Dan, you took issue with the Time (I think it was Time, anyway) blog when it first went up because you said its posts were unoriginal. Do you give Fallows more slack or is he taking a different angle and thus producing more original posts? [I have not had a chance to look at Fallows' blog so I cannot comment on it...]

This was a very interesting diversion from studying partnership tax; thank you much Dan!

For the record, while some are a quicker study than others, I would never challenge a person's right to speak on a subject. My earlier criticism had to do with what I saw as an inaccurate interpretation of events. Chinese workers improvising on their job is about China being a developing country.

In writing up my 2 cents on Fallows's article, I came upon Paul Midlers, and had this to say:

Paul Midler over at the China Game, puts together an interesting commentary on Fallows. Its post that I can identify with, and anticipate seeing more of as Old China hands look to clarify things (perhaps reframe is a better word) that are written about China from people who are FOBs, or whose experience in China is still lacking substance.

Further to that, and in response to your post, I would say this:

The problem right now is that there are too many writers and not enough experts writing on China. I understand your view that writers can bring something that experts cannot, however the Old China hands are getting tired of the FOB reporting and the impacts of their report.

Case in point, the recent product safety issue. Had people seasoned in China and in industry been writing the reports, rather than writers, than it would have been a case of Mattel and others having poor quality control. Instead, writers with limited exposure and access wrote China pieces that took the focus off the core issues and turned it into a political tit-for-tat.

For right or wrong, I would expect to see more commentary on the quality of reporting in China, and personally I hope more experts here will take writers to task on their "perception" as it will force writers to raise the bar on their work.

Case in point, This article by David Brooks that was forwarded to me by an old China hand this morning with the simply "lame" following it..

To China Hearsay's list I would add: In China, I can walk down the street drinking a beer, while blowing my nose, all the while ventilating by exposing my belly to the cool night air.

I also concur with China Hearsay and Dan when they point out just how relaxed the Chinese can be. The same applies to teachers as to lawyers, when it comes to dress standards. I taught in South Korea for two years, and in Japan for one year: every SINGLE day I was expected to turn up to school clean shaven and dressed in a suit and tie. I taught in China for five years, where in contrast, I was able to get away with wearing a T-shirt and shorts to class if I wanted to.

Dr. Pamela Logan, the Director of an American-based NGO operating in Sichuan Province (the Kham Aid Foundation), has also discussed the fact that rules mean nothing in China, that they are often skirted around and subverted, and within all levels of government and bureaucracy.

I'm confident enough to say, at the risk of sounding arrogant, that it is Mr. Milder who is lacking is perspective - not James Fallows.

Deep shame on Midler for questioning Fallows' right to express.

Great question. Man I hated tax law.

You answer your question in the question. I went after TIME because TIME is news. TIME is supposed to know what is going on in China and it was putting up post after post on the weather or on how the Chinese like flowers. It was boring, uninspiring, and written like someone who just arrived and was going on ten minute walks from the Holiday Inn. I also was pissed about how they were saying the exact things others had already said, but saying them as though they were the first.

Fallows is different. He admits to being a newbie. He admits to being thrilled. He is going in depth on his observations and he is "seeing things" and comparing and contrasting. He is shedding light. In his "planes" piece he said things I already knew, but he did it in such a way that I "saw" those same things in a new and clearer light.

I know you do not want to censor Fallows, but your post went way beyond simply challenging Fallows' assumptions and veered off into a pissy diatribe against non-experts/non-veterans writing on China.

The issue is not why the Chinese guy at the airport was using the tube, the point is that he was. Fallows sees that as a sign of China's flexibility. It's desire to get the job done. I agree. I see that as a good thing. You see it as China being a developing country.

I lived in Turkey for a year and I have been to Korea 150+ times (including back when it truly was a developing country), and I used to go to Russia all the time. I see China's flexiblity as a cultural trait, not a developing nation trait. On that we disagree and isn't it great we have people like Fallows on one side of the issue and people like you on the other. In other words, isn't it great we have people observing from all sorts of perspectives. A marketplace of ideas.

"If it were up to people like Midler, foreign journalists arriving in China would need two visas: one from the Chinese government, and the other from the long-term expats who can't stand the idea that someone might have an opinion about China that they weren't allowed to vet first. In a choice between censors, who would you choose?"

Damn, that's good. I'd choose the expats, but only because they are so much less effective.

