Old school.

There’s nothing like it.

Finding an old school jacket in the attic that still fits. Grooving to the old school 8 track with a hot date on a rainy day. Getting out the old school playbook and kicking the opposing team’s butt with it.

While it’s trite to call someone an old China hand around these parts, these guys – the ones here long enough to live through some hard-core communism – get major props. It’s because they’re old school, with old school tried and true methods.

China International Business (CIB) magazine just did a series of good profiles on old schoolers. They focused on the men and women. We’ll focus on their old school methods, which might just save you, either in business, or during the next cultural revolution – whatever that involves.

• Street smarts work on corporate carpet. Jaime A. FloraCruz was an activist and critic of the president of the Philippines back in the 70s. Barred from returning to his homeland after what should have been a brief trip to China, he stayed and volunteered for hard labor in Hunan Province. “I was swept up with this romanticist notion of working in the countryside,” he told CIB. He emerged less than idealistic, and put his more practical methods to test shortly. In a fishing trawler off the coast of Shandong Province, bored, he scrutinized newsprint – and photos.

  According to CIB:

  He examined photos of political leaders on the front page of the People’s Daily every day for clues as to who was currently in and out of favor. “There was always a formula of how they sat, so when you noticed one guy had disappeared, you knew he was in trouble, or when someone had moved closer to Chairman Mao, you know the guy had just gotten a promotion,” he explains.

  He carried those street news instincts with him to Newsweek, working part time, and getting his name some serious print when the bureau chief was out of town. When Newsweek didn’t offer him full time employment, he went to Time magazine’s Beijing office and offered his help. It worked.

  Mr. FloraCruz was well educated, having studied Chinese history at Peking University. But his street smarts – no, make that countryside and boat smarts – got him ahead in China.

• Get some diplomat blood. Or have children as soon as possible in China. You may not succeed here as a first generation expat, but your daughter or son has a great shot. David Brooks is the son of a U.S. diplomat and sinologist. He grew up in China, having been here long enough to show fellow Chinese students a Western magazine about the Apollo moon landings. They burst out laughing. “The teacher and the entire class thought I was joking,” he told CIB. As vice president and general manager of Coca-Cola China, he clearly was vindicated as a non-idiot. But given how long he’s been in China – thanks to his expat parents – he’s had plenty of time and opportunity to prove himself here, and he has. There’s nothing wrong with getting ahead in life thanks to your bloodline. It worked for European royalty, it worked for Donald Trump, and it could work for you – or your offspring. Oh, and try to keep nobility in the family. Mr. Brooks married a diplomat.
• Refuse to cut your beard. China is a strange place for laowai, and sometimes, you gotta fight fire with fire. Joerg-Michael Luther first came to China in 1976, and recalls with fondness how he was finally able to open a representative office for Allianz in the 90s.

  CIB notes:

  Like any new entrant to the Chinese market, it was hard for Allianz in the early days. Government regulations required a two-year presence in the country, in the form of a representative office, before setting up business, and even then foreign insurance companies were only allowed to operate in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, with only one branch in each city. There were few regulations in place with regard to licensing, and a smaller number of people in charge of developing the regulations for the sector.

  Luther’s job involved implementing communications between the heads of the company and government leaders. Pointing at a picture of himself at a meeting between former Allianz chairman, Dr. Schulte-Noelle, and former Chinese premier Zhu Rongji, he recalls a novel technique for getting things done. “I refused to cut my beard until we got our license,” he says. “By the end, even the Chinese were talking about it.”

• Suck it up. This ain’t Kansas. Diane Long, now director of ALC Advisors, started out teaching English in China. That doesn’t sound so bad by today’s standards, but this was in the 1980s in Anhui.

  CIB reports:

  I was naïve and innocent. All the Chinese-Americans grabbed more livable cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Qingdao, and the rest of us got Wuhan, Anhui and Inner Mongolia.”

  Those two years in Anhui were instrumental to Long’s understanding of China at the time: “I took a shower once a week. A window would be broken and no-one would bother to fix it; there was no expectation. People didn’t know to complain. Everybody just thought, ‘things are the way they are.’ It’s very different from today.”

  But like her migrant neighbors, Ms. Long was upwardly mobile. She began working for an apparel sourcing company in 1987 in Shanghai, learning how to deal with spoiled Western customers and difficult local factory managers and workers.

  What she learned: to be frustrated is ok, as long as you’re still persistent. “In 1992, we had to wait six months before a telephone line could be installed,” she told CIB.

CIB’s profile series is excellent. It further suggests that following passion instead of money leads to good fortune, and learning curves can be long and painful in China, but ultimately worthwhile.

So hang around long enough, and maybe you can be old school too, and make one of the best old-school things: cold, hard cash.

    Channel: Local Wisdom     |