How Things Collapse in China

I recently exchanged a couple of emails with a close friend and business partner over some latest happenings in China.

It all began with my friend forwarding to me a widely circulated piece (author unknown) depicting how a condo building in Shanghai toppled and fell to the ground in June of 2009.

Inevitably I brought up the building fire that killed dozens of people in November of 2010, also in Shanghai!  I then went on to try to connect the dots…

I thought it would be self-explanatory enough to just show the emails themselves to illustrate my point. So here we go:

First, the piece my friend forwarded to me:

 

In response, I brought up the building fire incident just weeks before:

Did you hear about the latest building fire in Shanghai that killed dozens of people? Folks could no longer talk about it with a tongue in cheek like the way they did with this building collapse (where purportedly no one was killed).

Sooner or later all the problems in China will get more “impactful” and “fiery”.

To which he answered: “Yes, I did hear about fire but need your insights.”

To which I replied:

In mid-November the Deputy Director of the Shanghai Housing Bureau was officially arrested on corruption charges. One of the charges had something to do with his taking bribes from the developer responsible for the collapsed building.

He in fact has been offering bribes to superiors and taking bribes from developers for years. Many of these developers used to be government officials themselves. He and the developer responsible for the collapsed building in fact came from the same county. A few of those developers had fled overseas as soon as they heard that he was under investigation. One of them fled to Singapore, but has recently returned thinking the fiasco was over. He was put under house arrest a week after the arrest of the Deputy Director.

BTW, don’t think that this was an isolated event. It happens in China every day. Multiple times.

The reason the above case was picked up by the media was simply because this happened in Shanghai, supposedly the most transparent and orderly place in China, and that the collapsed building still commands a long-lasting “impact” and thus attention in the society.

And more importantly, don’t think that the rest of the Housing Bureau staff is clean. Remember the developer who came back from Singapore thinking that the same-old, routine, once-in-a-while anti-correction shakeup was over and it was going to be business as usual and then got caught. He might have very well been right – likely from experience and possibly also advised (unfortunately this time he was ill-advised) by insiders – that is, if the building fire had not happened (on November 15, namely, mid-November) which apparently put the “heat” back on these sort of things in Shanghai again.

Likewise, don’t think that any of the government officials who are not behind bars are any better than their kind who are.

Most importantly, don’t think that there is a special breed of people in China that will behave differently than the rest of them when put in the same shoe.

It is the system.

To which he exclaimed: “Really scary!!!  Thanks for the insights.“

It’s A “Numbers Game”

You might have heard or read that certain numbers are considered lucky in the Chinese culture, especially the number “8″, and certain other numbers are not so ‘fortunate’, particularly the number “4″.

Like many other misconceptions about China (“Guanxi” being another major one, please refer to my earlier post on the topic: Guanxi Demystified), those notions are only valid in the contemporary Chinese culture (circa 1980 to the present).

The irony is, most of these presently popular cultural norms would be considered silly and uncultured at best, if not completely vulgar and demeaning, in the eyes of those familiar with and respect traditional Chinese beliefs and values.

To some extent, it would seem as though the contrast or division between the contemporary and the traditional Chinese cultural traits would resemble that between the modern-day Egypt and its glorious past readily associated with the pharaohs and pyramids, as often depicted in literature and movies.

Let’s take the numbers ”8″ and “4″ for example: while traditionally both numbers had been rather neutral, nowadays the number “8″ is considered extremely lucky simply because it sounds like the Chinese word “发”, or “fa”, a verb meaning striking it rich, and the number “4″ inauspicious simply because it sounds like the Chinese word for “death”. 

As a result, all in China today vie for phone numbers, license plates, wedding dates, street addresses, etc. with as many 8′s in them as possible.

