As I take the morning bus here in mainland China I see so many of my fellow passengers falling asleep as they bump along the city streets. Everyone seems to work long hours here and many do so through the night. Yet I am told by friends and colleagues that Chinese people are inherently lazy and that they only work hard because their bosses are tough and they could easily lose their job.
But everywhere I see industry and a commitment to improvement. Most businesses run daily exercise and motivational sessions – often right out in the street. Staff stand out in circles with their manager like a football team before a match. Sometimes the meetings last just a few minutes and no-one looks skeptical or uninvolved. There are even set pieces with staff standing out in lines and one person at a time taking it in turn to declare an encouraging view followed by applause and even chanting.
When I first saw people all in parallel lines I thought it was a demonstration outside a hairdresser’s shop. Had someone had more hair taken off than requested and called their friends to support them in a protest, I wondered? But only in China would the opposite be the case. Managers achieve great loyalty and commitment and employees a great sense of fellow-feeling without any law or government official requiring them to do it or standing over them.
We are all bred with a strong sense of individualism in the west and this so often turns into disengagement, apathy or yobbishness. Walk the streets of most Chinese towns and there are no clusters of threatening youths up to mischief or drunken hooligans on the rampage. Neither are there many visible police on patrol. It seems that the people themselves hold such conduct in check.
China often gets a bad press in the west – amounting at times to propaganda. A country growing this quickly and being able to balance the principles of collectivism with free market principles must, however, be doing the right things. No other country I know feels so exciting to be in or exudes so much hope for the future. The USA was built on the “America dream”, but China has its very own special reality