Three Faces of a Changing China

No stock photo, this: infopreneur Diane Wang

Ask someone from the West to name a Chinese person. Yao Ming and “that runner” will take more than half of the first responses. Mao, Deng Xiaoping, and “the tank guy” will weigh heavily among the more informed. What disappoints isn’t the lack of China-specific knowledge, but the tenacity of the mirage.

By any meaningful measure, the average Chinese mirrors the average Westerner, content with a decent job, a full stomach, and something good to watch on TV. The one-in -a-hundred out to make a mark do so in many more fields than sports and politics. The not so subtle mass media theme “China’s coming!” should truthfully be “China’s becoming”, more and more like us. The following one-in-a-hundreds are presented in the spirit of proving so.

Diane Wang – Online Entrepreneur

Five years ago, she made $75 million when Amazon bought her online store. Most of us would rest easy with that kind of money, which is precisely why we’ll never see it. Diane’s latest project, DHGate.com, empowers the small trader, a portal to a post- financial crisis economy.

Alibaba nothing. Those first generation trade sites were business versions of foreign bride services. Diane’s platform supports quotes to letters of credit, finished product display to online payment, everything short of actually making that darn widget. Sourcers don’t even need to know English, with three translation companies and twenty logistics firms available through the site.

Charging buyers commissions between three and ten percent, DHGate facilitated over a billion RMB worth of trade in the first half of 2009. There’s plenty of room to grow. China’s e-commerce was worth three trillion RMB in 2008, two-fifths provided by SMEs, who will account for half of it by 2012. Who knows but that the baijiu-soaked business mating ritual will soon be relegated to tales of yesteryear.

Zhou Dan – Gay Rights Activist

As early ago as the end of the last century, coming out in China meant out of the closet but straight to the curb. Ostracism by family and friends was a given, police harassment and a trip to a psychiatric hospital a high likelihood. In 2001, however, China’s government decriminalized homosexuality, and officially ceased referring to it as a mental defect.

Shanghai lawyer Zhou Dan enjoys a much more progressive China in which to be out and proud. He lives with his partner, and is actually on speaking terms with his parents. Even more tellingly, his friends and colleagues met his announcement with an overwhelming lack of reaction.

But Zhou wants more than for his sexual orientation not to interfere with his happiness. A one man advocacy movement, he helped start a gay hotline in Shanghai , and teaches China’s first graduate course in homosexuality and social science. He’s even taken risk-fraught steps towards lobbying the government, making him one of those lawyers Shakespeare wouldn’t wish killed, using his skills for public service rather than corporate profit. Zhou can’t expect Queer as Folk on CCTV anytime soon, but it’s not like he couldn’t pick up the boxed set at any of Shanghai’s finer DVD shops.

Rui Chenggang – Globalist

Perhaps no one in the West has a right to expect a thank-you-card for some of the humble offerings it’s brought to China – the bicycle, the combustion engine, indoor plumbing , television, the computer – since no one western individual can lay claim to their invention. Still, a foreign devil’s moral muscles do give a slight twitch on watching news anchor Rui Chenggang chase Starbuck’s out of the Forbidden City, triumphant over western commercial imperialism, then drive away from his victory in a new Jaguar.

Yet there’s an odd comfort in knowing that China’s media darlings are as hypocritical and egocentric as the ones we grow back home. Rui is an outspoken booster of globalist agenda items like population reduction and climate change control, leaving mundane causes such as feeding China’s hungry and caring for its castaways to those less groomed for the spotlight. He gets personal training in making the world a better place at regular lunches with head coach Henry Kissinger, who hopefully leaves his Chile and Cambodia escapades out of their population culling tete-a-tete , but presumably helps Rui to craft cryptic sound bites such as “The more national you are, the more international you are.”

Talking heads trying to make the news instead of reporting it – check. Next up for China: pop stars and actors sounding off about their weighty political convictions.

Related posts:

1. Changing Times, Changing Art
2. China Briefing’s China Business Guides

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