Based on the 2nd, slightly revised and updated German edition
© 2011 Bernhard Wessling
1st edition 2010 (German)
Translation by Andreas Möhn
Set, cover design, manufacturing and publishing:
Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt
ISBN 978-3-8448-5818-1
For my family (including, for the time being, two grandchildren), my friends and my staff. Especially for those people around me who take part in my work and my observations in China and who want to learn more than what I have occasionally told them. And for those who do not always want to hear or read the same stuff about China.
What purpose this book does not serve yet is meant for (Preface)
Some characters, some places, pronunciation guide and some “thank you”
That’s how it started
ChangChun
Negotiating a joint venture
‘What if they all decide to move into the city?’
To China with Chancellor Schröder and Tycoons
My fear of ShenZhen
Chinese dimensions
The first steps
The young city of ShenZhen
Life in ShenZhen
Our driver
Football in ShenZhen
Gan Bei
Exhibitions
How do I best establish a company in China?
Nature in the juggernaut city
Minor entrepreneurs
The staff
LangLang and me inaugurate a new concert hall
I am trying to learn Chinese
In hospital
Stock market hype, top and flop
Noise
Toothache
The “China capital of crime”
Serial suicide at Foxconn
The 2008 Olympics
Encounters in the botanical garden
Getting and raising children with joy and sorrow
Odd: a World Cup with 33 teams
The Chinese New Year
LaoWei does not only play football
Appendix
What happened “after the deadline”?
Conflicting findings in books on China
This book is not a travel guide and no instruction set for how to behave in China as a tourist or a business(wo)man, it does not contain any tips on how to avoid pitfalls, and no hints about how to live as a foreigner in China.
It is a description of those observations as I could make in China during my now almost six years working there. Because some of these observations contradict some of the advice, tips, rules, instructions and manuals for China, this book has been first developing in my head, then in my camera and finally on my laptop.
This book is not a counterargument to the manifold Chinese books that you can buy. Some I have read that present themselves as tourist guides, as guides to discover China, or as indispensable reference works, without which you cannot do in China any work or business successfully, without which you cannot avoid those pitfalls as are lurking everywhere. Even if some of my observations may contradict some statements about China made in other books, I will not object to these books. Contradictory statements about China may be (but not necessarily!) correct.
China is huge, China is very diverse. What you will find in BeiJing with its many government officials and foreigners, or in ShangHai 
, the economic centre with a high proportion of foreigners, and what may be representative or normal there may be very different from what you will find in the boom-town of ShenZhen, the fourth-largest city in southern China. This is a modern, new city, virtually without history, consisting of 99 % immigrants and relatively few foreigners. I have been living there for almost six years. From there, I’m travelling on business inside and outside China.
China and the Chinese are much more varied and unique and different from each other than for example the Americans. The cultural diversity is more comparable to Europe. There are much less cultural and linguistic differences between Texas and Alaska, between Kansas and New England, than between central ShangHai and peripheral ShangHai, let alone between ShangHai, ShenZhen and ChongQing 
. You don’t have to understand it, but you should simply take note, that you wouldn’t generalise everything. Wait a moment, I am sorry – readers and other authors may generalise and try to understand as they like, it is just me who doesn’t want to generalise but simply to describe my personal observations during my time in China, when I had to do (at work and in the free time) almost exclusively with rather normal average Chinese.
And I would also not like teaching the Chinese about what I believe to be their weaknesses, nor how we think they should reform their government and better organise their society. Because I do not know how the Chinese could improve either, I do not even know how we could improve our society in Germany (although I think I know quite well what is going wrong with us), how can I, as an outsider, give advice to the Chinese? The other authors seem to think different.
There is no country in the world that you would get to know and really understand as a foreigner on holiday or on business trips. I bet you cannot even understand France when viewed from Germany (and the French are our neighbours) just by one or a few voyages.
Can even Northern Germans really completely understand inhabitants of the Ruhr area, Bavaria or the Rhineland?
How much more difficult we find understanding the incredibly diverse and sophisticated, but not uniform Chinese culture. As a foreigner (probably not even as a Chinese) you cannot grasp China “as such” by observing the situation in BeiJing or ShangHai where most of the foreigners in China live and where the authors of the Chinese books that I know spent some time.
Even from ShenZhen you cannot grasp it. Perhaps no one can understand China comprehensively, but only partially. China is too large, too diverse and of much more varied structure than we Europeans might think. In my opinion, this cannot be described in a single book. The attempt of doing so would require more than a human life (and China would be then again different).
