The Fine Art of Reframing…

This week's report comes from the Micro Coffee Shop in Dongguan. Fortunately, the name refers neither to the size of the premises, rather generous, or to the size of the portions, again quite copious. For some strange reason, the more the economy creaks and groans towards the possibility of recession here, the more these coffee houses spring up. From the point of view of a nomadic flaneur in constant need of refreshment and a place to write, this is a very positive development. On the other hand, one wonders what is happening to the underlying economy here as the slowdown starts to bite deeper and deeper.

The coffee house itself is just one of a chain one sees in South China. Micro Coffee's shops seem clean, well managed and quite appealing. The seats are comfortable with a pleasant selection of coffees on offer. What more could a peripatetic flaneur wish for? Whilst enjoying the fayre on offer in such coffee houses, it is not unusual to enjoy a little conversation, or even some gentle banter, with the locals, or at least those that have a smattering of English.

One of the crucial factors one has to realise when discussing any issue with Chinese citizens living within the country is that their own sources of news are very restricted. There is some debate, online and even occasionally on television, but essentially the discussion is down to variations on the theme, rarely disagreement with the theme itself.

This, naturally, is very advantageous to the powers that be (a lovely phrase, that one!). They don't really need to win the debate or convince anyone as other governments around the world find themselves having to, they simply decide the policy and instruct the media to broadcast in, together with instructions as to how exactly it is to be framed.

Many years ago, seems like another lifetime now, I studied the somewhat dark arts of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) as developed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. I say 'dark arts' as one pretty soon realises that although such practices are often presented, and indeed used, in a therapeutic context, they can and are readily abused by such amoral or immoral folk as those involved in government or advertising, to name but two areas where these techniques have been roundly used to exploit, cheat and generally take advantage of the unwary.

(On this front, I think if I hear one more person assure me that advertising has”no effect on me” I think I will start to tear out my already very short hair. The last invulnerable soul who assured me of this being the case was the proud owner of a Hummer…)

The Chinese economy is in some trouble now. One hears of firms going bust on a regular basis and simply by looking around it is plain to see that many shops are no longer occupied, even in some of the primest of locations. The government here though, is still as popular as ever, which speaks volumes for their skills at the fine arts of presentation and reframing. In NLP terms, a reframe is used to realign or reshape one's thinking on a given issue or situation. It is a very powerful technique, perhaps more so because of its ubiquity; there is scarcely any situation that a skilful reframe cannot change one's perception of.

At the recent New Year's celebration it was very apparent that the amount of money spent by local government, usually so generous in such affairs, was relatively mean. The fireworks in particular were noticeable by their absence. This sad state of affairs was presented as the administration practising those fine traditional Chinese values of prudence and economic restraint. A classic reframe, but one that worked very well, some people even telling me how much they admired the government for returning to such sensible ways.

Basically, in China, if you can couch the reframe in terms of nationalism and especially in terms of traditional Chinese culture, you are halfway there already. Those in power, like those who remain in power around the globe, know exactly what buttons to press when needed and exactly how to structure a needed reframe to cast themselves in the best possible light.

Another classic tactic along these lines is to point out that although things may be bad here, they are a lot worse somewhere else. Far too many times now, when the subject of the poor air quality comes up, I hear people referring to the awful smogs of London. Now, while it is true that there were indeed awful smogs in London, these mostly came to an end in the 1960s with the Clean Air Act. To listen to many people hear one would think that the news reflects the current state of affairs in the UK's capital. In one recent dinner conversation, my fellow guests seemed genuinely surprised, even a little shocked, when I showed that day's figures from Dongguan and London via an app on my Windows phone. London's air quality figures were about one fifth of those in Dongguan (pm2.5s at around 35 compared to Dongguan's 180). Beijing, needless to say, would suffer even more by comparison.

Perhaps the bleakest and most cynical tactic of all in times of economic hardship is the call to patriotism. Nationalism here is already very strong and needs but little stoking to work people into something of a patriotic fervour. In this way, China is very different from more mature systems such as those found in Europe or America. Often in those cases there are enough worldly wise folk willing to point out such tactics that the politicians are often weary of employing them. Not so in China where if there is any opposition, it will scarcely dare to raise its voice (perhaps wisely) anyway.

