Why China is both Right and Wrong

Tags

Beijing, Censorship, china, Green Technology, Pollution, Travel

This story that’s running in the Guardian newspaper today, isn’t particularly surprising. The Chinese government is having a major rant about the US Embassy publishing Chinese pollution data. Why? Because the Beijing government’s own figures are pure fantasy, so when the Americans allow the truth to come to light – the officials of BJ, lose face.

Welcome to Beijing, please check your lungs at the airport – you’ll barely miss them anyway.

Thus it comes down to those same officials bleating about how it’s nobody else’s business that walking through Beijing for a few hours is equivalent to taking up smoking 24/7 for the rest of your life. Once they realise this is a pretty stupid point – and they always do, the officials then flounder around looking for another, better excuse.

So here it is at the bottom of the article; “It’s not fair to judge us by developed nation standards.” (That’s my paraphrase so the Guardian don’t come asking for royalties).

This is indeed a much better excuse. They’re right. It isn’t fair or reasonable to expect developing nations to conform to standards set in other nations. It gets boring when outside observers demand that nations, which have been operating for 30-40 years in an industrial age, should immediately conform to standards we ourselves don’t meet.

Having said that, it’s not unreasonable to expect those nations to share accurate data. That’s where the Chinese government keeps getting it wrong. It should robustly defend the nation’s right to develop. It should also be happy with sharing the smog figures from Beijing. It can then point to the real steps it’s been taking to make them better.

Traffic calming? You betcha. There’s a limit on the number of registrations of new vehicles on Beijing’s roads each year. In the long run (it’s not a policy that will have immediate impact) that will get vehicles off the roads, and ensure that new vehicles are all of the highest environmental standards.

Going green? Absolutely, you’ve got a target of 100,000 electric cars on the streets in the next 3 years. There’s a pretty reasonable subsidy for buying one and the government will throw in a registration that you might not get for a fossil fuel vehicle.

Don’t forget the investments in solar, wind, nuclear, geo-thermal and hydro-power. Or the ambitious push to implement LED (partly driven by a need to subsidise a ridiculously over developed sector in China) in all public buildings, etc.

And don’t tell me that cool stuff like this energy efficient solar powered building isn’t worth bragging about. Because it is. If I owned this, I’d want to stand outside of it all day looking at it. Whilst rubbing my hands together saying; “Mine! All mine!” and laughing maniacally.

That’s what Beijing needs to do to silence its critics. It needs to publish the data – after all un-polluting the country will take time, and it needs to talk about what it’s doing to fix it. Every official in China recognizes the impending environmental disaster facing the nation, it’s a matter of national policy. So why the embarrassment and tub thumping? Possibly because self-deception is a matter of habit that becomes more and more difficult not to drag out on every occasion.

By the way, I’m taking a small drift away from Gender for a couple of days. This is mainly because the next part of the series is a tad irreverent and it doesn’t seem appropriate to follow a piece on suicide with a bag of wisecracks on a similar subject.

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First Impressions of Beijing – Part Seven

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Beijing, china, China Southern, Great Wall, Shangri La, Shenzhen, Travel

I can't let a mention of the great wall go by without using this image can I? Brought to you courtesy of the (shameless) Shards of China self-promotion team, who is very pleased with himself for slotting this in today as there will be a blog round up tomorrow that can use it all over again!

I’d like to tell you about Tiananmen Square and Chairman Mao’s final resting place, I’d also like to tell you about how spectacular the great wall was – but I can’t. That’s because as with pretty much everything else that week our “free day” was not to be. It wasn’t spent in any particularly productive manner but I think our hosts had twigged that once we left we weren’t coming back and they wanted to milk us for every last drop of useful data they could.

Not that it matters really, I didn’t see that much of Beijing but I very much liked the city. It might not be as modern as Shenzhen, though to be fair the CBD is pretty modern (and slightly empty – I think it might be too expensive to attract investment from Chinese firms keen on keeping cash in the bank where it belongs).

There was a time, many years ago, when I was intimidated by posh hotels - that's because I'm the archetypal heavy metal fan, long hair, unshaven and loud (and occasionally offensive) t-shirt to go with it. They take a dim view of "my sort" in many British hotels, in the rest of the world - they don't care as long as you can buy a drink at the bar (and that's much cheaper than back home). The Shangri-La in Beijing is very good, but avoid the one in Shenzhen like the plague - it's the worst hotel I have ever had the misfortune to spend time in. I'm not making it up when I say they have a happy hour they hide from their guests - even those that are staying in the hotel rooms. I've never known anything like it, I keep expecting John Cleese to start blathering about hamsters and the bubonic plague. In fact I think the furniture might have caught that...

