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MODERN MIDDLE KINGDOM: OLD PIPES, NEW PALACE

hat makes Chinese people tick? To secure a peaceful, productive twentyfirst century, we in the West must achieve a deeper understanding of their motivations and behavior. The Chinese are often described as inscrutable, even by some who have spent long stretches of time in China, but this is misleading. Despite Chinas growing significance on the world stage and an explosion of new Chinese material and lifestyle opportunities, local culture remains intact and, to those with cultural curiosity, knowable. China is modernizing, but it is not becoming Western, nor is it in the throes of a debilitating spiritual or cultural disorientation. In order to establish a productive relationship with the Chinese people, webusiness people, politicians, students, and touristsmust reorient ourselves to engage with a profoundly different worldview. Chinas economy and people are evolving rapidly, but the underlying cultural blueprint has remained more or less constant for thousands of years. As the nation races toward superpower status, it will nonetheless remain quintessentially Chineseambitious yet cautious at the core. In this sense, the country doesnt necessarily threaten to eclipse its Western counterparts. Chinas social structure and cosmological orientation yield strengths and weaknesses that complement, rather than debase, our own Western worldview.

WHAT CHINESE WANT

SNAPSHOT
The Chinese have always wanted to advance, to win the game of life, albeit without upsetting the apple cart. This tension leads to three key interrelated and eternal characteristics of Chinese culture that are, directly or indirectly, relevant for practically all marketing strategies:

a fatalistic, cyclical view of time and space characterized by meticulous interconnectivity of things big and small; a morally relativistic universe in which the only absolute evil is chaos and the only good is stability, a platform on which progress is constructed; and a view of the family, not the individual, as the basic productive unit of society.

These characteristics translate into quintessentially Chinese adaptive and dysfunctional traits that unify past and present, poor China and prosperous China. On the plus side, the country has a unique ability to

mobilize resources for critical strategic undertakings at the national level; study other cultures competitive advantages while adjusting them to suit Chinese circumstances; and progress, slowly but surely, toward rational, pre-defined objectives.

Less productively, China continues to be handicapped by

conformity that discourages bottom-up innovation, and an underdeveloped civil societythat is, institutions designed to impartially protect the economic and political interests of the individual.

The contemporary, street-level manifestations of Chinas cultural blueprint include

anti-individualistic social cohesion, underpinned by individual identities inextricably linked to the nation and clan, the latter still the elemental unit of Chinese civilization;

MODERN MIDDLE KINGDOM

top-down, patriarchal management of business and industry, reinforced by the obligation of CEOs to bow to Communist Party mandarins; contemporary consumerism, propelled by the tension between bold status projection and nervous protection of hard-won, easily lost, gains; diplomatic pragmatism, characterized by incrementalism and dependence on geopolitical stability.

AN ADVERTISING GUYS GOAL: EXPLORATION AND DEBATE

To some, advertising executives exist at the fringes of legitimacy. We are neither hard-core business people nor scholars. We do not control the levers of capitalism or offer academic insight. In fact, a few believe our profession is inherently corrupt, profiting from base human desires by transforming them into products pumped out of factories like processed cheese. On self-deprecating days, however, I remind myself that advertising people exist at the intersection of commerce and culture. Our ultimate goals have always been, first, to identify fundamental motivations for behavior and preference, and, second, to translate these insights into revenue-generating consumer propositions. No matter what the product category or target demographic, insight and profit margin are inextricably linked. In order to transform a mouse into Mickey Mouse, we must be both amateur cultural anthropologists and unaccredited psychologists. After a four-year stint in Hong Kong, I arrived on the Chinese mainland in 1998. I have been eager to explore the nooks and crannies of modern Chinese life, as many of the firsthand experiences I describe in the later chapters will attest. I bought a classic Shanghai-style house in the heart of the former French Concession, a tree-lined, intimate-yet-lively milieu favored by locals and expatriates alike. I grappled with the teeth-gnashing frustration of home maintenance. I slowly vanquished the prejudices of local neighbors, modest folk who regarded me as an overindulged foreign invader. Professionally, I have had the privilege of partnering with leaders of dozens of corporations, multinational and local, private and state owned. Directly or indirectly, I have managed, and aspired to motivate, thousands of employeesan aggressive-yet-conservative, inspiring-yet-maddening, starry-eyed-yetpragmatic group. Together, we have mapped the corners of Chinas consumer and commercial terrainfrom glittering coastal capitals to scrappy, gray, cookie-cutter inland towns. We have infiltrated both Orwellian boardrooms with