We have all slammed the writers who talk about China as though they have the inside scoop, when they so clearly do not. I went berserk on a Seattle lawyer who came to China for a few days and then pontificated (wrongly) on China's legal system in my local paper: And I am a big fan of China Hearsay's "Panda Puncher" series. But those are different.

In my post, I went after someone claiming expertise in a technical area, when he had none. China Hearsay goes after people who (typically) are demonizing China from outside China, without really making an effort to learn the truth.

Fallows is in China busting his butt to understand China and in my view, doing an excellent job at it. Sure he is going to misinterpret things about China, probably quite often. But so what? We all do.

Co-blogger Steve Dickinson has been studying China and living in China nearly his whole life. He knows Chinese history like an historian, Chinese pop culture like a 23 year old Beijinger, and Chinese law like a grizzled Chinese lawyer. But he oftentimes doesn't know things about China (of course) and he (horrors) is sometimes wrong. I am often wrong about the United States.

Not quite sure where I am going with this, beyond saying that when Fallows is wrong, it may not be because he is new, it may be because the subject is so difficult.

That is a "lame" article, totally. So what? I could come up with 100 lame articles in an hour and you know I could. Fallows' articles are not lame.

You are right, there was a lot of crap written on product safety (a lot of good stuff too) and I agree with your perception of the issue. But, there is always going to be crap written when a "new" issue pops up and from the amalgamation of crap and quality, knowledge usually occurs. I am not for a moment saying we should stop criticizing crap, because we should and I will. But we should not, as Adam Minter so beautifully put it, require writers to get an Old China Hand seal of approval, as though Old China Hands know it all and have nothing more to learn.

Maybe a bit off point here, but I lived in Chicago for three years, but it was not until I started going there after I moved to Seattle that I felt I was really starting to get to know it and enjoy it in full. Great city.

As though traffic rules are followed in either Beijing or Shanghai?

And on that, we have this one point about how China cares nothing about "rules". I find this rather ironic since the Chinese themselves practically invented protocol. Thinking back to one of my history books, I am reminded of what visitors from afar had to do during the Middle Ages in order to visit the emperor. What precise outfit a visiting dignitary wore was determined by the day of the week, and some who were not Chinese found it confusing, inconvenient, and even offensive. Daily life in China has been similarly been characterized by rules of etiquette. You see people spitting in the street, but you still hand out your business card with two hands.

My primary issue with the Fallows blog post was his conclusion that all of China's jerry-rigging is wonderful. My view is that Chinese workers are having to patch things up and improvise because their bosses can’t manage to pull the show together. I agree with Fallows that China is characterized with instances of improvisation, but I point out that where it can, China prefers modernization over improvisation. Stop thinking about who is an "expert" and turn on your brain. Does anyone really believe that the Chinese don't mind sucking on petrol hoses?

Neither Fallows nor anyone else ever said "China cares nothing about 'rules.'" That would be an absurd thing to say. All we are saying is that China is not a terribly rule bound society.

Neither Fallows nor anyone else ever said "that all of China's jerry-rigging is wonderful." That too would be an absurd thing to say. All that was said was that the Chinese are more willing to break protocol (than let's say the Japanese) in favor of "getting the job done."

Neither Fallows nor anyone else ever disputed that "China prefers modernization over improvisation."

Nobody even discussed whether the "the Chinese don't mind sucking on petrol hoses?" I, like probably everyone else, would assume they would prefer not to.

Singapore is most certainly a rule-bound society that is also Chinese. You know, they say it is a "fine place". You get a fine in Singapore for jay walking, for chewing gum, for littering. And HK is following along the same route, passing out penalties for any number of public offenses. We can expect Mainland China to become more rule bound **to the extent that it becomes more developed**.

By the way, your efforts to quote me and then suggest that no one uttered those words are unhelpful. If I ever mean to quote someone, I will quote that person. All you've done is feed me back my own words. I know quite well what I said.

What James Fallows *implied* was that China's tendency to improvise "a way" is a positive trait. At least when he showed us a picture of airport workers siphoning fuel into an airplane, we assumed he was not making fun of the Chinese. What I suggested in my response to his post was that he missed the point. The workers were refueling in an outmoded manner because China itself remains outmoded in many areas. As China advances, we will see it emphasize "the way" for getting something done. We will have more rules, and that all of China's jerry-rigging will be set aside in favor of modernization. And so China will look an awful lot more like HK or Singapore, maybe even Japan.

A careless use of words on my part: Dr. Logan never actually stated that rules mean "nothing" - she did, however, note that rules are very often ignored, or subverted. This, as I said earlier, is certainly my experience of China too.

