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April 21, 2005
Courtesy at the Crosswalks
This week, I write from Washington, D.C., where work on a client project takes me but steps away from the White House. Lucky for me, indeed – not that I have or would wish to have access to that office – but simply because this week sees the blossoming of the cherry trees, gifts from the Empire of Japan in 1912. So much of the DC environs has become as decrepit as any city that has slithered out of Philip Dick’s imagination, that this glorious gift from the Emperor redoubles its inestimable value nearly a century later.
Round about that year, the Qing dynasty of the Manchus had collapsed utterly, the Chinese Republican government was about to, and pitcher Smoky Joe Wood of the Boston Red Sox in the United States would say "I threw so hard I thought my arm would fly right off my body." Most Americans at the time were very likely oblivious to anything regarding the world at large, other than the World Series, which was particularly American. But in his comic novel, Picadilly Jim, P.G. Wodehouse speaks through his cricket-loving butler, Bayliss, to inform a heartbroken American that baseball originated as “rounders,” a children’s game played effeminately with a racket and a soft ball.
Whatever they claim to be, Americans generally will not run over a pedestrian. Here in D.C., whether walking or driving, I have found Washingtonians to be extraordinarily courteous and patient with the street-crossing walker. Fast-forward to Shanghai, the “Pearl of the Orient,” at least to mainland Chinese. What Shanghaiese driver will pause for a pedestrian? What one will stop for an elderly woman with bowed shoulders carrying her groceries in her arms and a young child on her back? Perhaps only a foreigner from DC…
Herein lies a lesson to be learned, one to be extrapolated from experience. In China, “big” wins – always, and with mind-numbing repetition. “Little” must defer. The walker, after all, is a mere bi-ped with limited speed and range of movement. No match for the 1 ton auto or the 10 ton bus. When, on crowded urban streets, competing bus companies rush from one stop to the next in search of customers – and make the driver’s compensation dependant upon surpassing a quota of tickets sold – “big” becomes a public danger.
True, the city of Shanghai, alone among Chinese cities, has attempted to force drivers to defer to pedestrians by placing financial responsibility on the driver in case of injury due to accident – even when not at fault. [For some background on Chinese auto transportation, see this.]
But, aside from this most modern of mainland Chinese cities, still 40 years behind its counterparts of Hong Kong, Singapore or Taipei, most Chinese drivers consider themselves “big.” The emphasis on the brutal exercise of power by those who apparently have it finds itself expressed throughout Chinese society, even where that expression is illogical or detrimental to the individual or society-at-large. This is, however, not a concept that has traditionally been in the ascendant. The recent 50 years have brought it to life and allowed it to flourish, but changes are in the wind.
More on the application of this idea in the Chinese management setting in an upcoming post.
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