Barriers to Entry

Overcoming Challenges and Achieving Breakthroughs in a Chinese Workplace

Paul Ross

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9789813295650
• eBook ISBN:
  9789813295667
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

This book offers a unique perspective on the challenges that non-Chinese employed by Chinese companies face and provides insight into the issues foreign employees working for Chinese management encounter. As its source of content the book analyzes the experiences of those currently working for Chinese companies both inside and outside China and in exploring the dimensions of that experience lifts the veil on the inner workings of a Chinese company. By supplementing this primary analysis with secondary research that encompasses a wide range of disciplines (cross-cultural relations, Chinese management philosophy and practice, human resource management, linguistics, and aesthetics, etc.) the book serves as an invaluable resource for those engaged in the study of Chinese enterprise culture and management, cross-cultural relations, international business and human resource management.

© The Author(s) 2020

P. RossBarriers to Entryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9566-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Paul Ross¹

(1)

Boynton Beach, FL, USA

Paul Ross

End Abstract

Against the backdrop of local panhandlers selling knock-off handbags at the entrance to a bustling shopping center in a Shanghai suburb, the lanky South African pushing foreign language programs for a local training company cuts a striking figure.

With a killer smile and patter delivered in Chinese he has honed to perfection over weeks of seven to eight-hour days, David immediately puts potential customers at ease. “I’m a bit of a novelty,” he grins, breaking away for a minute to make his pitch to a group of middle-aged Chinese women who see fluency in English as the key to their children’s future success.

As unconventional as David’s role selling services for a Chinese company may appear, his experience is far from “novel”. In fact, David is just one of a growing number of non-Chinese who are employed by Chinese companies and report to Chinese management.

Just a train ride away from Shanghai in the Southern Chinese city of Foshan a group of young professionals from the U.S., Europe, and South America is hard at work in the offices of the city government. They have been hired by the Government’s investment office to write brochures, develop videos, and craft value propositions that showcase the city’s advantages and serve as the base for pitches to overseas investors (Bland 2015).

At first blush, hiring a team of recently-graduated foreigners to work in a government office seems like a bold and unlikely step for a Chinese city to take, but Foshan has a history of taking bold steps and a reputation for adopting a pragmatic approach to overcoming challenges. The city was one of the first to catch the wave of entrepreneurial activity unleashed by the economic reforms the Chinese Government initiated in the early 1980s, a wave the city’s inhabitants rode to prosperity in the years that followed. Three decades later, confronted with slowing growth, rising wages, and increasing competition, Foshan was again taking steps to position itself for the next phase of economic evolution, leveraging innovation to transform itself from a manufacturer of cheap consumer goods into a purveyor of profitable, value-added services. Effecting such a large-scale transformation, Foshan’s leaders recognized, would require a new approach that included tapping sources of investment outside of China. Although hiring foreigners was a departure from the past that some more conservative voices in the government considered much too radical, those who set their sights on the future maintained that the potential benefit the foreigners could deliver—developing marketing materials and crafting value propositions that would appeal to overseas investors —far outweighed the risk and therefore was an experiment worth undertaking.

Few would argue with the claim that an “experiment” such as this was a bold step, but there are some who would question whether the “departure from the past” it represented was so radical. In fact, the phenomenon of foreigners working for Chinese and Chinese Government offices, in particular, has a long history.

Historical Background

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Robert Hart, a British citizen was employed by the Qing court to administer the empire’s sprawling tax and customs system. Nearly three hundred years before Hart, Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1591–1666), a Jesuit priest from Italy, served the Ming and Qing courts as scientific adviser, emissary, and interpreter. And if the definition of “foreigners” is taken more broadly to include non-Western peoples, the historical record shows that as far back as the Tang Dynasty, if not earlier, Sogdians, Turks, and the representatives of various other Central Asian peoples—were employed by Chinese as entertainers, domestics, and even soldiers. Filling in the spaces between these well-documented cases are accounts of numerous, yet lesser-known, medical practitioners, military advisers and science experts, who have at different times in China’s long history been engaged in the service of Chinese imperial offices and government bureaus.

Accounts that chart the history of foreigners in the employ of Chinese, although not numerous, have been written. Jonathan Spence’s “To Change China: Western Advisers in China”, for example, chronicles the exploits of foreign missionaries, soldiers, doctors, teachers, engineers, and revolutionaries who have served China over the course of nearly four centuries.¹ Anne-Marie Brady’s more overtly political “Making the foreign serve China”, picks up where Spence left off and tells the story of foreigners who came to contribute to the post-1949 Chinese Government, paying particular attention to the ways in which the Government took advantage of their contribution and, more often than not, manipulated it to achieve its own ends.² As rich and varied as these accounts are, not one of them considers the most recent development in the history of foreigners in the employ of Chinese. Yet it is precisely in the current era that the greatest departure from the past and the most significant transformation in this relationship has occurred.

Current View

In this most recent phase of development, an unprecedented explosion in commercial activity and corresponding increase in the number of Chinese enterprises across all sectors has created new employment opportunities for Chinese and non-Chinese alike. Coincident with the increase in the number of foreigners working for Chinese corporate entities, there has been an expansion in the variety of roles they occupy as well as the scope. Many of these are commercial positions that are commensurate with the operations of an enterprise and quite different from the largely bureaucratic or imperial-related profiles of the past. An even more fundamental change, and arguably the most consequential, is that the vast majority of foreigners working for Chinese companies today are not adventurers, fortune-seekers, and revolutionaries who have traveled to China seeking fame and riches. They are salespeople, product managers, technicians, and other professionals who very likely have not made the journey all the way to China, but have been hired by Chinese companies in the cities, towns and countries where they live. Data points such as the ones below provide ample evidence for this real and growing trend.

