This is China! BLOG

Different Yolks for Different Folks

A recent visit to the Philippine island of Cebu and a small discovery there set me to thinking about the course China has set itself to become a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) powerhouse. I had gone on a company trip for team building and other activities to the small subtropical island. Our hotel had been booked in the city – not at a resort on the beach, as we had all expected – and my room was not ready for me to move into yet. I did what I normally do when I’m in a city anywhere in the world with which I am unfamiliar: I took a hike. As the hotel seemed parked in the middle of a major thoroughfare there were just two directions in which I could walk: up the street or down the street. Either way, the view was pretty much the same: brightly colored chitneys stuffed with sweaty people shoulder to shoulder on their way to wherever the non-existent public transport system could not take them; open-faced motorcycle coaches careening through anxious knots of traffic; and lots of cars. Sidewalks were broken or nonexistent, and, despite the steamed heat, dust and mud abounded in equal proportion. It was on this first trip to the Philippines I gathered just how poor this Polynesian island chain really was.

As I headed back to the hotel after venturing out a bit more than a couple kilometers I passed by an extremely clean and well-kept avenue. I decided to take a jaunt down the side road and soon after discovered a bright, whitewashed building with two stern looking guards at the entrance. A bright blue sign hanging over the entrance asked the question, “Do you want to work in a Call Center?” I had been reading of late that the Philippines had become a destination for Call Center Outsourcing: nearly every Filipino under the age of sixty seemed to speak English; and nearly every Filipino singer in China I had ever heard sing seemed to have flawless American accents in performance. Why when suited with a white collar wouldn’t they be able to perform in the same flat, nasal-pitch of the most pedestrian American from the Midwest?

Just behind the Filipino call center was a small complex of adobe-style banks and Western-style venues: a bar-b-que shack, a café, a small Western-style supermarket. Three young Filipinos – a man and two women – dressed in business casual ware with security nooses round their necks strolled back to the Call Center from their break. It was all rather inspiring to find, really, amid the clamor and pollution of the main street.

And therein lays the rub: China is fast-developing its infrastructure, but the English-language skills as well as Western acumen are woefully behind that of a country as small and fragmented as the Philippines. The Philippines has the people with the language talent and cultural affinity, and it certainly has the economic desire to develop IT-based industries. However, the Philippine government is severely afflicted by in-fighting, nepotism and corruption, with no clear plan to develop the economy of its country to the same degree as China. The Philippines, in a way, is an India in the miniature: talented but constrained by self-serving systems of governance.

Who knows, instead of Filipino singers, China might one day be importing Filipine speakers with American Midwestern twangs to work in its Call Centers.