22 — Wednesday, April 3, 1991 - North Shore News

The Asian mind game

6&4 na spring morning in 1986, a Frenchman
was arrested in Tiananmen Square in central
Bejing. He had been screaming wildly and
making obscene gestures at passers-by. The Chinese
authorities subdued him and immediately put him on a
plane for France. Upon his arrival in Paris, he was diagnos-
ed as the victim of a complete nervous breakdown. He was

committed to a sanitarium...
The man was Andre Pierre. He
had arrived in China some nine
months earlier as the repre-
sentative of the French firm
Petrofuture International to nego-
tiate a $500-million contract to
build a petro-chemical refinery.
Less than 24 hours before his
abrupt departure, he had been

congratulating himself on a job t
well done.” Mike Steele
There are over nine million BOOK REVIEW

stories in the Forbidden City. This
is one of them. Westerners who are unaware of

So what happened? Why did an this and are unschooled in the
apparently experienced veteran of _ strategies involved are, she says,
numerous stressful, multi-million operating at a distinct disadvan-
doflar contract sessions suddenly tape.
crack? The Asian Mind Game is a reve-

According to business consultant _ lation for anyone unfamiliar with
Chin-Ning Chu, it was acombina- _ the Oriental business world. By
tion of factors that destroyed the combining philosophical concepts,
executive, not the least being that _ historical anecdotes and a wealth
the Chinese had been preparing of modern day stories from the
for these negotiations for far longer clashes between East and West,
than had the French — by atleast Chu has crafted an intriguing
a few thousand years. . primer for companies and indi-

And, arguably, Ms. Chu should viduals with Asian aspirations.
know.

The president of an Oregon- ‘see
based consulting firm, she
specializes in counselling Western
companies seeking to do business
in the potentially lucrative but
hostile Asian arena.

Anyone who remembers those
laborious lessons in penmanship
of yesteryear can only marve! at
the practice it must take to master
the grace and diversity of the

The downtall of Andre Pierre is Chinese alphabet.
one of the many horror stories to One of the earliest written sym-
be found in Chu’s book, The Asian _ bois, according to Barbara Aria,
Mind Game — Unlocking The author of The Nature of The
Hidden Agenda of the Asian Chinese Character, reputedly
Business Culture — A Westerner’s dates back to 1700 B.C. — and is
Survival Manual (Rawson/Maxwell
Macmillan; 271 pp.; $33.95).

But long before the author ar-
rives at Pierre’s debacle she has
carefully and systematically given
the reader the tools to analyze
Petrofuture’s approach to and
subsequent negotiations with the
Chinese. :

it is an absorbing and fascinating
series of lessons based on the way
in which Asian business leaders,
particularly those in China, Japan,
Taiwan and Korea, think and act.

The key, she says, lies in
strategic thinking, an analytical

_ and highly codified process in- |
stalled in Asian children virtually
from birth. .

It permeates and is indeed an” -
intrinsic component of Oriental
culture, one that affects and
directs all aspects of life .

The Nature of The Chinese
Character (Raincoast Books; 96
pp.; $17.95) is a slim, hardcover
volume of facts, figures and
folklore associated with Chinese
calligraphy and the history of 49
selected ideograms.

Accompanying Aria’s text are

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the minimalist yet evocative il-
lustrations of Lesley Ehler ard the
artistry of Russell Eng Gan’s
calligraphy.

Not having read David
Wingrove's first instalment in his
science-fiction epic (Chung Kuo:
The Middle Kingdony | really
didn’t know what to expect when
the second volume arrived

But the first hint that The Broken
Wheel (Deacorte; 448 pp.; $24.95)
might be a bad piace to start this
trilogy fay in its list of principal
characters: 121 by my count.

And then there was the vio-
lence... this included: one murder
that combined poisoning and
stabbing the victim; two more fata!
knifings; a chap killed by having
his neck and back broken; at least
three people blown to bits;
another shot point-blank in the
face; numerous others blown to
smithereens by a missle and a
young woman stabbed to death in
a brothel.

Well, so much for the prologue
and the first 11 pages and wel-
come to Earth in the 24th century.
Except of course it hasn’t been
called Earth since China, with
roughly one-quarter of the world’s
population, “awoke” from its
economic and military slumber in
the 2/st century.

It is now Chung Kuo, a cut-
throat, conspiracy-wracked, feudal
world state run largely by and for a
business elite. What's left of nature
has been consigned to a few sterile
preserves, humans are stacked in
mile-deep “‘hives’”’ and history
has been rewritten to eradicate al!
references to a non-Chinese dom-
inated planet.

While Wingrove’s dedication to
an extremely complex plot with a
multitude of sub-themes is laud-
able and his terrifying future
fabrication not entirely impossible,
| didn’t experience any profound
regrets at having missed the first
volume.

But The Broken Wheel did pi-
que my curiosity enough to
wonder what the final title in this
trilogy holds. :

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