The only other place we visited outside of Sanlitun that might be of interest to the traveler was the Shangri La in the CBD (near the world trade center). Unlike its counterpart in Shenzhen (at least the one in Louhu which is a dump) it was a fantastic hotel. We got there early in the evening, were greeted by servers who weren’t just beautiful but spoke English and managed to get us a drink in less than an hour.

The happy hour was extended to everybody (in Louhu it’s a dirty secret only shared once the hotel has finished draining your wallet dry for say 6 months) and well-advertised. I have to confess that the ambiance of the downstairs bar was so-so, but that’s OK it meant we could focus our attention on watching the lovely waitresses instead. The only downside of the evening is that in common with many places in Asia there were no toilet facilities in the bar and it meant a hike halfway across the hotel to relieve an aching bladder.

We returned to the airport in the same manner we arrived, with my knees in my nostrils in the back of a Range Rover. I was sorry to leave, I liked the cold weather (Beijing’s not humid so it’s a dry cold that I find quite agreeable) and the friendliness of the city. The people of Beijing are fabulous, I found them so much more welcoming than their cousins in the South of China and I’d be happy to return to Beijing one day for a longer stay and a tourist’s eye view.

On the subject of tourism – most of the time when I travel – I’m not a tourist. I get sent to work all over the world, and much of the time it’s just that – work. I do enjoy being a tourist and I travel frequently in my spare time too, but it’s only when time allows on work trips that I head in to tourist mode.

One of the folks who commented on a piece in this series was outraged that we’d gone to the tourist trap of Sanlitun rather than “slumming it” in a working class Chinese district instead. I rather think he’s got the wrong end of the stick. I’m not a temporary visitor in China who’s searching for an authentic local experience – I live that life every day here in Shenzhen. When I get a little trip away from the day-to-day details of my life, I want to be a foreigner – gloriously unashamed of my desire for a bacon and egg sandwich for breakfast and a pint of lager accompanied by rock music in the evening.

Credit where credit's due. China Southern did a good job of getting us there and back. If somebody could give the purchasing department a nudge and point out that 4 tiny cans of beers is not enough for one big plane - that would be great too.

I got to do just that in Beijing and I think that’s part of the reason I liked it so much. I think it’s the reason I’d like to go back too. Sometimes you get tired of noodles and green tea, well at least I do.

The flight home was gloriously uneventful and despite a slight delay at the airport (less than an hour) it was a good journey with China Southern (I’m told we were lucky – but I’m yet to have a disaster experience flying around China), though they still had no beer (we can’t be the only people in China to want lager rather than Baijou on a flight can we?).  The only sad thing about it was returning to Shenzhen, a city that I don’t like anywhere near as much as the one I’d just left behind.

First Impressions of Beijing – Part Six

Tags

Beijing, Beijing Duck, china, First Impressions, Naked Fat Man, Shower, Travel

It’s 9.30 in the morning and I am waving my genitals at an office building in Beijing, and possibly leaving people with lifetime issues regarding fat naked Westerners to boot. Why? Because they lied again – on returning home to the hideous flat we still have no hot water or flushing loos (I have already taken my revenge for this and flooded the bathroom for a second time the day before).

This is of course not me - it's Christopher Hitchens the famous dead atheist. I didn't take a camera in to the shower and even if I had, you wouldn't be able to see much except my belly...

I can’t stand going a day without washing, and two is too many to cope with. So I’ve taken my (as yet unused) towel, shampoo and shower gel to the office. Where thankfully somebody has already cleaned up yesterday’s tidal wave of waste. The good news is the shower works, the bad news is that one side is a bloody great window to the open world and there’s no frosting on the glass or curtain to cover it with.

This isn’t as distressing to me as it will prove to my chum 30 minutes later – I paid my way through university by getting my kit off for art classes. It was 20 pounds an hour tax free, and that beats working in McD’s hands down. So I have absolutely no shame about flaunting my gargantuan frame in front of tens of thousands of Beijingers if it means I can have clean hair again. And it does – though the water pressure leaves something to be desired, I have seen small children dribble more profusely than this shower does.

