biased against China gets to listen to this superb podcast over at Popup Chinese. It touches on many media-related issues, but the first few minutes are devoted to the bias issue.

These are really smart China hands talking, and they all agree that the notion among many Chinese (especially the fenqing) of purposeful media bias against China is seriously inflated.They generally agree there is some bias against China, but it occurs mainly over in the US editorial offices where the headlines and photo captions are written, and is not symptomatic of the foreign correspondents living in China.

They also acknowledge there is bias for the Dalai Lama, but not because the editors are anti-China, It’s because there is a strong, irrational bias in America towards Buddhists, just as there is often a strong media bias in favor of Israel, and an even stronger media bias against Arabs and Muslims. Thus, as they say in the podcast, the Tibetan monks get far more sympathy and attention than the Uighurs. But what the fenqing need to get is that this is generally not anti-China bias, but a bias in which Buddhists are gentle, devout souls who are all about peace and love. Editors in the US may also view China as the oppressors and the Tibetans as the oppressed. But this doesn’t mean they are anti-China.

What those pressing this issue furthermore need to get is that everyone feels they are a victim of media bias. The Republicans, the Dems, the left and the right – we all have complaints with media bias. We all feel we are misrepresented. Every company feels that way, too. China just needs to join the club; everyone perceives bias against them. The difference is that most don’t allow themselves to get so manipulated and worked up about it so they think they’re the only ones. Inaccuracy in media is simply a fact of life.

The podcast goes on to explain why this is especially so today, with US newsrooms being drastically shrunk in size and fewer editors doing much more work. Everyone suffers, not just China. And I know (I really do) that you can find this or that example of media bias against China. Yes, it does happen. But usually it happens in the copy room, and often it’s simply a mistake. There may be bias behind these mistakes; that’s probably what led to some Western media falsely describing weapons used in the Tibet protests of 2008 as belonging to the Chinese, when in fact they were being used by the Tibetan demonstrators. This wasn’t an act of intentional bias against China, though. It was a matter of jumping to conclusions based upon a bias that sees the Tibetans as gentle and sweet.

Much of the current media coverage, as discussed in the podcast, is surprisingly pro-China. There is a powerful new meme going through the media, particularly the financial press, about how China proves how effective an authoritarian government can be, and pointing to it as a possible model for the future. (As part of this argument the pundits point to the hopeless political mess in the US; does that make them “anti-US”?) Most economic stories on China are positive, although a lot of critics jumped on the property bubble band wagon, as well as Jim Chano’s predictions of a China collapse. But they also jump on similar stories in regard to Europe, and the US.

This is pack journalism, a bad thing, but certainly something that is in no way exclusive to coverage of China. The media, in a huge pack, went after Obama last week for not getting emotional enough over the Louisiana offshore oil rig catastrophe. Does this mean the media is biased against Obama? Say that to any wingnut and they’ll laugh in your face; in their eyes the media are hopelessly in love with Obama. The truth is they are just being the media – short-sighted, rushed, fact-starved, on impossible deadlines and fighting to get the best headline in the face of shrinking readership. They do it to Obama, they did it to Bush, they do it to Europe and they do it to China.

The notion that there is a monolithic prejudice among the US media against China is a falsehood and a fabrication. What you’re seeing is the standard prejudice and screw-ups that pervade all journalism, unfortunately. Many see the media fawning over China, others see it as needlessly and unfairly critical. Both are right. Because it is not monolithic, and the distribution of prejudice and poor reporting is spread out evenly to everyone and every nation.

