Was it hubris just to
walk in this Chinese metropolis alone
without a map and a vague destination : the Bund.
Why didn't he
just stay in his room, eating e-mails and go to bed early before moving back to France the next day.
Was it the
fact that you can't leave Shanghai without having
a walk at the Bund and having a look at the Huangpu river and
the skyscrapers
of Pudong or was
it an attempt in vain to organize and control the overwhelming
impression of this
Shanghai experience.
He had been
alert enough to take along a business card of his hotel with Chinese characters just
as a last resort guarantee
in case of total disorientation.
A Chinese man must have seen him staring in an indefinite direction and asked him in fluent English whether he was
lost.
The men proposed to accompany
him for a while and told that he was an electric engineer educated
in Shanghai and now
for several years working in Canada in a city near Vancouver.
"You earn four
times as much as in China or in Europe" he explained "and life is not more expensive over there".
He was visiting
his Chinese
girlfriend and
he hoped once to return to his home city to create his own business.
A Chinese hooker tried to seduce him
to leave the main road but in vain.
After a walk of about three quarters of an hour he arrived at the Bund.
After a walk of about three quarters of an hour he arrived at the Bund.
He had expected traffic jams and crowded noisy streets with bars and restaurants
with a
marvelous view on the Pudong skyscrapers.
He remembered that he was told at the first night that the big towers were not continuously
enlightened anymore
because of the huge consumption of
electricity,
so he could only gaze at the dark silhouettes of
the “key opener tower”
as she had called
the Shanghia World Financial Center the day
before.
The Chinese guide had invited him for coffee
at the 97th floor of the
giant to enjoy the view over Pudong and
the Shanghai Center.
"Call me Lisa", she proposed Tuur, "we all have
a European name to make foreigners feel comfortable".
She didn't start
with long and encyclopedical history talks and funny details about
the city, she wasn't continuously
pointing at
different buildings
with names and dates and there was no program for the visit.
So Tuur understood that she was not an ordinary guide, as she admitted, and except
for a visit to the Old City, the French Concession
and the Pudong area, they rather visited universities
and hospitals
on his request.
During long traffic jams and lunch and dinner they mainly talked about medicine, teaching and management especially
focused on differences between
Chinese and
European culture.
Tuur emphasized that
Shanghai and probably big parts of China had made a gigantic progression in
the last decades with as result that
economic activity, living standards, technology and
educational level
were comparable
to the US and Western Europe.
Because of the
failure of the communist system in
Russia and many other countries
in the eighties, Europeans were convinced
that there was a strong link between capitalism, democracy and freedom of speech but China seemed to contradict this hypothesis by
being an economic giant
within a strong hierarchical and controlling one party system.
Lisa didn't seem
to be limited by big brother while formulating her ideas and thoughts She mentioned growing physical violence to doctors by patients.
Because good healthcare is more and more being thought of by the Chinese people as a right and knowing that there was a very low tolerance for mistakes in the Chinese community,
this hat created a thorough frustration
within a broad proportion of the population, especially
for low educated
people who had unrealistic expectations to medicine.
Tuur replied : "Maybe China has adopted the irrational belief of Western world that healthcare
and medicine
are able to conquer definitely
illness and
pain.
And death is not anymore an event that hits you at the moment in a way you can't predict but in euthanasia, it’s reduced to a decision under complete
control of the patient and the medical administration.”
During another traffic jam, she mentioned that young people were very connected to the international
world but that nevertheless
the educational
system was still very much focused on knowledge transfer.
In her work, she encouraged students
to elicit their own meanings and to discuss freely about all kinds of subjects
Tuur referred to the copy culture as many Europeans
think about
Chinese
industry and wondered whether China could or wanted to
move from economic development
based on smartly doing business and hard-working to
an economy with emphasis on innovation, ecology and
sustainability.
"That's exactly what at this moment
in China is happening", Lisa answered, "or at least it seems to be the intention.”
Tuur wondered whether
the evolution
to a full-blown democracy
was just a matter of time or on the contrary an illusion
regarding the
history and
cultural identity
of Chinese people.
Was it the doctrine of Confucius that shaped the Chinese society into an hierarchical, hard-working, disciplined construction or was it the political, economical and cultural autocratic dominance that had been occurred during ages of emperor dynasties.
But from the other hand, shouldn't we forget that Europe also had its
kings and emperors and in recent history great dictators as Hitler,
Mussolini, Franco, Stalin and Milosevic.
Some believed that the extremely efficient
execution of
projects by Chinese was
due to a kind of military discipline although it had also to be concluded that this had not been a good medicine against
corruption.
During the last year, the government was heavily involved in chasing corruption and
several high-ranking
responsibles in society were
accused and moved away from their position.
But Tuur’s Chinese project hadn’t
even yet started.
Bert, Tuur and Walter had prepared
the visit for several weeks as they were asked to setup a
hospital management program in order to meet the growing needs
for
management expertise within the Shanghai
hospitals.
