Shanghai Welcomes You

I arrived in Shanghai from Dubai on a Saturday afternoon in November 2008. Having left behind the glorious sunshine of the Middle East, I found China cold, grey, and rainy. My trip in from the airport reminded me of that first day in Shanxi so many years before. Was this a good idea? I had come a long way in China, from a wandering tourist with a dodgy stomach to now making my life here. Sure, I had visited many times when living in Hong Kong, but this was raising the bar further. Now I had to cope with being on the ground every day. It still had not really sunk in.

The drive in from Pudong International Airport in Shanghai was somewhat long and uneventful. The airport, built reasonably recently, was substantial but a long way out of town. The journey was motorway all the way. With nothing to see except grey and concrete, I started flicking through a magazine the car company had thoughtfully left out. That’s Shanghai is a local version of Time Out; it lets expats know what is going on in the city for Western tastes. The first article that I read was about the bar scene in Shanghai: how much it was growing, how many different types of locations there were, how many new clubs; and then how much they were creating a mix of people, both local and expat, to enjoy the same environment. The article was introduced by a quote at the top of the page: “Alcohol is the tie that binds this city together.” Well, maybe this place was not going to be so bad after all.

I arrived in Shanghai on Saturday, and on Sunday I decided to explore. I headed for People’s Square, which comes as close as anywhere else to marking a centre to the city of Shanghai. There are a number of key buildings in the Square, such as the Urban Planning Exhibition Centre, which I had heard was far more interesting than its name would suggest. Five floors show the development of Shanghai’s past and future. Most famously, they showcase an enormous 1:2000 scale model of the Shanghai cityscape including all planned buildings, which gives a real sense of the sprawling nature of the city. Unfortunately, when I arrived at the Centre, it was shut for the day.

Standing outside the Centre and looking confused, I peered at my map. I might as well have had a sign on my forehead saying, “This man is a tourist.” Within seconds, I was approached by three young locals, who told me that they were students and that they wanted to practise their English. We chatted for a few minutes before they raised the real reason that they had come to talk to me.

“We are going to a Tea Ceremony now; would you like to come with us?”

As a novice, I was keen to learn about everything and anything, so I agreed. I followed the students into a nearby shopping centre, where we went up to a high, fairly quiet floor and then into a shop with a series of small rooms. We entered one room and sat down in front of a tea ceremony lady, dressed in a traditional-looking green jacket. 

The tea lady then talked us through four or five different types of tea, explaining the history and background of each one before we tried the tea ourselves. She added the hot water each time by way of a teapot with an extended spout – imagine filling your teacup with a brass watering can, and you will have some idea. She raised the tea can above her head with the long spout resting on her arm and directed the (boiling!) water into the smallest of teacups. I asked if I could take a photograph, but I was told that it was not allowed. 

This ceremony was all very nice, but hardly essential viewing. It was only after the final round of teas that, being the innocent China visitor that I was, I realised why I was there at all.

“Would you like to buy some tea?”

Everyone looked at me, and I could see where this was heading. I felt my naivety hanging over me. All of the students proceeded to buy tea, using what they told me were their own credit cards; at the time this gave me some comfort that this was not a complete rip-off. However, I had to go next, and I still left the room with some of the most expensive tea I’ve ever had. It sat on my desk at work for about six months before I ever dared drink it. Once or twice since then, I have been through People’s Square, and always there are “students” loitering around who would like to practise their English. (Ah, so that was why I was not allowed to take a picture of anyone …) Of course it was really a complete rip-off, and I have not stopped there since. If you find yourself there, be warned.

Clutching my valuable tea, I made my way from the Square back to my hotel, giving the Shanghai Metro a first try. I have found that the Metro in Shanghai is generally clean and tidy, and it runs very efficiently. It is somewhat crowded during rush hour, as it is in big metropolises everywhere. The authorities have been adding new lines at the rate of almost one per year, so that by 2012 it was already the largest in the world by distance of track. Anyway, since that first day, I have used the Metro many times, but I have never since seen what I saw on that debut trip.

As I walked from the entrance to the ticket gates, I could see that there was a group of people gathered on one side of the station lobby. I peered over the top of the crowd (being a tall westerner in Asia is always an advantage) and saw an old woman lying flat on the ground, facing upwards, with her eyes closed. There were two young men flanking her, kneeling and crying. The men continually bowed down and came up to kneeling again, violently prostrating themselves on the ground whilst wailing and shouting, with the woman in the middle doing nothing; she was not even moving. The crowd around them looked and murmured, but no one ventured any money or comment. After a few seconds I continued on, and then a few paces down the platform I realised what was supposedly going on – the two guys were in mourning, because the old woman was dead. The crowd were looking at a corpse on their way home on the underground system. I never did find out if this was a true situation, and whether the woman was alive or dead. Either way, it made for a somewhat unsettling initial Metro journey.

Monday morning, with slight trepidation, I ventured to the Shanghai office for the first time. Whilst I felt confident that I had the experience on the business side for my new job, I was nervous about the people-management that came with the role. In Dubai, I had handled a team of six people. Now I was going to run a team of twenty-five, split between two locations, Shanghai and Beijing. This was raising the stakes somewhat. My first morning in the office started predictably enough, as I was introduced to everyone on the team, and we went through the usual pleasantries. 

