By Ernie Tadla

I attended many banquets, but one, as the guest of the chairman of Jia Ling Motorcycles, was more memorable than the rest. Jia Ling produced more than one million motorcycles a year plus over one and a half million motorcycle engines for other manufacturers. DMG was staging a large international exhibition for Jai Ling in Chongqing in Sichuan Province. We planned it as a Las Vegas style event: strobe lights, large overhead movie screens, blasting music, and many gorgeous, leggy ladies.

We were mobbed. The mayor, who heard of our sound and light show, couldn’t get near our area. The press of the people damaged the stands and the grounds and caused us problems with the building management. We ran out of literature. For a guy from North Battleford, Saskatchewan, Canada, it was an amazing spectacle to be at the center of.

On the last evening, the Jia Ling chairman staged a banquet for DMG’s senior people. Protocol stipulates that the most senior person from each company sit together at the head of the round table with the rest sitting in descending order. As group general manager, I sat next to the chairman. Business dining is a ritualistic affair based on guanxi and face.

A row of drinking glasses was placed in front of me — for water, beer, wine, and maotai. Maotai, a type of baijiu - or Chinese liquor - is made from wheat and sorghum and has an alcohol content of 55 per cent. It is a clear, white liquid and you drink it from small, shot-type glasses. Clearly from some foreigners, like me a, it is a lethal drink. Chairman Mao served maotai at state dinners during Richard Nixon’s state visit to China. I’d had maotais before and it was awful, had a nasty aftertaste and didn’t agree with my body.

The waiter filled the chairman’s glass and then mine. I was crushed with cultural and male, macho pressure.

I wanted to match my honored host, not lose face with my Chinese managers and be one of the boys. So when the chairman toasted us and downed his maotai, we all drank. As soon as the stuff hit my system, I knew that if it continued, and it does, my concern would not be about losing face, but losing it all. I had a choice: drink another maotai and get sick there or rush to the washroom, or put my hand over the glass as the waiter started to fill it. I could hold my own with the beer and red wine, but I couldn’t handle the maotai.

I put my hand over the empty glass.

The second, the very second, the chairman observed my action, he ordered everyone’s maotai glasses removed from the table. This was his way of showing me respect and saving my face. If I didn’t drink maotai, no one would. In actual fact, I felt I had lost face because my behavior had affected the drinking enjoyment of everyone else. They loved maotais and company banquets were some of the few times they could enjoy them. But that was a Western reaction. The Chinese are non-judgmental and acritical. So we never skipped a beat, drank red wine and beer and continued with the party. No fuss, no embarrassment, just Confucian face saving.

And apparently, I’m not the only one who saved my dining grace - if not face - by passing up maotai.

In the excellent book, Nixon in China: The Week That Changed the World, Margaret MacMillian detailed the former U.S. president’s encounter with maotais. Future secretary of State, Alexander Haig, having witnessed Nixon’s slight tolerance for alcohol and having experienced the potent Chinese maotai himself, warned in a top-secret cable, “UNDER NO, REPEAT, NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD THE PRESIDENT ACTUALLY DRINK FROM HIS GLASS IN RESPONSE TO BANQUET TOASTS.”

Editors’ note: This article is republished with permission from How To Live & Do Business In China, by Ernie Tadla. Mr. Tadla also is a China business coach. He can be reached at www.odysseychina.net.

    Channel: Vital News     |