Today was one of the most interesting days in Shanghai thus far, though maybe only to me.
Sundays start off with our Business Ethics class, which has always kind frustrated me because I really like discussing these kinds of things (I see a close correlation between ethics, politics, and religion) but not many other people in the class seem to want to discuss these highly debatable topics. For those that know me I’m sure you can image me in such a class, constantly talking… ok maybe that’s just in any class but especially in this one.
So my first thought, when I wasn’t getting the discussion in class that I wanted was to just shut up. I would let one interesting topic slip by, then another, but on one would really say anything with the exception of maybe a comment from one of the Frenchies. Which is fine, but who I really want to hear from is the Chinese students. Today I was determined to change that.
Here’s what happened as best as I can remember:
So we read a story about oil companies going in and striking a deal with a local government. Essentially the oil companies would get 80% of the profits from the oil and the government would get 20% even though it was actually the government running the oil rigs. The normal arrangement for this type of contract would be a 50/50 split. But in this case the top government officials were actually keeping the money for themselves and none of it was “trickling down” to the population who was deep in poverty. The local leaders wouldn’t have made the deal if they didn’t get to keep the profit though. The oil companies countered any human rights protest by saying that they were personally donating millions to local hospitals, schools, etc.
Valentine noted that regardless of the trivial donations the oil companies had a moral obligation to not do business with an obviously corrupt group of individuals. I then decided I would counter that by saying that it wasn’t a company’s obligation at all and that they should solely focus on bringing profit to their shareholders. If they hadn’t struck the deal with the local government then the deal would never had been made at all and nobody would have benefited a single bit, which is basically taking a pure utilitarian stance. And then I waited… silence, and the teacher moved on.
I couldn’t help it, at this point I had become desperate, and I immediately shot my hand up. Addressing the class I explained that how could one possibly agree with that, clearly the oil companies are in the wrong here by helping spread corruption in a clearly fragile nation. They had a moral obligation to make sure their business partners were behaving in a correct manner. On top of that their contributions that they were making would actually worsen the local situation once the oil was gone from the area. Throwing up hospitals was great but they’ll staff them with their own people, and because they’re essentially giving away the service they’ll put any local form of care out of business, then when they pull out there will be no one to truly fill the void. I later made the analogy that this was like if you got a paper cut and in order to alleviate the pain I gave large amounts of morphine. Sure your pain goes away but I’ve now addicted you to an insanely powerful drug.
I then tried to bring it home as best I could and told them listen the US and China are extremely close business partners, and we are in fact business people. That means more than likely we’ll being doing business with each other at some point in the future in some form. This was there one chance of really affecting their potential business partner and how could they possibly want to do business with someone that says it’s clearly ok for a company to go in and rape a country?
Now I finally started getting the reactions I was looking for. In fact I got an excellent story from the girl whose comments I had liked from a previous class. She recalled a story from her work where her western boss was getting frustrated because he wasn’t getting feedback from his employees. He kept sending out e-mails and wasn’t really getting any responses back from the company. He decided to address them as a whole and tell them that they must start giving a response. So the next e-mail he sent out he got a response, “We’re thinking…” Wonderful, this was the kind of thing that I wanted a look at how Chinese people handle conflict and process and respond to information.
I also got a bunch of other useful bits of information:
• They weren’t use to this type of topic and discussion
• If they agree they’re not going to say so
• But if they don’t agree they’re also going to keep silent because they’re processing and thinking about the problem, not merely responding.
• They don’t know me and therefore they feel uncomfortable challenging my ideas.
So we bantered back and forth a little bit about differences in learning styles but the class was already close to ending at this point so the teacher had to end it. But anyways I’ve let them know I would really like to receive their input and we’ll see if this actually leads to more classroom discussion.
After class another interesting discussion popped up between Clement and I. I’m summarizing here and he might have meant something entirely different but this is how I took his position. His way of learning about the Chinese culture is to sit back and watch and observe, where he sees my approach as more intrusive and asking them to behave in a manner that clearly isn’t aligned with their culture. And frankly I agree.
My thought process on the whole thing is this: I have four more classes, two of which we’ll have test on, to learn as much about the Chinese perspective on ethics as I possibly can, and the students in the classroom are my conduit to that knowledge. Thus far I haven’t received as much knowledge as I want and my time is running up. If the whole thing fails what have I lost? They’ll simply continue to behave as they would normally and the whole thing will be merely as if I had said nothing. Or real class discussion might start happening and
I’ll get what I want, to put it bluntly.