Let everyone do his/her own thing, make his/her own observations, and enjoy. It's the season of good fellowship (Fallowship?). I can afford to be so generous, since I know it all anyway.

As for Dan, who stirred up this whole hornet's nest, great fun. Todd

Actually, I guess Midler already has as he seems to have backed off from just about everything he was initially saying.

In any area there are members of an expert guild whom the non-expert writer often deals with and tries to learn from. In my experience – which covers an appallingly broad range of areas of non-expertise over the years – there’s a pretty consistent ratio. Maybe three quarters of the existing experts are affable, cooperative, aware of the difference between their role and the outside writer’s role, patient in explaining the terrain, etc. And maybe one quarter are huffy and guild-minded, saying: How can this person PRESUME to walk onto our terrain? The people with the guild mentality are almost never the most impressive, secure, or accomplished members of the expert class. At least in the business I know best (reporting), it is the marginal performers who are likeliest to defend their guild expertise. I am thinking of some J-school professors I know, who had not been stars at their newspapers or networks but now give their students lectures on the lines of “There I was, at the White House press conference, something you can’t understand until you’ve experienced it…” You wouldn’t hear that out of someone like Tom Brokaw.

Japan is all about protocol and ritual because the process of doing things the right way is what many people feel gives higher meaning to their lives. China is all about "xiang ban fa." Order where it exists is a response to power of one sort or another. It has always seemed to me that most rules - the ubiquitous "gui ding"s - are there to be "dui fu"-ed: Nobody would accomplish anything much in China if they actually obeyed all the "gui ding"s - and probably the economic reforms would never have got going in the 80s. It seems that much of a Chinese entrepreneur's job is spent figuring out how to get around "gui dings" while appearing to obey them.

Jaime FlorCruz, current CNN Beijing bureau chief with 36-year stint in China, said this to me the other day.

"They [Chinese people] shout different slogans at different times. But in the final analysis, it’s pragmatism that drives them, not ideology, not religion. Because of that, they are able to subsume their difference and focus on pragmatic goals. They can say anything that works as 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'. That’s pragmatism at work. With that, they are able to do many things."

Perhaps, the "airport incident" reveals Chinese pragmatism? My Korean impulse tells me that I would have done the same thing at that moment, if I can get my job done and move on. Whether someone is taking a picture of me is another issue.

I will agree with you that in Japan, the rules are made to be followed, while in China the rules are there often to be broken, forgiven, reinterpreted, or otherwise ignored. In time, this will change...

Having later managed a sales office in Seoul, I would generally agree with that comparison. Although I can't personally speak to Japan, an American colleague with deep experience in both countries later described managing a China sales team as much more like herding cats compared with Japan.

Putting all this into the context of my current focus on sourcing, buyers/outsourcers are well-advised not to rely solely on having a procedure in place. Stay engaged with production, keep monitoring to catch any deviation from agreed procedures (a less sinister contributor to Paul M's 'quality fade' perhaps?), and be proactive about inspecting product. Good practice anywhere, and indispensable in smart China sourcing (sorry, couldn't resist).

They drove fast, as the Chinese tend to, and when they came to a red light, instead of stopping, the driver ran right through the intersection.

“What are you doing?” the friend asked. “You know that was a red light?”

“Ah, don’t worry about it,” he said. “My father does it all the time.”

They came to another red light, Again, the driver barreled right through.

“It’s a red light! You’re going to get us killed!”

“I told you, don’t worry. My father does it all the time.”

The friend was a nervous wreck, and then the driver came to a green light.

Instead of going through the intersection, he stopped the car just short of it.

“What are you doing now?! That’s a green light - it means we can go!”

“Yeah, we could… but my father might be coming the other way.”

Interestingly enough, having happened to have spent some time in Japan about the time Fallows was first there, I remember much the same was being said about him there then, too.

Regarding the Chinese approach to rules, one can say that they are observed when the consequences of ignoring them are dire. But at different times, more casual times, many Chinese tend to luxuriate ostentatiously in their freedom. As do I. It’s very liberating as many outsiders have discovered to the detriment of their dignity.

And when only results matter, rules can be set aside. This flexible approach tends to befuddle any observer, neophyte or veteran. But how many long term residents have been saved by just such pragmatism in one instance or another?

When it comes to writing about China, who was it that observed that the month long visitor writes a book, the year long student writes an article, and the long term resident ceases to write? Just as is the case with the U.S., to generalize about China, you may as well generalize about the universe. It takes a de Tocqueville to pull that off . . .