Currently China is involved in territorial disputes with at least seven other states, any of which can and is used to stir up nationalistic feeling when required. Perhaps of these, the dispute in the South China Sea is the most likely to flare up into something very dangerous. In this particular instance, China finds itself in dispute with the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia. One worries that, given the current deteriorating economic situation, it could prove all too tempting to focus the population's attention away from the problems at home and into such dangerous waters.

Back in the coffee house some of my fellow imbibers are now enjoying a game of cards, whilst others watch basketball on a 42inch screen. The latter is very popular here, Dongguan in particular being known as the 'City of Basketball'. Personally, it has never been to my tastes, consisting as it does of a lot of very tall men running down one end of a court to put a ball into a net, then running up the other end and doing the same thing there. The highlight seems to be when they occasionally bump into each other but, as highlights go, its not particularly riveting.

All seems normal, perhaps even prosperous at this level. Beneath the surface though, it is not hard to detect the stark reality of an economy and a people who are  beginning to scent the unpleasant odour of recession. As ever in China, the stage managing is very impressive, but also as ever, economic reality will, in the end, prove very difficult to conceal forever.

Wage Slavery...

This week's flaneurial thoughts come from the relatively recently found dada (not capitalized) café in the town of Epping, which lays claim to have the highest High Road in the whole of Essex ( a dizzying 332 feet above sea level). The café is small but perfectly formed. Apart from a very exotic, if somewhat expensive, range of teas and some very strong coffee, they also serve a range of snacks and quiches, employing what seem to be former roof tiles instead of plates. If nothing else, it lends new meaning to the phrase 'put mine on the slate...'.
Reading the café’s copy of “The Times” I discover that the UK is apparently now a land of opportunity for the over 65s. Gone are the days when such folk found themselves 'forced' into retirement. Now more and more of them are 'benefiting' from the 'flexibility' of zero hours contracts. Most of these people are also employed at minimum wage level apparently, another wonderful plus for the UK economy.
In the world of spin, even the ugliest of facts can be made to sound pleasant. The reality, it seems, is that elderly people find themselves increasingly having to work whether they wish to or not. The already meagre allowances are being steadily chipped away by the powers that be whilst the state in the UK is increasingly unwilling to help even the most desperate of folk (unless, of course, the folk in question are the likes of Russian millionaires, Chinese property speculators or hugely wealthy non-doms who seem to somehow manage to maintain that status despite the fact that they have lived in the UK for up to 30 years).
It seems that it is not enough to have a society based on the wage slavery, but if at all possible, the desire from the upper echelons of government seems to be that the slavery continues until the moment the slave in question shuffles off their mortal coil.
The Chancellor, George Gideon Oliver Osborne, formerly known as the 'Oik of St. Paul's' and yet another member of the Bullingdon Club, has developed a fondness in recent times for preaching about the 'dignity of work'. Sometimes the dignity in question seems harder to witness in practice than to espouse in theory, the reality often involving, as it does, employees being forced to work long hours at the beck and call of fickle employers who currently enjoy the benefits of some very 'flexible' labour practices. These entail such things as the aforementioned zero hours contracts, compulsory and often unpaid overtime and a steady eroding away of even the most basic of decent working conditions. Mr. Osborne, it should perhaps be noted, has never had what used to be quaintly termed as a 'proper' job himself...

The American essayist, and very profound thinker, Henry David Thoreau pointed out the nature of the trap that we are all lured into. In his book 'Walden' he devotes the whole of the first chapter to 'Economy'. In it he shows how we are tempted and seduced by the desire to have so many 'things' we do not need and how being enslaved in such a way keeps us having to work long hours at jobs we often hate in order to acquire them. We are enticed, through the skilful machinations of the advertising industry, into greed, into the absurd belief that if we can only acquire enough things that this is somehow, almost magically, going to make us happy.

