Two weeks before boarding my first flight to Asia, a friend of my mother's wished me well, letting me know she was jealous.

“You're so lucky,” she told me. “Wish I was going.”

She had never been to the Far East but was enamored by its ideas and traditions, especially medicine.

“Just think about it,” she said. “They've been practicing medicine for thousands of years. They know all kinds of things we don't.”

It was an unintended send‐off as I found her words echoing back to me two weeks later in Taipei. I had been invited to join a group of office workers on a day trip their company had planned, and on the return—at the drop‐off point—I managed to get my hand smashed in the door of their van.

“Duibuqi!” cried the woman who injured me.

I was frozen in pain. A colleague offered that she had something. “Chinese medicine,” she said enthusiastically, before bolting.

A glass jar was presented, upon which were some handwritten Chinese characters. The lid was removed, revealing a dark, viscous liniment. And as it was applied to my hand, I held out hope.

Three women stood around me now, concentrating fully on my paw and taking turns offering commentary.

“That's better,” one assured.

“Much better,” another confirmed.

While everyone stood around waiting for something to happen, my hand continued to throb and a strange thought entered my head: Was this Chinese traditional medicine? Was this how these people thought the human body worked? Broken bones healed in a jiffy with a magic salve?

I was in my twenties then and somewhat embarrassed to have such rude thoughts. But the scene struck me as comical, and I had to suppress the urge to laugh. Thanking everyone for an otherwise lovely afternoon, I lied and told them I was feeling better. I then made my way to an area hospital, where I received a set of X‐rays for the hand, which luckily had not suffered any fractures.

It was a strange beginning to a career in Asia, and perhaps an unproductive one. Westerners in it for the long haul were supposed to arrive mesmerized—enchanted at least—and that condition was meant to carry them through the several years it took to pick up the language. The bloom would come off the rose eventually, but it was meant to do so only after a fair amount of time had passed.

The effect of having my bubble burst almost upon arrival put me in an odd disposition: Chinoiserie and other Orientalia now struck me as daffy. I had little interest in studying anything Chinese in the traditional sense, and along with that ennui went any intention of taking my time in this part of the world seriously.

Thankfully I was young—this was twenty‐five years ago—and I didn't need much of an excuse to stick around. A reliable old motorcycle, a rooftop apartment in the mountains outside of the city, an assortment of colorful characters for friends, and the odd job would suffice. I spent no time on language training and managed to pick up a fair amount of Mandarin in spite of myself. Wrapping up three years in Taiwan, I returned to the United States and entered a graduate school program that began by sending me to Beijing for the summer.

And that was how I wound up in my first proper Chinese language course with a woman named Miss Zhang.

In our first one‐on‐one session, Miss Zhang tossed me what she must have thought was a softball question: “Why are you still in China?” She was taking the American government's dubious view (it was Beijing's as well) that the years I lived in Taiwan should be clocked as time spent in the People's Republic of China, and she asked because few nonnatives ever returned after a stint. Although foreigners were arriving in significant numbers, when they finally went home, they rarely boomeranged back.

Why had I returned?

In making my way to graduate school—it was a business program with an international component—I had to explain in an application why I had wanted to study such things as discounted cash flow and conjoint analysis. On this other motivation, I was drawing somewhat of a blank.

On the surface, Miss Zhang appeared a serious woman. She considered me for the briefest moment and then broke the silence between us by saying, “You know what you should tell people when they ask you that question?” Then she giggled. “You should tell them, ‘Wo shangle zeichuan.’ I'm on the pirate ship.”

It was a twist on an old idiom, one that suggested it is easier to jump on a tiger's back than to dismount. I got the reference but wondered: Was the ship meant to be China? Who were the pirates? In the back of my mind, a light bulb went off, one that would take me years to identify. Only later would I conclude that Miss Zhang had picked up on something—that I was lost—and what she ultimately offered me was not a conversation starter but a hint of where I ought to be looking for inspiration.

Not long after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, I moved to Guangzhou, a sprawling metropolis located two hours north of Hong Kong, and from there I began a career representing American companies that had manufacturing interests in the region. The work put me in contact with Chinese factory bosses who were indeed pirate‐like in their approach to commerce. And I appreciated that they shared a similar brand of humor to Miss Zhang's.

