Chinese Rules: Five Timeless Lessons for Succeeding in China. Tim Clissold
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presence. People remembered her. She had that knack of walking into a room and connecting – of making people she’d only just met feel individual and special. I could tell that Wang liked her even though they couldn’t communicate directly. Years later, he told me that the reason that they’d chosen IHCF as their foreign counterparty was that they felt comfortable dealing with Mina.
As I got to know her better, I began to realize that Mina’s energy levels elevated her above the normal confines of time; strictly vegetarian, she never drank alcohol and needed hardly any sleep. I’d often find out that she had spent several hours before sunrise wading through some turgid documents while doing forty klicks on an exercise bike, or that she’d run fifteen miles before breakfast. Her energy bordered on the inexhaustible; she once mentioned in passing that she’d just completed an Ironman event, which apparently involved swimming several miles before riding a bicycle uphill for about five hours and then blithely embarking on a marathon. I wasn’t in the least bit surprised when she broke her hip years later while running two hundred and fifty miles across the Sahara. On top of the almost limitless physical output, she had developed ‘blue sky thinking’ into an entirely new art form; she had a thousand new ideas a minute that used to burst into the conversation unannounced from random angles.
Over the time that she’d been travelling to Asia, Mina had developed an affection for China, which I liked; she felt comfortable there and, like me, she enjoyed its eccentricities. She was easy to be with, that was for sure, and completely focused on the task at hand; but at times it was tough to keep up.
We both agreed that Wang had seemed strangely disconnected and never seemed to answer any of the questions directly. It felt as if he wasn’t telling us the real reason for wanting to change the contract; the whole day had been taken up fencing over side issues. We had to figure out his real objective but with Cordelia still impossible to contact, there wasn’t much we could go on.
‘There’s an old Chinese military saying, “Know yourself and know the other and you’ll survive a hundred battles”,’ I said. ‘Trouble is we have no idea what Wang really wants. We need to figure it out and find out who he reports to, what pressure he’s under, what other options he has.’
Mina grunted.
‘That doesn’t give us very good odds for winning this particular battle,’ I said.
‘Well, that’s all very interesting,’ said Mina impatiently, ‘but this isn’t warfare, is it? It’s a negotiation.’
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but the ideas are still useful. That’s why Chinese people are so good at all this. Just think, The Art of War was written more than two thousand years ago and they still use it every day. Anyway, your lot seem pretty military, too,’ I added. ‘I bet Winchester’s been reading Clausewitz at bedtime for years.’
‘Well,’ she continued, ignoring that comment, ‘if Wang won’t tell us what he wants, how do we figure it out?’
I’d seen from the company brochure that a part of the chemicals group had gone public in Shanghai a couple of years earlier. They were one of the larger manufacturing groups in China, so Wang could easily develop other options; we knew that he was already talking to some Japanese buyers, so that closed off the possibility of threatening to walk away from the deal if we didn’t get what Winchester wanted. We had to be smarter than that.
‘We can’t ask Wang directly,’ I said, ‘so we’ll have to go around him. Let’s try to find someone else to tell us what’s really going on. Sunzi always talks about the importance of using spies. That little guy – you know, Wang’s assistant, Chain-smoking Chen – he looks as though he might be converted.’
We agreed that the next day Mina should continue through the contract with Wang and that I’d start to work on Chen. It was well past midnight by the time we turned in, but at least we had a plan for the next day. I was still wide awake and only drifted off just short of three o’clock, so I was in a deep sleep when the phone rang at quarter to seven the next morning. ‘Where are you?’ she said. ‘I’ve just got back from a run.’
Mina and Wang spent the whole of the second day arguing about the timing of some obscure approval documents. I soon lost the thread of the argument, so I started working on Chen.
Chain-smoking Chen was twenty-four and had spent his whole life in Quzhou. Both of his parents worked at the chemical factory. He told me that he had never travelled outside the province, but when Wang assigned him to work on the carbon project, he’d grabbed the chance to come to Hangzhou. He was shy and reserved but he brightened up a little when he saw that I wanted to chat. After his first trip to Hangzhou, he had joined an evening class in English, dreaming of finding a job in a foreign company somewhere along the coast. But his mother and father lived in the factory; Chen was an only child so it looked as though he was struggling with the dilemma between his loyalty to his parents and his desire to break out of this country backwater. He was cautious and I found it difficult to draw him out.
By the second evening in the bar, Mina was becoming frustrated; I’d hardly said a word for two days. I sensed that she was losing patience and beginning to think that Winchester might have been right about me being a halfwit after all. A stream of anxious and distracting messages had been arriving from London all demanding updates on our progress. Meanwhile, Wang frequently revisited parts of the contract that we thought had already been agreed, so it was almost impossible to convey a clear picture back home. Whenever Mina tried to explain that Wang was switching back and forth, the team in London grew even more aggravated, which led to a further cascade of anxious messages. I encouraged her to be patient, but with the drumbeats from Mayfair getting louder and louder, I knew that it couldn’t be easy.
Throughout the whole of the morning of the third day, Wang didn’t even call us. He kept us cooling our heels at the hotel. Chain-smoking Chen had told us that the mayor of Quzhou was in town so we figured Wang was detained in meetings. That wasn’t a good sign; he seemed to be prioritizing routine meetings with a government official ahead of sorting out our contract. By the early afternoon, there was still no news, so we took a long stroll around the edge of the lake, wondering what to do. Suddenly, at about four thirty, Wang called and told us that a car was already waiting for us back at the hotel. He wanted to know where we were. Sprinting back around the lake, we changed into business clothes and were whisked off to another, much smarter hotel in a different part of town. There we were ushered into a large room with low chairs arranged around three sides of a square. Embroidered doilies were draped over the backs of the chairs and between each of them, a ceramic teacup with a lid sat on little wooden tables. After a while there was a commotion outside, and a man in an immaculate black suit strode in and shook Mina’s hand.
‘Ni hao!’ she said. Hello!
‘Ey!’ said the mayor, tilting his head back and smiling at Mina admiringly. ‘Nide Zhongwen zhen bang!’ Your Chinese is truly marvellous!
Mina stared back blankly, searching around for a translator.
The next thirty minutes were taken up with minor pleasantries: how far we’d travelled to get to China; how the pagodas around West Lake had been famous throughout history; how the scenery had been celebrated in Song Dynasty poetry. The mayor’s entourage nodded in agreement and laughed at all the appropriate moments. Next we had a description of the municipal transport systems; the number of Chinese tourists; the delights of the local fresh fish; the esteem in which Hangzhou’s dumplings were held throughout China. I could see Mina fidgeting and glancing at her watch. She’d arranged a call back to London for seven o’clock and it looked like we were in for the long haul. Just before six, we were suddenly whisked off to a banquet, stuffed with about fifteen courses, plied with several bottles of beer – each presented with a large white ceramic statue of Confucius – and, less than an hour later, loaded into a car and driven back to the hotel, puzzled by the whole episode. The project had never been mentioned.
When I saw Mina the following morning, she was at her wits’ end. She’d been on the phone all night and Winchester was beside himself with impatience. A meeting had been scheduled with the syndicate underwriters for the next day in the City and the pressure