I just returned home after a few weeks of travel to find a family of foreigners peering into my apartment. A random, happy, white family, whose picture was undoubtedly stolen off some website, is now pasted on the advertisement for a new housing development going up across the intersection my home.
So, why did the Beauty Shores Business & Living District paste up a family of foreigners on their advertisement? It is certainly not aimed at Sanjiang County's booming foreign population, because there are only two of us, my wife and me. In the simple words of our neighbor, "because foreigners are rich."
This is a comic example of the Chinese people's impression of foreigners to help bring up a deeper issue of worldview and how it applies to foreigners working in China (in any capacity).
For this new living district, the advertisement suggests: "If this is good enough for rich foreigners, it is the right place to move to impress your family and friends and show that you have money (even if you do not actually have it)." The underlying fact which all Chinese know to be true is that foreigners are rich.
Besides being a little bit annoying to know that everybody assumes you are rich, how does the presupposition play out? When foreigners try to buy anything in China, a very common reaction is for the seller to inflate the price. This applies to everything from buying a soft drink to investing large amounts of money.
Need we ask why? Well, "foreigners are rich," and it is easy to not feel guilty for cheating the rich guy. This is why copying MP3s of some rich, well-known artist and giving them to your friends does not feel bad (among other reasons). In many ways, this is just natural. Not the way it is supposed to be, but certainly natural.
Cheating the other guy, especially when the other guy is a foreigner and will not know the difference, is tempting, but when the other guy presumably has money to spare, the opportunity is often too good to pass up. Although Western companies and business people are far from perfect examples of business ethics, what we all need to remember is that the Chinese have even less ethical restraint than Westerners. That is a bold statement, but definitely true.
The real solution is how we approach these tendencies. I do not say all this to degrade the Chinese culture senselessly. I say it so that we can adapt our methods and systems of functioning in China. If controls, checking, and accountability are built in to the way we invest our money, the majority of these problems will disappear. The temptation to cheat is decreased, and the money can be successfully used for the intended purpose.
And the motivation is not to save foreigners money. This is about setting up ethical business standards in such a way that the foreigners and Chinese alike can do their jobs without the unnecessary temptation of greed. It does not alleviate greed, but removed the unnecessary temptation.
Chinese may continue to think foreigners are rich and are easy targets for cheating, but well-thought-through business practicies will establish ethical businesses which alleviate the strongest tempatations for corruption. Then, it really does not matter what they think; our actions and smart business practicies will prove with action what our words could not.
