What's Wrong with China by Paul Midler

Author:Paul Midler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119213734
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2017-11-29T19:53:08+00:00

CHAPTER 15

Partner on the Deal

Although it has a reputation for being a difficult country in which to do business, China has always given visitors the impression that it is otherwise safe. In the nineteenth century, a time when buildings were not secured, Herbert Giles noted with some fascination that foreigners who went on vacation could expect to return and find everything right where it had been left.

Stanley High, writing in the 1920s, described a long journey from Chongqing to Tibet, in which he employed no fewer than seventy‐five coolie laborers. To finance the camel‐driven caravan, he secured several hundred dollars in silver and packed it away. Each one of the laborers, he figured, knew precisely where he had stashed the money. And yet this small fortune, an amount “sufficient to provide a lifelong endowment for any half dozen of them,” remained untouched.

I have lost two mobile phones in China and was lucky enough in each case to have the handheld brought back to me. All I had to do was ring my number and speak to the kindly fellow who was in possession of it. Of course the person who answered the phone was never the one who had actually found it, but he was nevertheless glad to assist. All we had to do was discuss the small matter of his travel expenses, because somehow—within a matter of minutes—the device had wound up in a distant town, and surely I would insist on personal delivery.

Scamps of this variety typically ask for only a fraction of the replacement cost but more than they could get selling it on the black market, and thus it is economically expedient to follow their lead. In such cases, you were inclined to resent the extortion until you had a phone stolen in some other place—as I did in Vietnam—and found that the thief had turned it off and thrown away the module chip, making it impossible to negotiate the device's return at any price.

Because there is greater economic efficiency in returning a lost item to its owner, we are not surprised to learn that this is yet another old tradition. In this country, noted Giles, “Many cases of theft are compromised by the stolen property being restored to its owner on payment of a certain sum, which is fixed and shared in by the native constable who acts as middleman between the two parties.”

China is home to a better class of criminal, I believe. Property crime is more humane and less violent. Purse snatchers, for example, often take care to drop the purse in their wake for the original owner to more easily recover—sans its monetary contents, of course.

In Guangzhou, I know a man who had his computer stolen while sitting at a Starbucks. He didn't mind the loss of his laptop, he said, but in his computer bag were some irreplaceable business documents. In this city of millions, the police somehow managed to recover his bag, along with the papers, though naturally the computer was still missing.

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