The Problem with China’s Teens

This post comparing the daily lives of Chinese and American teens caught my eye and brought back a lot of memories. (It’s already a couple of weeks old; I just saw the link via Danwei.) American teens dream of “writing their own Aeneid,” and their teen years “are an endless drama: fights with parents over curfew, acne, not making the football team or cheerleading squad, break-ups, depression, anorexia, Waiting for Godot, anxiety, the prom.” Very different from their Chinese counterparts:

Boys and girls are not permitted to be near one meter of each other on school grounds, there’s a regulation haircut and school uniform, and there’s no mobile phone service and Internet access. All the students dress, look, act and think the same, and an administrator’s greatest pride is to see his 1000 students do calisthenics in synch on the soccer field. Walls and gates limit the movement of students, security cameras and the eyes of teachers track students, and if it were possible administrators would implant a signalling device on each student. If all this is still not enough to depress and stress out the Chinese teenager, then the head teacher and/or parent will now and then remind him that he’s worthless and useless.

The result of all this unreasonable and unnecessary repression is that Chinese students are remarkably polite and well-behaved. But at the end of their schooling they won’t be able to write their own Aeneid, (though maybe the more literary among them can write The Tale of Peter Rabbit). They will matriculate at a top university, but they will lack sympathy and empathy, which will hinder them from developing and managing personal and professional relationships; they won’t understand trust and tolerance, only power and fear. They may rise to a top management position, but lacking in self-understanding and self-reflection they’ll curse and criticize their subordinates, making the workplace a cold stagnant repressive regime.

Having skipped the tumultuous teenage years, Chinese are forever doomed to live as teenagers all their lives. Whereas Americans may be stubborn, moody, quick to anger, insecure, impetuous, condescending, extreme, and paranoid in their teenage years, Chinese may suffer from these psychological issues all their lives. The psychologists who wrote Reviving Ophelia, Raising Cain, and Real Boys may not be happy with how American families and schools are distorting the emotional development of children, but if they came to China they’d faint in horror and despair.

Based on my own experience, I’d have to say the writer is onto something. I worked with so many Chinese colleagues in China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taibei, and it was interesting to see the differences and similarities in terms of maturity and ability to deal with issues and decision making. Not surprisingly, the Hong Kong and Taiwanese workers were generally better at problem solving and controlling their emotions, having grown up in a more developed, relatively free-thinking environment. They still had “face” issues, and sometimes things that I saw as trivial could set off tears, which I also saw frequently in Beijing. The Singaporean workers, at least in my office, could have been from New York or Paris. Especially stark was the difference between the average mainland Chinese worker and their colleagues who grew up in Vancouver or spent years studying abroad. It was as if they came from different planets. What a difference in personality and temperament, when the teen years are spent doing more than memorization.

Obviously, with so many students and so much poverty and such a deeply entrenched system this isn’t changing anytime soon. Like most other issues in China, it seems to be getting better, but very, very slowly. And just to make sure I’m clear (for the trolls): I have many friends who went through the Chinese educational system and never left the mainland. And they are the salt of the earth. Critical thinking, however, can be an issue for some of them. Some of them completely overcame these issues, and exposure to other cultures seemed to have been a big help.

“The Chinese Communist Party is like God”

If you aren’t following the Sinica podcasts on Popup Chinese, you are missing some excellent commentary on current issues in China. This one is from two days ago, and it complements this post. It is 100 percent must-hear.

A key contributor to the podcast, Gady Epstein of Forbes, now has an article on a topic that comes up a lot in that podcast, namely the staying power of the CCP and how it has maintained an iron grip on all aspects of life in China that it deems necessary to maintain control. Like the podcast, you simply have to read it.

The piece is based on the soon-to-be-released book The Party by Richard McGregor, which I’ve already pre-ordered. Judging from what Epstein writes, this is one scary book.

“The Party is like God,” a professor from People’s University in Beijing tells McGregor. “He is everywhere. You just can’t see him.”

The Party is not simply an account of how the party succeeds in ruling through its mechanisms of autocracy. The party’s Achilles’ heel–its lack of any independent check on its power–undermines at every turn its efforts to police corruption, vet its members, reform its bureaucracy and respond to crises.

The maneuvering required to conduct a high-level corruption investigation sounds like it is out of a mafia movie. Taking down a Politburo member, former Shanghai Party Secretary Chen Liangyu, required a side deal to keep hands off of the family of former General Secretary Jiang Zemin, whose consent for the takedown was required because he was the reigning kingpin of the Shanghai faction, despite the fact that he no longer held any official leadership posts.