I do not try and do not claim to describe and explain “China”. I also do not claim to know more than the writers of other China books nor want to correct them. I only intend to describe some of my observations, and I am committed to reproducing them correctly and authentic.
I cannot guarantee that they are typical, only that they have taken place more or less as told here. In any case, my stories describe some facets of Chinese life, not: Chinese life as such.
I am describing a little bit of life in China as it occurs every day, in diverse and different form from what you may have thought, and even after reading this book there will be new observations everywhere and ever again that will be different from what we expect them to be (and different from what I would expect and describe).
This book is conceived of as a complement to other books on China. Although it was not my intention, it may happen that some reader may get practical hints out of this book. In any case, I would like to help setting apart, expanding and enriching our understanding of China.
It is common practice in China to refer to a person not only by family name but also by position or function or by a characteristic quality, this habit I have adopted here. Therefore, the characters in this book are called, for example, “Mayor Song” or “Engineer Su” although in Chinese the proper word order is: “Song CunZhang”, or “CunZhang” for short, and “Su GongChengShi”, usually “Su Gong” for short.
I also think it was a pity if the reader should pronounce in mind those names as the way the Chinese phonetic system PinYin might suggest. Professor Xu is not referred to as “Ksoo” but — if you follow Wikipedia’s definition, entry “PinYin” - in a way – about like “chü”, the “ch” being a sound that you make with the lips spread and the tip of your tongue curled downwards and stuck to the back of teeth when you say the vowel. The “ü” is equivalent to the sound in German “üben” or French “lune”. To get this sound, say “ee” with rounded lips. PinYin has very clear rules on distinguishing “u” or “ee” from “ü”. In PinYin, you write “ü”, some phonetic systems replace it by “v”.
| Name | Who is it? | How is it pronounced? |
LaoWei  |
this is me | Lăo: emphasis from high to low and back Wèi: emphasis from high to low stress, the vowels in „wei” are like those in “bay” |
WeiSiLin  |
my full name | SiLin: Initial voiceless “s”, the “i” is very low back in the throat; lin = “linn” |
SunLi  |
my first staff | SunLi: sounds almost like „Sue-Ann-Lee”, just that there is no hiatus at the “-” but a gliding vowel. |
Engineer Chu  |
her husband | Chu: “choo” (note: in PinYin, „u“ is sometimes „ü“, for example, with Professor Xu) |
HaoKang  |
her son | How kang (I will spare the reader from that „hao“ is actually emphasised with the 3rd voice, i. e. hăo ) |
Professor  |
Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, almost my joint venture partner | See above |
Wang  |
Craftsman | „W“ as in “where, why, water”, „a“ as in “calm” |
LuLu  |
his wife | “Loo-loo”, with a very short “oo” |
Song  Da Song |
Former farmer | “Song” Da like “dah”; the Older Song |
| Xiao Song Song DeLian  |
his son, chief physician | Little Song, the “x”, as mentioned above for Xu: a crossover between soft „sh“ and „s“ His full name, the “d” is followed by a very short vowel like that in “turn”, lian may be either “Lee-ahn” or “Lee-Ann” (but with a short “ee”) |
Engineer Su  |
Formerly an engineer, now bird photographer | “Soo” |
ShiTou, „Stones“  |
Football player | The „i“ is very much in the back of the throat |
YeDan  |
Early pensioner, painter, professor | “Yeh-dahn” with a short “a” |
Fang ShiFu  |
Drivers who used to be racer | “Fang”: “a” like in “calm”, but short; “Shi” see above for my friend “Stones”, “Fu” = “foo” or “phoo” |
BaiJiu  |
Not a person but a shot, literally „white wine“, but this is misleading | Bai as “ba-ee” jiu: “j” as in „James“ , then „ee-ouw“, all together: „jee-ouw“ |
Si Hai Gong Yuan  |
A favourite park | „Si“ as above, “hai” like “hi”, then “gong” as written, “yuan” has this darn ü-sound while “-an” is just like the first name, “Ann” |
Lian Hua Shan Gong Yuan  |
Another favourite park | Lian = “Lee-Ann” |
Xia Sha Cun  |
„Village“ in ShenZhen | Xia roughly like “chee-ah”, cun= “coo-Ann” (no hiatus, just glide from the “oo” to the “a”: “ooa”!) |
Fu Tian  |
District of ShenZhen | Fu = “phoo”; Tian = “Tea-Ann” |
ShenZhen  |
The main location of events in this book | Shen = the way it looks, zh = a voiced sh, as in French “journal” |
Beijing  |
Capital of China, occasionally mentioned | “Bei” like “bay”, Jing = the way it looks |
All persons who are mentioned in this book have been given a different name by me than those they have got in reality. Also I have slightly altered some events in terms of time, place, storyline, or characters, in order to make recognising anyone more difficult and to protect the privacy of individuals.