Thoreau demonstrates with incisive insight that excess possessions not only require excess labour in order to purchase them, but also often end up simply being a burden, something we need to concern ourselves with because they need cleaning, maintaining or even simply storing. People believe they need these things and this 'need' then forces them into devoting much of their waking time to working long hours in order to have these often completely useless items in their lives.

Advertising feeds into this 'need'. It persuades people that they are measured, or somehow validated, by their ownership of objects. It has them chasing after the acquisition of endless 'stuff'. On visiting people's homes, I am often struck by just how much 'stuff' they own. Things that are never used, that seemed a good idea at the time, that now lay neglected and unused in the 'spare' room or garage, or simply cluttering up every available space in the property. This seems to be the case as much with those of limited pecuniary means as for those fortunate enough to find themselves in better financial straits.
Happy, fruitful and fulfilled lives are not achieved by the endless acquisition of stuff, but by doing things that have meaning and value to the individual concerned. Whether that be through family, through relationship, through service, through the expression of talents and the doing of things that one loves, or simply by following the kind of life one wants to live.
Of course it is often necessary to have sources of income and the means to achieve these things, but often far, far less is needed than would be supposed to be the case.
Standing in the way of people's abilities to lead free and expressive lives is often the phenomenon of debt. The system is almost set up in such a way as to ensure that debt is taken on from a very early age (indeed, in the case of students, even before they are working) and piled on from that stage onwards through the acquisition of cars, houses, appliances, etc., so that most people, for the vast majority of their adult lives, are never out of debt.

It seems that very soon the average UK household debt level will top £10,000. This figure, quite amazingly, doesn't include mortgage debt. In excess of a quarter of all British adults of working age spend more than 40% of their income simply to service their debts. They are having to run faster and faster just to stay still.

Back in the Dada café, the lunchtime crowd have come and gone and the staff are busily washing the tiles, attempting to make a clean slate of things perhaps... My final thoughts are of Henry David Thoreau and his notion, when writing about economy, that the most precious thing we possess in life is time. For him, the idea of spending the days, weeks, months and years of our lives doing tasks we hate to obtain things we don't need seemed like an absurdity.
I, for one, would not disagree.

Same same, but different....

Tis the very first day of January in 2015 and I find myself comfortably ensconced in yet another Chinese imitation of a very (in)famous, tax-evading (oops, I meant tax avoiding, of course!), American coffee chain. These seem to be two a penny here and are very fashionable at the moment in China. This one is called 85 Top Coffee for some strange reason and has a logo that would probably breach various copyright laws in most countries around the world. Not in China though.

          All is not as it seems here and one often finds oneself doing a double-take as one realises that what one thought was, say, a Rolls Royce or a Mini, is actually not. If one were so inclined, one could happily spend twenty minutes or so trying to spot the differences between the Chinese version and the European original, in similar fashion to that ubiquitous game that one finds printed in the newspapers of the world. The list, at the end of the twenty minutes, even with the most careful of perusals, would not be very long...

         

Oddly, those highly respected protectors of company's and people's rights, the Chinese Courts, rarely find in favour of the plaintiff when a European company has the audacity to complain. One can only admire their obviously much keener eye and the way it is able to perceive clear differences that are far beyond the abilities of lay observers, such as myself, to perceive.

          In the case of the American company, owners of the famous green, circular logo, it is perhaps a little difficult to feel too much sympathy though. It seems from recent evidence that they do tend towards a certain flexibility in the interpretation of the law themselves. Their beans, for example, tend to be sourced from that well known home of coffee, Switzerland (must be the climate...). Strangely, last time I was privileged to visit the home of cuckoo clocks and highly creative bankers , I didn't particularly notice the presence of large coffee plantations. Oh well, I guess their economy must have moved on in the meantime and branched out into the coffee trade...

          For all that, I must say that these particular surroundings are rather conducive to quite cogitation and writing and are therefore much to my liking. The music in the background, easy listening jazz, makes an altogether welcome change from the seemingly endless loop of Christmas songs that I have been subjected to for the last few weeks. The seating is modern and comfortable, the décor dark, the odd mature house plant growing against brown walls. All-in-all, it has the feel of some of the more exclusive coffee houses of Thailand or Indonesia.

