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Let’s take another example. For decades Australia was known by a handful of words and images: Kangaroos. Koala bears. Boomerangs. Aborigines. There was nothing wrong with these things, except that kangaroos, koala bears, boomerangs and aborigines were only indirectly related to one another, linked by their exotic “other”-ness.
The resurrection of Australia as a worldwide tourist attraction probably began in the mid-1980s with the release of the film Crocodile Dundee. The movie had as its protagonist a bushman who told time using the position of the sun (well, kind of) and who, with dry, imperturbable machismo, faced down two knife-wielding New York muggers by producing a bush-machete with the words “That’s not a knife—that’s a knife.” A subsequent marketing strategy was, and is, linked to the fact that the Australian summer solstice takes place in late December, meaning that summer arrives in Australia just as winter appears in most Western countries. In response, Australia rolled out a handful of marketing strategies that culminate around the winter holidays. Around Christmastime, Australian broadcasters shoot video footage of bronzed men and bikini-wearing women adorned in Santa Claus hats along Sydney’s Bondi Beach, a stretch of ocean popular with surfers, skateboarders and volleyball players. The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is slow, and Australian broadcasters offer this footage for free to news outlets worldwide. Except for a few cities in Samoa and New Zealand, Australia is also the first continent to greet the New Year. Sydney is a photogenic city, and its annual fireworks display frames both the Sydney Bridge and the Sydney Opera House, footage that is also offered free of charge to news stations worldwide.
If it takes years for a city’s or a country’s brand identity to crystallize, it can also take a long time for a country to overcome a negative somatic marker. Vietnam, for instance, is renowned for its beaches, parks, museums, shopping and physical beauty, yet several generations of Americans can’t help but link Vietnam with a disputed, protracted war. Colombia, in South America, is one of the world’s most beautiful—and peaceful—countries, but it is still trying to shake its global reputation as a country synonymous with kidnapping, murder and drug violence. Why, I sometimes wonder, doesn’t the Colombia tourism board take advantage of one of its most positive associations—coffee—and partner with Starbucks to create an in-store campaign devoted to Colombian coffee beans? Alternately, as I wrote earlier, Medellín is home to the longest escalator in the world, built into the side of a mountain. Why doesn’t Colombia market its escalator in the same way Dubai trumpets its indoor ski slope?
Again, the power of film should never be underestimated. New Zealand, a largely unbranded country, saw its tourism industry increase by 50 percent after the 2001 release of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring.8 Today, New Zealand’s customs service stamps “Welcome to Middle Earth” on the passports of incoming tourists, and the government also issues postal stamps with the names of Tolkien characters on them. Some nations, like Taiwan, negotiate directly with Hollywood, hoping to find story lines that can help transform their image, in the same way the 2010 remake of The Karate Kid, partially filmed in China, helped to overturn the popular image of a polluted manufacturing center into that of a magical, mysterious, historically fascinating country.
Still, few people associate contemporary China with the Xia, Tang or Song dynasties, the Silk Road or Confucianism. What comes to mind instead is more likely than not a series of negative somatic markers, including the unsmiling face of Chairman Mao, communism, the Tiananmen Square protests and state-run censorship of the press, the Internet, religion and reproductive rights. Widespread publicity about the working conditions at Foxconn’s manufacturing facilities—which manufacture the West’s best-known products from Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Cisco, Vizio, Microsoft and others—hasn’t helped things. By now most Westerners are aware that their most beloved gadgets—iPhones, iPads, Kindles, Wiis, PlayStations, Xboxes and others—are built by poorly paid, ill-treated Chinese workers in working conditions so substandard that Foxconn erected suicide nets after 14 employees jumped to their deaths in 2014. “Made in China,” then, is a three-word fragment it would be difficult to transform. I wouldn’t be able to do it with one job, but I would do what I could.
