What motivates China in the "Age of Ambition"

I haven't read Evan Osnos' new book yet. In the meantime, I'll take a stab at predicting what he'll call up as some of the motivating forces behind Chinese folks who you don't hear much about in the nightly American news hour. I just had his book zapped to my Kindle today and look forward to seeing how my predictions match up with his observations. After 6 years living in Beijing, my take on what animates the ambitions of Chinese today:

1) One billion customers to serve: I could not initially get my head around the number of different sportswear companies with the exact same logo as Nike operating in Beijing. I then considered the sheer number of people these days looking to buy sportswear, like Mr. Clean and the college kids playing pickup basketball on campuses all around the city. There can exist 4 different stores sitting on the street right next to one another, occupying the same market niche, because if just a fraction of a percent of the hundreds of thousands of passerbys decide to pick up a tanktop or runners at that store, they're set. As James McGregor describes in his book, while the story of the past several decades has been China as a producer, the story of future decades will be that of selling into and inside China--a reality to which the rest of the world is slowly waking up, but of which Chinese are acutely aware and positioned to seize advantage.

2) Adaptability as a way of life: Connected to the phenomenon of having so many potential customers at your doorstep, that businesses seem to pop up (and out) so quickly in Beijing is not surprising. Peter Hessler remarks in one of his books how being handed a business card in China listing 15 different proficiencies is not uncommon. Off the top of my head I can count 3 plumber/electrician/locksmiths within a 10-minute walk of my apartment. On most skybridges arching over the ring roads surrounding Beijing, you can find vendors selling everything from mobile phone stickers to socks. Particularly for the emergent middle class, things change so quickly, one cannot afford to approach making a living by siloing yourself and only doing one thing to get by. Businesses and families in the developed world are concerned that things are changing too quickly to keep up--commercially, psychologically. The level of adaptability displayed particularly by young people in China, is particularly extraordinary.

3) Searching for "something else": Walking to the subway through an affluent Beijing neighborhood a year ago, I heard an electric bike behind me accelerate rapidly and then swung in front of me. The driver was a kind-looking lady with glasses who asked if I would like a teaching job; they needed teachers immediately. I declined, but took her card, which read: "Holy Education." I asked if there was a lot of demand for ESL that mixed in Bible stories with learning about nouns and verbs. She said they couldn't find teachers fast enough. "It must be difficult teaching religious education in China, no?" She said that Bible stories are used as reading material without getting into the intensely religious parts--surprising, given the name of the company. In the past year or two, in conversations with parents and students, I have never heard more mention of Jesus than in any time past. Even those whoa are not expressly Christian had some very pointed questions during this past Easter, which is translated in Mandarin as "resurrection holiday." As affluent Chinese come to see how purely material metrics for success can often prove unfulfilling, and how particularly Christian spirituality can offer some kind of higher purpose, it will be interesting to see if Chinese families continue the search for new ways of living "the good life."

4) Used to the competition: In 2011, Amy Chua's book caused a stir with the suggestion that "Chinese parents" are superior in creating "stereotypically successful kids." I have met enough people here in Beijing to understand that China, like anywhere, seems to have just as many successful or failing people as anywhere else. An interesting learning experience was when I worked at Tsinghua University--one of China's two or three premier universities--and in my spare time helped students prepare applications for graduate schools in the US and UK. These were China's high flyers--students who competed against millions of other applicants to win admission to Tsinghua. When I mentioned the idea of a "safety school" to add to their list of MIT, Cambridge, Berkeley, and Yale, they simply shrugged it off. "I need to get into one of these places," they said. "Otherwise, I'll just stay in China, work and live at home." Why the obsession with only the top tier? "My parents would be disappointed with anything else." Many students had inculcated the desires of their parents and now could not differentiate between those and desires of their own. Regardless, they were--they are--extraordinarily driven and utterly unwilling to settle for anything less than their absolute best--which they are convinced is as good as anyone else's best, not just in China, but in the world.

