Guanxi I spent my childhood, a dismaying number of years ago, in an unlikely part of California known as Hollywood. My mother was a gossip columnist there, reporting on the lives and scandalous activities of the movie stars -- an odd thing, admittedly, for one's mother to do, but as children, none of us have a great deal of choice about these matters. I mention my distant Hollywood past because it has given me a unique perspective on some aspects of Chinese life that many Westerners find irritating and mysterious. Take the subject of personal relationships. I have heard a number of Westerners complain that it is impossible to separate what is friendship and what is business in China, and that the local people they meet are always looking for some advantage from their association with a foreigner. I had a conversation with a Swiss student on a train recently who was very bitter about this fact. He griped that every Chinese person who came up to him with a smile was in fact only trying to get something out of him -- to practice English, or get help securing a travel visa, or a job in a joint-venture, or some other unspecified gain. But the point was, the smiles weren't real and it bothered him. He pronounced heatedly that it was impossible to have a true friendship here. Incredible! If I closed my eyes and imagined Rolls Royces outside the train window instead of water buffalo, the Swiss student could have been talking about Beverly Hills! In Hollywood, like China, personal relationships are of supreme importance, and you simply can get no place without them. In Hollywood, every party you attend, every person you meet, often even your marriages and affairs -- they are all part of the general business flow in which everyone is doing their best to ingratiate themselves upward on the ladder of success, and grant occasional patronage to those flattering, kow-towing souls below. In this matter, China is probably a far nicer place than Hollywood, where your social position can plummet with momentary failure and people who have pretended to be your bosom buddy only last week, now will not bother to return your phone calls. "In Hollywood, you are only as good as your last movie," was an adage I grew up with. Of course in China (as in Show Biz), it is fairly easy to spot the phonies once you get a feeling for the way things work. As for myself, I went through several stages of adaption to Chinese life that are probably fairly typical for a new arrival. At first I thought, my God! The Chinese are the friendliest people on earth! Everyone is smiling at me all the time! Then I went through a period of disillusionment when I understood that the local people are extremely adept in the art of ingratiating themselves and that few of these smiles were "real." Finally I understood that life here is probably the same as most places, and that true friends are a rarity everywhere, and to be valued as such. My wife and I have indeed found real friends here; only a few, perhaps, but that is why we treasure them. Like Hollywood, China is a place where who you know is everything. In California, the word is "networking"; here it is "guanxi" -- the personal relationships you form, the web of friends, relatives, and people you must be nice to in order to get ahead. There is an unpleasant side of this, of course. I know a very clever and hard-working young man, for example, who is about to graduate from a university and has been having no luck finding a decent job. He is fluent in Chinese, English, and Japanese and it should be a cinch for him to find work -- except he comes from a poor family in the countryside and he has no connections. The first thing a Western business person must do in China is make "guanxi" with the right people who can help him or her get ahead. This can be a tricky matter. Horror stories abound in Beijing of foreign business people meeting the wrong people when they first arrive, locals who (because of their own upward aspirations) pretend they can help, but in fact cannot. The nightmare is to spend a ton of money on what you think is a solid foundation for setting up a business here, only to discover that you have no permits, no approval, nothing at all. How can you make the right "guanxi" -- meet, that is, Chinese with enough connections of their own so that they can get the necessary wheels moving? Experts I have talked with suggest the need to hire a consultant, someone who has been in this country for a while and is thoroughly knowledgeable in the seemingly inscrutable flux and flow of Chinese ways. But if you get stuck trying to figure it all out, don't get angry. Someone -- an old pal of mine, actually, named Shakespeare who has scored a number of box office hits recently -- said life was just a movie anyway, and all the people only actors and actresses strutting about. So forget you are in Beijing, pretend that you are in Beverly Hills, and the ways of China will be suddenly clear! Next week: "Face" From the Editor in Chief: If you have some travel or work experience in China to share with us, we will be very excited to hear from you! Send your feedback by e-mail or regular mail to ASM Overseas Corporation. Thank you! And if you liked this column, please check Expats In China (International Community in China) for more interesting and useful information on life in China as a foreigner, including calendar of events, entertainment, housing, employment, classifieds, personal, etc. |