In fact, such ”numeral favoritism” was first started by Hong Kong entrepreneurs who usually had deep southern Chinese agrarian cultural roots and who were known for their knack for turning a quick buck out of any and everything under the sun. They embraced the number “8″ (followed by “3″ which sounds like “alive” or “vigorous” in Cantonese, “9″ -> “long-lasting”, ”2″ -> “easy”, and “6″ -> “earning”) all they could and shunned the number “4″ like a plague…

As in all traditions and customs, apparently the practice made good economic sense as well –

License plates with many “8′s” in them would generate good money at auctions; Price tags would be inflated to end with an (or a combination of) 8, 88, or 888, etc. (Sounds awfully familiar to those of us who are already used to seeing $x.99 or $x99, doesn’t it?)

Real estate developers would eliminate the 4th, 13th (after all HK was a British colony until 1997), 14th, 24th…floors in highrise office or residential buildings — the incredible number and density of which have practically rendered them a collective signature landmark of HK – making an otherwise 30-story property appear to have 34 — no, strike that one out too — 35 floors, as squarely shown on the elevator panel. Hey, “35″ floors for the price of 30, isn’t that a great deal or what?! 

The practice wasn’t introduced into mainland China until the 1980′s when Hong Kong manufacturing bosses and traders started bankrolling the economic boom in the Pearl River Delta region. Initially the socio-political elites and intellectuals from the mainland would sneer at this shallow, near-superstitious silliness. But by the mid- to late-1990s, unable to resist the mighty ‘money talk’, they eventually became total converts and steadfast practitioners of such “vulgarity” of yesteryear…    

What irony — Hong Kong, a densely-moneyed island-peninsula of 7 million considered by many of its own residents a “Cultural Desert”, has been trailblazing, influencing and molding the development and formation of nearly all the present-day cultural elements (be it business or consumer, literature or music, movie or TV, food or fashion, arts or architecture, manufacturing or service…) of a nation that routinely flaunts its millennia of culture and tradition!

But seriously however, it shouldn’t be surprising, considering that China had been in fact cleansed virtually all of its cultural heritage during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s (among countless other similar but shorter ideology-purification campaigns/persecutions).

Speaking of numbers and Chinese customs, there is another frequently occurring confusion:

While words like “ten”, “hundred” and “thousand” all have their exact counterparts in Chinese, there’s none for the Chinese word for 10,000, i.e., “万” or “wan” (pronounced ‘won’). Yet the Chinese customarily record large numerals in its multiples — conceptually very similar to, but mathematically different or in contrast to, the “thousand” (i.e., “,000″, kilo or millenary) in the Western system. So 100,000 would be 10 wan, 1 million 100 wan, and 10 million 1000 wan.

But then there is another Chinese word to represent 10,000 wan, or 1 wan wan (i.e., 100 million), which is “亿”or “yi”. Again, it is conceptually similar to, but mathematically in contrast to, the “billion” in English.

As a result, numbers involving wan or yi in Chinese commercial (and often, government official) literature are often mistranslated: 100,000 in English usually gets translated as 100 wan (1 million) in Chinese; and 1 yi (100 million) is often translated as 1 billion in English.

Here is an example from the official website of a leading Chinese social networking company which has received $70M from well-known US venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital and Intel Capital. In its company introduction, they claim 178 million (1.78 yi) registered users and 440 million (4.4 yi) average daily page views in Chinese, but 1.78 billion (note it’d be greater than the entire Chinese and US populations put together!) and 4.4 billion, respectively, in English.

An honest mistake made by an inexperienced translator? Perhaps.

But with $70M one would think they could have hired the best translation talent money could buy, or at least an editor or a proofreader?

In any case, it is certainly a “convenient” mistake – 1.78 billion and 4.4 billion certainly look a lot better than 178 million and 440 million!

Either way, such negligence could easily cost the company millions (perhaps even billions, who knows) down the road. Once the company becomes a publicly listed company – an expected outcome given all that VC money, such misleading numbers could prove to be a ‘lucky break’ for securities fraud class action lawyers…  

There is perhaps a good take-home message for China-focused CEOs, HR executives and investors here: you can throw in all the money in the world, but when you don’t have the talent, you don’t have the talent.  

