More About "How Chinese Think And How To Deal With China"
Read what more experts have said about this book, How Chinese Think and How To Deal With China
"Absolutely essential for anyone who wants to understand China ... Only Dr. Kevin Fountain, nobody else, could have written this sorely needed book." Wu Zhenlai, President, Oriental Metallurgy
"The very best book for visitors to China, businesspeople, diplomats, tourists..." V. Carrubba, Chief Executive for Research and Development, Interdynamics and CEO, Secure Holdings Inc
"In China, Kevin is known and considered as nothing but phenomenal... a legend." Antonio Amador, A. A. Amador Associates
"Great sense of humor, never a dull moment, unmatched..."
Neil Riddell, President, Pacific Raw Materials
Read what "How Chinese Think And How To Deal With China" is about by viewing the Table Of Contents, a Foreward by the Author and the First Page of the book.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. A DOG WOULDN'T EAT THESE DUMPLINGS 1
Dogs and Dumplings 2
Dipping your Dumplings in Soy Sauce 6
Swimming In the Yangzi: the System 10
The Stars On the Flag: Nationalism and History 11
Mother Curses the Horse: the Chinese Language 13
It's Not Just Business, It's Personal 15
What's In a Name? Everything 16
Stand On Ceremony 18
Is There a Chinese Mentality? 21
Strategies and Tactics 23
Strewn Parts 25
2. SWIMMING IN THE YANGZI: THE SYSTEM 29
Swimming In the Yangzi 30
China Goes Its Own Way 33
Government Supervised Merchant Managed 34
The Party's Exit Strategy 37
Commercial Logic and Political Sense 44
A Red Light In Bangkok Traffic: 46 Laws and Ownership
The Rule of Law or the Rule of Men 53
Meet the Boss 58
3. THE STARS ON THE FLAG: NATIONALISM AND HISTORY 69
The Five Star Red Flag 70
Ethnic Nationalism 73
Social Darwinism 75
Kang Youwei 76
Yan Fu and Liang Qichao 77
Sun Zhongshan 80
Chen Duxiu 81
Hu Shi 82
Cold Logic, Hot Blood 83
The Wall In the Head 85
Orthodoxy and the Confucian Civil Service 91
The Golden Age 93
Call Off the Dogs! 94
Do You Know Where Your Precious Jar Is? 96
The Old Curse Comes True 98
The Younger Brother of Jesus Christ 100
The Last Emperor 102
The May Fourth Movement 103
The Past Is Always Present In China 105
4. MOTHER CURSES THE HORSE: THE CHINESE LANGUAGE 111
The Chinese Language 112
Future Tense and Future Sense 113
The Sound of One Character 116
Chinese Characters 118
Mr. Red Flag Li 128
How Many Characters Does It Take To Change a Lightbulb? 131
Originality and Appropriateness 133
How Does a Chinese Dictionary Work? 134
Translation and Transformation 137
Mandarin and Cantonese, Chinese and Dialects 140
Chinese and the Computer 142
Pronunciation of Spelled Chinese 143
Combinations 145
Manners of Speech 146
It Often Hurts To Ask 147
How Do the Words Look On You? 151
5. IT'S NOT JUST BUSINESS, IT'S PERSONAL 155
The Story of Bandit Zhang 156
What Confucius Said 158
Relationships, Connections, Guanxi 161
What Is "Guanxi"? 162
Gifts and Bribes 165
The Red Arisotcracy 167
How To Give and How Not To Give Gifts 168
The "Glass Snail Incident" 170
The Introduction 170
The "Dao" of Guanxi 173
Face Value 177
Face Off 179
Face Up, Face Down 182
About Face, Forward March 183
6. WHAT'S IN A NAME? EVERYTHING 187
The "Rectification of Names" 188
Your Name Is Your Place 191
Excalibur and the Precious Steed 192
Name, Rank and Serial Number 194
The Creation of Foreign Names 197
Coca Cola and Four Eggs 198
Calling Names 201
Swallow's Nest and Maxwell's House 202
Big Bucks Incorporated 204
China and Personal Names 206
7. STAND ON CEREMONY 211
Food and Ceremony 212
The Banquet Invitation 214
Decode the Seating Chart 216
The Missing Banquet Table 220
Chinese Food 221
Eating 232
Drinking 234
Chinese Alcohol or Spirits 234
Chinese Tea 238
The Meeting 242
The Ceremony 244
8. IS THERE A CHINESE MENTALITY? 249
Hospitality 250
Is There a Chinese Mentality? 251
Practical and Specialized Training 256
Quality and the Amount of Essence 260
Secularity 263
Big Is Beautiful 266
Down To Earth and Conventional 267
Conservatism 268
Conscientiousness 272
Red Eyes and Power Eyes 273
Romanticism and Emotionality 276
Cynicism and Suspicion 280
Parochial or Provincial 286
Driving the Overnight Truck 288
Pride and Inferiority Complex 290
Insecurity and Competition 293
Be My Own Boss 299
Women In a Man's World 303
Pointing To a Deer and Calling It a Horse 306
Thinking In Pairs, Balancing Polarities 310
