Chinese norms and values - the WTO-column

My moment of hilarious fun last week was when I noted in South-African newspapers some statements of the Chinese ambassador in South-Africa Liu Guilin who told the Africans they should not complain but work harder. I love it when higher Chinese officials become politically incorrect in a gross way. Issue was the voluntary two-year quota system for textile China agreed to for South-Africa to protect its textile industry. Quota are not going to help you, Liu told his audience, only competition makes your industry better.
How much more do you need to let Karl Marx turn around in his grave?
In the first week of November 53 African heads of state gather in Beijing to celebrate the Sino-African ties and for a moment I was afraid that apart from messing up the Beijing traffic even more, it would become a very dull propandistic "good-news" conference. But when people like Liu Guilin are around, they might have actually something to talk about.

The statement Liu Guilin does reflect a collective Chinese attitude. Hell, my Chinese wife tells me every day I should work harder and complain less; and I find her much harder to ignore than the Chinese ambassador in South-Africa.
"Why don't we see children playing in the streets, like we see at home," I was asked last week when I guided a group of European trade Union people through the city. I had to think for a moment. I guess it is because they are at home or at school studying, I said. They have no time to play on the streets. "What a sad life for those children," they said.
It was actually the European trade union movement who, based on the appalling treatment of industrial workers at the end of the 19th century developed the concept of a balanced life: eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep, eight hours of spare time each day. From a propagandistic point of view, that was a great invention even the Chinese could learn from. In Europe it is still the basis of the negotiated relationship between employers, employees and often the government as an enforcer.
These norms and values have never really catched on in other parts of the world, like in China or the US. In the US people work, compared to the Europeans, that hard it would be one of the few economies in the world that would get a gigantic boost when the government would introduce Golden Weeks, like happened in China at the end of the 1990s. Compulsory free weeks to spend your money.

Now, where does that leave China? My trade union delegation noted at a Unilever plant in Hefei that their colleagues in Anhui were certainly not working as hard and efficient as they would have to back in Europe. It has been the basis of a lot of scientific research in Europe, suggesting that even when you make longer hours, the productivity drops to such a degree that those long hours actually make very little sense. But that might vary from industry to industry, depending also on the skills you need.

Should we all work harder and compete better? Since the Americans work already harder than the Europeans and still complain about lack of competitiveness, that might not be the only solution. The Chinese might be able to set the pace already in Africa, where their economic influence is already much bigger than in Europe. I'm not sure what it is going to mean for the Europeans in the long run.

Fons Tuinstra