Which leads to another observation of mine for some time now: many home-grown Chinese companies may look very established, professional and sophisticated from the outset, but once you have engaged them you’ll realize they are more like “adolescents in adults clothing”, i.e., they may look the part and try to act the part, but they are just not quite there yet. As with everything, it is going to take time…

(To be continued)

The Children Slayers of China

A widely circulated slogan on the internet in China these days reads:

     For every wrong there is a perpetrator, and every debt a debtor.
     (If you want a good fight) the government building is on the right.

For those of you who read Chinese, the original Chinese text is ”冤有头,债有主,前面右转是政府”.

A typical example of the political satire/ euphemism commonly found in present day China where reportedly over 30,000 internet police patrol the net around the clock, the rhyming slogan has been suggested to be hung in front of every kindergarten or grade school in China.

I am obviously referring to something that is already well covered in the media: during the 51 days from March 28th through May 12th, across China 5 atrocious knife attacks (China has a strict gun-ban) targeting young children in kindergarten and primary schools took place one after another. (In addition, there were at least two more separate attacks where the perpetrators killed family members or fellow villagers including young children.)

All middle-aged men, one of the attackers set himself on fire following the atrocity and was subsequently burnt to death, and one other was heard shouting “they don’t let me live so I won’t let them live either. Let’s die together!”  

Like suicide bombers in the Middle East, they all seemed to want to make a statement with their actions.

While collectively the incidents helped, for the first time, put a spot light on a disturbing social trend with grave implications because they happened so close to each other, they were however not the first of such type of attacks where the attackers, in an attempt to inflict the maximum hurt and thus shock in the society, deliberately sought children’s blood to shed in order to revenge what had made their hearts bleed in the first place, be it grudges against others or injustice suffered.

And sadly many in China believe they won’t be the last either, for the root causes run down deep in China’s contemporary socio-politico-economic fabrics. Just consider the following fact and you will know something is terribly wrong with this society: China has the world’s highest female suicide rate. What’s more, it is higher than its male suicide rate, whereas the global male-to-female ratio is about 4:1…

But why children? 

While universally all human societies place much emphasis on children’s welfare as their collective hope and future, in China children carry another layer of significance that is quite economically driven and thus pragmatic: the country’s long-followed “One-child Policy” — firmly in place since the late 70′s — has rendered the children one of the “most precious assets” here – this being in a nation where the “yin-and-yang” of everything has been fundamentally disrupted and increasingly consumed by a “Great Leap Forward” to chase the mighty Yuan.   

Children also happen to be the most vulnerable and thus the easiest to attack (or ‘loot’).

I wrote in a previous post in March about how over a hundred children in Shanxi province reportedly either died or became retarded after receiving apparent bogus vaccines distributed by a government agency and the subsequent government cover-up/cencorship. What I did not know at the time however was that the whistle blower in the incident, a medium-ranking government public health administrator, as well as parents of victims subsequently received anonymous offers of ’silence fees’ and, as an alternative, threats of bodily harm. 

(For those who read Chinese, here is a video showing how vaccacines are marketed and sold in China http://www.56.com/p62/v_OTgyODc2OTE.html. In a nutshell, they are casually traded in online classified forums like surplus industrial inventary with no regulatory oversight and with sales people suggesting “if you are concerned about whether it is fake or not, just do not use it on your own children”).

In 2004, 171 babies with severely swollen faces were admitted into hospitals in Fuyang, Anhui Province because they had been fed what turned out to be zero-nutrition baby formula produced by unscrupulous businesses across the country. Ultimately 13 of them died. The others were believed to have had irreversible damages to their brain and organ development.   

Despite crackdowns by the government, in 2008 following the Olympics, the Chinese people learnt — due to (or perhaps rather thanks to) the pressure from the government of New Zealand – that one of the country’s leading discount baby formula (aka milk powder in Chinese) producers had been adding industrial melamine to boost its protein content reading in tests — in fact a tactic widely practiced by the whole industry in China, as it was later found. The number of infants affected was estimated to reach over 300,000, with close to 13,000 of them hospitalized and eventually 6 dying of kidney stones and other kidney damages, according to official accounts.

