China in Ten Words (24 page)

These days when my mother recalls the past she puts it differently; time has softened that disappointment and provided a more precise word for the wrong she suffered. “It was you who bamboozled us into coming here,” she says now.

The word “bamboozle,” then, has rapidly gained acceptance in China. Just as “copycat” gives imitation and piracy a new range of connotations, “bamboozle” throws a cloak of respectability over deception and manufactured rumor.

In 2008, just a couple of weeks before the opening of the Beijing Olympics, a local newspaper dropped a bombshell. It began:

Beijing this August will be the most exciting place in the world. Not only will the most outstanding athletes in the world gather here; the rich and powerful of the world believe that visiting Beijing for the Olympics is the ultimate in fashion and have made their bookings months in advance. They include Bill Gates, the world’s richest man. However, this software giant—who has already given away billions of dollars to charity—will not be staying at a hotel in Beijing this time. Rather, he has chosen a penthouse apartment less than two hundred yards from the Water Cube. If he opens the windows and looks out, he will get a perfect view of the crystal-blue Water Cube Aquatics Center and the stunning Bird’s Nest Stadium.

Bill Gates, we were told, had shelled out a hundred million yuan on his penthouse lease. The report went on:

The apartment is on two floors and has about 7,500 square feet of space. However, even if you are as rich as Bill Gates, you won’t be able to buy it, for these properties are for lease only. Bill Gates has it only on a one-year term, though that will cost a hundred million yuan. “We don’t do short-term rentals,” sales associate Miss Yi explained.

The article took the form of an interview with this saleslady. After gleefully reporting what a big spender Bill Gates was, Miss Yi waxed even more lyrical as she enthused about the grace and luxury of this new residential complex: “The whole structure resembles a huge jade dragon with head raised and wings extended, its posture magnificent, its spirit lively, and all in perfect accordance with the principles of feng shui.” The report added a mysterious touch: apparently it was only “under the guidance of a master” that the building design was elevated to such a high level, with such rich symbolic significance.

“By all accounts, many clients of substance have already put their names down,” the article continued to bamboozle.

“Bill Gates has paid his lease,” Miss Yi told us, “and others—I can’t reveal their names—have already moved in.” Miss Yi, normally so discreet, revealed inadvertently that not all the units had been spoken for. “Some are still unclaimed, and if you want to take out a lease, there is still a chance.” When a reporter asked whether one could lease an apartment next to Bill Gates, Miss Yi replied, “It’s possible. But first you need to fax over your details and get things verified before we can set up a tour. As to whether or not you can be Mr. Gates’ neighbor, you need to complete the first steps before we can discuss that.”

As soon as the news got out, China’s mainstream and not-so-mainstream media circulated the report, and I think at a minimum more than a hundred million people must have learned about this new residential complex in Beijing. Soon the news spread to the United States, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation issued a formal denial. A few days later Zheng Yaqin, director of Microsoft’s China operations, suggested at a press conference that it was simply promotional hype cooked up by a property developer, using the Olympics and Bill Gates to get attention.

When pressed by journalists, the developer denied all responsibility for the article, claiming that it was a fiction concocted by the media. The first media outlet to report the news countered that they got the story directly from the sales associate, Miss Yi. As the pot called the kettle black, people soon stopped caring about where the rumor originated. Even though the media continued to report it as genuine news, none of it made any sense: if Bill Gates spent a hundred million yuan to lease this penthouse, then each square foot would have to cost 13,000 yuan—an absurd figure, for if one were to flat-out purchase the apartment, 5,000 yuan per square foot would be about the going rate. Once people worked this out, the media quickly changed their story, hailing the whole episode as “the supreme bamboozle of 2008.”

The media in China today are full of fake stories like this, because there are seldom any legal repercussions. To circulate this kind of story is a kind of fraud, but in China people just shrug it off as bamboozle. In this particular case “bamboozle” implied both deception and hype, but it also contained a certain element of entertainment. That being so, nobody was inclined to regard it as a serious issue.

One thing we did learn, however, was just how much leverage a bamboozle can exert: by playing the Beijing Olympics and Bill Gates for all they were worth, it was able overnight to convert an obscure housing development into an apartment complex famous all over the country. In economic terms, leverage is a monetary policy, confined to profit-and-loss risk management issues; in capital markets it simply makes it possible to clinch large deals with a relatively small outlay—as the Chinese expression goes, “using four ounces to shift a thousand pounds,” or as Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.” But now we clever Chinese have found a place for leverage in common and everyday bamboozling. Bamboozling is everywhere, and so leverage is everywhere, too.

Chinese authors and publishers, for example, like to use Hollywood as leverage to bamboozle readers and the media. A few years ago one Chinese novel was no sooner published than it was hyped to the skies in the Chinese media. Although the English edition had yet to appear, it was widely touted that Hollywood was going to make a movie out of it, at a price tag of $300 million. As I was puzzling over this, thinking I’d never heard of a Hollywood movie costing so much, the bamboozle industry was upping the ante to $800 million. Aided by this kind of hype, two Chinese novels have indeed become best sellers in recent years, each claiming to be bound for Hollywood at a cost of $800 million. The novel that claimed to be worth a measly $300 million did not sell so well, I think perhaps because it did not employ bamboozle leverage to best effect and failed to “use four ounces to shift a thousand pounds”—its four ounces shifted only four hundred pounds. If you’re going to bamboozle at all, then clearly the bigger the better. As we Chinese say, you don’t have to pay tax on bullshit. That being so, why not bullshit to the max?

“The more boldly a man dares, the more richly his land bears”—that famous Great Leap Forward mantra—turns out to be an apt description of bamboozlement’s essential nature. Its logic is confirmed by another Chinese homily: “The timid die of hunger, the bold of overeating.”