I want to thank the translator Andreas Möhn (and the translation reviewer Nardina Alongi) who – as far as I can tell – did a very good job in transferring the style of my original German book into (British) English and their patience in the discussions with me.
Two persons who are playing an active role in this book, SunLi and ZhangMiao (you will get to know them later) have reviewed this English translation of the original second German edition, and have checked it for accuracy whereever I as a foreigner could have misinterpreted something. A third person (who does not play a role in this book), a Chinese business partner, also reviewed the English manuscript.
I am very grateful to all three of them for their suggestions, hints and the active debates with me. As a result, this English version is slightly different from the German original (which neither of the three was able to review), not drastically different, only in a few details which I can confirm with some modest degree of satisfaction.
Moreover I am grateful that SunLi and Zhang-Miao not only had allowed me to include some personal details already for the German version (while they did not know what I would write about), but finally after reading the English version approved and released with some smile.
There was no way how to go on like that. From China only bad news were sent. Once a transaction failed, another time, a customer had trouble with some facility, persistent shortcomings in quality, persistent complaints by customers, and then, suddenly, out of the blue there came a note from our Taiwanese distributor: ‘The day after tomorrow, the process line for our customer 
ChangHao will be installed. Who will be there? What do you mean: impossible? Do you not want to have any new customers?’ What line? Who is ChangHao at all? We don’t know that company. Why don’t we know anything?
My Vice-Director for Sales – as well as our Sales Manager – kept flying once every three months to China, spending five to eight days driving around with our distributor and then returning with the same old hat: ‘Our concepts are not fitting for China, we have to adapt to local conditions there, our distributor knows better than us about that.’ And this, in an epoch when production is massively getting relocated from Europe and the USA, preferably to China.
I was fed up. The customers refuse following our process requirements the way we had developed them, and then they complain about inferior quality? Production lines are installed that we do not know about nor could design in cooperation with the customer, and then our processes are supposed to operate in them? None of our proposals, appropriate for Europe, already established in Korea, are right for China? Chinese customers do not accept them? I refused to believe that.
Some time ago I had already once confronted our Board of Advisers with the problems that I had with our Vice-Director. I had indicated then that I would suggest to fire him. That was what I did in the end. And two weeks later I returned to China. Four years I had not been there.
I wake up. My room is dark. Where am I? I grope for the window, a thick and heavy curtain blocks the daylight. I move it aside and have a look. Ah, some US-American city. Uh? Why the USA? When did I fly there? And which city is this after all? … Slowly I get more awake and remember: In fact I had taken a plane from BeiJing to ChangChun 
, hadn’t I? That is a city to the far North of China, and the North is poor, and China is an underdeveloped country. Right, BeiJing is the capital, there they open the shop windows for foreigners like me and make everything as proper and modernistic as possible – but they don’t do that in ChangChun?
I wonder about my mental condition, perhaps for some fractions of a second, but it feels like an endless time. At last I note that there are Chinese characters down below, outside, and yes, now I remember to have arrived at ChangChun airport, yesterday evening I checked in at the hotel, and now the information sheets on the desk confirm that I am here indeed. However, this looks more like Philadelphia.
I am preparing a joint venture with a subsidiary of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. I have known Professor Xu 
for years: He is young, highly intelligent, funny, open, dynamic, and quite ugly, showing protruding teeth.
We drive to his factory at the outskirts of ChangChun. Every ten kilometres my local time shifts back another 20 years: Here, ChangChun slowly turns the way I might have imagined it if I had had enough imagination. Horses and donkeys pulling carts with all sorts of charges. Heaps of coal in the street being shovelled on other carts, in addition to heaps of kale – ah no, this is Chinese cabbage, getting loaded on yet other carts.
One weekend, at my request we drive to the border with Inner Mongolia. I want to observe cranes. At the end of the 300 km drive we are back in the year 1398: no electricity, no water, the huts are roofed with corn leaves, the lake has fallen almost dry, before the huts peasant women are threshing grain by hand, with flails. Every 50 km I felt we drove about 100 years backwards in time. The donkeys are running free. Dogs roam. Children are naked. It is touch dry. I am getting thirsty just from the view of the drought.