Following the scandal, the father of one of the victims’ was so enraged and concerned that he turned himself into an activist and started organizing other parents in making sure that justice would be served and that like incidents would not happen again in the future. He was eventually arrested and tried behind closed doors with his feet in chains — something that usually “adorns” death-row inmates, such as the former chief/deputy chief of the Justice Department/Police Force (respectively) of Chongqing who was recently sentenced to death as the “top dog” in last year’s crackdown of mafias there (please refer to my earlier post entitled “The Ancient Pigeon…”).

Also in 2008 right before the Olympics, thousands of school children died during the Sichuan earthquake when their shoddy — as partly evidenced by the skimpy steel usage revealed by the toppled buildings’ broken walls and uprooted posts – school buildings collapsed, often in the most harming way possible, i.e., with ceilings on each floor caving in. By stark contrast, most government office and residential buildings stood intact, in many cases literally next to the leveled school ones.  

So when their surviving parents’ grievances and protests were silenced and their subsequent lawsuits thrown out, in the name of social harmony (he-xie — see my previous post entitled “The Ancient Pigeon”), reportedly the only thought on some of these parents’ mind was how to get guns and explosives…

Apparently what we are seeing here is just the tip of the iceberg (for more information on this, please refer to my earlier post entitled “China Looming Large: The Next Titanic, Or Mere Sandcastle”).

—————

(The text below was added on June 2, 2010 at 9:36 pm  as a comment.) 

“And sadly many in China believe they won’t be the last either…the only thought…was how to get guns…”

Sadly these came true yesterday. And apparently the advice from the “slogan” above was well heeded, too.

On the morning of June 1st (China time), another middle-aged man – a 46-year-old Zhu Jun stormed into the courtroom in Yongzhou, Hunan Province with a light automatic rifle and started shooting at the bench, killing 3 judges and wounding 3 other court employees, before taking his own life.

Zhu was the head of the security guards at the local postal office and he reportedly had a dispute with the local court over the fairness of the judgement on asset division in his divorce case.

“Guanxi” Demystified: How it differs from our usual “Connections”?

Guanxi is perhaps one of modern day China's most mystified notions to many Westerners

This is a re-post of an old article written in 2007 to provide references to some background info on China’s recent past.

By Shawn He Yuxun
Oct. 23, 2007

You might have heard the Chinese word “Guanxi” (pronounced guan-shee, literally meaning “relationship” or “connection”) frequently touted by many a China consultants or “old China hands” who have been there and done that.

But don’t we all on this planet talk about and need “relationships” and “connections” in business? Then how is this Guanxi different from the usual “relationships” and “connections” that we know. And just how much of it is a “guarantee” for success in China, and how much of it is merely a China consulting “chic”?

Prior to the 1980s, every aspect of China’s economic life was planned, controlled, directed and operated by the government. No private ownership of any property or asset, much less profiteering for an individual or group, was allowed. The government would allocate everyone a pre-defined slice of the “big pie” (incidentally the equivalent terminology in China — where rice rules the dining table — was “Da Guo Fan” (da-gore-fun), which means “rice in a big (communal) wok”). If one wanted any more than what was allocated to him/her, he/she would have to circumvent the system and rely on another individual in charge of a particular function in that “allocation chain” to do him/her a special favor.

During those days of hyper Communist ideology control, people were obliged to sacrifice their individual interest for that of the whole society. Any act of favoritism was a serious offense not only regulatorily/legally, but also ideologically. The only people that anyone would risk their reputation, career or livelihood (and in some extreme cases even lives) to do special favors to would be those with extremely strong or solid ties or relationships (i.e., guanxi). In fact, the Chinese themselves would say the guanxi between so and so is very “Ying” (ying) — which means “hard” or “solid”, or very “Tie” (tyeh) — which literally means “iron“ or “iron-like“.