An hour later I am considerably cleaner and nicer smelling – it’s really only Westerners that consider deodorant an essential in China but I like it that way. It saves on having the armpit covers of your shirt collapsing in a yellow acidic gloop.  It may also offer others scant consolation from my cigarette and coffee soaked breath.

We’re now discussing staffing plans and I’m trying to assert the importance of a financial controller before the GM hires another 150 useless plonkers. This is cutting reasonable sway with the 2 managers and the owner, but the GM isn’t happy at all. After all if we start hiring competent people he’s going to look even stupider than he does now.  As I’ve already decided that this isn’t going to work out long-term I’m not quite as pushy as I would normally be, but I do enjoy baiting him so it goes on a little longer than he’d of liked.

These are ducks but they're not Beijing ducks - which aren't served with hoisin sauce in Beijing either.

My business partner and I are keen to at least get one day off this week and go exploring Beijing’s touristy stuff and this too is promised (and again not delivered – there’s a pattern here somewhere – it looks like China). So we drag our way through the day contributing reasonably well to all the discussions in hand and then it’s off out to eat.

Tonight we’ll be spared the whole group and it will be just our 2 colleagues from Shenzhen who will join us. They’re taking us for Beijing Duck (the one and only time I have seen this wonderful food in China – Shenzhen just doesn’t have it) and the food is awesome. I am even presented with a little card so I can log onto the Internet and watch my duck grow up and then get slaughtered, should I so desire to do so.

Beijing Duck is always served with the skin separate from the duck itself. This is because it's particularly scrummy - and enables weedy Westerners to refuse to it - not me though I love it.

The other guys start the conversation; “The GM’s useless isn’t he?” This is a major deal – it’s not like the Chinese to come out with such blunt assessments. I agree and ask what possessed them to hire a guy whose achievements in life so far include running every business he’s ever been associated with into the ground. They tell me it’s because he cried at the interview. I tell them this is a rubbish reason to give him a job.

They tell me they want to fire him, I volunteer to do it – mainly because I’ve done it many times before (obviously not to this guy – or he would have left screaming the day I’d arrived) and because somebody has to do it. They tell me that it might not matter as the investor thinks they’re idiots too and is probably going to take his money out of the business anyway. In which case they’ll be moving back to Shenzhen.

I resist the urge to strangle them as obviously this seals the “we’re not staying here” part of our deal anyway…

First Impressions of Beijing – Part Five

Tags

Beijing, Business, Chairman Mao, Chicken Soup, china, chinese, Sales Forecast, Travel

After a great night out in Sanlitun, we return to our miserable flat. It’s now that we discover for the first time that the loos won’t flush – and that we have no hot water. We grumble and head off to bed. In the morning we awake and of course nothing has magically changed overnight so we head into the office somewhat stinkier than we’d like to be.

Bacon in China tends to be a game of "spot the tiny bits of meat amid the fat" - I actually don't mind too much, my arteries probably do though.

We start in Subway and have what purports to be a bacon buttie for breakfast but of course this is China and the bacon is more like angry fatty ham instead.

Back in the office it’s time for round two, and ding-ding they’re off – my chum is already having a complete go about the state of the apartment, they take my key and promise to have everything fixed by the time we go back this evening.

Today we won’t be able to get into the board room until after lunch as the GM is interviewing yet another member of staff. We take one look at the measly desks and decide to go and “work” from a coffee shop instead. By now we’ve pretty much decided we won’t be taking a job with these clowns – so our morning task is to locate espresso and savor it. I half-heartedly complete the plan for the car show – for which later I will receive inane praise along the lines of; “Given your lack of experience in the car trade – how did you know that during a week long show, where millions of people will place their grubby paws on the body work, that the cars would need cleaning? Good work!”

When we return to the office the GM is still interviewing the poor sap (who has come for an admin post that doesn’t need filling) and all I can assume is that he’s making sure that the guy can grovel properly after his pasting from the previous day.

In the afternoon we all get together for a report of my partner’s trip of the day before, a quick summary is; “You’ve got to be joking – people expect multi-million RMB vehicles to be looked after -not parked in a 2,000 RMB a month building site rental slot.”

My graphics are never this good - and in this case I didn't use graphics - adding new dealers at quarterly intervals and pretending that they'll consistently hit targets is pretty easy to read straight from a table of figures. It's the kind of prediction that I'd throw someone out of my office for giving me (I like best case - worst case - probable scenarios at a minimum) but it did the trick in Beijing, where I don't think business planning was a skill they'd considered.