          85 Top Coffee itself is to be found near the main entrance to a large shopping complex that has been given the modestly unassuming name of 'Star City' in Chang An. The ground floor is smart, modern and home to various jewellers and mobile phone outlets. The first is occupied, at least mostly, by clothing outlets. The second floor is...largely empty and unoccupied. The fourth the same, except for a slightly run down gym that is currently offering outrageous discounts to get increasingly reluctant customers in through the doors.

          This particular mall isn't alone in this. Often the presentation is of a thriving economy but the reality is a little different. The first faint whiff of recession is in the air, although carefully hidden away, particularly from Western eyes. Even on the apparently bustling high streets one sees, every now and again, vacant shops with dusty and naked mannequins strewn across the floor, amidst the discarded hangers and the piles of leaflets posted through the door, the premises having clearly been empty for quite some time.

          When I was here last year, I was told that it would be a great idea to invest in Chinese property. The old adage: “You can't go wrong investing in bricks and mortar” was heard incessantly amongst the group of people I staying with. I wondered to myself at the time how often I had heard this particular refrain. It brought back memories of the property boom in Ireland in the early part of this century, people queueing around the block just to get their names down and the chance of buying a property before the price rose yet again. How different it looked a year later, the cranes motionless, building sites abandoned mid-build, flats that could scarcely be given away. With these memories in mind, I decided to resist the temptation to invest.

          This year in China, prices are down. It is not the same across the board, some areas doing notably better than others but... dark rumours abound of the inability of property developers to pay back enormous loans, often secured on the shadow banking sector, and of town halls in debt up to their eyeballs having financed local government projects via less than conventional means and shady deals with builders. Up to the time of writing, there have only been one or two collapses (I mean this in the financial sense – though if one sees the quality of some of the building it is a small wonder that it doesn't happen more often in the physical!). One has the feeling of a pack of cards that has grown far, far too high and is teetering of the very edge of disaster.

          Still, one of the advantages of the Chinese system is that the powers-that-be can manage news, and financial intervention, in such a way as to avoid, for a time at least, much of the panic that ensues in the West when it becomes obvious that the market is about to collapse. There have been bail-outs and pay-offs but the news scarcely reaches the headlines. There are rumours of whole cities, built at enormous cost, with scarcely any occupants (the so called 'ghost towns') and developers subsequently caught up in mountains of unpayable debt.

          If one were to believe the figures, the Chinese economy is still doing very well and growing at rates that we can only dream of in the West. For 2014 the figure is likely to be reported as just over 7% but... these figures are more likely to mislead rather than to inform. As Leonard H. Courtney said (often mis-accredited to Benjamin Disraeli), 'there are lies, damn lies and statistics'. The management of data and the form it is released in is a dark art that has reached new heights in the People's Republic of China.

          Over the years, one cannot help but notice that people who wish to invest in stock markets, housing, or whatever have a strange ability to manage their own perceptions. They tend to see only that which they wish to see. An ability to tell themselves that somehow this market is different to all previous markets, that this is not a bubble but a new paradigm, that the old rules don't apply any more and this market will go on growing forever. Of course, it never does. The same old rules do apply and when a market grows much faster than the ability of the purchasers to keep up it will, inevitably, decline. If it is a bubble, it will, inevitably, burst. Strange how this always seems to come as a surprise to many despite it being re-iterated time and again in the past.

          Back in the café, life goes on as pleasantly as ever. These last few decades have been good times for China and the standard of living here has increased to an extent that parallels, in many cases, that of America and parts of Europe. People gamble (technically illegal in China – but no one ever seems that bothered), smoke (technically illegal – but no one seems that bothered),chat and pass the time of day with a goodly degree of bonhomie. It is an entirely comfortable and reassuring scene. I have my fears and forebodings but for now I simply wish, for their sake, long may it continue.