In the middle of the boom in export manufacturing, I found myself riding a train in Guangdong, seated facing two questionable‐looking characters who were dressed head‐to‐toe in black. My reputation as a fixer was established by this time, and they easily appeared to be the sort who traded merchandise for a living.

Almost as soon as we pulled out of the station, the man seated by the window began eyeballing me, so I thought I would break the ice.

“Nimen cong nali laide?” I asked him.

“You wouldn't know the place,” he said.

“I've been around. Try me.”

“It's a small city,” he demurred.

“Ni shuo ba,” I insisted. “Where are you from?”

“Chaozhou,” he said, finally. “We are from Chaozhou.”

I had worked in Chaozhou, with a factory there that made majolica‐style pottery. It was an out‐of‐the‐way place, and though I had never experienced trouble there myself, I was familiar with its nasty reputation. Putting on an air of familiarity, I told him that I knew his fair city well—because I had once been swindled there.

“Wo zai nimen Chaozhou bei pianle,” I said, deadpan.

He caught the joke and laughed. That a foreigner would be cheated in his roughneck city was a given. That the laowai—outsider—should take such abuse as the normal course of events made it hilarious.

His partner, who wore a cap, was considerably less amused.

“Cheated in Chaozhou?” he said, sounding incredulous. “That is impossible. The people of my city would never cheat a fine foreigner such as yourself. Whatever the circumstances of your dealings, surely there must have been some misunderstanding.”

His partner, the fellow by the window, was no longer smiling. I couldn't quite catch the relationship between the two but knew at least which one could be trusted. China was a rough‐and‐tumble world all right, and there were those who were frank about the place and those who put on airs and graces. You appreciated the ones who gave it to you straight, because you knew that you could work with them. The other sort was nothing but trouble. Imagine standing under an awning in the middle of a downpour, commenting on the weather, only to have some stranger next to you respond: “Rain? What rain?”

China brought many meaningful lessons, but only in great retrospect. It takes time for the subconscious to process the unfamiliar. Patterns form only slowly, and then you have to wait as certain realizations bubble to the surface and become points of awareness. Along the way to enlightenment, it is also necessary to let go of preconceived cultural notions, which often impede understanding.

A few years ago, wandering around Hong Kong, I had the idea to buy a new pair of shoes. This was in Tsim Sha Tsui, in the days before they ripped down the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Nathan Road, replacing it with the popular commercial center iSquare. There used to be a small shop just behind the hotel right off Peking Road, and in the storefront window I spotted a sign saying that it was an official reseller of a popular American walking shoe. It sounded like the perfect replacement, and after trying on a pair and immediately paying for them, I asked the shopkeeper to throw away my old shoes, explaining that I would just walk out with the new ones.

I almost immediately regretted the move. Within an hour, my feet were feeling pinched, and by the time I got back to my apartment in Guangzhou I was in agony. This confused me, because the shoe brand had such a strong reputation, and I wondered if the shoes were not somehow counterfeit. Just over the border from Hong Kong was Guangdong province, where the vast majority of the world's shoes were being produced. It made bootlegging easy, but this was an internationally known brand that I had purchased and the vendor had been officially licensed. It seemed unlikely that the shop would sell a bootlegged product, yet I had the feeling I had purchased shoes that were illegitimate.

An acquaintance in Guangzhou who was in the shoe game lived not far from me, and as I had not seen him in a while, I offered to drop by his office and say hello.

Taking up one of the shoes, he removed the insole and showed me evidence of a bad glue job. He then pointed out poor stitching and some odd stamp marks. It was not the work of a big‐brand company.

“These are fake, for sure,” he said.

“But the shop is an official reseller,” I said. “How can they get away with selling knockoffs?”

The next few words out of his mouth would shift my perspective on the Chinese economy in a dramatic way.

“They probably sell both.”

“Both?” I asked, not quite wanting to understand.

“Well, to keep their license, they sell some real shoes. Then, on the side, they sell a few fakes.”

The scales fell from my eyes. Not only did I understand what he meant by such a hybrid business model, but I immediately also recognized that I had been seeing it for years—and that I had even run into a version of it during my first attempt at product sourcing.

After graduating from business school, I took what I called my Four H's Trip—a train journey that took me through Hunan, Hubei, Henan, and Hebei provinces—a bisection of the country from south to north. My final destination was Beijing, and a friend in the States who knew I would be there asked if I would help him purchase a volume of costume jewelry in the wholesale market there.