Only one thing reminds me of the modern era, in which I live: My mobile always finds a full-power signal. This day, I will observe seven different species of cranes – and the way of life centuries before my time.
We exchange contract drafts. Professor Xu and I agree that we want to found and manage a joint venture in ChangChun, intending to become supplied with intermediate products from Germany plus the required knowledge for further manufacturing steps and applications. But the provincial government disagrees. They want us not to provide intermediates into which our intellectual property has been dispersed to be used but not pirated; instead they prefer that we would grant the joint venture a license to produce the intermediates themselves.
I refuse. The government of the Jilin Province 
invites me to negotiate.
For the third time I take a plane to ChangChun, this time in mid-winter, it is minus 25° C outside. I don‘t let myself be fooled again in the morning, I know after all where I am. After a day of fruitless negotiations the vice-governor invites us to dinner. We meet at a large round table, looking to me as if it had been sized to five metres across. There are about 20 people, Professor Xu is absent, I am alone with at least 19 government officials.
All of them are friendly, they smile at me, the first toast is applied in halting English. The most varied dishes are served. Every five minutes one of the other diners approaches me with a kind invitation to empty with him the shot glass: ‚Gan Bei!‘ BaiJiu is poured into my glass, that is a clear Chinese liquor, high-percentage, highly dangerous. As an addition, Chinese red and white wines are served like a dog’s dinner. (BaiJiu tastes better, but is more hazardous.)
Everyone wants to drink with me, and every time I have to empty the glass. How nice is everyone!
I am very friendly and my glass is always empty, my mouth is often full. Sometimes my glass is not empty from drinking, but the large plant in that pot behind me – if I remember properly, it was a bamboo – is still drunk for days after. According to informed sources it had to be taken to the plant hospital in emergency at night. At the end of the evening everyone is boozy except me. I drank the least of all.
No contract closed. The intellectual property will remain in Germany. Professor Xu understands and respects my decision, the provincial governor has had something else in mind.
Professor Xu is from a very poor family. He grew up in the wetlands and channel networks far beyond the ‘water towns’ around ShangHai. Meat never got on the table there, with a few exceptions: If he managed to catch a mouse or a rat, then he grilled it on a stick over an open fire, still no meat on the table, but at least in the stomach.
Back when I visited him in ChangChun, his father was still a self-sustaining peasant who grew himself all that he needed for living. His income, as far as money was concerned, was equal to about ten Euros. Per year. Everything that he and his wife were eating and drinking they produced themselves.
Because of his exceptional talent and performance, Little Xu very early received a scholarship. He was not even 30 when he got an appointment as Professor of Chemistry at the Academy of Sciences.
A few years later he finally succeeded in convincing his parents to visit him. He picked them up in his native village, together they drove to the airport and flew from there to ChangChun. ShangHai and ChangChun were cities of a kind that his father and his mother had never seen before. For them, it was unthinkable, in terms of money, ever to travel there.
The second evening they went to a restaurant for dinner. The son invited his parents, along with his wife and their little baby. Father and mother were not shown the menu table, the son ordered the dishes.
When the bill was brought, the father heard the amount that was to be paid. Right at the table he started crying bitterly and could not stop. His son had at that one evening spent four or five times as much of money as he had available for a whole year.
This story moved me very much, and it reminded me of the trip to the border with Inner Mongolia. On the way to there, country and villages had looked increasingly poorer. You have to understand that in China, not just anyone who wants to may move to a city and find a job there. I asked Professor Xu: ‘What if suddenly, at the very same day, all those poor maize and cabbage farmers within a radius of 50 km would decide to move into the city?’ – ‘Well, then we get a problem.’
11 September 2001. I am driving a rental car in Wisconsin from the crane reserve Necedah National Wildlife Refuge to the nearest larger town that features a FedEx station. Some equipment supplied for the whooping crane release program I need to send back to Germany for repair. This has nothing to do with my chemical and commercial work, I am a hobby crane explorer and engaged in the program for saving the North American whooping cranes.
The ‚National Public Radio‘ station which I always attend to in the car when in US, because of its more profound news and analyses and because of the classical music, tells that a plane has crashed into one tower of the World Trade Center, there is fire, there is chaos. In the next village I drive to the roadside, find a phone booth and call my financial advisers.
While I am at the phone, that second plane crashes into the other tower. Every reader knows what followed. But back then I did not know how to continue: financing the company was tough to impossible, our capital reserves (stocks and other financial assets) kept melting away as the famous snow in the sun.
