When you first arrive in China it’s one of the first things you notice. Everywhere, on every street corner, in every tourist town… new temples of plastic and glass are being erected.

I recall five years ago, during my first day in the Peoples Republic, nervously wandering around Guangzhou, my head full of cold war paranoia and cultural confusion. Slowly I searched through exhaust fumes and chaos, passed the lines of impoverished country migrants and the chain-smoking, pot bellied Canton middle-managers. Finally, beyond the anarchy of the street stood before me a familiar palace, its golden arches climbing out of the smog. It was of course, a McDonald’s fast food restaurant.

At that time I managed to refrain from the easy road and instead found a noodle joint whose owner accepted my ludicrous hand signals as a sign that he should serve this hopeless, wide-eyed foreigner some food. My hunger satisfied I went on my way, but I did peer through the McDonald’s window as I passed by. And lo, before me sat a group of suited Chinese and foreign businessmen busy scoffing down their Big Macs. What were the wealthy and successful doing in this dump?

Half a decade down the line, I’m beginning to understand how foreign big business, especially in the food and beverage sector are cornering so much of the market here in China.

In the mid twentieth century many commentators (including Che Guevara) believed China had realized a truer form of communism than socialism of the USSR and other communist states. Many conjectured that this was due to China’s natural bend towards communism sighting the collective and unified thinking of the Chinese people as evidence. But the success of Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Chinese Diaspora left other critics noting the Chinese natural bend towards capitalism. Money worship has been part of Buddhist practices in east Asia for centuries and the Confucian notions of hierarchy, respect and family lend themselves very comfortably to basic cooperate structure of big business. Today in the PRC we have what the late leader Deng Xiao Ping described as “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which is principally one of the most ruthless and dynamic capitalist structures the world has ever seen.

What fuels the greatest economic rise in human history is quite simply, raw exploitation in the purest Marxist sense of the word. Over the past three decades the Chinese rural peasantry, who are for the most part uneducated and impoverished, have been encouraged and empowered to migrate to the eastern boom cities to work in factories, construction or the service sector. A Chinese factory worker will work seven days a week ten hours day for the monthly wage equivalent to what a British worker would expect in two days. The arguments made in order to continue these nineteenth century style labor camps is that there is no way other way to get poor and backward people out of the country and better their overall standard of living of the nation. Whether this is true or not is open to debate. What is without doubt is that in any Chinese city, tables are busted, luxuries are assembled, shoes are polished and dishes are washed by those born outside of the cities.

Educated Chinese city dwellers will explain somewhat apolitically - when I ask for a bowl of rice for the seventh time and a waitress arrives with a lobster - that many Chinese have no education at all. This is why customers are constantly barking orders at minions of nervous waiting staff who often struggle to fulfill even the simplest of requests. But urban Chinese will never openly criticize the waiter or ask to speak to a manager, feeling this will cause the unnecessary loss of face and damage the natural social harmony that is so revered in this country. In fact, the major complaint I hear in Chinese restaurants is that “westerners always complain.”  Perhaps then, in writing these words I’m fitting that troublesome opinion they have of us. But I digress…

Above all else, what Starbucks, McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut and other foreign enterprises offer their customers is a guarantee of high quality service, hygiene and responsibility. Chinese managers in Chinese run businesses don’t, for the best part, value the notion of training their staff. They prefer to import a farmer (who may have only ever seen a restaurant on TV) and put them straight to work. The service staff don’t know the dishes on offer, they don’t know to repeat the order back to a customer and they certainly don’t take responsibility for an order when it’s wrong. How can you complain to them when it’s the mangers fault for not training them?

By contrast the service staff in Starbucks remember your name, speak a little English and when they make a mistake, respond apologetically and offer a discount. They do this because they have been trained and empowered to do so. In domestically-run businesses by contrast, mangers are seldom on hand to complain to and when they are, they always appear busy surfing the internet, dining or drinking with customers. They seldom appear to be doing any work. This phenomenon is common from top to bottom, in every sector. For example I recently went to a mainland Chinese owned five-star hotel to inquire about pool membership. The receptionist could not answer my questions and as it was lunch time, all the managers were needless to say, out to lunch.

Now I’m the kind of guy who’d always choose a local coffee shop ahead of Starbucks back home in Europe. I vote with the way I spend my money and thus boycott many major corporations. I would never set foot in a McDonald’s or the equivalent junk food outlets. I choose instead to support local initiatives, small enterprises and green projects. It’s called ethical shopping. But in China, years enduring bad service, poor hygiene and scam-artistry, increasingly pushes foreign punters (and middle-class Chinese) towards major foreign franchises.

The foreign businesses are aware of this. The adverts for KFC target the wealthy middle classes, the young and the hip, not the tabloid reading blob-monsters of home. But while foreign businesses small and large, increasingly consume the market in China, what will the native restaurateurs do?

Well for the time being they can continue to toast and smoke with punter. There are enough of them to uphold this myth of hard work and the illusion of importance and enough farmers to keep buying in like sheep.

But not forever.  Managers on the mainland have lived too long with the luxury of non-accountability and in blatant disregard for efficient and effective service. They must remember and accept that in opening the door to foreign competition, they must eventually compete.

“Who cares if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice?” – Deng Xiao Ping.

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