I didn't know much about trinkets, but a contact in Beijing offered to make a formal introduction to a woman named Bei Bei, who operated a store within the Hongqiao Pearl Market. “Do not stop at any of those other shops,” I was warned, because Bei Bei was the only plain dealer in the multistoried bazaar.

Seated at a table in Bei Bei's showroom, I went over samples with an assistant, taking photos and making a note of the prices, which seemed more than fair. The work went fast, and after two hours, I excused myself to take a break. On the way to the front door, I passed by an older European man who was also evaluating merchandise.

“How much for that one?” I asked, pointing to a piece he had been inspecting that was identical to an item I had been shown. I had no actual interest in comparing prices and was just making small talk, but the man peered up at me over a pair of bifocals and, smiling, he mentioned the figure he was about to pay. It was three times what I was quoted and, save for some unseen difference in quality, the variance in pricing seemed…unusual.

When I got back to the shop, I said nothing to the gentleman and walked straight to the room Bei Bei occupied in the back.

She had a small window that looked out onto the showroom. “What's going on out there?” I asked, gesturing with a thumb toward the old man.

“You needn't worry about him,” she said, confirming my suspicion that a fleecing was in progress.

This made no sense to me, at least not at the time. How could I be treated fairly while another customer was being taken advantage of in the very same shop? Many of us have a preconceived notion that there are only two kinds of service providers: the good and the bad. You have the reputable mechanic and the dishonest one, the fair attorney and the predatory one.

Chinese business operators instinctively understand how a hybrid model achieves the highest level of economic returns. Businesses that offer a fair deal to everyone leave too much money on the table, but those that cheat indiscriminately risk entirely losing their reputation. The key is to provide a fair deal to those customers who provide a key benefit, such as large volume or a link to a reputation network, while squeezing mercilessly those who do not bring such advantages. Chinese business owners split their customer base in much the way a farmer separates his milking cows from those bound for the slaughterhouse.

Mainland Chinese are sometimes described as morally agnostic, which is a way of saying that they choose to do “whatever” in a given business situation. But this is not what usually takes place. Chinese business operators who seek a hybrid business model look to lift profitability to a theoretical maximum. As though on a search for the Holy Grail, they pursue every possible strategy that has a hope of increasing profits. Business operators will use methods that appear haphazard, nonsensical, or even unscrupulous in their constant search for that economically optimal point.

Once you recognize this sort of thing is taking place, all kinds of previously unfathomable business models used in China suddenly make better sense. I once booked a room in a fashionable‐looking hotel, but stepping inside I was surprised to find something from the Mao era: carpeting pockmarked with cigarette burns, wallpaper peeling at the corners, and, between two rock‐hard twin beds, an antiquated‐looking console with knobs and switches that no longer worked.

A manager eventually explained that there were two types of rooms on offer and that the refurbished rooms were located only on the seventh floor and above. I had seen an advertisement for the nicer type of room but had not taken care to book the one shown. This was not a bait‐and‐switch strategy but rather an odd hybrid with a four‐star hotel situated above one of the same name that rated only two stars. In the United States, we would call this a branding nightmare, but Chinese are not bothered by the scheme. Quite the opposite—they welcome the flexibility. Taking a cheaper room, they might allow their friends to think incorrectly that they were staying at a luxury property.

Chinese economic behavior fascinates me in a way that traditional culture never could. Before they ripped down the Xiangyang Market in Shanghai, I enjoyed going there on occasion to bargain for merchandise that was obviously counterfeit. North Face knockoffs were especially popular, and walking past a vendor, you might be told that a jacket was being offered for 300 yuan. If you picked up the item and put it back on the rack, the price would immediately drop, and you soon learned there was a natural floor at 150 yuan—or one‐half of the original asking price.

It was supposed to be an open secret among tourists, but after visiting the market for years, an old China hand revealed to me that most merchandise could actually be had for only one‐third of the originally quoted price. “One‐half is for the tourists,” he explained.

How utterly efficient, I thought, that these vendors would have worked out such an informal system of price discrimination that placed all buyers into one of three buckets: the foolish naïf, the ambitious tourist, and the savvy local. It was certainly a good deal more efficient than the Arab souk, where sellers start by asking for an astronomically high price and buyers open with an equally ridiculous bid, with the two working out the difference slowly over several cups of tea and perhaps a game of backgammon.

