China Hands: A Disappearing Species
Two recent encounters with high-level westerners from very different backgrounds has made me realize just how much China has changed as a career choice for foreigners in the last two decades. At the same time, it’s also made me realize that the older generation of “China hands” represented by one of those westerners who came to Asia in the 1980s and ‘90s are a dying species, perhaps destined for extinction in the not-too-distant future.
Some may say this transformation of China to a routine work location for foreign executives from its former status as an exotic and often difficult destination is a good thing, reflecting a rapid economic advance that has vastly improved the lives of the country’s 1.3 billion people. I mostly agree with this view, since the China of today is certainly a better place to live in most ways than the one of just a decade or two earlier. But the looming relegation of these China hands to the history books also seems like a reason for reflection and just a touch of melancholy, since many of these people were instrumental in helping China to transform to its current state of prosperity.
The first of my two encounters took me to the interior city of Chengdu, where I interviewed James Rice, a China veteran who has been in the country for the last two decades and goes by the colorful name of Dami, or “Big Rice”. The second wasn’t even a personal meeting at all, and came through my reading of a profile in the Shanghai Daily of David Rose, the 33-year-old China head of Virgin Atlantic airlines who just arrived in China just six months ago.
Somewhat appropriately, Virgin’s Rose is making his new home in commercially-focused Shanghai, which in many ways personifies the new China that is increasingly preferred as a national headquarters for multinationals that may have chosen the stodgier Beijing a decade ago. By comparison, Rice is based in China’s heartland where he’s trying to globalize Shui Jing Fang a famous brand of Chinese baijiu liquor that sold a major stake of itself to European spirits giant Diageo (London: DGE) in 2011.
My encounter with Rice came during a two-hour interview at Shui Jing Fang’s headquarters in a dusty industrial suburb of Chengdu where the smell of fermenting rice liquor filled the air. The interview was part of a bigger series for my research at Fudan University, where I’m compiling an “oral history” that chronicles the lives of western executives working in China in the 1980s and 1990s.
Rice was just the kind of executive you would expect from that generation, casually dressed at our meeting and full of stories about all the interesting and unusual challenges he faced at a wide range of previous employers, from US chicken titan Tyson (NYSE: TSN) to French food giant Danone (Paris: BN). A high point of his career came when he testified to the US Congress and worked behind the scenes with his local government guanxi to help avert a trade war involving chicken products imported to China.
While Rice learned his China skills during the country’s “Iron Rice Bowl” days when it was still shedding its socialist roots, Virgin Atlantic’s Rose more resembles the current generation of post-1980s Chinese known as balinghou that now populate many of the country’s most dynamic companies.
Rose, dressed smartly but casually in a photo accompanying the newspaper article, looks like many of the young up-and-comers you might see at any western-style company. His career also looks far more geographically diverse than Rice’s, including a previous posting in Kenya before his arrival in Shanghai to take up the position of Virgin Atlantic’s country manager.
The interview itself looks slick and tightly focused, no doubt using themes created by marketing experts in London. The central message is clear and consistent, aimed at showing Virgin as a young and hip airline that is “Putting the glamor back in flying”, as the article’s headline reads. By comparison, Rice spends much of his time trying to figure out how to integrate many of Shui Jing Fang’s older employees that grew up in an era of state ownership into a newer, more entrepreneurial company that Diageo wants to create.
During my own two decades in China, I’ve met plenty of people from both the older generation of China hands like Rice and the newer one of career people represented by Rose. Whereas the former see China itself as their life’s work, most of the latter see the country as just another stop on their longer career path. The latter type were traditionally concentrated in Hong Kong, but have increasingly been finding a comfortable new home in my adopted city of Shanghai, as these two major cities compete for the crown of China’s most international city.
I was somewhat surprised to read not long ago that Shanghai is actually now home to many more expatriates than Beijing, with some 173,000 foreigners now living in the former compared with 100,000 in the latter. But considering Shanghai’s outward looking nature compared with a more inward-looking Beijing, I suppose it really shouldn’t come as a huge surprise.
I suspect that Beijing is still home to more of these China hands than Shanghai, and perhaps many of this earlier generation of westerners is following Rice’s lead and seeking new challenges in less developed cities like Chengdu where western influence and expatriate populations are still relatively small. But in the end, I also suspect the number of people like Rice will continue to dwindle over time until we finally reach the end of a colorful and freewheeling earlier era in China’s ongoing economic transformation.