On the other hand, since all resources and assets (both tangible and intangible) belonged to the government and not any individual or group, there was never a nominal economic cost/value (i.e., price) on the transactions associated with those acts of favor, nor could they be monetarily bought or sold. Effectively a “barter“ system was created in which anyone could leverage whatever resource or asset within their power or control to “barter” for a return favor from another individual in the future. And this “barter” system only functioned within those transaction parties’ “iron guanxi” network, or Guanxi (note that I use the bold font to emphasize that this is not your average relationship — i.e., guanxi in its normal, literal sense — that we are talking about), so as to minimize “credit” risks (i.e., betrayal, rip-off, and/or exposure.)

Back then, when people sought such Guanxi in a hurry, they would say I need to “pull some relationships“, or in Chinese, “La Guanxi”, pronounced la-guan-shee. (Funny how Americans would say I need to “pull strings” in a very similar fashion). Because you could never practically “develop” such a relationship or guanxi in a short time — This was an exceptional type of relationship that only existed among close relatives, friends and associates, or generally speaking, a closely-knit group of people who are mutually dependent.

For obvious reasons, at the time “La Guanxi” was always coupled, and almost synonymous, with “Zou Houmen“ (zoe-hoe-mun) which literally means “entering through the backdoor“.

In the Western world, having the right relationships or connections, while very important, is usuallly not a sufficient, nor in some situations necessary, condition for someone to accomplish a business objective. You’d need to have sound business fundamentals first. Good relationships and connections only serve to facilitate a transaction that makes good business sense in the first place.

It is perhaps fair to say that in the business environment that we are familiar with, relationships and connections (i.e., normal guanxi) only play a secondary role, except in some extraordinary cases. (And it is in these exceptions that you’d most likely find Guanxi, in the Chinese sense, at play.)

When China first embarked on its economic reform and opening policies in the late 70′s, since there was no pre-existing market-driven system to guide the economic flow and since most of the transactional entities were state-owned, things were carried out predominantly over this Guanxi-based system since that was the only proven means for one economic entity, be it an individiual or a company, to reach out to another that had not been its normal point of contact under the old, “by-government-mandate-only” system.

So by and large throughout the 80′s and most of the 90′s, having Guanxi this “ultra-relationship” or “super-connection“ ALONE had proven to be a sufficient, and in many cases also necessary, condition to get something done, regardless of the fundamentals. With Guanxi, a completely unqualified and incompetent person could land a very important job and/or position. Also with Guanxi, a company with no track record whatsoever could be awarded massive contracts. You get the point…

As the economy becomes more and more marketized / privatized and competitive, the value and effectiveness of the Guanxi system has also greatly deterioriated. In industries that have been substantially deregulated / privatized or where there is much competition, business is business, and Guanxi has been neutralized / marginalized to resemble just what relationships and connections are like in the Western world.

When commenting on the subject during an AeA event co-sponsored by MeetChinaBiz in July, 2007, Greg Shea, president of Beijing-based U.S. Information Technology Office (USITO), a US advocacy group for the ICT industry (a fairly deregulated and fiercely competitive one participated by all players around the world), said: “Don’t let those consultants scare you into thinking you’d still need Guanxi to play in that market nowadays. It is bollocks, bollocks, bollocks, as the British would say…”

If Guanxi in its true, original sense (where a phone call or a note from a VIP would land a person or a company an otherwise impossible permission or deal) still exists today, it would only exist in highly controlled or non-transparent sectors, at very high levels and behind closed doors — i.e., not easily accessible to the average business people and consultants that crowd the busy China scene of today.

From Guinness Records to Guinea Pig

China seems to have the potential to set a Guinness world record to be the country that possesses the greatest number of Guinness world records.

Both unintentionally and willfully, that is.

When you have a population of 1.5 billion (well, the official figure has been kept at 1.3 bn for a decade, which like many of its other stats is a myth given that the country has an annual growth rate of above 1% according to Columbia University), imagine the odds of any potential genetic permutations!

Hence it shouldn’t be a surprise if China ever claims the ‘ownership’ of such world records as the tallest or the shortest man/woman and the like. By the same token, the country should also have the greatest odds to claim most of the medals in sporting events around the world.

So the results from Beijing 2008 Olympics were really long over due. And it SHOULD be a surprise that China doesn’t have the world’s largest economy. 

