They say that if the Shanghai metro gets you knocked up, the Beijing metro will take care of it. A tasteless joke perhaps, but one the locals relish. It doesn’t have quite the same appeal for me asI find myself at Guomao Station, Beijing’s busiest subway stop. I am trussed up in my school uniform-come-business-suit and have never felt less ready for my first day at work. Before me is a uniform sea of black haired heads, most of whom are openly staring at me, not because of my Renaissance beauty or supermodel legs, but because in a city of 14 million I am patently Western (and now patent with sweat.)
I set myself up for an August of experiment. After a laborious phone interview I landed myself a place on the internship programme CRCC Asia, who have wrangled me a month’s internship with a local Beijing law firm, King & Bond. I neither study law nor speak a word of Mandarin. I can, at least, use chopsticks, and am therefore marginally better equipped than the other CRCC intern. She is from New Jersey and mainly plays Angry Birds at her desk.
The first thing to know about the Chinese working world is the importance of guanxi, the Chinese word for the friendly business relationship between partners. It normally involves a large meal, washed down with Baijiu, a sort of Chinese vodka that I’d happily use as nail polish remover. Luckily I was forewarned, but people’s attitudes towards each other in the office were almost overly friendly. The Chinese intern, who had been there for nearly a month already, clasped me around the waist the minute I arrived and frogmarched me round the office hand in hand with me. My supervisor looked mortally offended when I tentatively suggested we eat somewhere other than McDonald’s for lunch. Saving and giving face is a big deal in China and it must be adhered to, even if it means suffering a few chicken feet and chips.
While I was familiar enough with guanxi, there are many preconceptions that I had about Chinese business culture that didn’t always ring true. A country that is fast becoming a world superpower must be the apotheosis of intellect and ruthless efficiency when it comes to business.
The clerks’ room of King & Bond was a different matter, however: six out of ten clerks were fast asleep. Some had even brought pillows. Upon further enquiry I find that apparently this is totally normal. I was left meanwhile to copy and paste the entire Chinese website into Google translate. Another woeful misconception: the Chinese are clean and business-like. Yes, they wear hygiene masks in the office. So far, so good, according to my stereotype checklist. A spot of procrastinating in the office toilet revealed the grim truth. One woman, who I later recognised as one of the partners, spent a good ten minutes in her cubicle hawking and spitting, before lighting a fag. She then took a business call in broken English from the same cubicle. They say time is money.
The actual job was vaguely interesting. Aside from the inevitable endless photocopying and faxing, I was taken to a few embassies as a sort of promotion gig. They mostly went well, barring an incident where my supervisor rather pompously assured the Ethiopian ambassador that Bolivia and Venezuela were indeed African countries. The general level of office English proved to be no better that its geography, and I had to insist upon proofreading most of the documents before they went off. One does not write ‘looking forward to meeting you!!!’ in an email to the head of HSBC.
Other than the language barrier, there were aspects of Beijing that were infinitely frustrating, but also moments of real wonder: trying to find a cab that will take you even though you aren’t Chinese? Impossible. Eating well for under £1? Every day. Forget your Pret salad and your Starbuck’s skinny mocha when a working lunch consisted of at least four dishes for under a pound per person. Wanfujing market sold less recognisable fare for a similar price: deep-fried scorpion, cockroach, silkworm or snake were too brave an after-work snack for my tame Western palate.
One of the best and strangest things about Beijing is its own cultural clash. From the austere Tian’anmen square to the breath-taking Ming era architecture of the Temple of Heaven, it is almost bizarre that you can spend a whole day faxing in a window-less office and a whole evening haggling in the Silk Market. China may be a superpower and a strict communist regime, but the vibrancy of the city is not easily quashed, perhaps because of the inward-looking nature of the state. From China’s Great Wall to its Great Firewall, this is a country of and for the Chinese people, and it is bristling with life and energy, when its employers aren’t asleep.