On my first visit to Shanghai, when I checked into my hotel room on an upper floor of the Park Hyatt, the floor-to-ceiling windows were enclosed by smooth drapes the color of wax, or chalk. Seconds later, I realized that what covered my window weren’t drapes at all, but smog so dense and restrictive that nothing at all was visible from my 88th-floor window. The bathroom tap water had a chemical taste, and when I went outdoors, the air had a faint tang of metal.
China is responsible for more pollutants than any other country in the world, with two-thirds of China’s biggest cities falling short of minimal environmental standards.9 Among the first words every Chinese child learns is wuran, or pollution. The word means “dirty contamination,” though the Chinese state media prefers wumai, or “haze,” with its implication that the conditions are short-lived and occasional. Regardless of what word you use, wuran is real, its effects physical, psychological and constant. Wuran sticks to the back of your throat. It invades your larynx, turns the inside of your nose black and makes your eyes tear up and itch. On Shanghai’s most overcast days, residents press rags, cloths and handkerchiefs against their noses and mouths whenever they go outside. Nearly a quarter of all Chinese infants are born with pre-existing allergies, and a former Chinese health minister reported once that anywhere between 350,000 to 500,000 Chinese people a year die prematurely from air pollution.10 According to the New York Times, “Only 1 percent of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union.”11
On the worst wuran days, a red flag hangs ominously at the front of local schools, and students stay indoors. So pervasive is the concern with airborne pollutants that the British School of Beijing and other international schools have built airtight domes equipped with hospital-grade air filtration systems around their campuses.12 Some runners participating in the 2014 Beijing Marathon dropped out of the race early, with “some saying it felt like running through bonfire smoke.”13 Not surprisingly, the biggest product trends in China are water filtration devices, air-quality phone apps, face masks, anti-nausea pills and high-end air-conditioning systems. The biggest pollutant is coal, which China burns more of than the United States, Europe and Japan combined, and whose sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions reach as far away as Japan and North and South Korea. The second culprit, according to the New York Times, is the increasing number of cars, heavy traffic conditions and low-grade gasoline.14
China, as I wrote earlier, is the largest car market in the world, with an annual production that exceeds that of America and Japan combined. Overseas car brands are obliged by Chinese law to partner with domestic Chinese automakers for local production, and most Chinese-made cars are the result of joint ventures with international brands. In 2010, a Chinese automaker, Geely, bought Volvo—today, many Volvo models are manufactured in China—and four years after that, the state-owned Dongfeng Motor invested more than a billion dollars in Peugeot-Citroën.
Herewith the problem. Global automakers and brands, including Hyundai and Buick, compose two-thirds of China’s car sales. This leaves branded China-made automobiles with a local market share of only one-third. Even the Chinese believe that local car brands are inferior to American and European brands, which is why, as a rule, Chinese automobile manufacturers earn most of their revenues by exporting cars to other developing countries, where low prices matter more than brand or legacy. For Chinese car buyers, Western brands stand for two things: aspiration and trust. By way of analogy, an Apple iPhone costs around $600, of which roughly one-third goes back to China, making the iPhone more or less a Chinese product, despite the fact that Apple has its headquarters in Northern California. The iPhone is a source of national pride for the Chinese, while at the same time
, the company’s American roots add an exotic appeal that would be lacking if the iPhone’s provenance was exclusively Chinese. A Western-branded product guarantees that a phone, or a car, isn’t just real, but that it also works.
By contrast, the Chinese are historically skeptical about Chinese-made products, from cars to infant formula, especially premium-priced ones. The pollution infecting everyday food, in particular infant formula, means that Chinese tourists visiting Australia line up in supermarkets to bring back home international formula options—a phenomena that has become such a problem that many Australian supermarkets restrict the number of cans consumers can buy at one time. Thus, whenever the Chinese can purchase an extra seal of trustworthiness—a European or American logo—it increases their confidence that what they bought is high quality. Unlike, say, an iPhone, “Made in China” automobiles didn’t exude any aspirational qualities. What was the point of being a successful Chinese businessman if you ended up driving a Chinese car? China is a proud country. Chinese residents needed to show the world who they were, and few things shore up a person’s identity more eloquently than the car he drives.
