MR China

3 lessons learned from tim clissold's mr.china

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There are a great many “business” books written about China, but most seem to be written by outsiders with little or no willingness to empathise with the Chinese mindset. While these kind of writers warn against the struggles of doing business in China, and while their experience may be both rich and diverse, they have succeeded only in misunderstanding their own importance in the Great Scheme of All Things Chinese. Tim Clissold, on the other hand, is a breath of beautifully British fresh air.

3 Lessons Learned From Tim Clissold's Mr. China

March 17, 2016

Check back soon

Once posts are published, you’ll see them here.

In his debut novel-slash-memoir, Clissold tells the story of a team of investment bankers from Wall Street who, with the help of a mandarin-speaking Brit and an ex-Red Guard, try to take on China’s emerging industries as the reform and opening up scramble begins in the 1990s.

Having studied in Beijing during the 80s, Clissold is a rare example of a foreigner willing to accept his own backwardness in the face of China’s archaic civilisation. Clissold accepts that his own attempts to westernise or “modernise” the Chinese result in epic failures and the loss of several hundred million dollars belonging to blissfully ignorant foreign investors.

As well as humanising an industry that is largely opaque to outsiders — capital finance is the exclusive territory of City workers and the wealthy elite — Clissold succeeds in understanding that doing business in a country as vast and diverse as China is about far more than language barriers and cultural clashes. Rather than criticise either side, Clissold paints portraits of Chinese characters alongside their foreign counterparts, analysing their divergent work-ethics and mutual misunderstanding. But his approach is a far cry from the fence-sitting cautiousness that the middle-ground usually implies.

Clissold contrasts screaming teleconference calls with Wall Street, with the utter immovability of unmotivated Chinese factory directors — or in some cases with the immovability of over-motivated Chinese factory directors. Highly strung, completely dogmatic financial “experts” flail about trying to micromanage issues that would never have occurred to them outside of China.

One great example is the mysterious case of the disappearing 8 million USD, stolen in a textbook fraud case by a Zhuhai factory director. Screaming Wall Street bankers insist that their China representatives storm the office of the bank’s president and demand that the money that should be wired in receipt of fraudulent credit papers — penned by one of the banks own managers, who disappeared alongside the Zhuhai director — be cancelled. The bank, in response, freezes their accounts. Clissold reflects with a bittersweet sense of irony that, had they taken the Chinese approach — and quietly withdrawn from the account until it emptied with no reference to fraud, false credit papers or outstanding payments — the majority of the money could have been recovered. However, the American institutional approach resulted in disaster. The firm’s Chinese staff members and business associates were understandably baffled by the foreigners’ brutish full-frontal assault on the bank.

As well as being a thoroughly enjoyable read, Clissold offers some life-lessons for those less well-acquainted with China’s system but still planning to do business here. Here, I have chosen just three:

1 | Neither the Chinese nor China want to be you or your country.

Though there may be a fascination with all things foreign, and though the Chinese may covet a foreigner’s freedom or perceived wealth, the Chinese do not want to remake themselves in your image. With this in mind, do not make the mistake of considering yourself superior by default of being international. Which leads to the second lesson...

2 | You have no cultural right to the mighty high-road.

Never think of China as a “developing” country and your own as “developed” when doing business in China. China is far more than you could ever imagine and you are privileged to have a part to play in its development. Bear in mind that this sense of national identity is ingrained in the minds of every single citizen from the peasant farmer to the multi-millionaire businessman. Their very Chineseness is their windfall, and your downfall.

3 | There is no one-size-fits-all approach to legal truth in China.

In China, the very concept of “law” is far different to our own. The phrase “case by case” comes up so often in the language of local governments and official authorities that it is the only rule truly followed. There is no concept of “thou shalt not steal”, or a definitive right and wrong. China’s survival throughout the centuries has always been based upon carefully balancing the needs and wants of a huge variety of interest groups.

Note: The content of this article does not reflect the official opinion of any unit of the Chinese government. Responsibility for the views expressed in the article lies entirely with the author.