The party’s apparatus of control dominated every stage of decision-making in the disastrous Sanlu milk powder scandal, from covering up melamine contamination that poisoned thousands of babies to censoring media coverage that could have saved lives to blocking legal action that could have given families some measure of justice and deterred future corporate misbehavior. At every stage where some check or balance might exist in a democratic system, the one-party system failed its people.

Well, I suppose it’s not like we didn’t know the party controls the media and everything else it wants to control, and that the big state-owned enterprises are simply part of the state apparatus. But reading this, you really have to wonder how real those signs of hope we all like to point to – the increased freedom to criticize the Party, the Glasnost approach we sometimes see in the Global Times and other Chinese media, the ability of public opinion to shake the party into action as it did after various crimes of corruption were exposed on the Internet – you have to wonder if these aren’t just escape valves that the party cynically uses to create a sense of democracy, a sham. Because no matter how touchy-feely China seems at times, if you really get in the way of the party in a manner it feels could undermine it, you will be crushed like a gnat.

It’s easy to forget that when we see the stories about Han Han standing up to the CCP (this was an especially delightful example and I urge you to check it out, I was laughing out loud). And it’s easy to forget that no matter how earnest those wonderful cadres we know are (and so many of them really are wonderful), their earnest attempts to bring about change can only go so far. As we all know, there are limits. For all the new freedoms and rising GDP, China remains a quasi-police state. Not a Nazi Germany or North Korea-style police state, which rule by sheer terror and fear, but a less visible system of control that’s no less insidious, should you end up in its bad graces. Like the children who drank the San Lu milk, who could easily have been saved if squelching the news hadn’t been in the party’s interest.

As Epstein says at the close of his article, most Chinese are content not to look behind the curtain and ask questions – “times are too good.” But no good times last forever, and after the ball it will be fascinating to see how the party maintains the harmony and relative stability it so cherishes today. Will it work when springtime becomes the winter of discontent?

Rock Paper Tiger: A Book About Modern China that Rocks

Rock Paper Tiger, an up-to-the-minute, kaleidoscopic romp through contemporary China with some side-stops in US-occupied Iraq, is the first novel of Lisa Brackman, already well known as a blogger. She’s also one of my best friends, and I’d been waiting to get my hands on this book for at least half a year. It will officially launch next week, but it’s already for sale here, and you should go right now and order your copy. No matter how good a friend Lisa is, I wouldn’t tell you to do that unless I loved the book. Love is an understatement.

Lisa has done  the impossible: created a taut, breathless thriller that along the way takes the reader on a whirlwind tour through China, the big cities, the smaller cities, the places tourists go and the country’s underbelly. She manages to weave into the narrative an endless stream of details about life in China, what living there actually feels like, such vibrant images you can touch and taste them. In effect, it’s a kind of primer on life in modern-day China, yet it never feels like we’re being lectured or taught. Each image and each description is tightly connected to the story.

Rock Paper Tiger’s plot is complex, with as many twists and turns and borderline cliff-hanger chapter endings as a Dan Brown mystery – only Lisa, unlike Brown, is a great writer.

The hero Ellie Cooper, an Iraq war veteran now living in Beijing, doesn’t know what she’s getting into when she says “Nice to meet you” to a guest at her artist friend’s apartment, Hashim, a Uighur. Hashim is in the book for all of 15 seconds, but it’s this chance and rather meaningless encounter that soon has Ellie running as fast as she can, despite a leg wound she suffered in Iraq, as she’s pursued by American mercenaries and Chinese PSB agents. And others. We never know who to trust or what’s motivating them, and we never know where Ellie’s roller-coaster chase will take us next.

