ajfortin.com

There’s a debate that surfaces from time to time on the question of whether westerners can really know China. Most recently it emerged in a debate around investments.

Here’s one view by Richard at Asia Buisness Intelligence:

Understanding how Chinese “view the world and lead their lives” is essential to productive interaction with them, but one can not rise above shallow faux-knowledge gleaned from Western-adored emblems of Chinese culture, like tai chi, without learning the language or living and working with Chinese on a daily basis. (I have come across self-professed experts on China who can not even speak the language fluently — a defect I find scandalous.)

Richard is arguing a point in opposition to people like Jim Rogers who has a new book out, “A Bull in China: Investing Profitably in the World’s Greatest Market”. Martin Howell of Reuters writes about Rogers,

“Now is the time to engage China and all things Chinese,” he says. If you can’t go for a visit, take a class in tai chi and then learn about Chinese medicine, watch Chinese movies, Rogers suggests. “The point is to develop a clear sense of how Chinese people view the world and lead their lives. Try to figure out how China’s consumers will spend their hard-earned cash and where they might put it to grow.”

So this an argument ostensibly between poseurs and true experts. But both sides do an injustice to how we learn and develop cross cultural understanding. By this I mean, everyone has to begin somewhere — the beginner status in any enterprise often gets treated as something less than worthy — but humility (by the beginner) in face of the breath of human experience is required if respect is to be shown for that experience. So distinguishing between the poseur and the beginner who is making ‘beginner mistakes’ as part of the learning journey is an important one. Even the beginner has important contributions to make when he or she demonstrates, in their naivety, how one culture perceives the other.

But what is it to “know” a culture like China? What are experts really expert in? There is a great market for China “experts” these days and the dismissing of competitors is a fine art. Expert consultants must continually represent their knowledge as valuable to others; that’s what they got to sell. But experts often come with their own political and cultural baggage which may or may not be in service to the companies who hire them no matter how much they know. It’s the whole package that’s important to understand.

We have to become better cross cultural learners, that’s clear. Yet let’s get beyond these artificial pretensions to a knowledge that is ever fluid, changing and idiomatic. There is no “essential” China. It only exists in our minds or in advertising. Anyway to enter this cultural stargate may be as good as any other.