1 big reason Americans can't afford to ignore China

The Rhodium Group just published a report showing that the US-China relationship is at a crossroads: for the first time in modern history, more money from Chinese companies is coming into the US than the other way around. These trends are only accelerating:

It is important to observe that US investment in China isn't stopping; although the rate of foreign direct investment (FDI) growth seems to be stagnating, US investment in China will continue to be an important feature that should be of significant interest to Chinese officials. Of greater importance to this relationship, as the Rhodium report points out, is American policymakers' increased consideration of this sea change--most importantly, I would argue, as it relates to employment of Americans in America by Chinese-owned firms:

Although the number of jobs currently produced by Chinese employers in America is relatively small, the number is increasing exponentially. Major takeaway: going forward, the career paths for hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of Americans based in the US will be defined by their ability to understand and navigate Chinese culture, language, and corporate behavior.

7 things you learn about the non-China world while living in China

- A well-ordered traffic system isn't as important as you might think. Oddly, one of the things that scared me the most about the more recent Die Hard where Timothy Oliphant organizes a fire sale is that--oh man!--the traffics lights would all be screwed up. Then you come to Asia and see that, despite traffic lights working most of the time, people don't really care about them and a surprisingly number of people aren't dying because of this (at least by my last count).

- Parenting skills are not innate. You take for granted that, despite also carrying on some of the baggage from the generation before, your parents are utilizing a set of skills and knowledge in raising you than Among more affluent families China is still coming up the curve in areas like, especially during Spring Festival, not letting children play with high explosives.

 - "Hot mess" is also a business model. Constant change leads to constant preparation for opportunities that present themselves every day. Oftentimes, we develop services that we're selling before most folks inside our shop even know this is something our company does. Once we have customers, then everyone plays catch-up. It's a fun, if not ulcer-inducing model. If I had a nickel for the number of times, on 3 minutes' notice, I've been told I'm going to do something I could not have fathomed doing before that moment... New arrivals at our organization are constantly blown away by how quickly situations change and how one has to adapt on the fly. Those that cannot don't last long.

- Fashion makes absolutely no sense. The English-gibberish tshirts sported by young people in Beijing are silly--but are they more silly than paying $125 for a hooded sweatshirt because it says the word "Hollister" on it? "But the quality is excellent..." Not that excellent. As I've heard from a lady, there is something about Asian women that sometimes enables more aggressive fashion choices to work out well for them. As some folks from Shanghai will observe, Beijingers dress a bit like they just grabbed whatever was closest in a pitch-black closet that morning and ran out the door. What's more amazing than dressing like this is that sometimes it leads to outfits that, to fashionable people, "make sense." (So I've heard.) Don't get it.

- Weird food is relative. You're teaching the terms "often, sometimes" and "never" in a class about food. In asking about "foods you often eat," student flatly responds: "doves." More interesting than the student's response is how unfazed you are with their constant dining on the international symbol of peace: you just had one last month in Shenyang. at a curbside dove joint where the wait staff would twist their heads off in front of you (proof of freshness) and grill them up chuanr-style. Could have had a shot of blood on the side. You passed.. Maybe weird food isn't relative.

- We're all just animals. You can't help but realize this when you see how unapologetically open people are about spitting, farting, urinating, and defecating in public or semi-public. In the elevator today an otherwise coy and unassuming woman let go of a sharp, short burp that made me jump. Better out than in, I suppose. Just as the book title says, "everybody poops." Everybody also does everything else that involves expelling body gasses, liquids, and other semi-solids.

- Economics trumps politics. The residue of the Cold War, the lingering sense of a great Communist menace that many think they perceive (particularly in the US) is absolute horsewash. China is more rabidly free-market capitalist than the US was even in the days of the robber barons. Ever since Deng Xiaoping proclaimed, "To get rich is glorious," China has been a place where the "honor's in the dollar." Many politicians get into the game, not because of the power and influence they yield (usually not much), but because the chances for kickbacks and bribes that occur at different bureaucratic bottlenecks.