Before thinking about improving the quality of Chinese cars, I had to begin Subtexting what “quality” meant for the Chinese. This was a difficult question to answer in a country that deemphasizes emotion, and whose natives are more or less stony-faced. In situations like these, I find it better to observe people from an undercover perspective, a skill set I developed when a team of Australian customs officers from Sydney let me shadow them for a week. What I learned over those seven days was what not to look for. The staff taught me not to be focused on or distracted by what people did, but to keep close watch on what they didn’t do. Customs eventually let me join the five-member security team tasked with opening and closing thousands of purses, backpacks and carry-ons, in order to correlate people’s behavior and the contents of their suitcases. In time, they told me, I would be able to predict what passengers had inside their bags before they even opened them. And before I knew it, I could.
On an earlier trip to China while working for a retail client, I asked executives whether they would let me spend 48 hours inside their CCT camera security room, a pipeline of sorts into the DNA of Chinese body language. How do Chinese consumers behave when they’re alone? How do they act when they’re considering buying something? Finally, how do they act when they are stealing?
Inside the CCT booth in Beijing, I spent two days monitoring both in-store purchases and thefts. People would pick things off shelves and tuck them under their coats, pockets or handbags. More intriguing still were their tics in the moments leading up to the theft. Invariably they would scratch the sides of their arms. Cut to ten years later, when I asked a cross-section of Chinese men to sit inside their dream cars. As they took seats inside the car, I noticed they scratched their hands up and down, back and forth, on their pants, before placing their hands on the wheel. During this time, not one showed any emotion, or even smiled. Their cultural training dictated that their facial expression remained blank and indecipherable.
Later, when I interviewed them outside the car, they unconsciously repeated this same behavior. To me, the scratching was an old childhood tic, an absent, unstudied gesture the men used to comfort and reassure themselves in a time of stress. The men knew they were doing something wrong. They were in a car that wasn’t theirs. They were revealing their childhood dreams. They wanted to make sure no one else noticed. In China, I would later learn, almost every other bodily gesture or expression has been tamed, trained and controlled out of existence, except, perhaps, for this one. I took note of it, and then it was time to venture inside Chinese apartment buildings.
More than half the Chinese population lives in, or close to, an urban area. Across Beijing, Shanghai and many other cities, you’ll find many thousands of functional, anonymous high-rise apartment buildings. As a rule, Chinese apartments are built to last 25 to 30 years, versus 70–75 years in the United States.15 They are poorly constructed, with negligent safety standards, tiny rooms and minimal personality. The walls are white and blank, and the flooring is plastic. Almost every piece of furniture is wrapped in plastic, which couldn’t help but remind me of my work in Saudi Arabia—except that in China, there were no Eiffel Towers or London Bridges, just one object after another—lamps, tables, chairs—enshrouded in the tightest possible coating of plastic.
When you do the work I do, you quickly learn that the more “personal” an item is, the more it reveals the truth about someone. Among the most personal things we own and use are those we put inside our bodies, or place inside our mouths, or that our bodies absorb—food, drinks, pills, toothbrushes and even the weather. On the basis of this equation, a banana is more “personal” than, say, a pair of shoes, in the same way a frozen TV dinner is more personal than a coat, a hat or a pair of gloves. In this case, the most critical clue about Chinese behavior—and how the Chinese assessed the quality of a product, or service—began with the sight of a lone toothbrush.
Generally speaking, when toothbrushes stand in a holder, or a cup, or jar, their owners tend to be less sexually active than not. If and when their owners are romantic, their sex lives tend to be highly structured and less hospitable to spontaneity or innovation, a scenario that over the years I’ve come to call “Appointment Sex.” In Russia, only three out of ten toothbrushes were standing, and I found a similar ratio across France and Italy. It’s worth adding that the owners of toothbrushes whose heads face down are more sexually active, more impulsive and altogether less constrained to schedules. Yet in the first seven or eight Chinese apartments I visited, the toothbrushes were standing, either in cups or holders. Three weeks later, as I set out my photos on a bulletin board, I totaled up the figures. Nine out of ten Chinese households appeared to be under the leash of “Appointment Sex.”