The oddest thing about the market benchmark is that it has been in use for ages. In Understand the Chinese, published in 1934, William Martin wrote about these market vendors: “He asks for twenty dollars; you offer a third of it, as a rule.”

__________

A few years ago, interested in finding a new freight forwarder, I acted on a tip from a trader I knew in Guangzhou. “Call these guys,” he said, handing me a business card. “They are the cheapest.”

Ringing the company the following morning, I spoke with the receptionist, who asked me first where the goods would be shipping to. When I told her the United States, she gave me a different number to phone. At the other number, I was given a quote that was laughably high and threw the business card in the trash. I didn't even think about the exchange until I ran into the acquaintance who made the original link.

He asked me how it had gone, so I told him.

“Your freight forwarder is crap,” I said.

“What are you talking about? They're the best.”

Relaying my experience in detail, I explained that I had rung the company and was told to call their other office.

“That's strange,” he said. “The freight forwarder is owned by my friend. He doesn't have any second office.”

The receptionist, it turned out, fancied herself an entrepreneur, and while collecting a steady paycheck from her employer, she sent occasional leads to an outside company in exchange for a commission. This was another sort of hybrid model common to China, a combination of working faithfully for one company while quietly leveraging that position in order to earn a margin for oneself in an outside venture.

Chinese philosophy speaks of the doctrine of the mean, a principle that emphasizes midpoint solutions. When two people are arguing a case, for example, neither is judged as wholly right or wrong; truth is meant to lie somewhere in between. In a similar way, there is a tendency to recognize that absolute loyalty to a company (or a person) is not ideal, because utter fidelity is rarely a utility‐maximizing proposition.

An American private equity company that I have worked with bought a sporting goods manufacturer based in China. The seller of the business, an enterprising Shanghainese, received forty million dollars in cash and, as part of the deal, he remained CEO on an annual salary of one million dollars. On top of that, he had an opportunity to earn bonuses and he retained a twenty‐five percent equity stake in the business. But despite every incentive to play it straight, he quietly set up a separate, competing trading company and started redirecting new orders there. This was naturally in contravention of a noncompete agreement in place, so his business partners sued him.

The Americans involved presumed that it was the goal of the enterprising CEO to trash his original company entirely—to put it under while wholly supporting the new competing entity he had created. But that was not his plan at all, because such a move would not have been economically optimal. The separate business was nothing more than a backup, an auxiliary channel for reducing personal risk while increasing personal income by some small additional amount. Chinese operators enjoy hybrid models because they fit in with their mindset, which views incrementalism as a core strategy. The goal is always to establish a new foundation, and then from this starting position nibble one's way toward greater levels of advantage.

A few years ago, I wrote a book called Poorly Made in China, in which I attempted to explain the destructive practices I had witnessed in manufacturing. Factories were discreetly degrading the quality of their products by manipulating raw inputs. It was more than corner‐cutting, because the fooled party—the foreign buyer—commonly gave explicit instructions on what was supposed to be produced. Manufacturers were sly about this quality fade and went as far as tricking third‐party testing agencies into assuring their products were top‐notch.

Manipulation took place in secret, and if the factory's moves went undetected, the degradation would usually worsen over time. You could get a producer to return to a better quality standard, but first you had to uncover the scheme, and then you had to browbeat the operator into doing the right thing.

It was gamesmanship, and it was annoying. It seemed prevalent, yet no one was talking about it. My work took me to different manufacturing sectors, and because I saw the same pattern in various corners of the economy, it struck me that this could be some kind of national characteristic. I even had the temerity to think that I might be the first to write publicly about the phenomenon. I read a lot but had never run across any description of China in this light. As it turned out, I just wasn't looking far back enough.

In 1855, French Catholic priest Abbé Huc published a two‐volume account entitled A Journey Through the Chinese Empire in which he described his intrepid adventures through the interior provinces. Assigned a lower‐level official to meet their needs and ensure their safety, Huc's travel party paid a considerable sum to a mandarin to ensure that the expedition would be a smooth one. Only after covering some ground did they realize that they were increasingly being taken advantage of.