Interspersed with (and related to) the chase are Ellie’s flashbacks to several years back when she served in Iraq. One fateful day she stumbled into a secret prison that bears an uncanny resemblance to Abu Ghraib, but due to a mega-dose of fear and confusion she says nothing, despite her horror and her knowledge something really bad is going on. Does this make her a party to the crime? That’s a question Ellie has to live with.

Another twist: a good portion of the story takes place online, within a video game Ellie must play in order to communicate with friends who – she hopes – can help her figure out what’s going on. The descriptions of this virtual world and the challenges she meets there, like being attacked by a nine-headed, bird are among the most imaginative in the book.

Every scene is jammed with imagery, but never to the point of being cluttered. If you’ve never been to China you may think Lisa is exaggerating. If anything, her descriptions are often understated, and hilarious. Here’s Ellie, trying to hide from her pursuers after she arrives in Chengdu:

I catch a cab outside the train station, take note of the giant statue of Mao with his arm outstretched like he’s directing traffic – or maybe he’s just trying to greet the patrons of the shopping malls and the Starbucks down the street.

I get to the backpackers’ joint, wedged between a hotpot restaurant and a camping-supply store on a narrow lane.

“No baggage?” asks the…clerk? Manager? You can’t call somebody a “concierge” when he’s sitting behind a scarred desk in a beige room containing a bulletin board leprous with notices about treks to Tibet and Jiuzhaigou and dubious job offers to teach English, a pressboard bookcase overflowing with paperbacks, and a pile of backpacks heaped in one corner.

Lisa similarly brings to life aspects of China that many of us take for granted: train travel (hard seats, soft sleepers and hard sleepers), Internet bars, dumpling houses, VPNs, Beijing art colonies, the lifestyle of the nouveau riche, the seedy karaoke bar of a backwater village, the sulfurous air of a coal mining city, the pollution (just about everywhere), the way Chinese people always ask your age and whether you’re married…. For everything she observes (and that’s a lot of things) she comes up with an image, often startling. How can she come up with so many images, and how can they all be this satisfying?  Some new buildings in Beijing, for example, are “glassy high-rises with green Chinese-style roofs perched on top, like somebody put party hats on the heads of awkward giants.”

What impressed me the most is that Lisa does the same with the flashbacks to Iraq – the imagery is just as detailed and precise. She’s been to China many times, but never to Iraq. People who served in Iraq will have a hard time believing Lisa didn’t.

Imagery and style and the thrill are one thing. But those are practically ancillary to what’s at the heart of the story and that is Ellie Cooper’s humanity and essential goodness. She’s been to hell and back (in Iraq), only to be betrayed by her husband in China, and she’s in constant pain – her popping percocets becomes a kind of punctuation of her various circumstances. You have no choice but to admire her.

The book leaves several loose ends loose. The fate of some key characters remains unresolved, and we’re also left wondering whether certain characters are heroes or villains. But that’s okay; the ambiguousness keeps you wondering when the book is over, and maybe that’s partly why you can’t get these people out of your head.

I admit, I had trouble reading the first few chapters of Rock Paper Tiger. The main issue was that I know Lisa, and since the book is written in the first person I kept hearing Lisa’s actual voice doing the narration. Ellie Cooper often speaks in sentence fragments, and she constantly appends the phrase, “I guess” to just about any thought she has. That little voice in my head kept saying, “But Lisa doesn’t talk like this!” Then, after about four chapters Lisa disappeared, Ellie took over, and I succumbed.

I always try to find something to criticize in a book I rave about in order to show “balance.” But I can’t criticize much here. Sometimes I wondered whether readers who know nothing about China might not find some of the images confusing, like a reference to someone wearing a “Cui Jian t-shirt,” and they might get thrown when they see the word “fuwuyuan” (which soon gets defined by context).  And maybe a part of me wanted all of the mysteries explained. Maybe, but not much. (The final episode of Lost last night was far more frustrating in this regard.)

