This is China! BLOG

The Sea Turtles of China: They Can Never Come Home Again

Kevin (not his real name) was one of the first individuals I met when I first moved to Suzhou, nearly five years ago. A jovial British chain smoker with a chronic, liquid cough and a pot belly that rivals any nine-month pregnant woman’s carriage, the sixty-something year old Westerner is always ready with a canned joke that is usually quite funny. I had invited him for lunch at the Blue Marlin to pick up on some of his experience and wisdom gained in having been in China nearly fifteen years. Or, as he so astutely put it at the end of our two-hour long conversation, “Oh, wisdom. You mean you wanted to know all the mistakes I’ve made here in China?”

One of the topics we seemed to dwell on was Chinese returnees, or Sea Turtles. Who are they? What do other Chinese think of them? Are they really as clever as they think they are when they return to China?

I was the first of the two of us to get to the restaurant. In fact, I was the first in the restaurant, though it was precisely noon on a Friday. Actually, it was the Friday between Christmas and New Years, when ninety-five percent of all expats are back in their home countries or are on vacations in other countries. I had my pick of the establishment, so I settled at a table for two away from the front entrance. I ordered a cup of black tea to see me through the wait.

Kevin gave me a call to tell me he would be about ten or fifteen minutes late. It was more like a half-hour. Which was fine; always-equipped with my latest issue of the Economist Magazine I set about catching up on some reading and chatting with the waitresses.

When Kevin finally arrived, we were still the only customers at tables in the restaurant; a couple expats sat at the bar chatting, drinking. Kevin was preoccupied with a Chinese employee whom he said was “becoming Chinese again.” We placed our orders: he wanted merely a bowl of tomato soup and some garlic bread while I took a club sandwich.

While we waited for our orders he said, “A Chinese girl we hired two years ago lived and studied in Germany for nearly five years.” Kevin, though not German himself, works for a German company. “When she first started with us, she did things the German way: direct, professional, precise. Now, it’s tough to get any sort of meaningful information out of her,” he said. “So I had to take more time this morning than I had planned to find out what she was on about.”

His tomato soup came almost immediately. I had to wait ten minutes longer for my sandwich. He smoked a cigarette while we chatted and waited, and refused to start his soup until I had received my sandwich. “Even the German GM noticed she wasn’t what she used to be. He had been in on her initial interviews.”

The issue for Chinese comes down to social pressure and social acceptance; and the mere fact that one just has to get on in the environment in which one finds oneself, we agreed. Kevin told me how when the young lady comes out onto the shop floor to discuss something with him, the Chinese operators look sideways at her. When she returns to the office, they begin chattering away amongst themselves. Though he doesn’t understand exactly what they are saying, he knows they are talking about her. He believes they don’t see her as Chinese; she is more German to them, he is sure. And then, to compound their perceptions, they consider her – or at least her family – to be of the elite in the city. He told me he explained it to the GM this way: “Seven years ago for a young Chinese to be able to study in Germany – to be able to get there and to be able to pay for it – was almost unheard of. That means her family had connections and they had money. The average Chinese actually resents that fact, though they’ll never say directly. They’ll just work toward and wait for the day when they or one of their family can show off in like fashion.”

“Which is why fashion couture will do so well in China,” he chuckled. “Chinese love to show off their wealth.” I thought about the Chinese tourists I sometimes see in the waiting areas of international airports; they like leaving the cloth labels on their coats to show the world they’ve bought a name-brand.

“One of the problems a returnee has,” Kevin continued, “is the expectations from her family once she has returned from overseas. The family has probably pooled resources to get their child abroad, and now they expect a payback. Right there is an expectation to conform that’s pretty difficult for returnees to deny.”

“What do you think of returnees in management?” I asked, actually enjoying my club sandwich. I made sure this time they did not insinuate a fried egg in the thing. For some reason in China, fried eggs make their way into some of the most astounding plates. Hamburgers is one of those dishes.

“No one trusts them,” he said emphatically. “The Chinese staff just doesn’t accept them. A Chinese who had lived and worked in the States for twenty years was given the job of opening a plant in Suzhou. In nine months he was out of here. Western companies hire these guys because they’ve been able to convince Management they really are Chinese and know how Chinese operate. But they’ve been out of the game too long. And Chinese staff just isn’t willing to follow them. It doesn’t help that many returnees tend to look down on the local staff, too.”

I recalled a South Korean friend who had been employed at a company in Shanghai that had hired a new GM, a fellow from Hong Kong. At the first meeting with his management staff, the Hong Kongese brandished his British passport, proclaiming, “I am not Chinese! I am British!” It wasn’t long after my friend left the company due to conflicts with the GM.

“James McGregor in his book One Billion Customers wrote that he had never seen a Chinese schooled in the West for an MBA who then returned to China who did NOT become an emperor in his own right,” I said, keen that Kevin had brought up the subject of returnees. “And I’ve personally seen the same. What’s your experience?”

“Look,” he said, spooning the remnants of the soup. “A friend once told me the story of an African man that had gone to medical school in the States, married an American woman, even had a kid. That doctor years later returned to his hometown in Africa to open a new, modern medical clinic. My friend was at the opening, and was impressed at how professional everything and everyone at the clinic was. When my friend returned to the clinic a several months later, he found the good doctor wearing African garb, scratching his balls and whisking away flies with his horse hair crop.

“Point is: we all revert to our native condition. It’s part of what makes us human beings. So I’m not surprised that these MBAs throw everything out the window to fit back in. It’s who they are.”

It’s who we all are, in the end, it seems.

Bill Dodson
SUZHOU, China