The Remains of the Day (Part III)
(1)
I never expected that, after more than a year abroad, I would return to China on a business trip. After twelve tedious hours in the air, once the plane was docked and the seatbelt sign flickered off, I practically leapt out of my seat the instant I could—at last, the wanderer who had drifted for so long could once again lay eyes on the homeland that haunted his dreams.
No sooner had I stepped off the plane than I was wrapped in waves of heat, my clothes soaked with sweat within minutes, like a farmed chicken already oozing grease in the oven. I hadn’t imagined Beijing could have such an aggressive, sweltering summer—by comparison, summer in the South Bay is demure and well-mannered, quietly keeping to one side, so unobtrusive that unless you deliberately go out looking for her, you can hardly feel she’s there at all.
My wife asked me what had changed in Beijing, and I didn’t know how to answer. My friend’s car drove out past the airport expressway, along the North Fourth Ring Road, and the whole way it looked no different from two years ago. And yet there were more cars on the road, the traffic more congested, the drivers more short-tempered. It’s an insoluble fundamental contradiction—the contradiction between the people’s ever-growing demand for resources and the extreme scarcity of those resources. After returning to Beijing, I drove exactly once: from home to the airport to pick up my father, who had come to see me. The drive was so stifling, the parking so laborious, that I never wanted to drive myself again.
My freedom from driving was thanks to the boom in the ride-hailing market. Two years ago the ride-hailing wars were raging, with subsidies that left jaws on the floor; many friends who lived close to the office simply made ride-hailing their main commute. But back then the bookings were mostly traditional taxis—private cars remained in a regulatory gray zone and never flourished—so the market was all wolves and little meat, and during rush hour you’d often call for ages with no one responding. This time, private-car bookings had finally been legalized, and two years of market cultivation had split the business into many niches: carpooling, express rides, premium rides. So I could get a car almost anytime, anywhere. This saved tremendous energy and time: I didn’t have to drive myself, didn’t have to hunt for parking, and could even leap out of the car during the last few hundred meters of a traffic jam, clutching every last second in my own hands—the classic way of buying time with money. At 200 yuan a day (two long trips to and from work, plus a few short ones in between), averaging 25 workdays a month, for a mere 5,000 yuan a month you could have an on-call fleet that was both reservable and nearly always available, with models including the Audi A4, Camry, Accord, Peugeot 509, and so on. That cost looks enormous, but in today’s Beijing, parking alone in some districts runs one or two thousand a month; add on fuel, wear and tear, insurance, traffic fines, and so forth, and the difference is really just an extra two or three thousand. If for the individual market it’s still a hefty cost, then for the enterprise and government markets it’s an absolute bargain: because unless you reach some critical mass, the price of running your own fleet is simply too high—the difference being like building your own data center versus using AWS.
And perhaps ten years from now, when autonomous driving matures and becomes widespread, that cost will drop even further.
(2)
The ride-hailing wars ripened China’s O2O market. Take Beijing: from a roadside jianbing stand to a hotel, everything can be paid for by scanning a WeChat QR code. That convenience left me in disbelief. The day after arriving in Beijing, I was wandering near Wangjing SOHO when I stumbled on a barbershop called Xingkeduo Quick Cuts. With some time to spare before my next appointment, I went in for a haircut. Pay by scanning a WeChat code, get your place in line via WeChat notification—everything so natural, sparing me all the innocent time I would otherwise have squandered at the barbershop. I mused on WeChat Moments: China’s O2O development has surpassed America’s by a whole Japan. Friends rushed to correct me: No—by three Japans.
Yes, China’s O2O (indeed, mobile internet) sector has achieved a leapfrogging development that leaves its European and American counterparts red-faced with shame. This kind of leapfrogging in human society is worth pondering: very often, a society’s maturity can actually hinder its participation in disruptive innovation (see “The Disruptor’s Game”). America’s credit-card market is so mature that it prevented payment tools like PayPal from becoming a mainstream method of payment; while in China, the vast populations of non-first-tier cities and the elderly either don’t have credit cards or don’t like using them, so the mainstream of society harbored a deep-seated longing for a payment method more convenient than cash. And so, having both gone through a magnificent round of ride-hailing wars, America mostly just ripened the ride-hailing market itself, completing the survival-of-the-fittest; China, beyond that, saw an even more important and farther-reaching change—the nirvana of mobile payment. The migrant workers who couldn’t use credit cards, the elders who wouldn’t, all realized their longings on WeChat or Alipay.