As if the penchant for world records were in their blood, Chinese politicians (especially the local ones) and businessmen are all fond of creating one nowadays.

China is simply sick and tired of being the “Sick Man of Asia” or the “Sleeping Giant” of the past century. Being the biggest and tallest is in vogue. Getting noticed by the world is popular.

A lot of this world record stuff usually contributes to the local GDP — think buildings and structures! – and GDP growth (at any expense, that is) would earn local officials stripes and promotions. As far as constructions go, the heart of the matter usually has less to do with genes than “jinzi” (Chinese term for gold) because corrupted government officials (are there any left who are not?) routinely get handsome kickbacks from land sales and contracts. (Now you should understand why the housing prices keep peaking despite the government’s repeated threatening crack-down talks).

Just the other day I was surprised (I shouldn’t have been, should I) to read that China today has also become the No. 1 venue for world’s preclinical and clinical trials thanks to its immense population, and of course, the various implications from such.

I quote: “The status of China as a key player for conducting preclinical and clinical trials has strengthened…due to an ever growing labour pool available to support clinical trials…As lifestyles change and the population ages we are seeing a subsequent increase in western diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular issues…Inevitably China’s huge population can provide faster patient recruitment and the large percentage of patients without health insurance motivates high participation and patient retention.”

Sounds like China is not only fast becoming the “guinea pig” for pharmaceutical and medical equipment companies around the world, it is also fast becoming the “Sick Man of Asia” again, both metaphorically and literally this time.

The Ancient Pigeon: A Tribute to Google’s Brief Existence

Over the weekend, China’s netizens were suddenly mesmerized by yet another mythical animal “born” to defy the mighty “fence” known as the Great Firewall (GFW) of China — the ancient pigeon, or “Gu-ge” in Chinese.

For those who don’t know Chinese, read pinyin or know the Chinese name for Google, Gu-ge (pronounced ‘goo-ga’) is also how Google’s Chinese name is pronounced. So “the ancient pigeon” and Google are really homophones in Chinese.

In fact, the extra intrigue was that this ferocious ‘animal’ was actually unleashed in a satire-style article published by a rather prominent official newspaper, the Chongqing Evening Paper.

The current leader of Chongqing, one of China’s 4 centrally administrated cities (Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin are the other 3) that enjoy the status of a province, is BO Xilai, a fast-rising political star who is particularly popular nowadays thanks to his recent cracking down on what was dubbed by the official media as “organized crimes/mafias” in the city (which resulted in the arrest of over a thousand police personnel including their deputy chief who was also the chief of the city’s justice department).

This New York Times article sheds much light into the intricacies of these mythical animals which also include the now widely renowned Grass Mud Horse (Cao-ni-ma) and River Crab (He-xie) among others.

China Looming Large: The Next Titanic, Or A Mere Sandcastle?

It seems the question that begs to be answered is not if a major social turmoil will occur, but when.

Both inside and outside China, politicians, economists and financiers are busy trying to deal with China’s problems.

The recently held 3^rd Session of the 11^th People’s Congress passed scrupulous resolutions to tackle run-away housing prices and the rotten healthcare system, among many other issues.

The day following the adjournment of the congress, Beijing residents were greeted with new record-setting housing prices.

And in the week that followed, the biggest news seemed to be a scandal in which over a hundred children (Sigh… children again – recall the principal casualties during the 2008 Sichuan quake as well as the victims of the poisoned milk powder incident) in Shanxi province either died or became retarded after receiving apparent bogus vaccines distributed by a government agency AND how the government continued to try to shun responsibilities and cover it up to date…

In the mean time, the West is painstakingly trying to fix the valuation of the Chinese currency RMB and other matters of trade or diplomatic technicality.

To me, they all seem to be just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Are they simply pretending or they are in total oblivion to a potentially much grimmer reality of China beneath the surface?

