Which China?

“China is different.”  “Really?  Precisely how so?  Which China?  Different from before the time you were born?”  I find myself having a harder and harder time keeping still when someone in their twenties utters the first statement with great solemnity in a tech business context.

This particular company was located down in a glistening tower in Huamao zhongxin.  I can remember staring out that way at a row of five story, eighties vintage dull apartment blocks that ran along the “outskirts” of the city along Jianguomen, beyond the third ring road in the late nineties.  I was sitting in a “China is Different” new building at that time that Motorola had just moved its office into and claimed for its own with its eight big letters up atop the building.  The identical building beside it housed Hewlett Packard. 

These young people today are part of a company that has taken a disruptive model for delivering real estate services and adapted it, with seemingly great success to a Chinese context.  They use free, open source versions of software and they are considering whether or not to license an enterprise version.  “We’d like to see a case study.”  We’ll, this is a reasonable question but, “I shared one of the precise U.S. company you modelled your business on, which describes in great detail how they use it.  And I showed you that earlier in our meeting this afternoon.  I don’t know that I have anything more contextual than that.” 

And then, in Chinese to my colleagues, as if I couldn’t possibly understand, we get:  “you see, China is different.”   Something about the hunrizi, passive manner in which this is uttered, suggesting that he is not content to have meaningful information brought to him but rather needs it gently spoon fed, something about the absolute confidence is China’s impenetrability, when he’s lived on earth less time than I’ve been in this city works to draw bile.   China is at its best when it is hungry and curious.  I’m tired of meetings with sated, dullards. 

Wednesday 11/08/17