Meanwhile, the credit-card mindset so poisoned American entrepreneurs that their products are built around it. I once bought a set of wooden carved cars from an old man in a small town near Napa, and the payment method was so clumsy: the old man plugged a card reader into his phone, swiped the credit card (several failed swipes before a different card finally worked), entered the amount, asked me to confirm, and at last completed the transaction. The same old man in China need only flash his pre-printed QR code, and I’d scan and pay—no extra device, no complicated process. The startup Coin, which was hot for a while, used an app and a single card to manage all your credit cards, so consumers could carry just their Coin card everywhere. WeChat Pay lets you walk out the door with only your phone and settle almost every purchase in daily life. Which is better, which is worse—it’s plain at a glance.
(3)
From childhood we were taught that the Chinese nation is a hardworking, brave, and kind people. In tech and internet circles, “hardworking” is almost the Chinese people’s biggest label. On this trip back, I met many, many friends, both those I knew and those I didn’t: some were struggling starters, some established industry leaders, some investors whom outsiders regard as lofty and grand, and some winners who had already achieved great success, had no worries about food or clothing, could have retired in glory, yet started a second company. Whatever the type, the ferocity with which they attacked the work at hand left me bowing in reverence. Qinchao and I once did a livestream about “flesh-body wall-climbing” (emigrating abroad), and by the time we finished it was nearly eleven at night, yet the offices of FreeS Fund were still brightly lit, several investors still working intently at their desks. I took part several times in discussions of major matters at friends’ companies; meetings were often scheduled for ten at night and ended deep in the night, yet the teams reveled in it. Once I chatted with a friend at LeEco in the US, who said his biggest headache was getting American employees to be more “wolf-like” and less concerned with work-life balance. Speaking of wolf-like, Huawei is the company that talks about it most; despite such sustained, high-speed growth, it still thinks of “winter” at every moment. China’s telecom industry was originally ten or twenty years behind the rest of the world, and its grasp of core technology was left who knows how many body-lengths behind. Huawei’s approach: you use one person, I deploy three; you work 40 hours a week, I demand 70 from my “strivers.” I admit I’m the clumsy bird who can’t match others’ skill, so if I pit my 200 hours a week (3 × 70) against your discounted 40, with more than 5:1 in time and intellect invested in bitter pursuit—how could I fail to catch up? The recent rumor that Cisco is laying off 20% globally is the result of exactly this competition. Go look at comparable American companies (I’ve never been to Cisco, but I’ve experienced Juniper firsthand): you’ll find that, apart from Chinese engineers, a typical engineer’s workday doesn’t exceed six hours. An extreme example: someone drifts in around eleven in the morning, reads USA Today in the pantry, then lunch, then a half-hour walk, wanders back, sits through some meetings, writes a bit of code, drifts off around four to pick up the kids, and can’t be found evenings or weekends. Tell me, how do you compete with that discounted 40 hours?
Startups in Silicon Valley are somewhat better, but they too lack wolfishness, and their product iteration is unbearably slow. Once, in a 1:1 review, I pointedly confronted a colleague about his problems, hoping he could make up for slow progress with more investment. But as an ABC, he had already been institutionalized by this pervasive American “slowness.” Among some startups I know, the most dependable members of the R&D team turn out to be the Chinese and Indians who haven’t yet been fully assimilated—that’s simply the atmosphere of the entire American tech scene. Perhaps founders in incubators walk on thin ice, as if on the edge of an abyss, and work like mad, but once they’ve raised money and hired their first batch of employees, the mad work gradually gives way to work-life balance.
Hard work and diligence may well be a major reason China’s tech and internet companies can leapfrog ahead, and perhaps an important reason why American internet giants like eBay, Amazon, and Uber, coming to the Chinese market, couldn’t defeat the “local snakes”—though they’d rather blame policy, government relations, and conspiracy theories. Even if Facebook and Twitter weren’t blocked by the Great Firewall, they’d still have a hard time beating WeChat and Weibo. Google, of course, is the exception—and that’s because Baidu, which claims to “understand Chinese better,” is just that bad.
(4)
During my first week back, I squeezed onto the subway every day. Years ago I could still spread open a book to read on the train, and even, when I had a pen, write and underline on its pages. Now reading a paper book on the subway has become a luxury. So while crammed into the subway I could only open my phone and read books I’d downloaded. Generally I treat these utterly boring yet long stretches of time as occasions for reading classical literature, earning credits in the school of how to conduct oneself. During that period I read mostly the Lüshi Chunqiu and the Records of the Grand Historian. Back to back I read these two passages:
In general, in judging a person: when he is successful, observe whom he treats with courtesy; when he is honored, observe whom he recommends; when he is rich, observe whom he supports; when he listens, observe how he acts; when at leisure, observe what he enjoys; when habituated, observe what he says; when in straits, observe what he refuses to accept; when lowly, observe what he refuses to do. Make him happy to test his integrity; make him joyful to test his tastes; anger him to test his discipline; frighten him to test his resolve; sadden him to test his character; afflict him to test his will. These eight observations and six tests are how a worthy ruler judges a person.