It wasn’t just Chinese toothbrushes that caught my attention, but the bristles, too. Their wear and tear indicated normal everyday use, but with a difference: the normal indentation that ran down the midpoint of the bristles, dividing them equally, was missing. Did Chinese toothbrushes as a rule lack indentations? No, having visited local drugstores and markets, I knew Chinese toothbrushes resembled toothbrushes sold everywhere else in the world. Were the toothbrushes for display rather than for everyday use? No: the worn handles indicated that the toothbrushes were used regularly.
Tooth-brushing rituals are the same across the world. Over the years, I’ve noticed interesting, oddball global behaviors around this subject, independent of culture, religion or age—including the fact that based on my own polling, 4 percent of the world’s people brush their teeth in the shower. Shower brushers, I’ve noticed, too, tend to be more creative than most, and generate most of their ideas while under the nozzle or in contact with water. Still, the length of time we take to brush our teeth, and the pressure we exert as we grip our toothbrush handles and press the heads against our gums and teeth, vary from country to country. What, then, had happened to the indentation on the bristles? Several Chinese consumers let me watch as they brushed their teeth, and the answer showed up immediately. Across the West, people press the bristles of their toothbrushes hard again their teeth. It’s as if they believe that the more pressure they apply, the more likely they are to end up with whiter teeth and brighter smiles. In Shanghai, it was a different story. The Chinese parted their lips, applied toothpaste onto the bristles, and held the toothbrush in place before their teeth. Then they brushed. Not with the bristles, as Westerners did, but by rapidly fluttering their hands and arms up and down. The toothbrush itself barely moved.
If nothing else, this gave me my first fragment of small data about sensory perception in China. Reminding myself that the toothbrush itself was a Chinese invention dating back to 1498, I took the liberty of noting this clue as one likely embedded in China’s DNA. It was a good foundation on which to begin creating a hypothesis.
On to the sh
ower, where the first thing I glimpsed was a soap bar. So? In contrast to body wash, a popular trend throughout the 1990s, a soap bar acts as a buffer between our hands and our bodies that, in turn, may also point to reduced levels of sensuality. Not by itself, of course; people have been using soap bars and having feverish sex for centuries. But coupled with the standing toothbrushes, it added to a theme I was observing, focused around the concepts of momentum and speed. Once I made my way into Chinese bedrooms, I knew I was on the right track.
Any amateur detective will tell you that it’s more difficult to notice the absence of something than its presence. Still, just as every Chinese shower had a soap bar, not a single bed wore a bedspread. Sheets, yes, a light blanket, yes, pillows, yes, but bedspreads, no. There were virtually no exceptions to this rule, either. By itself, the absence of a bedspread wasn’t terribly unusual, but considering the high levels of protection across China against everyday wuran—fabrics pressed against people’s mouths and noses, stand-alone bubbles around schools and sports centers—the absence of bedspreads surprised me. Put another way, if a bed is akin to a human hand, where was its protective glove? Human skin, after all, comprises three layers. The epidermis, or visible layer, flushes our skin with color while continually generating new cells. Beneath the epidermis is a thicker layer, the dermis, which produces sweat and oil, and also connects to our blood vessels. The third layer of our skin is a shelf of subcutaneous fat, which modulates skin temperature and links the dermis to muscles and bones. Like the skin on the human hand, a bed is also an arrangement of layers, with the bedcover on top of the mattress, followed by sheets, blankets and occasionally a quilt or duvet. These things all have a role to play in the process—the slow seduction—of falling asleep, or preparing for romance or sex. Nor was this a general cultural discrepancy; from research I’d done in Japan and Thailand, I knew that bedspreads were commonplace elsewhere in Asia.