The Phantom Hand 312
Pride 315
9. STRATEGIES AND TACTICS 317
Negotiating China 318
Time and Place 323
The Classic of Changes 327
The Thirty-Six Stratagems 332
10. STREWN PARTS 359
Undiplomatic Direction 360
The Doomsday Book 361
A Chinese Path of Thought 368
People 372
Context 376
Time 378
The System 382
The Third Man 385
A Chinese Code of Conduct 387
Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway? 391
FOREWORD by the Author
Understanding China is one of the most fascinating and fun rides you can take.
My ride began a long time ago. In the early days the handful of foreigners who were residents of China lived in hotels. My hotel sat adjacent to the Beijing zoo, and we sometimes wondered if the boundary between the two were not a bit confused. Midnight heavy in my room, a bulky black telex machine suddenly clanged to life, shaking the table next to my bed, spilling water, rolling pens to the floor, banging a message onto heavy paper. The hotel room was my office and my home. One of my neighbors in the hotel worked for a Japanese company. His company had provided a turnkey factory to a Chinese organization, and now there were problems. The factory suddenly was not working as it had been designed to work. The Chinese buyer repeatedly demanded help, but balked when the foreign supplier suggested that they send engineers to the plant to fix it. My neighbor, citing my Chinese language proficiency, asked if I would help him. We would drive to the factory on a Saturday morning and see if we could ascertain what the problem was, and why the Chinese did not simply invite the ready engineers to visit the plant. Saturday came and we got in the car. When we arrived finally at our destination, we saw rebar sticking up from the angles of vast and barren concrete, and their sad reflections in broken glass and murky puddles. It was a scene of strategic retreat, the ground scarred by hasty excavation, the muddled ruts of heavy trucks and and the footprints of remorseless removal equipment. The entire plant was gone! In secret, the turnkey facility had been dismantled and relocated.
China has become no less magnetic since then. Not long ago I took a sick Chinese to the hospital. My heart sank when I led my miserable friend into the waiting room. The huge hall was standing room only with sad and suffering people, all bloodshot eyes anxious to see the doctor. But when the nurses saw me, and quickly identified me as a foreigner, they instantly moved me and my friend to the front of the line. And no one complained! The hospital treated us with typical Chinese hospitality as Chinese treat guests.
I left the hospital and ran to an appointment with one of China's ten largest and most successful advertising agencies. Their offices occupied an entire two floors of a skyscraper, and were filled with high tech gadgets, monitors, honeycombs of buzzing cubicles, smartly-dressed administrative assistants, and geeky creative types with hair styles that imitated the MGM lion or a Mohawk warrior who had just awakened from sleeping off influenza. The CEO was what is known in Japan as a "bar code man;" he grew his hair long on one side then combed it over his head in a striated attempt to hide his baldness. This CEO modeled his tailored navy blue three piece suit as an imperial robe, smiled as a judge to pleading lawyers, and shook our hands with limp enthusiasm as his staff handed us bound and printed paperbacks of his biography. He was a man who took command and was accustomed to being obeyed.
Looking to launch a promotional campaign for beauty products, we were frog-marched into a cavernous meeting room rendered undersized by an immense conference table, so close to the walls on either side as to make sitting down with any grace a tricky business. The lights went down, a wall lit up, the expensive and famous ad agency presented their campaign concept. Our product, they said, was "hot," and "hot" means "fire," and "fire" adorns the safety first signs at petrol stations. They seriously wanted to pair our fashion and beauty products with gas stations. I was overcome by a feeling of deja Kafka; the whole situation was absurd and surreal. I thought I must be in the wrong room, sitting in the electric chair when Slim did the shooting. Petrol stations stink, I protested, they are greasy and dirty and that is not the image we want for our beauty products.