But for both of us I think we agree that the verdict as to whether or not my approach was the correct one to make is still out. Quite frankly I think I could have gotten the same message across better by engaging the kids outside of class, but it wasn’t till I got their reaction did I realize that this might have been a better approach. From what I’ve observed in America (where I’ve had similar problems with students not wanting to talk during class, though not as much) this stance wouldn’t have worked because in general we don’t want to talk about class once we’re done with it. But I didn’t know that it might work here, and if I’ve learned nothing else but understanding that that is a different approach to take, then I’ve learned something valuable while I’ve been here.
It’s also important to know that this will also has huge implications to how I’ll change my style when doing business, so the implications of this affect me in more ways than just classroom engagement.
We’ll just have to see how the next class goes. I know this whole thing sounds strange but I’m really excited to see the results.
Then I picked up on my quest for Hookah tobacco which leads me to a small store in an alley about half way between the Weining Road and Loushanguan Road stop. There I was hoping I might find a decent deal, but in fact it was the exact same price as the one I received in Suzhou, 50RMB for 50g, which is simply way too much.
I had one last card up my sleeve, a sketchy posting I found on the internet. I had contacted the guy via e-mail and he gave me a price of 120RMB for 250g, which is 75% more than I would pay for it via the internet back home, and no most companies will NOT in fact ship to China. But he doesn’t have a store he simply sold it from his home, now in America I would be on HIGH ALERT but here it seemed a much more plausible way of doing business because the property prices are so high. It should also be noted that apartments are not as shady as they are in America, nobody here actually owns a house, and so everyone lives in some form of an apartment. So what the hell I sent him a text that said if he was willing to see it to me for 100RMB I would buy three boxes and if not I’ll just buy one for 120RMB. He agreed to the 100RMB price, and sent me directions to his apartment.
Have you ever tried to find an apartment in the massive sky scrapers that are the Shanghai apartment complexes? Good luck, but here’s a hint the numbers are actually posted on the back of the buildings. Luckily his apartments looked nice enough, and they were right next to Zhongshan Park which is a pretty nice area so it wasn’t like I was heading into the slums. That being said once I got to his floor I checked all of the exits and made sure they were open and made sure I had some sort of escape route.
“Paranoid much? “
Yes in fact, super sketchy drug like dealings (though I wouldn't know actually, I'm assuming they go down something like this, maybe there's an official shop but I doubt it) put me on edge, but hey I’m here to have an adventure. And what's an adventure with out some shady characters to spice it up?
Anyways this guy, Vincent, actually was nice enough, and he was French, the irony of which did not escape me. Any who apparently one of his friends had visited and left him with a crap ton and he didn’t want to use it. All of the boxes were shrink-wrapped and it seemed legit enough so I went ahead and made the purchase. If it’s crap well then I’m out $40, and honestly the laws here are so strict that this guy would likely face a death-like sentence if it was poisonous.
O fireworks are going off outside!!
Anyways so the whole things made me think of some weird drug deal, but whatever I’m just happy to finally have found some tobacco that’s not insanely overpriced. Could I have been jumped and had my money stolen? Sure, I realize that, but random violence like that just statistically doesn’t happen here and an internet posting selling shisha tobacco is just a weird way of going about doing it. Anyways, it all worked out ok and I got a story out of it.
On another note I finally went down stairs and communicated (telling someone something really isn’t an accurate description of what happens) that my toilet was clogged. By this time I had broken one plunger and bought another all to no avail. Once they were done it looked liked there had been an epic sea battle in my bathroom, but the toilet flushed and that was all that mattered.
O I also successfully used my hookah, and the experience was pretty epic. There’s a great view from my balcony, the air was nice and cool, and I wrote half of this blog outside just enjoying the night. All in my entire hookah journey has taken me over half of Shanghai and parts of Suzhou, and so it gave me a purpose for venturing out. Now I feel like I need a new crusade to call my own. Maybe I’ll try and find a Chinese girlfriend… kidding… maybe not… I think it’s time to stop writing now.
I updated my last blog post to include at least one picture from Suzhou, I’ll try and add more later, but the internet is so slow it’s taking forever to upload them.
Nighty night
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