Two years ago, en route from Washington to Beijing, I can’t remember what I was doing on the plane – except that I wasn’t reading any China business books.

That was a mistake.

I had traveled to China a couple times already, and had covered issues ranging from the significance of a Chinese presidential visit to the rise of pharmacogenomics in China, but on this trip I was moving to the mainland.

I didn’t presume that I knew China. I just assumed I’d learn on my new government job.

After all, when my Chinese contact found out I was learning Mandarin, she told me not to worry too much. I had plenty of time to practice when I got to work. If I didn’t have to worry about that, I thought, why should I worry about something of less fundamental importance, like business culture?

I took a pass, and probably, more than a few cat naps on the journey, perhaps dreaming of the missionary-like changes I intended on making.

I joined Beijing Review as an “editorial consultant” but dreamed of driving this old government communication tool toward a future of finer news coverage. I came from an association magazine in Washington, and thought of Beijing Review as an association magazine too. It just happened to be representing a bigger association – the Chinese government. With better editorial standards and more creativity, the Beijing Review could offer a voice that was more professional and compelling, albeit slanted.

I started a blog that intended to document such changes, but several months into the job, the blog was dead, and fed up, I wouldn’t even fulfill my year contract.

How had I failed so miserably?

For starters, I was napping in a 15-hour classroom.

I could have read Tim Clissold’s Mr. China: A Memoir on the plane trip there. I would have learned how difficult success is to come by in China, and perhaps tempered my aspirations. Or I could have learned this telltale pearl from James McGregor’s book, One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Line of Doing Business in China: “If you ever get depressed by Chinese ill-treatment of foreigners, or foreigners’ ill-treatment of Chinese, take solace in the knowledge that the Chinese are treating one another even worse.”

If I had only known that, perhaps my time at Beijing Review could have been more peaceful and productive.

Instead, I plunged in with what must have seemed like orders. We would have a story meeting once a week. We would have it in a certain room. We would complete a bold story series under my instruction. We would change the way we wrote articles. We would reward the creative and enthusiastic and penalize those with old habits.

In my view, we were getting nowhere, and I was more disillusioned by the day.

I had antagonized colleagues that needed the most help. I remember more than one public screaming match with a woman several years my elder. I still think she’s a bitch, but I was a real bastard in causing such loss of face. Looking back, I had no understanding of the term “face” and how important it is.

Then one day, long after I started disengaging with my place of employment, I found out something very upsetting.

A lot of my editing was causing financial hardship for the staff. Apparently, writers only got paid for the number of words they wrote, and translators got paid for the words they translated. I was cutting articles substantially because they were unnecessarily wordy, but to my shock, they were necessarily wordy.

Moreover, the changes that I spearheaded would have consumed precious time to write.

I wasn’t cutting words. I was cutting pay, and in my quest for better content, more than my predecessors had.

The Chinese were treating each other worse than they treated me or I treated them. I was ignorantly implementing these strict rules, but they made them.

If I had contemplated Mr. McGregor’s wise words, perhaps I could have been more empathetic, and steered clear of months of frustration for all of us.

But Gady A. Epstein, writing in his Forbes article, “One Tired Dragon,” suggests that reading many China business books is wasted time.

“Most real experts on doing business in China would not be writing how-to books about it,” he writes. “Everyone has the same few things to say about China.”

Mr. Epstein’s critique was most heavily pointed at Managing the Dragon: How I’m Building a Billion-Dollar Business in China, a book by Jack Perkowski, who we have featured on this site here and here for his insights.

I have not read Mr. Perkowski’s book, but I’m happy to defend it against wayward criticism like this from Mr. Epstein:

When it comes to the actual business of making money in China, the real problem with today’s legions of experts is that the best ones are likely not selling their snake oil on television, the lecture circuit or the bookshelf. The Masters of the Universe who are making (or losing) enormous sums in China now aren’t talking much about how they’re doing it; they’re too protective of their turf, and they’re too busy making the next deal.

That would be a shame if true; good thing it’s not.

Go to an AmCham-China lecture – or one by another chamber of commerce - and I guarantee, you’ll learn plenty from businesspeople that are winning the China game and willing to talk. I’m on a committee there not because I’m paid, but because I volunteer to help an organization that does wonders for helping foreigners in China through shared insights. Thanks to some of their lectures, I’m confident on how to carve out some new business opportunities here.

As Beijing bureau chief for Forbes, Mr. Epstein should know that reading about China is helpful too.

Maybe Mr. Epstein is tired for some reason – like I was at Beijing Review – but if the “Masters of the Universe” aren’t talking to him about how they’re making money here, you can be sure they’re talking to The Wall Street Journal.

Or they’re writing themselves. Is not author Donald Trump also a titan of industry? Or author Jack Welch?

Mr. Epstein’s view is scintillating for its almost-insight into the China business book world. With all the consultants running around, his words almost ring true.

But they don’t, so it’s time for me to pick up a copy of Managing the Dragon. Although there’s no substitute for on-the-ground experience, I’d suggest others do the same before or after they get here.

    Channel: Local Wisdom     |