Due to vast social and legal injustice as well as economic unfairness and inequality throughout China today (the situations of which are continuing to worsen by the day), public anger and hatred toward the country’s corrupt-to-the-core government officials and their cronies and/or accomplices in the commercial world have risen to such levels that, during the last several years, not a single day would pass in China without hundreds of mass protests or riots around the country, many extremely violent and involving casualties as well as large numbers of security forces.

Professor YU Zhengrong, Director of Social Studies Center at the China Social Science Academy Rural Institute and an authoritative figure in China’s social issues, detailed a worrying trend of escalating social unrest in a speech he gave to a crowd of Beijing lawyers in Dec of 2009. He used to hold the view that although the Chinese society was rife with problems, yet it was generally stable and the chances for serious upheavals were rather remote. He in fact shed much light into why the regime was able to defy time and again many Western scholars’ China collapsing predictions.

But having spoken to many newly retired high-ranking officials of late, he started having doubts. There seems to be a consensus among many elites of the establishment that a major social turmoil will be inevitable. The question is not if, but when.

Each year more and more laid-off factory workers and land-deprived peasant farmers become aware of their rights. As a result they become more and more organized. The situation reminds me not only of the days when the Chinese Communists were trying to seize power from the Nationalists (GMT), but somehow also of pre-French Revolution Europe. In fact, to me the underlying similarities are striking.

Just days ago a ‘controversial’ blog surfaced in China and spread instantly to many popular blog sites and chatrooms, generating numerous hits and responses. (Although they would usually get picked up and removed by the government censorship very quickly).

Basically a black humor piece written in an extremely sarcastic manner, the author confessed that if the US invaded China, he would surrender immediately and even be a guide for the US military. The reason? The author argued that his lord never treated him like a human being. He was simply his lord’s ruling subject and would live his life as such, that is, he would give up his dignity but not his life to his lord. If his lord’s dynasty were suddenly endangered and his lord asked him to act like a man and fulfill a man’s duty, he would say to his lord: “Why didn’t you earlier, your highness? Sorry, but now I am not going to serve you any more”.

If one were to view the reader comments as a “quasi survey”, the majority echoed the author’s feelings. Many wished for the day to arrive soon. Some even indicated that they, like the author, would be happy to either join or assist the US military.

Perhaps one should not readily accept these wishful daydreams at its face value. Sarcasm and near-paranoid venting notwithstanding, however, like the tip of the iceberg the article did ‘betray’ some deeper truth about the current state of the Chinese psyche.

(Apparently appreciating the RMB would force more Chinese out of a job and into the “rebellion camp” as illustrated above. The government should know that well).

A Necessary Condition For the “Chinese Century”

Will the 21st century be the “Chinese Century”? I believe the answer is very likely, but far from certain. (And perhaps I should add that that prospect is dimming by the day within the confines of the status quo, too.)

Think of it — who in 1910 would have thought without a doubt that a Pax Americana era was coming?

China as a whole possesses many “necessary conditions”, although none sufficent, for that notion to become a fact. One of them is, perhaps most strikingly, its people. The sheer size of its number, to be exact!

With a billion and half bodies living, moving and consuming everyday, development and growth – especially starting from a small base – of all kinds in a human society would be a GIVEN, like spring hitting a winter-ravaged but fertile field. In fact it would take a genius to prevent that from happening! (Unfortunately there was one in recent history. And to me he was indeed a genius in many regards – no joking intended. But that would be a different topic so I would not elaborate here.)

But one of the key — and probably the most important — prerequisites that the present day China is gravely lacking also happens to be people — a special group of them: people in leadership roles who have both the mental capacity as well as skill sets to inspire and appeal to the entire world.

While progress along this line has been evident in recent years, the performance of the current Chinese elites, political or socio-economical, during the country’s latest round of policy/legislative summit gatherings – namely, “The Two Conferences” or “Liang Hui”, pronounced leon-hui in Chinese (which consisted of the Political Consultative Conference and the People’s Congress) – had been predictably boring, if not outright disappointing. That is, even by the standard of the Chinese masses who are already well accustomed to authoritarian rule.

Now try imagine how the rest of the world would view them (much less be inspired and motivated by them)…