Let’s now review another case, one in which an entrepreneur used CCTV as leverage to bamboozle others into making him rich. This episode dates back almost twenty years, to a time when China had yet to enter the Internet age but was already a nation overflowing with advertisements. Today, of course, TV commercials and newspaper ads are even more abundant and of infinite variety—imported and domestic, refined and vulgar, violent and erotic. Established companies hawk their wares in neon lights and on expressway billboards; shady, underground businesses paste flyers on utility poles and the steps of pedestrian bridges. Advertising is now so ubiquitous and ostentatious that the big-character posters of the Cultural Revolution years seem tame by comparison.

At the time of this episode, the most expensive advertising spot was a five-second placement before CCTV’s
Network News
at seven o’clock each evening. CCTV had begun selling the spot off to the highest bidder, but it was all still in an experimental stage, before the network started to check the financial resources of the bidders. In those days, if a beggar were to dress up in a suit and put a millionaire’s smile on his face, there would have been nothing to stop him from going in and making an offer. Whatever company made the highest bid would immediately be hailed as the Bidding King by media outlets big and small, and all this publicity would be even more effective than the five-second commercial itself.

Our entrepreneur had only limited financial resources, and he felt that if he simply continued to do business on a modest scale, he could never hope to be more than a small-timer, even if he pulled out all the stops. Now he saw his opportunity. Like so many other grassroots entrepreneurs in China, once he had set his sights on his goal, he would stop at nothing to reach it. He traveled alone to Beijing and adopted a low-key stance as he entered the CCTV commercial Bidding King auction room, which was thronged with millionaire entrepreneurs and powerful managers of state-owned enterprises. He found a chair in the back row; when the auction began, he sat with head bowed and eyes half closed, as though about to nod off, but every time he heard a bid, he would lift his right hand and make a better offer. As the price rose higher and higher and other companies gradually withdrew from the competition, he kept raising his hand, as cool as a cucumber. In the end he claimed the CCTV Bidding King’s crown with an astronomical offer of 80 million yuan.

With this title under his belt our hero returned to his home base and made an appointment to meet with the mayor and the party secretary of the municipal committee. “I’ve brought back the 80 million yuan Bidding King title for our city,” he told them with a winning smile, “but my own assets are just a tiny fraction of that. What shall we do? If you back me up, then our city will have produced an entrepreneur famous throughout the nation. If you let me down, then our city will have produced the biggest trickster in the whole country.” He left them with a parting shot of “Do whatever you think is best.”

Local officials were then single-mindedly pursuing GDP growth, hoping that the areas under their jurisdiction would produce a nationally known entrepreneur—an achievement they could bandy about as a way of boosting their own chances of promotion. If the most brazen swindler in China were to emerge on their watch, conversely, this would have grim implications for their career prospects. An emergency meeting was called, and after much soul-searching the mayor and the party secretary decided to instruct the local commercial bank to give the Bidding King a loan of 200 million yuan—a loan rich in Chinese flavor, for commercial banks were often then at the beck and call of the local government.

That was how this small-time businessman twice bamboozled his way to success, first by exploiting the leverage offered by CCTV’s Bidding King title, then by making the most of Chinese officials’ vanity to end up with a nice little haul of 200 million yuan. But his bamboozling wasn’t over, for he would then bamboozle himself a reputation as a nationally known entrepreneur.

S
tories of this kind keep coming so thick and fast I need to tell a few more: first, two about how people bamboozle the government, then two about how the government bamboozles the people.

Average Chinese citizens have no ambition to be famous and powerful, nor do they dream of making their fortunes overnight; for them contentment brings happiness. So when they bamboozle the government, the leverage effect is that of four ounces lifting four pounds; as long as they enjoy a fair degree of success, they feel pleased with a job well done. Whatever bamboozling leverage they have tends to be found close to home: lacking friends or relatives in high places, lacking access to a wide social network, all they really have in life is family and marriage, so these provide the only real leverage, as the first two stories will show.

Three or four years ago, a city education bureau announced a new measure to raise the quality of local teachers and enable graduating high school seniors to be more competitive in the university entrance examination. All high school teachers were to take part in an examination that would test their credentials. Those who passed could continue teaching; those who failed would have their jobs terminated. At the same time, out of humanitarian considerations, the education bureau noted that some teachers were raising children alone after divorce or the loss of a spouse and might be suffering hardship through the combination of workload and child-care responsibilities, so they issued an additional proviso that the requirement would be waived for teachers who were raising children single-handedly.

It is only since my own son entered middle school that I have realized the crushing weight of examinations in China’s educational system. Practically every day he has to prepare for an exam, whether it is a daily exercise or review quiz, or a test, monthly exam, midterm exam, or final exam. There are all manner of tests in Chinese high schools, and from the day they enter the school gates, students are trained to become test-taking machines. But those teachers who were used to testing students daily found a test suddenly staring them in the face, and it made them quake.

The teachers in this small-scale city thereupon began a large-scale bamboozle. The ruling that widowed and divorced teachers with children would be excused from taking the examination gave them just the leverage they needed. Off they rushed to the registry office and filed for divorce. Observing this flood of divorces (and subsequent flood of remarriages), the townsfolk found much to admire. “That’s the wisdom of the masses in action,” they would tell one another.

Wherever they met, whether in the street or in the school, the teachers soon got in the habit of greeting each other in a new way: “Divorced yet?” Before long, that became a standard greeting all over town. In the end fewer than 30 percent of the teachers took the examination, and most of those were unmarried or married without children; naturally there were a few others too who were confident enough about passing to actually sit for the exam. With the crisis over, remarriages commenced and greetings were revised accordingly: “Remarried yet?”