Stereotypically, overseas Chinese businesses have tended to be family-oriented, with an unwillingness to trust outsiders with too much responsibility or to partciipate as a hired hand for someone else. This natrually tended to reduce the size of the average enterprise. I wonder if the corporatist experience of Communist China has broken these predilections and made it easier to form large corporate entities as we see in Korea, Japan, the U.S., etc.

We often think of Japanese and Chinese together as very group oriented, but your grandfather figure is a good example, as also the Chinese-Canadians you know, of how individualistic Chinese thinking often is. In American bonsai culture you can see in the trees as well as the formality of relationships that the Chinese are the improvisers and the Japanese the replicaters. That a Chinese artist tries to listen to the individual tree and to flow with it, while the Japanese artist takes a longer and harder path to form each tree into one of 7 distinct forms.

We were dining at a Cantonese restaurant in Beijing when our host launched into an essay on the great economic achievements of the “new China” which he closed with his request that we toast to: “Isn’t Communism wonderful?”

Of course, his notion of communism meant the radical individualism of their blossoming capitalism, especially as you see it in Canton. They don’t have to define communism as the rest of the world does, nor do they have to respect the normal limits on privatization. Is it good or bad that their military is more fascinated with maintaining the flow of cash from marketing tobacco than with marching into new territories?

Two posts ago Grant said about the NFL and the American economy, that they grow “ever larger, ever faster, ever more responsive. And not a moment too soon because China’s coming. And it won’t be wearing any pads at all.” The image of an NFL linebacker rushing the quarterback is probably a good one. When Rupert Murdoch, Paul Gigot, and Gary Becker discussed China at last April’s Milken Global Conference they referred to a chart which presents China s the world’s biggest economy in 2050…. Some 7 times bigger than Japan, and substantially bigger than the US.

Chinese demographics and banking are real concerns, but amazingly, last week China chose to radically open their retail sector to outside companies. Shopping in China has been changing rapidly for some time, but a full openness to WalMart, Home Depot and a million Chinese merchants returning from places like Singapore and Lebanon…. This will accelerate the process.

When I was doing small home repairs in Canton 15 years ago I had to go to an amazing number of shops to get a few plumbing items. Most stores were manned by listless government employees who’d often say: “Mayo” (we don’t have any) to any request, even when the goods were right in front of you. And where the privately owned stores were very eager to please, they wouldn’t think of western habits like standing behind one’s product. A customer spending half a year’s salary on a bike better check it out very, very carefully before leaving the premises.

Now they jump into a competitive model where exchange doesn’t require establishing personal relationships, where every ounce of fat is constantly being pared from the distribution process, and where the producer knows what products left the store shelves that very night.

A culture that has largely skipped the wired phone and gone straight to cell technology, that is producing several times the engineering graduates of any other country in the world, and that now is mainlining Sam Walton’s urgently efficient ethos is soon going to be coming up with hi tech innovations that revolutionize the way our children live. Instead of getting SARS and new forms of flu from Guangdong province we might be getting biotech innovations and cars that don’t crash. No wonder that Ford Motor and Kay Jewelry are getting the message that WalMart and China may do to them what they did to Toys-R-Us.

Dave Meleney