Twenty-two Rules for Zhejiang Businessmen

Twenty-two Rules for Zhejiang Businessmen
The following document was reportedly found on the wall of a Zhejiang businessman’s office, and has since been circulated widely among Chinese bloggers.
Chinese link: http://jiaren.org/2009/11/30/zhejiang-businessman-22-rules/ 

Twenty-two Rules for Businessman from Zhejiang Province
1. Persist in watching CCTV-1 News.
2. Don’t readily trust an agreement or a contract.
3. You yourself must keep your word, as a promise is worth a thousand ounces of gold. But this doesn’t apply to those who always break their word.
4. Don’t conduct business where you can afford the win yet can’t afford the loss.
5. Don’t input too much in advance, and save enough strength for yourself.
6. There’s nothing in the world that you can’t do, yet businessman can achieve something while refusing to do something else.
7. Be careful when choosing a partner.
8. Don’t have family members in your team.
9. Don’t sleep with a woman who has a conflict of interest with you.
10. Don’t tell the details of your business to your woman.
11. You can bribe but don’t be a tainted witness at court
12. Don’t commit tax evasion or tax fraud, but learn how to do legal tax avoidance.
13. You can make use of journalists but don’t trust them.
14. Don’t be ostentatious, unless you’re a real Mr. Big.
15. Stand in the middle, and don’t engage in any political faction battles.
16. Don’t care much about the gain and loss of money and interests.
17. Don’t show off your money.
18. The right to speak lays with the capital. But you shouldn’t let others know easily how much right to speak you hold.
19. Learn from other people’s success and failure, gain and loss, yet you can ignore the cases outside China.
20. Don’t employ the rules of the gang to solve business conflicts.
21. Don’t take care of every single thing personally under the precondition of controlling the overall situation.
22. Leave yourself a route to retreat, in case you are deserted or betrayed by friends and allies.

 This is a really fascinating find that has been, as of late, circulating wildly in the Chinese blogosphere for particularly obvious reasons. For one thing, it sums up in 22 points pretty much what the mentality is towards money is in China, how it relates to power, and what dangers come with having it. We can see from this list the degree to which China's economic model could be described as Social Darwinist and Leninist; there is a sense of survival of the fittest combined with a Leninist model of purging those who are unpopular or unfit for the regime.

Suffice to say, both of those traits are well encoded into this list. We can see that bribery is not a problem, only being caught is. We can also see that, in the last point, there is an overwhelming sense of paranoia that you are in this alone and that the only person you can fundamentally trust in the end is your own self. This is particularly worrisome, because when combined with #2 (that you should never trust a contract) the Chinese are indicating that they do not have a remarkable amount of faith in the western concepts of legal obligation.

As far as this list goes, it seems quite clear that China is a society very different from the world it is interacting with (particularly since #19 says that this is true, and that any cases outside of China do not apply inside China). What we are looking at here is both a list into the Chinese economic psyche, but as a consequence also the political psyche. If an economic environment cannot have faith on an impartial judicial system and legislative system to both mediate conflicts and design regulations that are enforced, this style of thinking is likely to persist.

Yet the problem with a legal society...is that those with power have to also submit themselves to the law. Will this happen in China in the next decade? I would say it is doubtful...