One Billion Customers - James McGregor [6]
I was taking a page from the very effective marketing strategy that China so expertly employs to make the Western world salivate: with empty pockets but big ambitions, sell the China mystique and the dream of one billion customers. With its strange history—two thousand years of continuous imperial rule, followed by a crippling encounter with communism that left an impatient, hungry, and hardworking population determined to get rich and regain its rightful place in the world—China would present opportunities and challenges to the global business community of a scale and magnitude perhaps never seen before.
I said that it would be risky, difficult, and time-consuming for Dow Jones to build a media and information business in China where the Communist party was still obsessed with information control and propaganda. But I reminded them that while Chinese leaders still mouthed the slogans of Marx and Lenin, their actions focused on markets and leverage. When Deng launched reforms fifteen years earlier, I said, there was only one place in the world with a significant population of poor Chinese people—China. The several tens of millions of ethnic Chinese who lived outside the country were among the world’s most ambitious and successful scientists, inventors, engineers, merchants, and business tycoons.
“What Deng is doing isn’t brain surgery,” I said. “He is letting the Chinese people move beyond their debilitating political struggles and do what comes naturally: focus on education for their children, focus on acquiring individual wealth, focus on building the nation and gaining international respect, and always remember that anyone who openly challenges the government’s authority will be ruthlessly crushed in the name of national stability.
“And one more thing,” I said. “As we have seen in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, and Monaco, the Chinese people love nothing more than playing with money. Gambling and financial speculation are hardwired into their genes. So the question is when, not if, China will have the world’s largest financial markets. That is something that Dow Jones must get out in front of.”
My scheme worked. Even those in the room who figured I was half-insane became enchanted with and excited about China. I was soon flooded with visitors from our wire services, databases, stock indexes, television production, print publications, and other divisions. For Dow Jones, like corporations across the globe, China was an exciting new business frontier, as well as a fun and fascinating place for a business trip.
I didn’t think of it this way at the time, but what I was describing was a China that is simultaneously the world’s largest startup and the world’s largest turnaround. The country can draw on a two-thousand-year tradition, but it also is inhaling Western business know-how and technology and doing everything at the same time and for the first time. That is why China has been able to progress so quickly.
If you think about the last decade of China’s economic and social development in terms of comparable changes in the history of the United States, you can feel the wind on your face. China is undergoing the raw capitalism of the Robber Baron era of the late 1800s; the speculative financial mania of the 1920s; the rural-to-urban migration of the 1930s; the emergence of the first-car, first-home, first-fashionable clothes, first-college education, first-family vacation, middle-class consumer of the 1950s, and even aspects of social upheaval similar to the 1960s.
It almost