Learning from Lula - the WTO column

(today in Chinabiz)

Shanghai - You might not have noticed it, but Shanghai did have a major conference this week, the World Bank meeting on reducing poverty. It proved you can have a major conference with major state leaders without blocking the whole city: I call that progress for Shanghai, where we have seen different scenes.

My award for the most Chinese session during this conference had the title: What have we learned from the Shanghai learning process? Loads of learning here. Of course was the meeting closed for most participants and the media. You do not want the wrong people to learn too much.

It was mainly a conference that celebrated, rightfully, China's successful efforts to elevate hundreds of millions of Chinese from poverty in the past 25 years. But since everybody should learn here, I will focus here on the difference of operating style between China and the Brazilian president Lula, an area where China can improve greatly.

Chinese can be very tough negotiators - there is no doubt about that. But with very few exceptions those negotiations take place behind closed doors and are not targeted at winning the hearts and souls of the world. Unless you start to know some of the Chinese negotiators involved personally, you could easily be fooled and think they would try to comply with the classic misconception of the Chinese, shy, not outspoken and unreasonably polite. Their way of behaving is very effective in China, but outside this country it is seen as a handicap.

A businessman with extensive negotiating experience in both China en Korea told how his Korean joint venture partner threw the papers on the floor and started to trample on it in a flare of anger. He liked it. "In China I was already having a war with my Chinese partner for three months before I discovered that. Everybody else knew it."

While I do not want to deny China the right to conduct verbal wars in the way they do it, sometimes it does make sense when the rest of the world gets involved. President Lula called the subsidies on agriculture and other products by the developed countries "scandalous" and spoke out against the unfair quota on for example textile that would cost China millions of jobs.

Even when the US started to blame China - wrongly according to most economists - for "stealing" American jobs with unfair methods, China never pointed publicly at the way how the US and Europe protect their markets in an unfair way.

I'm sure that a more outspoken attitude would be appreciated, not only by president Lula, who now seems rather lonely as the spokesperson for the developed country, but also among many of the Europeans and the American, who too seldom see that the unfair trade practices of their governments are being challenged.

Fons Tuinstra