China’s Full Monty, to U.S. Cheers

It couldn’t have been mere coincidence. Last week while I was in Berkeley to observe as a leading U.S. journalism school taught our future editors and correspondents to better understand China, in Los Angeles a leading business school was mapping out how top Chinese executives can come to America to better understand capitalism. This was the same week that in China, Beijing’s leaders themselves were contemplating doing the “full Monty” and shedding all of their communist-economic outerwear. Watching intently--and cheering wildly--was the World Bank, which issued its long-awaited report, “China 2020.” Yes, it urges Beijing to take it off, take it all off. Chinese leaders, winding up their all-important 15th Communist Party congress, know all about Western criticisms of their remaining 1,000 state companies--those hopelessly inefficient mega-messes that try to run things in the old centralized Soviet style. That approach didn’t work for the Russians and it isn’t working for the Chinese; but while the Soviets wouldn’t admit it until the economy collapsed, the Chinese, increasingly, do. The perfectly timed World Bank report reinforces that Chinese instinct. So does UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management, that West Coast bastion of business management wonks.

For the past three years, the school has been educating some of China’s brightest managers in our capitalist ways. That program has worked so well that Beijing now wants the Anderson people to start schooling its biggest fish: the bosses of those notorious state industries, including the nation’s railways, airlines, telecommunications companies, ship-builders and chemical and energy companies.

UCLA is proposing to enroll these top Chinese executives in what might be called “Capitalism 101.” Explains Debra-Lynne Terrill, overseer of the Anderson School’s executive education programs: “What we offer is a management cram course. When [Anderson School vice dean and former deputy L.A. mayor] Bill Ouchi went over to China the first time to negotiate the initial deal, he asked what they needed. And their vice minister for personnel said: ‘We need everything.”’ So in addition to classes at UCLA in June, participating U.S. execs are to host their Chinese counterparts at their headquarter sites and then, in the fall, travel to China to work with Chinese CEOs on their own turf. Says Terrill, “China has a great interest in how we do things. And when we tell them, and when they see it for themselves, they can’t believe what they’re seeing, they can’t believe what we Americans do. But that’s how they come to understand how much they have to reform.” Added James Aggen, the program’s hands-on manager, “Trips like this to the U.S. used to be considered a reward, a vacation, really. Now their mind-set has changed. Now the kind of thing they come here to learn is a necessity for them.”

But if Chinese leaders are open-minded (and desperate) enough to learn from us, are we smart enough to want to learn more about them? That’s the challenge for America--and why another venerable California educational institution, UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, is PacRim-izing its program. I just wish leading editors and writers from across the nation could have joined me last week for the first graduate seminar under the school’s brilliant new Asia-Pacific Media Workshop. Presided over by Prof. Carolyn Wakeman, students who had returned from reporting experiences in Hong Kong were briefing others on the difficulty of covering China’s most significant recent acquisition. Observed one of the grad students, a young, savvy woman who had spent 10 weeks there observing the hand-over from British to Chinese rule: “You need a lot of research to write a careful story. You can’t jump to conclusions and you can’t rely on what’s been reported by the Western media.” Is that ever the case! Another student said he really didn’t begin to worry about Hong Kong’s plight as it moved to rule by Beijing until waves of Western journalists began to arrive for the July 1 hand-over. “They were just parachuting in, and they had to begin jumping to conclusions. But you couldn’t blame them. They were under such tough deadlines. Like them, I came in knowing nothing about Hong Kong.”

The program’s goal is to plant seeds for a better understanding of Asia in the minds of America’s future journalists, the obvious (and correct) premise being that Americans don’t know enough about China and Asia. Thus it’s commendable and important when one of America’s best journalism schools commits itself to motivate tomorrow’s editors and correspondents to fight our trans-Pacific ignorance. And it’s commendable, and important--if not exactly part of the job description--when one of America’s best business schools works to help China’s current leaders extricate themselves as gracefully as possible from the crippling legacy of Marxist-Leninist economic orthodoxy. They don’t know enough about America, either.

Over time, mutual ignorance will only poison the Sino-U.S. relationship. Commitments from America’s institutions of higher learning, as exemplified by these two fine California chools, could prove the best antidote America has.