Then it’s on to the sales forecast – my job – I present a simple Excel extrapolation based on the figures supplied by Germany, and our Chinese colleagues fall over themselves with excitement. You would think this was rocket science rather than copying some numbers out of the license agreement. After a big round of applause for me, it’s time for us all to face the occasion I’ve been dreading since we got there – the obligatory Chinese communal dinner.

So off we head to a restaurant that everyone claims used to be frequented by Chairman Mao but which is clearly in a building that is less than five years old. Despite this (and my fears) the food is pretty good and what is supposed to be the “great leader’s favorite soup” is absolutely excellent, it is the one and only time in China that I’ve really enjoyed a chicken broth. Sadly there’s no Tsing Tao and we have to make do with a too sweet local brew that I’ve already forgotten the name of.

Of course Chairman Mao almost certainly never ate in our restaurant but credit where credit's due - his chicken was good, I didn't ask if they'd been saving it for him, because they might just have been...

It’s not really done to talk about business over dinner here (thank goodness) so instead we squeeze out a few pleasantries, while everyone gangs up on me and keeps repeating; “You really must learn to speak Chinese.” I’m half tempted to point out that based on the evidence before me – everyone in the room who can speak Chinese can’t manage their way out of a paper bag, and I’m worried that it might be the language that damaged their brains. But I don’t – because even I’m not that rude, particularly when I haven’t been given a plane ticket to get home yet.

The GM arrives late and makes a big show of squeezing himself between me and the investor. Between bouts of bottom kissing for the boss, he tries to convince me that he’s not as crap as he clearly is. This is an impossible task and I smile politely whilst consigning everything he says straight to the circular file in my head.

After a couple of hours everyone’s making their excuses to go home, and my friend and I can finally get back to the serious business of getting drunk in Sanlitun. More tomorrow…

First Impressions of Beijing – Part Four

Tags

Bar Street, Beijing, Child Pickpockets, china, Sanlitun, Strip Shows, Travel

The Apple store in Beijing is famous for rioting crowds, they look peaceful enough here. But on the day the iPhone 4S didn't launch in Beijing - hundreds of touts fought pitched battles outside. When we visited it was busy but not ridiculous. I'd like to point out I don't endorse Apple products - I hate the iPod I bought, and regularly ridicule the iPhone and iPad for their extraordinary crapness - no matter what their users say.

We head off to Sanlitun by taxi and the good news is that it’s not too far away. We’re dropped off outside a shopping center with Beijing’s only genuine Apple store in it, and we decide to take a wander before choosing our bar stool for the evening.

The first thing that becomes enormously clear is that the district is geared for fleecing unsuspecting tourists. Child pickpockets abound – it’s easy to spot if you know it might happen, it involves mum or dad distracting you while their nipper gently moves round to your blind side to help themselves from your bag or pocket.

My prevention technique for this is simple, a thumb in the top of my pocket blocks my wallet and I have a handle on the top of my backpack – so I can hold it in front of me and move it gently from side to side (ensuring that it will smack any grasping hand away without damaging the child). My chum doesn’t carry a bag of an evening so he has it easier. We exchange some rude words in Chinese with the thieves and hurry on down the road.

Only to be greeted by two gentlemen who want us to accompany them to a strip show. This won’t be happening – firstly because I don’t like strip shows (really – I find it hard to understand how anybody finds them arousing). And secondly because they’re absolutely illegal in China and if there really were a strip show you wouldn’t be shouting about it at the top of your lungs in a tourist district.

In the day the whole area is quiet enough and jolly pleasant - you could take your mum there and she'd like it too. At night however it gets quite a bit rowdier - and I loved it for that.

I suspect it’s a variation of the old tourist scam in Soho (London) – where you end up in a club with an ugly old lady in a bathing costume paying $700 a glass for her “champagne” (fizzy apple juice) and there’s no chance of her ever getting naked. When you try to leave – you get presented with the bill and almost die. An Indian friend of mine got fleeced like this and it cost him nearly a thousand pounds to get away.

