Always Bother to Mention

Called for a DiDi.  Why do these guys accept the fare when they are so far from the destination?  I see a cab pull up to let someone out at the door to the hotel lobby. I’m gonna be late otherwise and so I ask if he’s free and throw my luggage in the back.  Once inside I fiddle with the DiDi app and cancel the fare with the guy I’ll never know.

This gentleman begins to speak to someone on the phone in what sounds like Shanghainese.  He’s off the call quickly then I speak to him in Shanghainese as well.  He responds.  But then quickly I discern that he isn’t from Shanghai.  He tells me he’s from Subei and I correctly guess that he’s from the city of Xuzhou, up near the Shandong border, not far from the Huaihai battle that decided the civil war in the Communist’s favor.  I explain that I’m the husband of Shandong lady, the province right across the border, adding that I share the same burden as Xi Da Da, as I always bother to mention. 

I’ve had so many tech clients over the years, I’ve invariably worked with some who later prove the competitors of others.  One client from a few years back competed strongly against a new Chinese upstart.  Who could they be that they were winning deals?  How could they have developed strong tech so fast?  Alas, that former client was sold for a song after the investors pulled the plug.  But today I am riding up to that former Chinese competitor.   They’re lovely, smart, and remarkably international.  I tell them, unsolicited, that as an old China hand I’m so glad to see that they’ve become internationally successful.  On the way out I noticed they were putting up cobwebs and jack O’ lantern cutouts and it occurred to me for the first time, that today was Halloween.

We have to cut across town then to another remarkable company that seems to have sprung up out of nowhere.  I’d call them a unicorn, but they were recently purchased by one of China’s and hence the world’s, largest companies.  I hadn’t realized that they had been in this business for years, that they were founded over in Taiwan and that, no, their arch rival and not they, are the new-entrant.  There are a few, like Foxconn, but not many Taiwanese companies who’ve risen to such unassailable heights here in the mainland, and certainly none in this company's space.  I always seem to enjoy visiting the myth-buster companies that don’t fit in to the way I’d assumed the market to work.

Thursday 10/31/19