82% (17,600) of workers employed by the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) in Africa are local hires. To support its operations in Zambia, the Chinese National Minerals Corporation has hired 12,500 local workers. (“2013 Report” 2013)

In the U.S., Chinese investments support about 80,000 domestic jobs, a five-fold increase in the past five years and a recent study by the Rhodium Group, a U.S. research firm, predicts that a doubling of Chinese investment in the US by 2020 will generate on the order of 200,000-400,000 additional jobs. (Anderlini 2015)

Hi-tech giant, Huawei has announced that it will add 5,500 employees in Europe over the next 5 years and plans to double the number of European scientists and engineers to 1,700 in three years to realize its regional R&D ambitions. (“Huawei to Hire” 2014)

These references and others like them form the outline for a new chapter in the history of foreigners employed by Chinese that is just now unfolding. To fully appreciate the story that is being told in this chapter, however, it is instructive to take a closer look at some actual cases.

Huawei: Shifting the Paradigm

Held up as a model for the global expansion of Chinese firms, telecommunications equipment provider Huawei today claims customers in more than 170 countries around the world and thanks to the sustained demand of those customers for its products Huawei has since 2011 recognized more revenue from its overseas business than it has from its business in China. Over the same period of time, the ranks of Huawei’s foreign staff have swelled to more than 20,000.³ The employees who fill out those ranks work in capacities whose diversity and range far exceeds that of roles occupied by foreigners at any time in the past.

In 2012, for example, Huawei hired Donald Purdy, a high-profile U.S. cybersecurity strategist and former Homeland Security official, as the company’s Chief Security Officer to implement broad-based security training, build security into the company’s product development process, and establish strategy and oversight committees across the company (Nakashima 2012). C. T. Johnson, a 45-year-old U.S. finance expert, joined the company as corporate financial controller in 2013. and then went on to lead a division within the company that negotiates sales contracts with customers (Osawa and Chu 2013).

The cases of Purdy, Johnson and hundreds of other employees like them is what makes Huawei such a compelling and instructive example for how the employment of foreigners in Chinese companies has evolved. However, to appreciate the full scope of the phenomenon and be able draw meaningful conclusions, it is instructive to consider a broader sample of cases based on the experience of workers employed in different industries and situated in different geographies.

Global Employment Report Card: A Mixed Record

19 October 2012—Douglas Mwila, 24, had his ear sliced using a metal object by his supervisor Guo Haisheng at China Jiangxi while on duty.

All Africa Global Media

16 September 2016—An angry Chinese small-scale miner, Zeng Wuachin, has sacked his personal driver for allegedly stealing frog meat from his stew.

Ghana Star

29 June 2011—Last month cook Patrick Makaza quit his job at the restaurant saying he had been beaten by his bosses. “Working for these men from the East is Hell on Earth,” he explained (Moyo 2011).

Mail & Guardian

Failing

The experience of Africans working for Chinese management as portrayed in the local press is typically highly-charged and conflict-ridden. The image of the Chinese boss these accounts promote is often that of an uncivilized and insensitive brute who insists on overtime for no pay, is not above stealing his employees’ lunches, and has even been known to slice off the ear of a poor African worker or two along the way. Graphic reinforcement for this unkind image that has been established in print can be readily found in videos circulating widely on the Internet. One such video opens on the shocking scene of Ethiopian workers lined up in tight rows like a platoon of soldiers at the entrance to a Chinese company’s manufacturing site on the outskirts of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. As the scene unfolds, the workers march forward under the watchful eye of a Chinese supervisor who shouts marching orders into a bullhorn. Although the scenes introduced in the video, like the accounts that appear in the press, are so extreme that they stretch credulity, they cannot be entirely dismissed as pure fabrication either given the well-documented evidence of confrontations, some fatal, that have occurred between local workers and Chinese management over the past few years.⁴

There are some who contend that such a confrontational relationship between management and workers is inherent to the risky and often dangerous operating environment in the extractive industries that many Chinese companies in Africa represent. It would be tempting, therefore, to conclude that the experience of Africans working for Chinese is unique to Africa and largely dependent on the nature of the work and the composition of the industries represented. However, records of incidents involving Chinese companies in other geographies and representing other industries suggest there are other factors that need to be taken into consideration.

Fuyao: Labor Unrest

When the Fuyao Glass Industry Group, a Chinese supplier of glass used in automobiles, bought and refurbished an old GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, it hired more than one-thousand five-hundred workers from the area to staff the new facility and at the time was widely praised for injecting new life into an otherwise moribund local economy. However, less than two years later, workers who eagerly joined the company when it opened found themselves locked in a contentious relationship with the company’s management. What began as a trickle of isolated “incidents” involving disagreements between local workers and Chinese management soon became a steady stream of formal “cases” that raised concern among members of the community, attracted media coverage, and eventually appeared as an issue to be addressed on the agendas of local government officials.

One manager claimed he was dismissed because he was not Chinese and pointed out that with his departure the director of Human Resources would be the only member of the executive team who was not Chinese (Scheiber and Bradsher 2017). Those who remain...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. History Lessons
• 3. On the Runway
• 4. Roles and Responsibilities
• 5. Living to Work
• 6. Bamboo Ceiling
• 7. All Work and Play
• 8. Metaphorically Speaking
• 9. Reverse Angle
• 10. A View to the Future
• Back Matter