Southern Perspective Shenzhen

Interesting commentary by Stan Abrams over at China Hearsay about Huang Songyou, the former Vice President of the Supreme People’s Court.

Stan’s question is does admission of corruption at this high of a position give you more or less confidence in the Chinese Supreme Court?

All of us that eat, sleep and breath China know how important appearance or the mysterious “face” culture is here.

To me, seeing someone at that high of a governmental position removed from his post for corruption is a step in the right direction, as it is always difficult for people to admit that there are problems.

As David Dayton at Silk Road International  points out in his latest blog post, the western mindset is different from the Chinese.

3. Identify a common enemy. Once the cat is out of the bag and there is admission that there really is a problem (often a huge first step) then you have to find out both where the problem came from and then how to fix it.  My experience is that while I’m interested in getting problems fixed (solutions to meet deadlines) the factory is more often concerned with finding someone to blame—usually a sub-supplier.  It’s always the sub-suppliers fault. While it may seem antithetical to what you’ve been taught in business school, sometimes letting the factory place blame on someone is not always a bad thing.  Regardless of what (or when) the outcome is, someone will pay for the mistake and so getting the blame game over with as soon as possible is often the best way to move on to what the resolution options are.  While I never like seeing one person get nailed to the wall (as it’s never comfortable and almost never only one person’s fault) if you can’t avoid it, minimize it by moving on to the solution as quickly as possible.

Blame must be placed on a few shoulders as possible and once blame has been placed on a scape goat, it is time to move forward with the business at hand.

While I find it encouraging that the mistake was admitted (although not much else as it looks like Mr. Huang Songyou will walk away with just a slap on the wrist), is this an indication that the Chinese legal system is tightening on corruption or that it is more wide spread that was first believed?

In the famous words of Davey Crockett “Remember Rio Tinto!”, or something like that.