One Billion Customers - James McGregor [74]
I won one of those small victories at an early meeting with Xinhua. The Xinhua officials across the table were angry and befuddled at the uproar their edict had created. They hoped to calm things by backpedaling and telling us what they thought we wanted to hear. They promised “no interference in our business,” only “minor management fees” and “strengthened protection of intellectual property rights.” In turn, we politely blanketed them with lists of detailed questions about how the policy would be implemented. We went around and around until a Xinhua official named Yang Zhen had had enough.
“We are in charge,” he snarled, shaking a finger at me. “You will do what we say. You have no right to question any of this.”
Yang’s outburst was telling. There are, of course, many extremely sophisticated and intelligent people and organizations in China. But there are also many who still operate in a world that is best described as a “thugocracy.” Decades of social chaos, political purges, and wrenching Maoist manipulation created a government operating culture in which bludgeoning your opponent into submission and then taking the spoils is a way of life. Xinhua was chockful of heavyweight thugocrats like Yang. We knew we couldn’t beat them through intellectual argument alone. We had to be just as thuggish as they were. My next chance to hit them hard came a few weeks after our meeting with Yang. My weapon was a Xinhua sales brochure.
We were back at Xinhua on a chilly February morning for more discussions. A dirty gray blanket of sooty coal smoke hovered over the frozen concrete of Beijing. Sleepy Xinhua staffers, long underwear protruding from their pants legs and shirtsleeves, shuffled through the barely heated halls cradling jars of hot tea. We settled around a table pockmarked with cigarette burns in a dimly lit meeting room where tattered red curtains blocked any natural light. Four Xinhua officials filed into the room, offering wide smiles and friendly handshakes. As we sat down, a man with disheveled hair, a jumble of stained teeth, and a rumpled white shirt opened a pack of Chinese cigarettes and leaned across the table to offer us a smoke. Discussions started when the Xinhua boss lit up an imported Marlboro and demanded: “When is Dow Jones going to register with Xinhua?”
Instead of answering, we launched into our now familiar back-and-forth litany about Xinhua being both our regulator and competitor. We said that as regulator and competitor Xinhua had a clear conflict of interest. As always, the Xinhua officials swore up and down that there was a clear division between Xinhua’s regulators and Xinhua officials who were launching competing businesses.
After a half hour of back and forth, Xinhua took the argument in a new direction. They accused me of “ulterior motives.” They said that I was trying to destroy Xinhua’s reputation for integrity. That was what I had been waiting for. We knew that salespeople from a new Xinhua subsidiary company were already calling on our clients in southern China, telling them to cancel the “illegal” foreign services and subscribe to the new “authorized” Xinhua service.
I apologized “for causing any misunderstanding.” Then I conducted an informal survey. Smiling, I pointed at each of the four Xinhua officials one by one, asking a question: “Are you our regulator or competitor?”
“Regulator,” they each responded.
Then I lifted my briefcase onto the table and slowly pulled out a brochure that the new Xinhua subsidiary was distributing to our clients. I opened it to a photo of smiling Xinhua executives.
“Then who are these guys?” I asked.
The photo was of the four Xinhua executives sitting across from me. They were the leaders of the company Xinhua had created to take away our business.
All four stared down at the photo without saying a word. After fumbling to light another Marlboro, the leader announced that this meeting would end so that they could