At first, they were put up in palaces and “treated in all things like mandarins of the first degree.” But as the trip wore on, the money that the missionaries provided was applied to fewer comforts. Lodgings became increasingly poor until they found that they could not bear to spend the night in them.

In those days, there were no roads, and the best routes were little more than stony footpaths. The sedan chair was the way to go, and while it might seem like a burden to the men who made a living carrying these chairs, the weight of one rider when distributed among four sturdy laborers was not all that much. Huc wrote that though they had paid for new sedan chairs of the sort used by officials, they were in fact given old, narrow chairs that were uncomfortable for any length of time. And though they had covered the expense of four sedan chair bearers, the official who handled their affairs contracted only three coolies, pocketing the salary of the fourth. All of this done, Huc said, “in order to squeeze a little more profit out of us.”

China's economy has risen fast, so we presume that any witnessed fixation on money must surely be a byproduct of the current go‐go business climate. “His whole life is materialism put into action” is how we might describe a young Shanghainese of today who is monomaniacal about getting ahead. “Lucre is the sole object on which his eyes are constantly fixed” sounds like an accurate description of factory owners you currently deal with in Guangdong. To read these exact descriptions by Huc of Chinese people he met 150 years ago is curious. And he was not the only traveler of the era to make such observations.

“All they talk about is money,” quipped Edwin Joshua Dukes, another Christian missionary, in 1887. If clergymen of the nineteenth century were put off by native materialism, it was at least partially because such values presented an obstacle to their proselytizing. Chinese appeared to need an economic incentive for conversion, so the disparaging term rice Christians gained popular usage. Reverend George Smith claimed in all seriousness that he was sometimes asked, “How many dollars a month shall we obtain if we become Christians?”

Yet another fed‐up missionary, Reverend E. J. Hardy, decried in his 1905 book, John Chinaman at Home, the emphasis that materialism was given over matters of the spirit. “After the day's business, the shopkeeper counts his cash with great care, and the click of his little calculating machine brings music to what he is pleased to call his soul.” The machine to which he alludes is, of course, the abacus.

“The Chinese are by no means the only people in whom the instance of the pursuit of gain is highly developed,” wrote Reverend Arthur Smith in 1888, “but with them it is carried to a higher pitch, more uniformly exercised, and operates as a more potent force than with most other races.”

Alexis Krausse may have been ahead of his time when he suggested in 1900 that a local would “sell his grandmother for a profit of a few cash.” The Baptist missionary William Edgar Geil took denunciations of the Chinese furthest when he suggested in 1904 that “the desire for money is as strong in them as in any other people, not even excepting the Jews.”

That is quite a statement, and perhaps we should wonder how the Chinese managed to avoid a reputation for money‐grubbing during subsequent years when anti‐Semitism was fueled by negative impressions of precisely the same sort.

Chinese have such a penchant for thrift that it has been highlighted as a contributing factor in modern-day food safety crises. We were reminded of this recently when thousands of infected pigs were found floating down the Yellow River. Accompanying reports highlighted locals seen pulling carcasses out of the water for their salvage value. The past has a way of echoing back to us. During England's first trade mission to China in 1793, George Macartney observed the same scene as his party floated down a river on their way out of China. Inhabitants were seen fishing a dead pig, “obviously diseased,” from the same waters in which they were traveling.

Chinese today are concerned over food safety because they understand the lengths to which many are willing to go in order to generate a profit. Stories about fake beef and fake mutton are commonplace today, and it's easy to find information on the chemical processes required to create these dangerous counterfeits. Should we be surprised to discover that this was also a nineteenth‐century problem? William Henry Wilkinson in 1855 described a dinner hosted by Western Christians in Peking. Two of his guests—natives of the city—had only one request of their missionary hosts: that they not be served beef, because any meat advertised as such was more than likely “horse or donkey re‐christened.”

That China as a nation habitually produces shoddy items is not a new story by any measure. A century ago, foreigners had a saying related to the many roads then being built in the country: “Good for ten years, bad for ten thousand.” It is a pattern with which many are familiar today. Chinese buildings and infrastructure projects almost always appear impressive when they are unveiled, but sooner than expected, they fall into disrepair.

