Selling to the C-Suite by Nicholas A. C. Read

Author:Nicholas A. C. Read
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2018-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

UNDERSTANDING THE MINDSET OF CHINESE EXECUTIVES

Six hundred years ago, China was a political, an intellectual, a military, and an economic colossus. In his groundbreaking work 1421: The Year China Discovered America (Harper, 2004), Gavin Menzies contrasts China’s position on the fifteenth-century world stage with that of the major European powers of the time, and concludes that in every way, China ruled supreme:

At the inauguration of emperor Zhu Di’s Forbidden City in Beijing on 2 February 1421, 26,000 dignitaries ate a 10-course banquet served on fabulous porcelain. At the feast to celebrate the coronation of Catherine of Valois as Queen of England on 21 February 1421, 600 guests ate one course of salted cod on slabs of stale bread that served as plates. Zhu Di’s walled city was more than 1,400 times the size of the walled City of London. Later that year, King Henry VI went to war against France commanding an army of 5,000 men whom he ferried across the English Channel in four fishing boats. In the same year, Emperor Zhu had a standing army of 1,000,000 men.

The Emperor had more than 1,350 warships, 3,000 merchant vessels and 400 grain transports, plus an armada of 250 treasure ships equipped with cannons and rockets that transported 30,000 men around the world. Each ship was 400 feet long. By contrast, Columbus’ Santa Maria was 82 feet long, about the size of one of Zhu’s ship rudders.

The Silk Road was open all the way to Persia. China’s industrial system was flourishing. Forward bases had been opened around the Indian Ocean. The way was clear for Zhu Di’s greatest gamble yet—the entire world was to be brought into Confucian harmony.

Yet within 150 years, a change in policy saw China reverse its expansionist policies, scrap its navies, and burn its shipyards. It entered a long sleep, where it remained while other world powers emerged during the Industrial Revolution. In the 300 years that followed, China was embroiled in various wars and rebellions, mounting debts, the loss of Hong Kong to British rule, and the eventual end of 5,000 years of imperial rule. China first became a republic in 1912; this republic was overturned by a prime minister who declared himself the new emperor in 1915, then “died” a year later, leaving a power vacuum that was greedily filled by ruthless warlords who carved the country into fiefdoms.

After World War I, the revolutionary Sun Yat-Sen set out to unite his fragmented nation through an alliance with the Communist Party of China and with help from the Soviets. His protégé, Chiang Kai-shek, disagreed with communist rule and seized control of the rival Nationalist Party, using military force to defeat the southern and central warlords. He then waged war on the Communist Party itself in 1927 and drove its supporters to the northwest in what became known as the Long March, during which the communists reorganized under Chairman Mao Zedong. China then endured 14 years of tumult that included the Japanese invasion and World War II, during which time the communists succeeded in winning popular support.

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