Even while I was in the wetlands of Wisconsin, far from all events, waiting for the opportunity to fly back to Germany, a letter from the Federal Chancellery descends on my unguarded desk in my German office. Well, it was certainly sent automatically, without taking the current situation into consideration: Chancellor Schröder invites me to accompany him in November on his next trip to China. Me? Now?
Yes, I had written to the Chancellor at some point. I had described the situation in ChangChun (without mentioning the unfortunate bamboo), but I did not expect any response to that. I had merely desired to tell someone in that governmental space station where everyone fantasizes about all those fantastic opportunities in trading with China how the common person fares who wants to launch an insignificant joint venture and is tried to be made drunk (in vain) by the provincial governor. And now I was expected to travel with all the top politicians and Tycoons to China?
I put the invitation aside. Do I have the money, the relaxedness and the time to go on such a trip, right in the turmoil of world history and business financing?
Of course, in the end I go. Curiosity and adventurer’s soul triumph over sober reasoning. Maybe I can even learn something?
In November 2001, I am sitting in the second governmental plane. In the first one there is Schröder with various journalists and politicians, the second is occupied by Müller, the Minister of Economy, and a 50-member business delegation comprising 49 Tycoons of rank and fame, and one no-man – me.
Then I am standing with the leaders of German industry on the red carpet in the Great Hall of the People while Schröder is welcomed by the Prime Minister, Zhu RongJi, with all honours of protocol as you know it from TV. It looks nice, but of course it is just diplomatic entertainment.
The following dinner at the giant restaurant of the Great Hall of the People is another remarkable event. I present to Prime Minister Zhu RongJi and Chancellor Schröder a CD containing self-recorded photos and audio files of cranes from all over the world. The calls of cranes that migrate across all national boundaries shall be my icon of international understanding.
The next day, I meet again Professor Xu who delivers some other proposals suggested by the provincial government. But these as well do not convince me, we obtain no result. The joint venture plan has failed.
Several events, visits and official meetings are scheduled in BeiJing and ShangHai. We, the Tycoons and little me, ride with a bus. Sometimes I am sitting next to Heinrich von Pierer (of Siemens), sometimes to Jürgen Weber (then the chief executive of Lufthansa), and we also talk about cranes. Ron Sommer (Deutsche Telekom’s Board Director at that time) is very relaxed, like everyone else on the bus, much more relaxed than you may imagine when watching the TV coverage. But the “Bahnchef” (as he is called in German media), the Railway Boss, Mr. Mehdorn, the CEO of Deutsche Bahn, is the generic comedian. He keeps entertaining us with small performances of stage quality. I am involved in the talks as if I had always been one of them and yet another key member of German big business.
Just by the way I learn a lot from the other fellow travellers about China through discussing my problems with the provincial government of Jilin. The Volkswagen sales director informs me that – after several clues, strange observations and systematic own investigation – they discovered one day a ghost factory where some Chinese cloned original VW parts.
The main shareholder and CEO of a large high-technology company tells me of the chief assistant and a manager who were related to each other and had secretly built up a trading company that bought valuable resources from his company for far less than the normal price, claiming these raw materials were dirty and not compliant to specifications. The family-owned trading ring then relabelled them, so that they were now clean and pure and valuable, and sold them at the best price somewhere in China.
The police did not initially want to pursue the case. Then the German director was threatened to be arrested and expelled, then for some time his business license was revoked. Meanwhile the official stamp (without which no company can legally do business in China) suddenly was possessed by that manager who had set up the trading company together with the chief assistant. Only by threatening to inform the Minister of Economy (whom the main shareholder personally knew) this affair was finally settled and the sale of company values ended.
My company (if I would ever have one in China) would never have such importance that a threat to inform the Minister of Economy might leave any impression in a similar situation.
Another delegation member tells me that they had lost a whole subsidiary because the Chinese manager one day went with the company stamp to the authorities and rewrote everything in his own name. Although it was later be proven in lengthy court proceedings that this was effectively the theft of an entire company, the only benefit was some financial compensation, but the subsidiary was gone.
All this does not give me much hope, but rather my fears grow out of hand. If I ever had the courage to set up a company in China (which I would actually do once but did not know on this trip), I will have to take care not to drown in a mud of corruption and family clique – and especially keep an eye on the stamp! But how?