Following office tradition, as it was my first day, we all went out together for a team lunch. My colleagues asked me if I liked Chinese food, and I said yes, telling them a bit about my history of living in Hong Kong. Most of the dishes that were served up that day were fairly predictable and straightforward Shanghainese dishes, including chicken feet. I know now that this is a fairly regular dish, but I still have a lingering suspicion that someone threw it into the mix to test the new westerner a bit. I did try one chicken foot but quickly put it down and moved on to something else, rapidly changing the subject while I did so. 

As the meal wore on, I realised that the team was looking at me to lead the conversation, if not actually make a speech. This was not something I had anticipated. I was just expecting to talk about the business, understand some of the issues that people were facing, and get to know a few of the team members. However, they were looking to me to lay down my marker for what I was going to do and how I was going to do it. I don’t think that I did it very well that day, although I learned very quickly that I was not being viewed as a manager – I was being regarded as a leader. My colleagues expected me to show leadership right from the start. The regard for authority and the importance of ranking remains high in China. If you hold a position of authority, you need to act authoritatively. Unprepared at that lunch, I mumbled a few clichés about being excited to be there and looking forward to working with everyone. Then I changed the focus a little by going around the table and asking everyone where they were from and how long they had worked in the Bank. I learned my lesson, though; in every team meal since, I have either made a speech or at least had one prepared should the need arise.

Understanding this way of thinking caused me to adapt my management style somewhat over those first few months. I actually had to become slightly more autocratic and less inclusive than I had been before. If my team were going to respect me, then I had to be a leader and not one of the group or someone with whom they could laugh and joke. They expected me to stay at arm’s length. Once I understood that this was not personal on my behalf, I felt more comfortable with it. This style then influenced how I was treated in the office. 

For example, my team in Dubai had been very energetic and talkative, particularly towards me, whilst I had been in charge. I was told every aspect of everything that was going on in the business. Often the hardest part of my job was just having the patience to keep listening to everything that I was hearing, when I really wanted to be getting on with something else. By comparison, in China I met everyone on that first day, we went out for lunch, I wrestled with the chicken feet, and then we came back to work – in silence. No one spoke to me. Everyone just went about his or her job, and no one told me anything about anything.

I have read theories that this sort of behaviour has roots in the Cultural Revolution, when people were scared to be singled out and so sought comfort in the security and anonymity of the crowd. Yet the people I dealt with were too young to have been affected by that time; they had not lived through it. I came to understand later that, at school, children were discouraged from asking questions and disrupting the lesson flow. Students were expected to take what they were told and assimilate it without debate. This led to some early conference calls being somewhat one-sided, as I would speak for a while and then ask, “Any questions?” All I heard in return was silence. I had to check that there were still people on the line and I was not just talking to myself. Now I tend to keep the meetings short, ask direct questions of individuals to make sure that they are there, and try not to take the silence personally.

I soon understood that it was necessary to reach out and initiate dialogue with my colleagues; otherwise, I would never actually find out what was happening in the team, particularly when they were speaking Chinese to each other. When I started to do this, a few found it a shock that they had a boss who was not only expecting to have feedback and comments on the business but also wanted to be alerted to problems and issues as they came up. It took some time, but once they found out that I was not going to scream and shout every time something went wrong and that we were all on the same side, then the barriers started to come down. Over time, they grew to appreciate and value the fact that I actually wanted to collaborate and be at least slightly inclusive. Ultimately, we met up somewhere pretty much in the middle; they started telling me more, and I left them to get on with the work with only minimal interference.

The respect for authority also manifested itself in some surprising ways. For instance, when approaching an open door or exiting the lift, tradition dictated that the most senior person go through first. I wanted to maintain my English politeness, and so I invited the ladies to go through before me. Often they would hover by the door, not sure whether to go through or not, and so we would have a standoff before eventually someone would give in and go through first. I have to admit, on occasion, to actually pushing people out of the lift to start people moving – else we would have been there all day. 

Having experienced this, I also started to play up to the image, not just of being senior but also of being the foreigner doing business in China. This image served me well when seeing clients in Hong Kong, and now again in China. Outside of cosmopolitan Shanghai, when I started visiting factories and plants around the country, some of my clients had never even met a foreigner before, let alone had one come to pitch them banking business. This was my calling card, my way of getting people to remember who I was and who Standard Chartered were, when they were doubtlessly being marketed non-stop by local banks also. Being English was my secret weapon.

I also soon realised that my main sales role in the team was probably to turn up for dinners and drink baijiuwith the clients. This was partly because I was the token foreigner but also because I was in charge, and it gave the clients face that the team head was meeting them. Finally, it was just because I was best at it. Drinking in China can become competitive; everyone knows where they rank in terms of capacity against each other in the office. For better or for worse, I had laid down my marker fairly early as being able to hold my own. “How many bottles of Moutai can you drink? One? Two? More?” 

One of my prouder moments was being introduced at an internal conference with the introduction, “Next up to speak, Ian Mote, the man we’ve never seen drunk.” Technically this was not true, but on the occasions I had been in trouble, everyone else had already succumbed long before me, and I had gotten away with it. Nevertheless, I still allowed myself a quick smile at this compliment.

Another time, I was speaking with two of the ladies in my team, and they told me that they had a nickname for me, which was a name applicable for someone in my social position. I was not too sure where this conversation was going, but they assured me that it was a good thing.

“So, what is the name, then?”

“Zuan shi wang lao wu.”

“What does that mean?”

“Diamond Bachelor.” Because I was a senior manager, who was unmarried.

Diamond Bachelor, eh? OK, I could live with that.