One Billion Customers - James McGregor [11]
It isn’t surprising that throughout China’s history people have chosen to settle disputes themselves instead of seeking government intervention. In imperial times, justice was dispensed by local mandarins who lived in fortified compounds and had little contact with the general public. Their brand of justice discouraged people from seeking government arbitration. If one was involved in a dispute, or accused of a crime, you were never considered completely innocent. The assumption was that you must have done something wrong just to be in that position. Even today, Chinese people instinctively try to settle things among themselves.
Sweet and Sour Success
When I arrived in Beijing in 1990, the foreign business community was shell-shocked from Tiananmen. Nobody would take my phone calls, including the country bosses of IBM, Motorola, and other major American corporations. China had become an international human rights pariah and these Western executives didn’t want to bring any attention to the fact that they were continuing to do business in the country. It would be very difficult to write The Wall Street Journal business stories without access to those people, so I applied to join the American Chamber of Commerce in China, popularly known as AmCham, then still a very small group. I figured that if I could attend their luncheons and receptions I could get to know the businesspeople in a social setting and they would become more comfortable later accepting my interviews. Several people threatened to resign if they allowed a journalist to join. But I was finally accepted after agreeing to stay away from their regular meeting with the ambassador. To me it made sense that they could discuss their China business issues with the ambassador outside the earshot of a reporter.
Before long, AmCham members began complaining to me that the press was transfixed on writing negative stories, ignoring the fact that China was recovering from the tragedy and business was improving. I said, “Great, I would be glad to write about your business.” Then they would scurry away. I spent several months researching a story about American business success in China. You would have thought I was probing their sex lives. Nobody would talk to me, even the global CEO of Procter & Gamble, a company that was very successfully spreading its shampoos and other personal care products across the country. Once I became a businessman myself, I understood their reticence.
While the intensity ebbs and flows, foreign businesses are trapped between profits and politics. From the Chinese side, they fear that trumpeting success will bring platoons of bureaucratic pickpockets to their doors. While Deng welcomed foreign investment in China, nobody in the Chinese government has endorsed foreign companies making large profits. Even today, there is a lingering attitude that foreign profits in China carry the taint of exploiting the Chinese people.
The foreign companies themselves—especially American companies—are squeezed between investors and activists. With China’s rocketing growth, companies often must publicize their aggressive China initiatives and profitable China businesses to boost their stock price. On the other hand, the contentious politics of China relations also forces them to duck for cover when Western politicians are criticizing China for its weakness in human rights, for stealing American manufacturing jobs, and