However brushing these two incidents aside – I like Sanlitun. It’s like a proper bar area, where pubs serve a variety of cold drinks at reasonable prices. There’s music that doesn’t sound like a cat being strangled (Did I mention I don’t love Chinese pop music? Well I don’t.). You’ll find plenty of live bands that actually seem to know something other than “Hotel California” (a song I once loved – but have heard so many times since moving to Asia that I would now rather listen to the sounds of my hand being inserted in a blender).

We settle down in a little back street place where the barman speaks perfect English – and I nearly die in shock when I find out he’s self-taught and has never been to an English speaking nation. He sounds like a cast member from East Enders. This guy talks us through the area, recommends eating there the following night when everything is half price and brings us two ice cold pints of Tsing Tao for less than a cost of a small bottle of the stuff in a bar in Shenzhen.

It's normally busier than this at night - but it makes for a lovely photo doesn't it? With a bit of luck one day Shenzhen will catch on to the idea that it might be nice to provide somewhere you'd enjoy going at night. But I won't hold my breath as I suspect I'd turn blue and die long before anyone considers it.

Actually compared to Shenzhen’s paucity of entertainment options Sanlitun is amazing. We will return every evening and marvel at the friendliness of the different bars, the cleanliness of them, the quality of the food, the reasonable pricing and their dedication to customer service and drinks that taste like they should. Better still none of this will be conducted to the rattle of Shenzhen’s ever present dice cups.

After a lousy start to the week Sanlitun has perked both of us up enormously and we stay out late – bar hopping and avoiding the flat. Where our next nasty surprise awaits… tomorrow.

First Impressions of Beijing – Part Three

Tags

Audi, Beijing, china, Crashed Car, First Impressions, Range Rover, Squalid Apartment, Travel

The Shanghai Car Show is one of the world's biggest auto events - it happens every two years, alternating turns with Beijing. It's obligatory to hire pretty girls to stand around the cars - and this was the main focus of the current plan before I came along which could be neatly summarised as; "Get hot chicks."

The rest of the afternoon passed uneventfully for me, which is something that tends to happen when I’m on my own. It took four hours to develop a plan for the first exhibition at the Shanghai Car Show as well as a sales forecast that might keep Germany happy. The rest of the time was spent wandering around the little cafes at the base of the building and staring out at the view from the window.

My business partner wasn’t so lucky; on his tour of sites the general manager had once again proved his inability to do anything useful. They were visiting an Audi service center when his inexperience with the boss’s Range Rover came to the forefront and he drove it into a freshly repaired car outside the center. The people who ran the place were pretty calm about it, and advised they could fix the damage “off book” for 200 RMB, no need for insurers, etc. and then both owners would be none the wiser.

Fortunately the damage wasn't as severe as for Mario Balotelli's car which he smashed up shortly after buying it - though as he makes nearly 10 million pounds a year after tax, he probably wasn't all that bothered.

Any sane human being would have leapt at this offer, but not our GM – who insisted that because the boss’s car was insured he wanted to use that instead. The bill immediately went up by thousands of RMB. And my chum was trapped on some industrial wasteland for nearly 2 hours waiting for all the paperwork to be completed. Then there was the small matter of informing the boss that the GM had damaged his car…

When they got back to the office all we wanted to do was head out to our “new” apartment and chill out. It was a straight forward drive (even in rush hour) and 20 minutes later we were in the drabbest neighborhood I have ever had the misfortune to spend time in. Our building was one of 40 identical buildings; there was nothing on the outside of any of them to distinguish them from each other.

We were also isolated from any amenities whatsoever – no metro stop within walking distance, no cafes, no pubs, no bars, no restaurants, nothing except for a grotty little shop under the building. This shop specialized in not selling anything you’d want to buy and a quick scan of the shelves revealed everything to be at least 1 year past sell by date. This didn’t stop us from picking up a couple of beers to dampen down the shock of the remoteness of our lodgings.

Then it was up in the dodgy (it was swaying ominously from side to side) elevator and into our “luxury apartment”. Well I’ve stayed in some complete dumps in my life, but nothing that held a candle to this place. Each of the rooms had been decorated by someone who must have suffered from total color blindness, reds, yellows, blues, pinks, greens and browns clashed on every single wall and surface.

They’d neglected to provide any bedding or towels, so the driver was quickly dispatched to sort this out. What we didn’t know, and wouldn’t find out until much later that evening was that there was also no water supply to the toilets (to continue the lavatorial theme) and no hot water supply at all. For this we would require a gas payment card and some credit – and we had no card, and no ****ing clue that we needed one.

