Hindustan Times
Business tips over steamed tortoise
“Indian! Indian!’’ the Chinese shouted. To a bystander it would have sounded almost like a warning.
The Chinese organisers were just being helpful, leading us past a baton-waving policeman who halted traffic as the Indian business visitors to Nantong crossed the street and glided in a boat down the Hyderabad-sized city’s Haohe waterway.
Here on a riverbank in east China’s industrial heart, after drifting past unexpected landmarks, one translated by the guide as ‘audit museum, a-u-d-i-t,’ surrounded by middle-aged and elderly Indian businessmen and one celebrity MP, I bumped into this blog’s reader.
“Have you read my comments? I am Inchin Closer.”
Inchin Closer is Nazia Vasi, a young Mumbaiite who moved on from journalism in India to study Mandarin, teach English and head a tax and consultancy firm in Shanghai. After three years, she returned to Mumbai and set up her own India-China business consultancy aiming to help Indians and Chinese understand each other through their own perspectives and backgrounds instead of the ‘foreign/western view’.
Over the next chaotic two days, including an instance of the Chinese plonking enormous whole steamed tortoises in front of vegetarian Indians pecking at watermelon, Inchin Closer and I chatted about how Indians and Chinese could work better together. It’s important to pay attention to the nitty-gritty of work culture on both sides, but you may not learn how to do that in a textbook or a diplomatic speech espousing bilateral trade.
Indian companies need to realise that a Chinese department manager in a state firm has the control to make decisions, unlike an Indian manager, she said. “A Chinese department head recently came to India for a few meetings and realised he wasn’t being taken seriously. It was only when I explained to the Indians he met that he can decide whether or not to bring foreign investment from his Chinese company to India that they started taking him seriously.”
Most Indian businessmen don’t study Mandarin before moving to China to set up or run new factories and companies — and pay a price for it. “Some Indian companies that I dealt with in my earlier company in Shanghai got duped because the translation of the contract into Mandarin was contextually incorrect,” she pointed out. “Since the written word is considered paramount in court, Indian businessmen need to whet the essence of the contract completely before signing on the dotted line.” She suggests that Indians study Mandarin by writing characters in Hindi Devnagiri script — I used the method during a Mandarin course in Mumbai to get the pronunciation and nuances right.
Don’t get so carried away that you forget the basic tricks of the trade. “In their hunger to do business with China, many Indian businessmen tend to rely on online reports, traders they know through friends or acquaintances or contacts made at trade fairs,” she said. “Somehow they forget what they already practice in India — getting to know the company thoroughly, doing their homework and visiting the factory or meeting with company officials.”
Two days after our chance encounter, I was in Shanghai when I impulsively called up Inchin Closer to ask for directions. “I’m in Xintiandi, the old French concession,” I said. Inchin Closer was there too, and popped up five minutes later. It’s simpler to find her in a crowd of 20 million. Inchin Closer seems to be blocked in Beijing.
(7 votes, average: 3.71 out of 5)
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Paritosh Reply:
September 29th, 2010 at 10:58 pm
@ Vikram
there is absolutely no need to develop a “level of trust”. after reading Reshma’s blogs , i always felt that she is an equivalent of those Indians who dream about having a “friendly Pakistan” , the only difference being that China is the subject of her admiration.
this is a great stupidity that we gullible Indians commit . we cannot either identify our real enemies or arent ready to accept them as so. i feel we are the most deluded and naive people on this planet.
lets accept this , China is an enemy that wants India to disintegrate and suffer severe damage.
wake up foolish fellow Indians
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Vikram Reply:
September 30th, 2010 at 12:21 am
I dont think it is in our interests or even viable to take on China as a perenial adversary and enemy. We have to be alert and develop our capabilities but not close of any option for reconciliation
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Inst Reply:
October 2nd, 2010 at 1:42 pm
That’s the thing; if you do pure “containment” strategies or sacrifice your entire foreign policy to simply fight or destroy another state, you have no other options. You have to either win or lose, and if you lose, things will go quite badly. The Chinese economy is about 3 times larger than the Indian economy, while the United States is trapped playing whack-a-mole against global threats; yesterday it was the terrorists, today it’s the Chinese, and tomorrow it’ll be the Russians trying to hijack the EU. They won’t be on target forever, and when they’re distracted you’ll be in an even worse situation.
India can potentially be broken up, but at the end of the day it cannot be absorbed by the Chinese; they simply don’t have the raw amount of experience in colonialism, and what experience they do have is severely negative, reflecting the costs and difficulties of subjugating and assimilating foreign peoples. On the historical record, much of the time, when Chinese imperialism attempts to expand past its border, the result around half the time is that they partially Sinicize the subject people, but at the same time, they provoke a strong nationalistic bias. Eventually, after enough rounds of back and forth, the subject people are sufficiently Sinicized to mount a real defense against Chinese armies, while still having enough of a concept of national identity to be willing to throw off the Chinese invaders. Look up the history of Korea and Vietnam, for instance.
If I may guess, the India FA policy regarding China is based on a Chinese collapse, right? At the current time, what’s hoped for is that the Chinese economy and polity just drops dead some time in the future. In that case, the China threat will resolve itself. But the other problem with this kind of planning is that it becomes impossible to imagine a world where while India and China are mainly competitors, in many aspects they are cooperators. So it’s hard to see alternatives from this viewpoint.
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