TripDingo

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Elliot Ng, the VP of Marketing for Kango.com (who sponsors this blog) and having quite a few exchanges about the China blogosphere, entreprenuership, travel, technology, Shanghai nightlife, and the flows of information between China and the West (amongst many other things). Fantastic guy and I want to bake cookies for him already but I’ll jump straight into what I want to talk about in this post by referencing a post of his over at his blog, CNReviews.com:

There is an incredible one-way mirror (technically a two-way mirror) effect in the world today. People (ok, educated elites) in China have a high degree of awareness about what is going on in the US. But most people (including educated elites) in the US have a low degree of awareness of China.

Elliot then goes on to give an “especially clear” example of this one-sided “awareness” where a marketing director for a Chinese company shared that she watches the American TV shows Prison Break and Entourage. 

I have a few problems with Elliot’s statement (which I’m sure likely stems just from the lack of precision when using certain terms). For one, how are we defining “awareness?” Awareness of what? Of popular media entertainment? Social trends? Political trends? Societal values? Business environments? Professional norms? History? What? I could go on and on. Granted, there are more Chinese (absolute and per capita) who have exposure to American popular media than vice versa but is that sufficient to generalize “awareness?”  (more…)

So I’m riding in the backseat of a taxi on my way towards Xin Tian Di. The driver has the radio turned up loud, probably because I’m not much of a talker when it comes to riding in taxis (unless I happen to be drunk and seriously that bored). The radio talk show has the host speaking with what we can only assume to be some sort of expert or authority on the Shanghai real estate market. Blah blah blah, they’re talking about how the prices have gone up, in which districts, and how the rising prices of new properties are also bringing up the prices of “second-hand” properties. 

All of a sudden, the guest speaker catches my attention by making a reference to the United States:

“Here in America, it’s all black people in the cities but Shanghai is different because its usually the more affluent people people in the cities.”

Well…yes, that’s a reasonably accurate observation about the differenes between the dominance of suburban housing in the United States (white flight and all) and high-density, low-mobility living conditions in China. And if you’re Chinese, you wouldn’t even think twice about what the man just said. However, when you’re as ingrained with being politically correct as I am from the West, you can’t help but chuckle at just how casually this gentleman threw out such a generalization. Again, its reasonably accurate in capturing the difference between the inner-city ghettos of the States compared to the undeveloped poverty of rural China but damn, “it’s all black people?”

I mean, what about all the Mexicans?