Not to worry, laughed the account executive. This man was a candidate for the skinniest man in Shenzhen, which is no trivial distinction. Hair slicked hard to the skull over tapered and protruding face left the distinct impression of armadillo. He turned his body suddenly, waited for his clothes to catch up, then extended a bony finger and pressed a button. The screen-wall morphed behind him. Another whirl, a whoosh of sleeves and pleats, another button. A gaggle of giggling girls appeared on the screen, together with three cute sentences sometimes tittered by one girl sharing a secret with another. The last sentence was 骗人 "you're lying," which in China is delivered by young girls in a tone of circumspection similar to certain American teenagers gushing at one another, "Shut up!" Again we gasped for air. They wanted to juxtapose our product's name with the sentence "You're lying." Bad idea. Was this really happening? I repeat that this was one of China's largest advertising agencies, not some guerrilla promoter. Now I hear that this company together with a group of rival Chinese advertising companies has accomplished joint listing on an American stock exchange. The guy who recommends their stock is probably the same guy who put you on to Enron.
My life in China has been intriguing and rewarding. But the rise of China in our contemporary world has given my experience another dimension.
If you do not understand China, you cannot understand our world. China matters. China is a great country. China's economy will soon be the biggest in the world. China's population is already the biggest. China is a military and political power.
Almost everyone who knew I was writing this book expressed interest. But one person did ask: "Why should I want to know about China? What do I care about China? China is far away." Wrong. China is not remote. China is everywhere. A cynic would sigh that China's long reach is reflected in pollution from Chinese factories that blows across the Pacific even to California. The shallow bore will gush that he went to China and had such a great time and everything was so awesome. A realist would state that the extended arm of China places its manufactures everywhere. Chinese goods dominate stores and markets in Africa, South America, Europe, Australia, Main Street and East Podunk. But China is much more than factories, economics, tourist attractions and statistics. China is people. The great majority are good people, whose history, culture and language have led them often to think differently from Westerners.
There is no nation with more venerable history and traditions than China. Even two millennia ago, Chinese wore elegant clothing, drank from exquisite vessels, ate the world's most refined cuisine, scribed graceful characters into sublime literature. Over the past century, the Chinese people were forced to swallow their pride and tighten their belts. Now they have wrenched respect from the rest of the world, and seek new vistas and renewed roles.
China presents the world with an unavoidable choice: to understand China and to appreciate China as a friend, or to filter China through foreign eyes and fear China as a rival. I choose to welcome China as a friend.
The Chinese people have always treated me with warmth and dignity, and to them this book is dedicated.
FIRST PAGE
DOGS AND DUMPLINGS
Once upon a time, in the bustling northern Chinese port city of Tianjin, there lived a dumpling hawker. Every day his wife made fresh dumplings, pork and vegetables stuffed inside steamed buns, and the dumpling hawker pushed his cart full of dumplings to the bridge over the Hai River in the center of Tianjin. But still, business was bad. Even though the hawker arrived in plenty of time to occupy a space within easy visibility and access of the flow of commuters that swarmed the bridge, still passers-by ignored the man and his dumplings. One day, in exasperation the dumpling hawker wrote in big black characters on stiff white paper a sign that read: "A dog wouldn't eat these dumplings." From that point on his business prospered. "A Dog Wouldn't Eat These Dumplings" became a brand name famous in Tianjin, well-known throughout China and eventually one of Tianjin's claims to fame.
To the typical Westerner, this story seems strange. If a dog wouldn't eat those dumplings, then how could anyone expect that people might want to buy them? What good could anyone expect from a sign that declared to the world that even a dog would not be interested in these bloody dumplings?
But to the Chinese, the hawker and his potential customers, the sign meant something else. If you walked by, and you saw a sign that read, "A dog wouldn't bother with these dumplings" -- 狗不理包子 -- and still you ignored the hawker and his wares, that meant you yourself must be a dog! Chinese reaction to the dumpling hawker's sign ran down a different track of thought.
Given the same map, and the same directions, the Westerner and the Chinese can follow different pathways and arrive at very different conclusions.
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