But those aren’t even criticisms. Rock Paper Tiger totally rocks in every way.  It is so intense and trippy, so full of exotic images and astonishing characters who aren’t what you first believe, I kept thinking, “This is perfect material for a movie.” I hope all of you get to read it, but I hope more than anything that some producer somewhere hears about this thriller on steroids and puts it on the screen where it ultimately belongs.

And this is her first novel. I can’t imagine  anyone reading it and not thirsting for the next one.

The Peculiar Persistence of Communism in China

China is not about to collapse, democracy is not arriving in the forseeable future, censorship will continue, the CCP isn’t going away and it may still be in power generations from now.

Public Relations in China vs. the US

I’ve worked in PR in the US and China for quite a few years, and when a friend recently asked me what Chinese and American PR people can learn from one another, it got me thinking.

The approach of mainland Chinese companies to communications is quite different from that in the West. And I mean night and day. China is still learning how to implement modern communications techniques, but it is catching up.

You have to keep in mind that until 30 years ago these techniques simply weren’t relevant to the Chinese PR practitioner. Product marketing and branding were unknown concepts in China until around 1980, and so was the concept of a pro-active media. Most Chinese media served as government mouthpieces, and it’s only in the last few years that we’ve seen a shift toward independence. As part of China’s reform policy, the government has cut loose many of the media they once ran, forcing them to sink or swim on their own merits instead of depending on permanent subsidies. So finally, journalism in China is coming into its own, but it’s a slow and difficult process.  Under the circumstances, it makes sense that media relations, too, is in its relative infancy.

But that’s not to say we can’t learn anything from our Chinese counterparts. For example, I am always amazed at the ability of a good Chinese PR pro to own their media relationships. That is to say, they are wonderfully adept at building strong relationships with the reporters who cover their clients, to sensational effect. This is something that I often feel the US media relations industry has lost touch with — the “relations” part of “public relations.”

The Chinese PR experts I know are unsurpassed at cultivating relationships among the media and using this art — which the Chinese refer to as “guanxi” — to win great results for their clients. We in the West would do well to re-learn the art (really more a science) of building, fostering, maintaining and leveraging our media relationships.

As Chinese companies expand their horizons and play on the international stage, they need to adopt more of the Western communications practices, which include an emphasis on giving reporters access and information. We in the West are far more willing to badger the executive who doesn’t want to answer a question, to the point of nearly insisting that they get in front of the media and answer questions.

For cultural reasons that go far back, Chinese PR people often see high-level executive as someone they take orders from, not someone they counsel and tell what to do. In the West, good PR practitioners are always of the mind that they have two clients — the media and the actual, paying client. Reporters are a client we go far out of our way for, to get them anything and everything they want, even faster than they need it. My guiding philosophy as a PR person is that the reporter comes before anything else, right up there with my clients. I have a commitment to both.

Communications people at Chinese companies have a unique challenge: Most of their executives are uncomfortable dealing with the non-Chinese media, who ask them difficult questions and won’t simply print what they’re told. Many of these executives are used to telling the local media when they want to meet with them, and have a hard time dealing with foreign media’s requests for near-instant access. And they also can be quite evasive, preferring to push the reporter’s request over to somebody else.

This makes it so hard for the PR professional to function effectively, because they have such a hard time getting answers from those above them. Literally every Western journalist dealing with Chinese companies will tell you that getting information from communications people in China is like pulling teeth, mainly because they get no management clearance to say anything of substance. Senior management in Chinese companies tend to see PR’s role as protecting them from the media, holding pesky reporters at bay, and actually discouraging them from writing about their companies.

Chinese communicators have a lot to learn from the West because so many of them want to reach Western markets. To do this, they need to learn to provide media relations support that delights the journalist while helping the company achieve its goals. They need to learn how to force their spokespeople to be responsive and transparent. This is not an easy task, I know, especially considering how difficult it is in China to tell someone with a higher title what to do.

Chinese communications is getting better fast, and considering how far behind they were for so many years I am deeply impressed with how good many of my Chinese counterparts are. Many, however, have a lot to learn and it’s good to see that they realize this and are striving to improve.

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