OK it could have been worse like this place in Norway - but it was a pretty squalid apartment, and though I took a lot of photos of the insides - I can't find them now.

The first bedroom was adequately spacious with a decent sized double bed; however the second was slightly smaller than a prison cell and came with a bed that would be well suited for a cast member from Willow (the movie). For us normal sized people it would have been impossible to get our legs in it. A brief discussion over who would sleep in the sofa led to my mate insisting he’d prefer to sleep in the living room as there was a telly in there.

Other moments of joy included discovering that there was no cooking equipment in the kitchen, the heating didn’t work (in Beijing in winter!) and that every surface was filthy and the loos stank because they hadn’t been flushed in weeks (and wouldn’t flush that night either).

We called our 2 colleagues and shouted at them for a bit, and then told them we were going out because staying in wasn’t really an option and they said the company would pick up our tab for doing so. We didn’t know it at the time but they lied about this too. So we headed back into Beijing for its most famous bar district Sanlitun. And that’s where you’ll find us tomorrow.

First Impressions of Beijing – Part Two

Tags

Beijing, Car Dealership, china, Idiots, Overflowing Loo, Toilets, Travel

In the boardroom I was happy to find out that I wouldn’t have to go far to smoke, as the investor was a chain smoking 20-something from Inner Mongolia. His ashtray was overflowing onto the desk, so it seemed appropriate to spark up and offer him a cigarette. We’d learn soon enough that his own cigarettes cost over 100 RMB ($15) a pack, and he seemed determined to set fire to his billions of dollars as fast as he possibly could.

Despite the fact you can buy smokes at 3-4 RMB a pack. China also has some of the world's most expensive brands. Some sell for over 200RMB for 20. Our investor didn't smoke these particular cigs - his had an annoying ball in the filter which you needed to break, to "improve" the taste, before smoking. I still thought they were pretty awful.

We  squeezed into our low slung chairs (all chairs in China are made for people with no legs) they are so close to the floor, that the only option for me is to perch on the edge of the seat and tuck my legs back at 45 degrees. We’ve worked with the two folks running this place for a while now, and we like them even if we’re not sure they’re up to the task of running a major German brand effectively. So introductions are pleasant enough and even though it’s slightly worrying that the investor doesn’t speak a word of English – he seems happy that we’re here.

We’re told that they’ve already found us an apartment so we won’t need a hotel, our hearts sink – this pair of plonkers think that my friend and I are going to live together long-term. We’re good mates and all, but I think we’d end up going mad without our personal space. While my chum tries to explain, that this will be a long-term arrangement over our dead bodies, I sneak off to the loo.

The bathroom is huge and has a full bath and shower suite in the corner. Thankfully all I need to do is relieve my cramping bowels (airline food and espresso aren’t the best combination for me). This is where I make my first mistake; I forget that in Beijing you cannot put toilet paper in the toilet. It should be placed in the bin by the side. I am forcibly reminded of this when I flush the loo and it begins to overflow instead of emptying. So my first move in my possible new employer’s office is to cover the bathroom in poo.

I would flood the bathroom 4 times that week. Thankfully it was a Western style loo and not a squat toilet, so my trousers escaped unscathed...

The good news is – I am an executive and won’t be sorting it out. This task falls to the hapless “Emily” (all Chinese people take an English name), who is a school teacher from the boss’s village that he’s brought on board as the finance manager (this is a regular occurrence – utterly unqualified people in “senior” positions based on relationships from the past). But in reality her job is to sort out the things that nobody else wants to do. I suspect she’ll never forgive me.

Thoroughly embarrassed I return to the board room where we are to be introduced to the general manager that was hired 6 months ago, but we’ve only met once before for 5 minutes. I’ll be honest we thought he was a sneaky little rodent on first meeting, and it doesn’t take long to confirm our assessment. It is also clear that in 6 months (on what for China is a megabucks salary) he’s done nothing except turn his CV into a PowerPoint presentation. He goes on to bore us to death for 2 hours showing us this presentation.

When he finishes he stands as if waiting for applause. He really should have just got the hell out of there instead. Because I’m in the room and I’m famous for my lack of tolerance for idiots, even idiots who will theoretically be my boss one day. I ask him if he has anything relevant to show us, as we know he’s the general manager – but would like to understand the strategy he’s been working on for 6 months.

