Opinion | Why China no longer needs the wisdom of ‘Old White Guys’
- Once a prerequisite for any self-respecting business meeting, Nicolas Groffman says these ‘kindly curmudgeons’ have fallen out of favour in modern China
In 2004 my friend Tom and I were strolling along the Great Wall when we came upon a cluster of other non-Chinese people: white, black and brown; smiley; in colourful T-shirts: must be Americans. We watched them to see if they did anything funny. We were not disappointed.
One was an old white guy (OWG) with a beard and cowboy hat. He was sitting on a step. A few steps below him sat two youths, listening to him. “There is a building in Shenzhen,” he said, “said to be one of the tallest in the world. They call it the Ladder to Heaven. And yet, when it was built, the US contractor, who is a friend of mine, advised them to use a certain type of cement and steel in the foundations.
“But the local builders didn’t listen. And so the Ladder to Heaven was built – with the wrong cement and the wrong steel. It will inevitably fall down, and the foreign contractor will be blamed.
“Yes, the ‘round-eyed devil’, as they call us, will take the rap. And yet, my friends, this is just one building. All of China suffers from the same rot, a rot from within. It is an edifice waiting to collapse, just as it reaches to the heavens.”
Nonsense, from beginning to end. Yet these OWGs, like the Socrates on the Great Wall, can make a good living talking about how China is about to collapse because its people do not listen to the advice of other OWGs. And, like millenarian doomsayers, when the end of the world doesn’t happen as they predicted, they just say, “well, come back this time next year when it really will end”.