Very good point regarding names to travel. That is definitely being rule bound. I also think you are right that "the way" will become somewhat more common as China modernizes, and certainly that will be true of "the law." But, I still persist in believing China will never approach Japan or Korea when it comes to rules.

I think you have both countries nailed.

Nice comparision of China and Japan. I concur.

Good points. Are my eyes deceiving me or do you and MAJ actually agree on this one?

"Let everyone do his/her own thing, make his/her own observations, and enjoy." That is somewhat of a platektude, but not bad.

Good word to describe China: pragmatic.

Why are you so convinced China will become more rule abiding? I think they will to the extent they start to believe the laws are reasonable, but not otherwise. Didn't the CR inculcate them not to always follow rules? These are not rhetorical questions.

I've heard nothing but good things re Fallows' Japan book. So much so, I think I will pick me up a copy.

I buy all that.

It's always party time at the CLB.

I remember my father, who did his time with classical Chinese and the classical Chinese literature, talking about a Ming or Qing manual for social norms. It was hilarious; some portions of it involved deep conformity to existing paradigms (i.e, feeding your sick parents your flesh), while the other portions involved Dadaesque approaches to life, such as an incident where a man's friends catches him without pants, and the man retorts that the universe is his pants and why are they in his pants?

That's a joke.... right?

Just kidding....

I guess I do agree with MAJ here.

Inst:

"What was the importance of the rites (protocol) in Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism?"

I don't want to get into a long posting here, but regardless of which form of Confucianism you are talking about, Confucian rites and protocol regulate hierarchical relationships between human beings. On the other hand, what that means for China today is of course something that can be discussed ad nauseam.

Kanishka

How many experts did it take to run Motorola and GM into the ground?

I love the fact that Chinese once they set their mind to something, can usually find the cheapest (if not sometimes the most complicated) way to get it done. They worry about process later. Then watch out. We should be happy things aren't as organized and efficient as they could be. Where would our jobs be then?

The whole can do spirit here is fantastic if not exhausting and a constant struggle to deal with, but I'd rather have a team of rough hand can do-ers supporting me than a team of soft palm experts.

Real writers observe things others do not. Real writers see the same thing we all see and tell us about it in a way that makes us "see" it more clearly. Real writers tell us things we already knew but could not express.

If you're upset with the potential consequences another person's writing may yield, I think the most pragmatic thing to do is to focus on becoming a better writer yourself, so that you may exert more influence, or to lend your support and promotion to someone you believe to be better.

There are experts and then there are communicators. I sometimes get the feeling that a lot of "experts" prefer to whine in their ivory towers about "others" misleading the ignorant and impressionable masses rather than come down and actually try to "enlighten" those same masses.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with simply taking issue or voicing disagreement. Not everyone, including experts, needs to evangelize before they can complain. But we do have to occasionally ask ourselves if we're preaching to the choir.

When the Vietnam War ended in 1975 he and his family were expelled from Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon. They fortunately (because of business connections) found their way to Hong Kong and he and his mother (minus their older brother who remained in the PRC, not Hong Kong) legally emigrated to LA.

He was forced to return to Hong Kong after an honorable discharge (combat in Iraq) from the USMC as an infantryman and starting college because his family, still in Hong Kong and the PRC by choice, needed some business face time.

He cleared customs in Hong Kong without incident but then ran into a very tough customs interview upon entering the PRC. The official based his challenge on his citizenship documents.

The young man who told me that he considered himself Chinese by birth and American by choice and loyalty reached into his briefcase and produced first his Vietnamese birth certificate.

The PRC official was not satisfied so he produced his US Passport. The official asked for more.

The young man produced his Visa and supporting Hong Kong travel info. The official was forced to deal with the young man's impeccable Chinese and the interview was becoming very tense with enmity on both sides, spoken so it could not be ignored by either party.

"Finally, I decided to blow up the interview and told the interviewer that I had one more document to produce." He reached in his briefcase and snapped his USMC Reserve ID onto the table.

The interviewer left the room and returned in a few minutes honoring his visa.

I am not an attorney but have dealt with many around the world and what I am expert about has only a peripheral connection to this blog. As of 1994 when it was related to me in LA, it proved to me that individuals continue to evole in complex and unexpected ways.

As long as individuals are allowed to pursue their goals in a free society under law, I am sure that this process will continue.

I read all obs with interest. Best regards.