The room goes silent – I have committed the faux pas of not respecting Chinese face culture, and I have given him no room to talk his way out of the fact he’s done nothing for 6 months. He says he had a staffing plan in the presentation, I inform him that; “Hire 200 staff, so I can manage 50 more people than in my last company” is not a plan it’s an act of fantasy for a tiny startup that already seems to have 30 more staff than it needs.

China is the biggest luxury car market in the world, and the idea was to harness some of that with our chums in Beijing.

I ask him if he’s prepared a sales forecast, a marketing plan, looked at anything that might be at all relevant in regards to getting the vehicles into China, that sort of thing. One of our 2 managers decides to close the book on this at this point – but pointedly asks me to start compiling a list of what actually needs to be done.

My business partner then gets invited to go on a tour of potential sites for their first retail presence and first service center. I get to stay in the office developing a sales forecast that meets the requirements of their license awarded by the German company. It’s not even lunch time on the first day of the week and I’m already convinced that these guys couldn’t organize a “get drunk in a brewery with unlimited free beer” event.

I’ll be back in Beijing tomorrow.

First Impressions of Beijing – Part One

Tags

Beijing, Bicycle, china, First Impressions, Office, Range Rover, Travel, Work

I’m going to take a break from the economy this evening, and move to a slightly more personal topic. Though not the one that kept me from posting this week. Last January my business partner and I went to Beijing. We’d been invited by two people that we’d been doing some work with to promote a potential new brand in the Chinese market.

While it may look like a great place to build sandcastles, if somebody buried you up to the neck in it and a little gust of wind came along at the wrong time, they'd never find you. The Gobi Desert is pretty darned big.

It looked pretty good from a distance, the plan was to visit the city and spend a few days in the office and then if we were happy, they’d offer us a job with their new company.  So we found ourselves on relatively warm Shenzhen day, heading off to the somewhat colder wastes of the North. It’s worth noting that that description is only half joking, thanks to the pollution and erosion of the terrain – the Gobi Desert has marched half way across China right up to the doors of Beijing.

My business partner (who shall remain anonymous – not because he’s going to be in for a tough time on here, but because it’s just polite) is also a very close friend, but it’s not until you share a flight with another chap that you realize something very personal about them. That’s how loud they snore. I’m proud to report that he makes me sound like a purring cat, and the buzz saw drone from his schnozz would have scared Giant Redwoods a thousand miles away.

You can play spot the city that's held an Olympic games recently by the state of its airport, and the abundance of pictures of it completely undisturbed by passengers. Don't bank on it being like that if you visit.

Despite this the trip was affable enough even if the stingy airline only had 4 cans of lager on board. Beijing airport like all airports in major cities is nice enough but having seen more airports than I count we didn’t linger to check out the “buy tourist crap” stores.

We were met at the airport by the company investor’s chauffeur in a brand new top of the range Land Rover, which like every bloody vehicle in China had no leg room in the back and despite my friend enjoying the experience very much (he and I are in the car industry after all) it wasn’t a particularly comfortable trip to the office.

We headed into the heart of the central business district passing what can only be charitably described as unattractive housing, so it’s not just the UK that’s “grim up’t North”. Beijing may be famous for its cyclists, but there aren’t very many of them anymore and the traffic is something to behold. In fact it’s gotten so bad that the local government has had to put a restriction on vehicle registrations in the city (you can’t drive in Beijing without a Beijing number plate).

The one cyclist I did see was wearing a face mask to protect herself from the smog, which isn’t actually all that bad in Winter where it’s cold enough for the particles to fall out of the air (and on to everything in the city), but in Summer is possibly fatal (particularly if you have asthma or other respiratory disorder).

It isn't quite this nice to look at, but it isn't far off. I think I'd have liked working in Beijing's CBD. I certainly very much liked the city itself.

The CBD itself isn’t that bad, it’s a modern looking city center complex with a scattering of half empty shopping malls and towering office buildings. Our office building was nice, and better still there was a Subway underneath so we’d be spared the horrors of Chinese food every day at lunch. We dragged our suitcases into the lift and headed into the office itself. One of the things about all Chinese work environments is that they’re always open plan cubicle style places with cubicles so small that they remind you of a dwarven telephone box. Sadly this was true for this company’s HQ too, but on the bright side we’d be working in the board room and wouldn’t need to master the art of sitting sideways at a desk.

And tomorrow we’ll head back to Beijing and our first day at work, but for now have a great Sunday.