China has built so much in recent years, and the development has inspired awe among outsiders. Americans have even shamed themselves by comparing China's gleaming structures to their own crumbling infrastructure. It is an unfair comparison. Mainland buildings have shorter life spans than those in the United States, in part because the Chinese build for maximum flash. They prefer to take out smaller loans (or no loan at all) in order to minimize the payback period, and this often means deemphasizing longevity and concentrating more on the face that is created at the grand opening. As a result, no one sheds a tear when a fifteen‐year‐old building is torn down in China. The economics of a fast‐growing economy support a build‐it‐up‐and‐tear‐it‐down strategy. But that model will reveal flaws when growth slows and it becomes too expensive to replace a building and too impractical to refurbish it.

Quality issues may appear trivial, yet we can say that they have contributed significantly to major wars fought by China. The Anglo‐Chinese War (1839–1842) and the Arrow War (1856–1860) have been called the “Opium Wars” by historians and as such are portrayed exclusively as having been motivated by England's desire to force a dangerous narcotic onto an unsuspecting Chinese populace. Such a view overlooks more important contributing factors behind the two nineteenth‐century wars, namely, increased smuggling and the collapse of the Canton System. As for the drug itself, we acknowledge that pure‐grade opium is not nearly as harmful as many presume.

Nineteenth‐century advocates for the opium trade argued that lying down to a civilized pipe was not much different than joining a friend for a couple glasses of brandy. Charles Dickens was a known opium eater, and for all we know, some of his best work may have been done under the influence. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's habit, taken in the form of laudanum, is also well‐documented. Jonathan Spence, the famed Harvard sinologist, noted that some Chinese who sat for the notoriously difficult civil service examination smoked opium during the exams.

We have conflicting images of opium use and abuse. On the one hand, smoking appeared to be a genteel custom popular among the wealthy and scholar‐officials—the emperor himself was said to have indulged in the habit. But on the other, there is clear evidence that it was devastating to the general population. One late‐nineteenth‐century author provides a possible reason behind the contradiction: “Should the victim be rich,” wrote John Arthur Turner in 1894, he “does not seem much the worse” for his habit. It is a meaningful clue that helps explain contrasting portrayals.

In an obscure book called Formosa, written by J. D. Clark and published in 1896, I found the following description of opium that was then available for sale on the island: “In Formosa, for the adulteration of opium, two varieties of ‘cake’ are used. One is called ‘Tientsin cake,’ an abominable mixture of buffalo, horse, pig, or other skins boiled down to a liquid—burnt skin having a smell similar to that of Opium smoke—to which some kind of medicine is added and a small quantity of Native Opium, either pure or obtained by boiling refuse pods of the poppy plant.”

The other kind Clark references was called Hankow cake. Made from sesame seeds, this second variety contained no opium whatsoever, and apparently smokers could not tell the difference between these fake offerings and the genuine article—both in taste and in effect.

Abbé Huc mentioned that British opium suffered “much adulteration before it reaches the pipe of the smoker,” so who knows where to assign blame? If the counterfeiting of opium was as widespread as writers suggest—and knowing that fakes almost always involve a loss in quality—we are led to wonder about the real source of ill effects.

Historians are so hell‐bent on blaming the West for everything that went wrong with China in the nineteenth century that they have no room for an investigation into the serious possibility that the nation may have actually poisoned itself. If adulteration caused more harm to health than opium, then we might see the government's efforts to stop the opium trade less as an honest attempt to solve a drug problem and more as a desperate attempt to blame the British for what was essentially a Chinese failing.

American sentimentalists—panda huggers is another term—show not only a willingness to defend China against claims that there is something wrong, but they go one step further by suggesting that the country's biggest problems are somehow the fault of foreigners. “We taught them capitalism, you know,” is a statement made by many well‐meaning Americans. It makes our way of life seem like a virus deliberately passed on to an unsuspecting people. The idea is made further absurd by the recognition that the Chinese literally invented money—both coins and bank notes—and they have long been famous for their keen mercantile sense.

One hundred years ago, sentimentalists made the equally ridiculous claim that the West taught China how to lie. “It is often said,” wrote Stanley High in China's Place in the Sun, “that there were no dishonest compradors until the foreigners taught them dishonesty.”

In the nineteenth century, foreigners repeated the wisdom that “a Chinaman's word is his bond.” Meant as the highest compliment, this common saying referred to the fact that Chinese dispensed with written contracts, relying solely on verbal agreements. Although some foreign writers depicted Chinese businessmen as exemplary agents of upright principles, their more practical contemporaries presented a different picture, one that suggested the Chinese were in the habit of misrepresenting themselves.