In ShangHai, we have important appointments: The first is to celebrate the construction of the first support pillar of the magnetic levitation train system Maglev. I am impressed to see how the Chinese manage this project and even placed a factory for concrete pillars just there, only for constructing the Maglev, which will be dismantled again after completion.
Also there is a German-Chinese joint venture which has built a trade show exhibition hall that is now being officially opened in our presence. Then we help more vigorously at the opening of the first OBI store (a “do-it-yourself” tools and consumables market) in China. In the evening I am accidentally sitting next to Manfred Maus, the founder of OBI, and he tells me and all our neighbours at the table how he was doing market research (with an interpreter) in China to find out what the Chinese are expecting. He went to young families in new housing areas and asked them himself. This leaves a great impression with me.
But something he must have done wrong, because when OBI had already 13 markets in China (including that first one to whose opening we attended), in April 2005 they completely pulled back from the country. The year before, the chief executive of OBI Asia had departed on his own ways, together with the core of management, and also the most important trade and joint venture partner, Haier, had withdrawn.
From today’s perspective, two of the most important economic projects that we supported during this journey, the magnetic levitation train and OBI, have thus failed. For whatever reason – the Germans had drawn the short straw. And what kind of reports I collected on the bus trips was anything but motivating.
With a background like this, a few years later I am suddenly back to China – permanently.
I am not fond of cities. I am even less fond of big cities. They lock me in: the crowds, the tall buildings, the narrow streets. You can not even see a hundred metres afar. I am dedicated to nature, the sea, wide roaming views, trees, waves, birds.
I yearn for opportunities to look far out into the land, at least once a day, at least at the weekend.
A city of some tens or hundreds of thousands of inhabitants may attract me perhaps if there are a few good book-stores, even more if there is a well-stocked map store, and at times I must have the chance to attend a concert of classical music. Only for such purposes I go ‚downtown‘. Wandering around, shopping, a few days vacation there, ‚flying to New York over the weekend‘, how awful! A city of more than one million inhabitants I perceive as a hideous threat.
When I was wound up in China, it was unavoidable that I would set up my base in Guang-Dong, a province in southern China. The majority of our clients is located there, and from there I would also be able to visit East China, Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Singapore. At first I was planning to live in a small town on the outskirts of GuangZhou. At the weekends it was wonderful – hills, forests, rivers, birds, I could go for a walk and wonderfully relax.
But for the daily business, it was simply the wrong choice. The traffic connection was unbearable, and I also did not want to be permanently reliant on an interpreter, nor dwell during the working week in constantly changing hotels. So I decided to look for an apartment in ShenZhen.
ShenZhen is medium-sized by Chinese standards. Which means that officially it has seven or eight million people, in fact, according to some sources, 12 to 15 million. If I previously felt uncomfortable with cities of more than 50,000 inhabitants and threatened by one million of them, how should I ever get acquainted with more than ten million residents?
Trying to imagine dimensions in China is a hard thing to do, at least for an average German. Even the ‚medium-sized‘ city of ShenZhen is a behemoth, extending across 100 km (east to west) by 10 km (south to north) at the narrowest point and by 40 km at the widest, in its west. Millions of people dwell and work in an area that is similar to the shape of a sausage which someone has beaten flat on one side.
I am from the Rhein-Ruhr-Area, which is the largest conurbation in Germany and the fifth largest in Europe. About five million people are living there, compared with ShenZhen that is about a third of its people, in an area more than twice as large as ShenZhen’s.
Driving north or south from the town of Herne, the approximate centre of the Rhein-Ruhr-Area, you will leave the cityscape latest after 30 km and arrive in the less populated countryside of the Münsterland or the Sauerland (both are admittedly still more densely populated than the Tibetan Highlands), whatever direction you may have taken.
But if you drive two, three or four hours by car from ShenZhen to the north (and a little later to the west), you pass through other such behemoths – provided you do not stay in one of the inevitable traffic jams. First, there is Dong-Guan, about as large as ShenZhen but with one third more residents, next, GuangZhou, the provincial capital, deeply rooted in history, three times as large as ShenZhen and twice as populated.
To the south of ShenZhen no major sparsely populated areas can be found, either. Within sight of the sea there is already HongKong.
Well, far in the North of the behemoths Dong-Guan and GuangZhou there are vast agricultural areas. Known are the large banana plantations, there you get a very delicious variety (shorter but thicker as we know it). To the south, in the delta of the Pearl River, vegetables are grown and there is a lot of aquaculture. Somehow they have to feed those dozens of millions of people.