— Lüshi Chunqiu, “On Judging People”
Li Ke said: “It is because you, my lord, have not examined them. In daily life, observe whom he associates with; when rich, observe whom he gives to; when prominent, observe whom he promotes; when in straits, observe what he refuses to do; when poor, observe what he refuses to take. These five are enough to determine a man—why wait for me, Ke?”
— Records of the Grand Historian, “House of Wei, Chapter Fourteen”
My deep feeling for these two passages probably also stems from my own constant distillation of lessons learned in hiring and using people at Juniper, Tuke Circle, and adRise, so as to find a suitable approach for the future. Very often, two people of no great difference in technical ability end up diverging in their later development precisely over matters of character. For instance, “In daily life, observe whom he associates with”—as the saying goes, birds of a feather flock together; see who a person keeps company with and you basically know who he is. Another: “when he listens, observe how he acts”—no matter how well a person talks, it’s useless; see what he does. Basically all of this comes down to everyday observation, which is why I spoke of the importance of observation in that unfinished (and never-to-be-finished) “Dr. Qi’s Management Course.” If observation is passive investigation, then the “six tests” among the “eight observations and six tests” are active examination—digging a pit for the other to fall into. For example: “make him happy to test his integrity”—let a person ride high on success, and see whether he becomes smug and forgets himself. In fact, I haven’t done so well in this regard myself: in just three short weeks I did a great many pioneering things (which weren’t really hard—anyone else could have done them), and I got a bit puffed up; even my wife and father noticed and kept gently reminding me not to let success go to my head. Another: “afflict him to test his will”—let a person live hard, be tormented by pain and failure, and see whether his resolve holds firm. I particularly admire Fu Sheng and his team: in Kenu’s early days, they endured hardship holed up in Huilongguan, drawing almost no salary, toiling day and night for a year. By comparison, working at a “startup” like adRise could simply be called paradise. I often ask myself: if one day I returned to a life as hard as that at Tuke Circle, could I still bear it? I don’t know the answer. Perhaps the word “if” itself extinguishes all the longing for that answer—just as Master Yoda said: Do or do not, there’s no try.
(5)
In my three weeks in Beijing, the impact I felt was enormous. As Jake Sully says in his inner monologue in Avatar: Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world, and in here is the dream. At webRay and Haimawan I saw vigorous, fast-growing teams; I heard a friend at LeEco describe the grand blueprint of controlling terminals and entry points; I was stunned by Beijing entrepreneurs’ relentless 80+ hour workweeks; and I was captivated by the internet revolution in the streets and alleys that is so deeply reshaping society. If I were alone in the world, I’d want to charge straight back and take direct part in writing this far-reaching story.
And yet I harbor a certain fear of Beijing. To borrow from A Native of Beijing in New York: if you love someone, send him to Beijing, because it’s heaven; if you hate someone, send him to Beijing, because it’s hell. Beijing is heaven for the barefoot lone ranger, heaven for the wealthy and noble families; but it’s a nightmare for middle-class families with children (though Silicon Valley today is also a nightmare for the middle class). I have a family, and a second daughter soon to be born. That means I would live very hard in Beijing. I could be selfish—skip buying a school-district apartment, refrain from artificially intervening in their futures—but that would mean leaving them to grow up among the descendants of peddlers and porters (no pejorative intended; I live near Chengyuancheng, and they’re all small bosses richer than I am), which might actually be a good thing. Or, if I consider them, school-district apartments costing ten million a pop make my scalp tingle just to think about.
That’s the first point.
Another reason I fear Beijing is inflation. When I left in 2014, a Xishaoye roujiamo was 5 yuan; now it has climbed to 16. A bowl of beef noodles used to be about 8 yuan; now 20+ is commonplace. When a colleague and I went for a working lunch at Shaanwei Shizu, it wouldn’t come in under 30+ per person. When I had a decent dinner with a friend, it turned out to be over 100 a head.
Silicon Valley is another picture entirely. In 2006, when I first set foot there, I greedily bought all sorts of fruits at the Lucky supermarket that would count as premium back home: cherries around 1.99–2.99 / lb, red grapes mostly 1.69–1.99 / lb, California sweet oranges basically .99 / lb. Ten years on, at Sprouts you can still buy cherries at 1.88 / lb, at Costco you can get 5 pounds of grapes for 8 dollars, and oranges at fifty or sixty cents a pound are commonplace. A 40–50 dollar pair of Levis is still 40–50 dollars.
Ten years. Apart from housing, inflation in Silicon Valley is essentially zero. And in just two short years, the price rises I directly felt in Beijing more than doubled. To sustain the same standard of living year after year is just too hard.
(6)
The twelve-hour flight is nearly over, and this rambling piece is drawing to a close. Everything back home is gradually receding from me, and a new life is about to begin.
One life ends, another begins.