American missionary and diplomat Chester Holcombe sought to excuse the perception that the Chinese prevaricated by explaining that the culture was not properly understood. “Much of the falsehood to which the Chinese as a nation are said to be addicted is a result of the demands of etiquette,” he wrote in his 1895 book, The Real Chinaman. For this people, he explained, the word “no” is often considered “the height of discourtesy.” In the same year, Reverend Richard H. Graves published Forty Years in China, a book in which he included an amusing bit about how misunderstandings sometimes arise over concerns of etiquette: “I was polite enough to ask him to dinner, and he was not polite enough to decline the invitation.”

Chinese believe it is impolite to embarrass someone without cause, and this tradition of saving face naturally leads to instances where dissembling is the preferred course of action. Though the principle was well understood, foreigners still had a hard time adapting to it, and even the British—who themselves knew a thing or two about polite fibbing—were maddened by Chinese circumlocution. Herbert A. Giles, the nineteenth‐century British diplomat and co‐inventor of the Wade–Giles system of transliterating Mandarin was struck by how little it mattered whether words matched deeds or intent. “Lying, under any circumstances, is a very venial offense in China; it is, in fact, no offense at all, for everybody is prepared for lies from all quarters, and takes them as a matter of course.”

Writing in the 1920s, Rodney Gilbert suggested that habits of this sort were a sign of high intelligence. “Polite lying is everywhere an accomplishment,” he suggested, with L. C. Arlington echoing the sentiment when he wrote in 1931 that for the Chinese, “a good liar is, speaking generally, a clever man.” E. C. Werner, a British government official who worked in China in the period, offered that “untruthfulness is not considered by the Chinese a sin, but as a matter of the play of wits.” George Wingrove Cooke, special correspondent for The Times of London in the nineteenth century remarked that the ways in which a Chinese juggled words might reflect positively on the individual: “It is with him what a smart repartee is with us. The immediate recipient may wince and retort; but the world applauds, and the sayer of the bon‐mot chuckles.”

Westerners have long been frustrated in China due to variances in communication methods. Samuel Wells Williams—American linguist, Christian missionary, and author of the 1848 classic The Middle Kingdom—summarized his own annoyance with the Chinese thusly: “There is nothing which tires one so much when living among them as their disregard for truth.” Some foreigners regarded this cultural feature as an indication of a moral failing. “Being detected in a lie does not produce in the Chinese a blush of shame, but merely silence,” wrote former US diplomat Ralph Townsend, who also thought that misrepresentation could be considered a kind of verbal gymnastics, the act of being caught in a lie serving only as evidence of a “want of dexterity.”

Westerners complain less these days, so one is inclined to conclude that whatever “unparalleled mendacity” characterized China in the past no longer applies to the present. It is a topic that is hard to flesh out, because nowadays few wish to discuss the subject to any extent. Like in a court of law, folks plea to a lesser offense. Rather than admit they are lied to, foreigners will offer that they simply have a hard time catching all of the facts. Arthur Smith mentioned something along these lines in 1890. In China, he said, “one never feels sure that he has been told the whole of anything.”

In my China‐based work, I have been misled more times than I care to admit, but I do my best to put these instances out of mind—not merely because obsession is unproductive but also because the pain of betrayal stings. Every once in a while though, some episode comes along that is so absurd that it sticks in the mind.

Looking to fill a sales position, I dropped a note to a young Shanghainese who had the right background. We agreed that he would call me that evening at 8:00 PM to talk about the position. It was a minor formality. My plan was to get him on the phone and then set a date for a face‐to‐face interview.

When the time came and there was no phone call, I didn't think much of it. Folks in Shanghai can be unreliable, and I figured there was also the possibility that he had changed his mind about the job. I awoke in the morning to find an e‐mail from the guy in which he politely explained that he had been unable to call the previous night due to “a storm with thunders nearby,” and did I not know it was “dangerous to talk via phones” during such a meteorological event?

There had been no storm, of course, and the best part of the note was the cheekiness of his line, the way in which the candidate turned it around by implying that I was a boor for not understanding the dangers of using a telephone when it is raining.