So, ShenZhen and DongGuan together cover roughly the surface of the Rhein-Ruhr-Area but feature more than six times as many inhabitants. Add GuangZhou, and on an area that is less than three times as large as the Rhein-Ruhr-Area there will live as many people as in half of Germany. And we have not yet considered ZhongShan and ZhuHai, again with millions of inhabitants each.
And all of these residents are competing with each other every day, in every respect. Much more than we may believe, observing from our outside position, China is a boiling kettle of competition, of people moving on with tremendous speed like drops of water on a hot plate that try to find a cooler place the first, so as not to evaporate the first.
That is why everyone wants to be the first to arrive where everyone wants to go, whether at the bank counter or at the other end of the city or in its centre. The same rules formally apply to road traffic as in Germany or the U.S. or England, in reality some… else. The honking is so overwhelming sometimes and in certain places that one day I said: ‘They are practising for the Big South China Honk Festival, I suppose?’ – ‘What festival?’, our driver asked, confused, because he had never heard of this competition – no wonder, for I had made it up just then.
If the semaphore switches from red to green, no one knows what will happen: Anybody may set off quite comfortably, but it may also happen that someone spurts ahead from the rear, brakes away to the left and turns left into the side road in front of everybody else. If the semaphore is wired that way that at the same time it will show green light to the opposite lane, then those in the real rush will try to bend left before the approaching traffic, even if that means to slow down for a few dull pedestrians, because you cannot disregard flattening twenty people on the road: It costs too much speed.
Strangely enough, no one complains about that. There is honking everywhere, at every opportunity, but during such actions, no one does – unless the meddlesome fellow suddenly stops in the middle of the track. But if he rashly draws through and spurts ahead, this is acknowledged as advantage in competition. You might have been faster, too!
Excellence in competition, even in traffic, is generally acknowledged in China. Those common German wisenheimers do not seem to exist in China: No one will overtake another car that was reeving in front him, honk, curse or even drive pathetically slow before him to ‘punish’ him.
I get the all-inclusive package: HongKong airport pickup, plus a small detour to impress me, then we drive across the border to ShenZhen, to ‚Mainland China‘. While in the beginning I feel comfortable and protected because our distributor takes so much care of me, a little suspicion shows up: The more I enjoy the care-taking, the more I will get dependent on it. However, I do not at this time know how things will further develop.
We arrive in ShenZhen and fetch SunLi, a lady who has applied to us: She wants to work for us.
The first interview is a bit tenacious. She is very reserved but her English is good and her understanding of the market is as well. It occurs to me that she does not just say what I want to hear: She does not give me easy answers, but rather uncomfortable ones. She tells me that she was already interviewed by two managers of our company. I pretend to know about that though in fact I don‘t, and I explain that I would like to picture this myself.
She is a Master in a specialised field of engineering. Her studies she completed at a top-level university in BeiJing, and then she worked for four years at one of our customers. She is married to an electronics engineer and will probably want to have a child at some time, at least within the next few years, because of the biological clock that otherwise will run out. That does not concern me now, who knows what will happen till then, it will somehow work out.
After the interview I do not make any promise, I‘ll tell her later my decision on whether or not I will take her. Only our distributor is slightly annoyed: Why do we need our own employees in China? Is he himself not our best translator and assistant for any kind of trouble? Why do I book hotels independently, that is: why do I let my own staff do it and not our distributor? But appointments with customers will be arranged only via the distributor, won‘t they? – No, I will arrange appointments as I see fit, about that I am leaving no doubt. I will myself visit customers as appropriate, and sometimes without the distributor‘s company.
This is what I will learn about back in Germany: The sales director, now laid off, and his sales manager were adamantly opposed to hiring the young lady whom I interviewed. They considered her weak (‚in this business women cannot prevail‘) and they were uncomfortable with her non-standard replies. It seems she had a too independent mind and (despite her reserved attitude) self-confidence for these two guys. On the other hand, her appearance (and the way she was dressed) did not leave a lasting impression, and certainly not that of a modern manager. That, however, seemed to be the most important factor for my former vice-director.
Strange that the two guys had not told me anything about their former interview. I hired the young lady.
SunLi 
and Chu 
1996 – the 18-year-old SunLi is on the way to one of the most prestigious universities in BeiJing to begin her studies there. The train needs 33 hours to take her from home to her destination which is 1,500 kilometres away. During the seven years that she studies in BeiJing, the travel time gradually shortens from 33 to 27 hours, then to 22, and finally to 13; today it will be even less, and in a few years high-speed trains will serve this route, too, and shorten the trip to between five and six hours. Arriving in BeiJing, she moves into a student residence, where her father had already lived 25 years ago, he was then of course in the men’s wing, not with the female students. Very little has changed since then, China is still not out of stagnation, the policy of opening has just begun. Nobody knows what will be the results.