It was John, a Chinese consultant who had lived for many
years in France, who had mentioned the request to Bert, who works for Novellas, a French company
with several branches in China.
Bert had invited Tuur, who had 25 years of experience in hospital management, to consider the offer.
He brought in
Walter, assistant professor of the Paris Management School and
responsible for the
healthcare management unit.
The Shanghai hospitals had wanted to set up a hospital management program with a famous European business school and the Paris Management
School had a good reputation and had already established
a general management education
program in Bejing in cooperation with a local university.
Setting up such a
program and embracing the significant cultural and financial differences
between health care delivery in Belgium and China needed
a thorough preparation and in that perspective, Tuur, Bert and Walter had agreed
to come to Shanghai for discussing and preparing the program.
When the meeting
was canceled
because of
organizational reasons, Walter and Tuur couldn't hide their regret and frustration
from the
point of view that a canceled invitation, when
guests are prepared to come, doesn't seems polite and respectful.
They were taught by Bert that reality
in China was less predictable and controllable in
the preparation
phase because
often new circumstances modify
plans and that sometimes
Chinese people
take their time to
find out whether they can understand
and trust their potential business partners.
It reminded Tuur to the “tribute system” within China in the 17th
and 18th century when European leaders
and businessman had to bring gifts to the advantage of the emperor often without the opportunity to be
received at the.Court.
Tuur’s curiosity overruled his
frustration and
he decided
nevertheless to move to the Far East with Bert as a guide to taste the
flavor of Shanghai in order to
better understand
the project
and its opportunities.
After a 12 hours flight, Tuur landed at Pudong Airport where he was
welcomed by Bert and John and it was a
relief for Tuur that he
could shake
hands with one of the email ghosts he had been communicating
with during the last weeks.
John explained the difficult
circumstances and
the inability of hospital
staff to discuss
the program
at that moment but reassured that the program would move ahead.
On the second day at the fancy MINT-restaurant,
Bert and Tuur discussed about the magic of the city and the opportunities for
business in continuously changing environment..
“But if I want to do some shopping
for dinner, it takes me about 1h½”, Bert complained : :”Anyway, when I
mentioned to my wife to move to Shanghai three years ago, it took her five
minutes to decide, now we’re supposed to come back to France, it took her quite
a longer time…”
The next day at the
occasion of the city tour, Tuur visited a leading hospital where he could freely walk around and take some pictures
because the
hospital was
linked to the University where Lisa was teaching.
Generally buildings, medical equipment and
process design
of the clinic were comparable to modern European hospitals
except the fact that at different points in
the hospital, patients seemed to be a bit pushy in an overcrowding environment.
John later explained that there were one, second and third tire hospitals in China and because of the free choice of the patients, the first tire top hospitals were overcrowded.
In contrast, the third tire clinics were confronted with a lack of occupation and attendance.
In contrast, the third tire clinics were confronted with a lack of occupation and attendance.
This 500 bed
hospital was
exclusively dedicated
to children
from 0 to 18 years old and had been developed to a reference center for the whole country especially for
cardiac surgery
and oncology.
They had all modern
medical equipment
at their disposal except proton therapy
that was established in
two independent
centers in
Shanghai as a referring site
for all the hospitals
in the region.
During the visit,
Tuur noticed that local artists worked to
transform grey corridors to fairy tale landscapes.
Great was his surprise when he
found out
that within
the electronic
medical records
Chinese marks
were emerged
on the screen by tapping small sets of European letters on a traditional keyboard.
Tuur realized that
for every
Chinese mark, there was a correspondence
with a set of letters which
referred to the pronunciation although
every letter combination could
corresponded with different characters which
were popped
up to present the possibilities of
choice.
He was explained that
healthcare was
basically financed
by government
and the health care expenditure in
China didn't exceed 5% of gross national
product.
Nevertheless mean life expectancy
and birth death were similar to those in Western
countries with
an healthcare expenditure
from 10 to 18%, a doctor emphasized not deprived of a proud feeling.
Only a small part of costs
for salary
of staff and equipment and also big infrastructure projects were financed
directly by
the government
whereas 80% of the budget had to come from the middle and upper class segments of the society as an out of pocket or insurance contribution.
One could imagine
that hospitals had to focus
on wealthy people
in order to
meet the budget especially
when they have strong ambitions in terms of professional level and quality.
It had to be noticed that the
hospital had obtained already twice a JCI accreditation!
So they became magnet hospitals not only for
the rich but for every Chinese
regarding
the freedom
of choice
and especially for children
who were
very precious as
a
consequence of the one child policy during the last decades.
After two hours of visit and discussion,
Tuur was mesmerized by the transparency and
willingness to share.
Tuur was told that he was very
influential in setting up the hospital management program in Shanghai…
Staring from the Bund to the Huangpu river, Tuur realized that in
Chinese world, it's very hard to get what you’re looking for.
But if you
persist, you
might find
something else
than
expected, at the beginning poorly understood.
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