It is fascinating to gain a perspective on business in China, and most notably Shanghai, from those with their fingers firmly on the pulse. Whilst at home business studies lecturers harp on about how the sensible money is heading off to cities such as Shanghai as they are full of opportunity, cost savings and promise, it seems that those actually doing business out here have a very different story.
Whilst at the Australian Chamber of Commerce networking session last Friday I asked a notable Australian business angel about his experiences of investment in Shanghai were he is based. He summed it up quite nicely by saying: ‘the tide has come in and gone out again, the smart money is on the move’. He followed this with a fascinating example of how 10 years ago a company he knew had invested £2million in Shanghai to much fanfare and political pomp. A decade later when they returned with £150 million, a clerk was sent round to their office to deal with the paper work in a run-of-the-mill, every day procedure. Times have changed and such sums are just not news here any more.
The changing attitude of the city and resultant upward mobility is having an interesting effect on the social fabric. Whilst China as a whole has disproportionately more men than women, Shanghai seems to have a very different issue. The young women in my office despair that there are not enough well educated young men to go around and, given that the ratio of males to females in the office is literally 100:1 I think they are well placed to comment! There is a phrase in mandarin that literally means the ‘left overs’ or women who have not been able to find a partner by a certain age. These girls are educated, upwardly mobile and feisty. They know what they want but unfortunately for them there are just not the men to match here in Shanghai.
The same appears to ring true for the expats I have met. A number of the girls on the Gaelic football team are single and looking with little real expectation. That may be however due to the flexible and unpredictable nature of their being here. Two of them arrived with backpacks form Ireland 4 and 5 years ago respectively, found jobs and stayed because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Suddenly 4 years have passed and they seem not to be able to believe it themselves when they calculate their stay in order to answer my queries. Like many in the expat community however they keep telling me that they are not here forever, just whilst it suits them to do so. That’s an attitude that I have found very interesting and in a way refreshing. At this point in my life, going into 4th year at university, it is a time that necessitates fairly large decisions about my future path. It it’s nice to have it so firmly laid out therefore that no decision is final. Even the decision of where in the world you are going to base yourself. It’s also a little terrifying, as I am starting to fully comprehend the shear scale of opportunity available and thus the probably infinite choice if one is willing to travel and be flexible within the job market. One of the members of the men’s team asserted that he would be happy to live and adapt to anywhere if conditions dictated. I believe him. He seems very strong as a person and his mandarin (self-taught) is excellent.
Shanghai is funny like that. It can make the world seem like a very big and a very small place at the same time. Wandering into an Irish bar with the rest of your team after practice to see a guy in a Scotland top (who turned out to be from Edinburgh) bashing out folk music on a guitar is totally normal but also wonderfully odd, having spent the day in a multilingual office dealing with buyers and suppliers all over the globe. Yet in both of these extremes you meet the most amazing people who are so happy to talk about their experiences, share tips and point you in the direction of your next great adventure. I’m starting to learn that about people who land up here- they all have a story, usually a pretty colourful one that is definitely worth a listen, something I think I will be doing a lot of over the next six weeks.
25 July 2011