I have come to realize a difference in Chinese culture and society that is always recurring that I think extends into many forms of daily existence.  This difference has to do with the chain of command and the relationships between people, workers, businesses, corporations and government.  The relationships between people are entirely different in China and in my opinion, this stems from a fundamental difference in why and how people react with each other.  Take for example a normal interaction between a customer and a checker at a convenient store.  In China, let me preface by saying that people pay their utility bills at the convenient store.  So assume you have a customer who enters the store to pay an electricity bill after he gets off work.  The customer hands the worker the bill and to his surprise, the worker tells him, in a pretty rude and sluggish manner, that it’s too late to pay the bill and the computer to process the bill is too slow at night. The customer thinks to himself for a minute and then realizes that this answer is totally ridiculous and unacceptable.  How can the computer be too slow at night?  Wouldn’t it be faster at night since there are fewer people using it?  He also remembers that this store is a chain, there are hundreds of the same chain in Shanghai and probably thousands throughout China and he has never experienced this strange response before from any of the other stores he has been to.  If the machine was broken, that is one thing, but being too slow and late at night;  That seems ridiculous and is most likely a bullshit response.  So the customer presses on, trying to argue and persuade the persistent checker that this is a simple matter and that the reasons for this situation to not go away are illogical.  Unfortunately, to no avail, no progress is made and that is that, no bill is paid tonight.

Now, although this is a situation which really has no substance to it and it really does not matter THAT much if the bill is paid at this moment or not, the kicker comes in when you want to take this situation a step further, because there is no step further in China.  There is no question like ‘Can I speak to the manager’.  There is no ‘customer satisfaction card’ and even if there was, it would not be useful.   The fact is that there is no accountability and this theme appears everywhere in China.  There are rarely consequences for actions and there are always no benefits to the average person when trouble does come up.  The relationships between people, in all forms, are singular.  They are one strand connections that do not and cannot expand into any kind of higher authority.  If you were to ask this checker at the convenient store, ‘Can I speak with your manager?’, they would probably argue and say there is no manager.  Not only would the question have an unsatisfactory result but even the concept of asking this kind of question and the reaction of the checker to even listen to such a question would be pretty startling.  On the other side of the spectrum, there are probably some customer satisfaction organizations somewhere in Shanghai that are living and breathing to help customers and perpetrate fair business relationships , but really these are for huge crackdowns and taking out large scams and not setup for the kind of piddly situations that any one person might have in a simple convenient store on a daily basis.  (Much like the similar organizations we have in the U.S.)

I think I am used to living in a society and set of societal rules where people and companies are subject to some kind of accountability.  If you go back a hundred years ago, you would probably find a society in the US which was much like this society is now in terms of how people react to problems and how problems are related to one another from worker to manager to boss to company.  Now, at least in the US, you have the notion (whether or not its a realistic notion is an entirely different debate), that you can trust people, simply because of this accountability phenomenon.  If the business you are dealing with has a reputation of not being accountable for anything, the average person will have no trust in the company and the relationship between company and worker gets stripped.  In your average Mom and Pop store, this is basically how it works, right?  Back in the day (and still even now), customers attend their favorite Mom and Pop store, build a level of trust and satisfaction with the store and its workers, and over time the thought of being cheated is erased from the customer’s relationship.  This is basically how stores in China work.  But now, in the US, we have so many big stores and big companies and this concept of corporation that the trust between consumer and company has a default foundation.  Trust simply comes with the territory and by being around and visible and in business, you have the people’s trust.  The reason this is true is because there is accountability for the most part in combating any problems, whether they be huge problems that affect the company down to the most trivial problems like one chain’s worker changing the rules probably because she was tired or lazy or whatever.  We have grown into a society that kinds of trusts things.  This is not to say that we have no room to improve the level of trust, but the starting point of trust is mountains above the starting point of trust that exists in China.  Even the most basic levels of trust that you would expect would be given are in most cases missing.  Now for some examples.