There is a single phone down in the entrance hall, a harridan who runs the house makes sure that no young men sneak into the women’s wing, the young female students are dwelling six by six in one room each, they sleep in three bunk beds. There is little space. Washing and showering must be registered, hot water is not all the time available. At 11 p. m., the light is switched off.
A few years later she has completed her Bachelor and begins a Master’s study. This time, she lives with three other female students for years in one room for four. With almost all of these former room-mates she will keep contact even as a professional. With some male students, too, friendships have developed that will last for decades.
Sun and Chu, the engineers, have known each other since middle school days. They are studying in different cities, working hard and determined, both had no time (or no eye?) for any serious love affair. When they later meet again, the two get closer and after certain considerations, discussions and musings agree to get married. Both have neither a home nor a job. Engineer Sun does not write applications, she visits some job-fairs at her university.
An electronics company in ShenZhen recruits her, she gets a four-year contract although her education is much different from what this job requires. First, she moves alone to ShenZhen to get acquainted with her new profession from scratch. At the same time her husband is looking for a job, after several months he also moves to ShenZhen because he finds a job with Hua-Wei 
, a then largely unknown emerging company that is providing hardware and software for telecommunications networks. Today it is ranked second or third in the world.
The telecommunications company HuaWei is a prime example of the dramatic changes that the former fishing village of ShenZhen has witnessed within the recent 30 years. In 1979 a decision was made to establish in ShenZhen one of the four special economic zones of the Pearl River Delta in the province of GuangDong (or Canton). Deng XiaoPing thus intended to reform China’s economy, which later proved to be successful. August 26, 1980, Deng XiaoPing opened this first economic zone in ShenZhen, this is now considered the birthday of this city. While I am writing this book ShenZhen celebrates its 30th birthday, and Deng XiaoPing would now be 106 years old.
Out of a ‘village’ of about 30,000 inhabitants (along with a few neighbouring villages perhaps 100,000 inhabitants), who all lived mainly on fishing there, developed within this extremely short time a megalopolis of about 15 million inhabitants. Many millions of today’s residents are not registered, that is why they are not counted officially. Yet they live here.
Within the first decades, factories of cheap goods such as clothing, shoes and toys moved from nearby HongKong, which they considered too narrow and too expensive, to ShenZhen. Soon, however, the cheap production relocated on to DongGuan and further inland while in ShenZhen, electronics industry sprouted.
With modern high-tech companies ShenZhen attracts the best trained, ardent and ambitious young people. They want to work with HuaWei 
, ZTE 
, ZhongXing), Tencent, IBM, HonHai 
, Foxconn), the automobile manufacturer BYD, in software companies and dynamic start-ups, as well in the financial industry and in the vast logistics area at the port which has become the fourth-largest in the world, as well in the building construction industry and in numerous service companies that advertise, print, customise, consult, sell – or as lawyers, accountants, management consultants, all of which are in demand by the industry.
And on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the birth of ShenZhen, the automobile company ChangAn, based in ChongQing, announced to build a car factory in ShenZhen.
The HuaWei company is now feared everywhere in the world, but even within, let alone outside of China it is little known that the founder, who leads the company with strictest rule, owes only 1.42% of the (non-tradable) shares. The remaining more than 98% belong exclusively to the now 60,000 employees. They are organised in a holding company. There are no other shareholders, or mutual funds, pension funds, VC investors, nor state institutions or banks. Anyone leaving HuaWei sells back his shares to the holding at the prevailing daily rate.
Of course, ShenZhen is not a city of 90% academics. The booming economy also attracts the less educated, ordinary workers, by far not only migrant workers but also skilled workers or trainees, artisans and minor entrepreneurs running restaurants, car, bicycle and scooter shops, hiring in turn young people who co-operate, cook, serve, sew, supply and dispose. All kinds of shops spring forth, grow if they meet a demand or shut down if not accepted.
Together with employees of public administration, physicians, nurses, kindergarten and school teachers (both male and female) and the surrounding barbers, beauty parlours, massage parlours and whatever else it takes in a big city (and what it does not take, such as charlatans, fortune tellers and hand-line viewers) – all of them are the reason why ShenZhen is now economically the fourth-largest city of China.