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.

What is "broke"?

It's refreshing to come across Jamal Mashburn's account of the implications of the term, "broke," and what it means for professional athletes. Horror stories like Terrell Owens and Allen Iverson's life after basketball exist as cautionary tales, but, as Mashburn points out, only in a very superficial way. In only looking at the material implications of "broke," one is missing the larger problem that has nothing to do with money:

"'Broke' is not just a reflection on finances, most guys are broke before they step one foot on the professional sports field or court. Low self esteem, lack of courage and discipline, with no idea how to lead themselves outside the sport are some of the symptoms."

Courageous sentiments from a very introspective guy who walks the walk as well as talks the talk: Mashburn owns over 71 food franchises including Papa John's, Outback Steakhouses, and Dunkin' Donuts as well as car dealerships and a real estate company in Kentucky: a shining example that, for talented athletes, sports is just the beginning, not the highlight of the show.

CONTRADICTION: Haves and Have Nots

When you drive out of downtown Beijing, before you're outside of the 6th Ring Road you begin to pass through villages where you can see the development of recent years has not yet come to pass. Storefronts vary between brick or concrete blocks to tin-roofed shanties selling groceries and mobile phone charge cards, and everything is surrounded by farm fields. The people here aren't destitute, but they are generally the part of Beijing making less than the city average of about 5,000 RMB (~$800 USD) a month--probably much less.

And then there's the haves. Grabbing lunch just now at 7-Eleven the guy behind me asked for a box of condoms from behind the cashier. Not a totally uncommon request, but it was asked in a kind of brazen way that's uncommon with locals here. He was wearing a baseball hat, common for Korean folks especially and Wangjing, but more and more for internationally-inclined Chinese locals as well. Walking outside I was impressed to see him driving away in an Bentley with no license plates--a sure sign of government connections, which I guess is ubiquitous for most rich folks here.

It comes up quite often in staff discussions, how unfair it must seem that foreigners make such high salaries for jobs like English teaching in comparison to Chinese white-collar workers doing work of equal or more difficulty and making fractions of foreigner pay. Then again, you see locals driving around in Bentleys and begin to see that the have-nots here are just surrounded by what must appear like ridiculous opulence at times, and there's not a whole lot to do about it.

We had an employee post a very damaging message yesterday on our company microblog site that gets circulated to all of our clients. It was known for a while that he wasn't happy with his pay, though he was being reimbursed at market with relatively decent working conditions. To be honest, can you really blame young Chinese professionals for the resentment they must harbor against all the riches they see around them? Thinking about it more, this is the same vein that Mao must have tapped into in inspiring popular support for the Communist revolt.

Beijing pollution and financial crisis

It struck me today that the recent spate of gross pollution is doing to Beijinger's sense of the pollution scale what the global financial crisis did to our sense of the idea of billions versus trillions of dollars. A reading of over 500 pm2.5 (technically "beyond reading" on the US Embassy pollution monitor) has been crossed so much recently that it's been reduced somewhat--just as reports of Trillions of dollars lost in the CDO market and bailout funds of the past decade have reduced that once enormous amount of cash to the level we once associated psychologically with smaller amounts of money. Trillion is the new billion; 500+ pm2.5 is the new 150 pm2.5. Let's hope everyone's respiratory systems are able to keep up...