Banks

In China, there is a considerable problem with counterfeit money.  I don’t really understand why this is such a huge problem and to be honest I don’t really understand what are really the factors behind combating such a problem (whether its making higher quality money, cracking down on printing machines, making the penalties higher to scare away future potential counterfeiters, I don’t really know).  But since there is a problem in China with fake money, naturually everyone is a little bit weary about receiving fake money.  If you pay cash for anything in any kind of store, the first thing the worker will do when they take your money is inspect it.  Now I’m not really sure how extensive the counterfeiting operation of US dollars is, but I do know a little bit about how the powers that be respond to fake money in the US and it is in stark contrast to what happens in China.  So one of the problems that I see is that there is absolutely no accountability for fake money.  It is simply a matter of bad luck if you happen to be a person to receive fake money, even in the most ridiculous situations.  Imagine this.  You need to withdraw some cash from the ATM.  You go to the ATM inside the bank.  You withdraw a stack of 100 RMB bills, take your ATM card out of the machine and you inspect the money.  To your detriment, you discover the money is fake.  Half the bills you took out of the machine are fake.  You tell the bank half the money you just received from the ATM is fake.  The bank refuses to believe that the money came from the ATM and they will say they won’t do anything because they don’t have any proof that this money actually did come out of the ATM and not from your wallet.  They will do nothing about it, and most likely you are stuck trying to figure out what to do with a bunch of fake money.  Now any one of you can figure out some creative schemes for doing this, but the end result of any creative scheme is probably going to be redistributing this money back into the Chinese economy, if you do find a way to get real money from fake money.  So there you have it, even in the most obvious situation, the banks take no responsibility for handing out fake money to their customers.  And, in my opinion, they have no incentive to do otherwise (or else they would do something else).  If they do something like do there best to avoid giving out fake money, they would simply just be losing money.  There is just no process whatsoever to crack down on fake money, other than do do what any single person would probably do, which is to give the money to someone else.

Another classic example of business incompetence happened to me the other day.  I went into the bank to send a wire transfer from my Chinese bank account to another Chinese bank account, in order to pay for a tour that my parents are taking in a few weeks in Beijing.  So first I filled out this wire transfer form, which was no big deal.  There was a point of confusion because the tour company gave me the details in English and this was not usual for a wire transfer from one Chinese Bank to another Chinese Bank.  So despite the tour company actually giving me the English information, there was still a potential problem, according to my bank.  Even still, no big deal.  Here comes the hilarity.  The teller proceeds to give us the choice, if we want to risk sending the money using the English bank account name or if we want to call the tour company (which we did not have the phone number at the time) and make sure this was okay.  Well, we did have the bank account number, the recipient bank’s name and location and all of the details except the recipient’s Chinese name, which could have been in English or in Chinese.  We just did not know at the time.  To me, this seemed like a trivial and moot point.  First if we have the number to the account, we should just be able to send the money.  If the receiving bank is confused, they can ask their own customer if this is a payment they should be receiving.  No problem.  OR if that is somehow too complex, they do have the bank that will receive the wire transfer.  Give them a call, ask them if this is ok and if it is, voila, we are finished.  No problems.  So the teller first attempted to do this, but instead of having a special business line to the other banks (I know banks in the US have these special phone numbers to other banks because they have so much interaction with each other), she was calling the main office of Bank of China.  After being on hold for a good five minutes, she came back and said she doesn’t know.  If the transfer fails, we will have to come back and the choice remained.  So you probably would have guessed the outcome, we risked it with the English name, and of course got a call back the next day saying the transfer failed and that we must come back to the bank for attempt #2.   No surprises here.

Stores

There is a huge influx between the quality of stores in China and in particular the customer gaurantee’s that exist.  The idea of a corporation and a brand and a reputation is not quite the same as it is in the US.  It is almost as if China has adopted the modern concept of a brand name but they have not yet adopted the concept of customer loyalty and promised customer satisfaction.  Maybe an example will explain this.  Say you go into a Staples with a coupon and you find the product you want to purchase, take it to a register and pay for it with your coupon.  If the coupon is for Staples and there is nothing that is on the coupon that would exempt this store from receiving it, chances are that the company is going to accept the coupon all the time.  I have heard of examples of bad business practices but 99% of the time, there is not going to be a problem.  Contrast this with the same example in China and you could actually have a problem more often than not and this is why.  Companies are rarely related to each other as companies are in the US.  They usually operate on a more individual basis and the concept of a brand or a company name or even a company reputation is more about leasing the name than it is about actually providing the same service to all of its stores.  So in my first example with the convenient store, you might go to one store on one block and the very same store one block away and the prices vary.  Why is this?  I can’t really explain it other than the fact that the coporation above the two stores probably doesn’t have a policy that charges XXXX amount for product XXXX.  The same probably goes for using that slow evening computer when customers want to pay their utility bills, which I discovered firsthand.

I have even heard of one of the supermarket companies, Carrefour, which is dispersed all throughout Shanghai and is actually quite good  (If you dont know what Carrefour is, read up).  They have each of its markets essentially run by different factions and managers.  And there are even some Carrefour stores in Shanghai that are very loosely associated with the corporation and simply have struck a deal with the headquarters so that they can broaden the name of Carrefour into all areas of Shanghai and China and at the same time, bring the local store managers and whoever is responsible for running the store with the brand recognition that Carrefour brings to the table.  So what you end up with is a bunch of Carrefour markets that actually look and feel quite different.  If you look at the product line and the prices, they vary quite a lot.  The Carrefour near my house is excellent because there are tons of imported products and because the area near my house is kind of in a central location.  If you go to a more outskirted Carrefour, the service and products are obviously not the same.  So this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it goes to show you that you can’t always expect the ‘Carrefour’ service you are used to, even if you are at a Carrefour!

To be continued….