The Amoral, the Innocent, and all of Those in Between.
Jiayuguan, Gansu Province, China, November 19th, 2013
Salaroche


Regarding daily business interactions with the local people, China is a land of glaring contrasts. On the one hand you have the salespeople at some HP or Dell computer dealers who often don’t hesitate to sell you a used computer for a new one. On the other hand you have local strangers who don’t hesitate to hand their Credit Card information to foreigners so that they may buy plane tickets on the Internet from local Travel Agents.

Only chance determines whether the characters you find along your way are of the first or of the second kind, and only experience can help you sort the ones from the others all by yourself. Then there are those characters in between; those who are neither crooks nor “saints” but often have more of an inclination toward the former than toward the latter. Those are mostly people who assess others by their looks and then decide whether to try to cheat you or not. If you’re a foreigner in China, most likely you have already met a few locals of this kind.

Some Taxi drivers, for example, will try to hide the taximeter from you by the end of your ride so that they may charge you some extra 4 or 5 Yuan (approx. US$0.65 - $0.82). Some convenient store owners often charge foreigners a few Yuan more for anything you may buy and some street vendors may try to do the same if you come to buy from them a second time.

I’m no newcomer to this kind of environments, meaning that I’ve already learnt without a tinge of a doubt that people are the same wherever we may go. I’ve lived in, or have been to, enough countries in Asia and south of the US border to know that ethics is a very relative term in many of those places. Not that dishonesty is absent in US business affairs. Just go ask all those Harvarite, Princetonian, or Columbian economist crooks responsible for the sub-prime-mortgage and derivatives scam whether they feel guilty about the ongoing global financial debacle they unleashed and you’ll see what I mean.

But the subject of my present observations has more to do with day to day money affairs than with high finances. For example, while walking along the beach in central Vietnam, looking for a hotel in the port city of Da-Nang, I came across a small hotel that had some reasonably-priced rooms listed on the wall. I asked the lady behind the counter whether she had any of those rooms available and she said “yes”, but the price she quoted me was some US$10 higher than the listed price.

The lady spoke fairly good English, so I asked her why she was quoting me a higher price and she just said “because you’re a foreigner”. I just told her “no thank you”, went away, and kept looking around for another hotel.

When I walked by the same hotel about half an hour later the woman was no longer there; now there was a guy behind the counter. So I went in and asked him whether the prices listed on the wall were valid and he said “yes”. So I thought: “Well, after all, not everybody is a shameless thief around here”.

The situation in Hanoi is not much different. Over there you go to any particular restaurant one time and when you come back for dinner a couple of days later prices have already gone up, not because of any rampant runaway inflation, but because you’re a foreigner. “Why charge local prices to foreigners?” they think, “foreigners are rich; charge them more!” I’ve heard the situation is a bit different in Ho Chi Min City (Saigon), but I’m yet to verify whether that’s true.

Fortunately, before going to Southeast Asia or coming to China I had already lived in some Latinamerican countries, where I was initiated in the art of avoiding small rip-offs of the daily kind. I had already lived in Barcelona, Spain, as well, where the situation can sometimes be somewhat similar, although perhaps a bit on the funny side of it.

For example, by the end of my 2004-2005 stint in Barcelona, while subcontracting for General Electric’s medical division, I sometimes went for lunch to a new small restaurant located just a couple of blocks away from the office. They had some rather good homemade ham and cheese sandwiches there but I never knew in advance exactly how much any of those would cost me until the time came to pay the bill.

At the beginning I would ask how much those sandwiches were, but the lady behind the counter always answered that they were “something like five euros”. I never got a straight price from her upfront, so I eventually gave up on asking for prices and simply resorted to hope that she wouldn’t be in a bad mood when handing me the bill.

Such kind of situations would perhaps be inconceivable in Japan or Switzerland, just as it would be very unusual for something similar to happen in the US, where all restaurants have a menu, or an itemized price list on the wall, or both. But there are many countries in the world where personal and business ethics are rather flexible.

In that sense, China is a land of clear contrasts. Over here you can find the whole gamut of social behavior, from the kindest imaginable person to the most cynical and shameless cheat. You can also find a good variety of behaviors in Vietnam but not as manifest as here in China. As far as South Korea goes, during the two and a half years I lived there I never found myself in situations that left any room to doubt the locals’ integrity.

Under the light of these experiences, I no longer hesitate to affirm that human beings are basically the same wherever we may go. At the bottom we all have the same instincts, wishes, passions and desires, except that some social, political and economic environments often determine the different ways in which we may administer and manage that common human nature we all share.

Civilizations are not held together by ideals, but by the social mores and laws that keep them going. Societies that emphasize ethical behaviors will tend to be more orderly and prosperous than those that don’t. This obviously doesn’t have much to do with any strict social controls of the kind authoritarian governments usually impose on their populations, for if it did, China and Vietnam would be as clean and orderly as Singapore, which is evidently not the case.

The deep social upheaval suffered in China under Mao, on the other hand, and particularly the “Cultural Revolution”, very likely had a decisive impact on the general ethics of the population, although arguably in the time across the different dynasties a good level of corruption had already crept into the heart of Chinese society as a whole. Then there was Deng, Xiao ping’s 1992 alleged speech telling his people that “to get rich is glorious” but not giving them any ethical guidance for achieving such glory (Did England during the Industrial Revolution or the US during the Gilded Age have any kind of ethical guidance? No they didn't)

Whatever the case, there’s no doubt there are good and not-so-good people everywhere. There are even very good and very bad people everywhere as well. In that sense, China is no different from the rest of the world, except that, since this country has the largest population on the planet, we are bound to find more samples of all possible kinds here than anywhere else, from the amoral to the innocent to all of those in between.

Salaroche