Thread: Africans in Beijing harassed as Olympics approach

Liberate yourself from those stereotypes, Ray. Come see Beijing and Shanghai and find out how boisterous and disorderly Chinese actually are. As reported on James Fallows' (the Harvard/Oxbridge-educated editor of The Atlantic Monthly) blog, the PLA guards for military museums don't bother to keep up military protocol, and Chinese workers are not as dedicated to their jobs as those in neighboring Asian countries.

Please don't stick to these culturalist notions. Within the Sinosphere, order differs a lot depending on the government of the society. Singapore is supposed to be very orderly, but that's in large part because of the PAP running a nanny-state, with libel suits for dissidents. Taiwan, on the other hand, recently had an enraged Guomindang supporter kick the Democratic Progressive Party's ex-president Chen Shui Bian in the buttocks. Mainland China is somewhere along the middle, as the country is too large to be efficiently run, while the central and local governments are authoritarian. So you have about a hundred mass incidents per day, while Zhongnanhai (the Chinese Communist Party's headquarters in smoggy Beijing) dictates that all the factories in the Beijing area get closed down 3 weeks ahead of the 2008 Olympics.

The Chinese are doing a marginally better job of running their country than the Indians, that's all, and it's all down to luck. Deng Xiaopeng or whoever was calling the shots back in the 1970s figured out how to design a power structure that ensures economic growth and modernization without significantly modifying the existing power structure. This means that the corrupt Chinese government can somehow guarantee at least 8 percent yearly GDP growth without causing significant inflation. But if you consider the human capital evident in China itself, the people aren't particularly impressive. The locals are usually not up-to-date when it comes to modern management or policy concepts, the stream of technology innovation in China is not impressive, and the Western press is inundated with stories of Chinese blunders, whether from the business or political sector. It is true that the level of education in China is improving, but of those who can go to university, most go to Chinese schools, where the teaching methodologies and the objective of teaching is outdated.

The two good things about the Chinese system, however, are that, while politically unstable, it usually can guarantee economic growth and that the people running China are, while unwilling to push hard with political reforms, are enthusiastic about structural reforms and advice from certain foreign experts. For example, when Lenovo bought out IBM's PC division, the resulting entity was headed by American managers. As one blogger said, the standard computer company was owned by Americans, run by Americans, and had its products manufactured by Chinese. Lenovo became a company that was owned by Chinese, run by Americans, and had its producted manufactured by Chinese.