International Law

The Seductive Strains of the China Bandwagon

Jim Rogers, megamillionaire, has given up on the United States: China is the promised land. (He's flogging a book.) Who can fault the investing expertise of one who has made more money than we ever will? Martin Howell of Reuters, for one, in an article succinctly entitled, Jumping on the China Bandwagon with Jim Rogers." Mr. Howell writes of Mr. Rogers:

He counsels us to "get out of the dollar, teach your children Chinese and buy commodities" and declares that it is scarier to have savings in the U.S. stock market than to have some of them in China.

These suggestions, in and of themselves, are frightening enough, but Mr. Rogers further recommends that we attempt to understand the Chinese by eating Chinese take-out.

"Now is the time to engage China and all things Chinese," he says. If you can't go for a visit, take a class in tai chi and then learn about Chinese medicine, watch Chinese movies, Rogers suggests. "The point is to develop a clear sense of how Chinese people view the world and lead their lives. Try to figure out how China's consumers will spend their hard-earned cash and where they might put it to grow."

Understanding how Chinese "view the world and lead their lives" is essential to productive interaction with them, but one can not rise above shallow faux-knowledge gleaned from Western-adored emblems of Chinese culture, like tai chi, without learning the language or living and working with Chinese on a daily basis. (I have come across self-professed experts on China who can not even speak the language fluently -- a defect I find scandalous.)

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It is better to remain entirely within one's upbringing than to believe it possible to skim the surface of a vastly different set of assumptions about the world and think one has the keys to the kingdom. Ask yourself: is it possible for a foreigner to understand your conception of the world from a single visit to your nation's capital, or a viewing of your latest hit film, or the reading of a holy book?

Full post as published by Asia Business Intelligence on December 26, 2007 (boomark / email).