Friday, December 9, 2011

A New Expereince in China

Over the last 16 years, I have been to China many, many times.  I have seen China before highways and western hotels and when the only English tourist-vendors knew was a high, screeching "Cheaper, Cheaper."  China is now a modern, dynamic country now that has no resemblance to the old days of of closed boarders and intrusive police, so when I have a new experience in China, it tends to be a little jolting.

For the last week I have been shuttling between Hong Kong and Shenzhen China.  I spent 3 nights in Hong Kong, 1 night in China and then returned yesterday to Hong Kong for the final day of work.  It is not as cool as it sounds as I spend most of my time facilitating meetings around riveting subjects such as Vendor Accountability and Goals & Objectives. 

Typically, when we are transferring from Hong Kong to Shenzhen or back again, we hire a car service to ferry us the distance.  It is not far, about an hour, but you need two licence plates to do it legally - one for Hong Kong and one for China.  These plates are expensive and hard to get, so car services that have them are in demand. 

On this particular trip, we were en route back to Hong Kong when our vehicle, which consisted of the driver, a Indian living in Hong Kong and an Indonesian, were stopped in the middle of the road by the police. In a split second, the driver we pulled out of the car and a plain-clothes policeman jumped in the driver's seat and roared off with us sitting shocked in the back.  About 100 yards down the road, we pulled off the road and the policeman began to interrogate us ... in Mandarin Chinese.  This was a problem due to the aforementioned make up of the group - none of us were Chinese! 

Between all our broken and spotty knowledge of Chinese, we were able to piece together that the line of questioning was about the payment for the vehicle.  The policeman was very interested to know if we were paying for the car ourselves.   Since it was a hired vehicle through the company, we were, in fact, not paying directly for it and answered accordingly.  There were some follow up questions that exceeded our language ability and so, after 30 minutes, he either got what he needed or realized he was never going to get it and returned our driver.

What had actually happened, as we pieced together later, was that the Chinese Government was cracking down on privately registered Hong Kong cars being used as commercial vehicles.  Our answer of "no we are not paying, the company pays," must have been interpreted as "no, this was a company owned car" and therefore met the requirement.  In fact, as we found out later, it was in clear violation of Chinese law and if we had fully answered the question, the results may have been different. 

The life lesson I draw from this is that apparently clear and concise communication is not always the recipe for success.  Sometimes leaving a bit of ambiguity is the difference between a night in the Peninsula Hotel and a Chinese prison.