China and crisis management

"China must do better at handling disasters“RIDICULOUS” is how China’s banking regulator, Liu Mingkang, recently described American lending practices that led to the current crisis. In private, some Chinese officials have expressed even greater contempt for the Western financial system. But while Communist bureaucrats are allowing themselves a little smugness, they have crises of their own to fret about and are struggling to learn—even from the West—how to manage them. Many a foreign businessman, in after-dinner speeches to colleagues, has observed that in China the word for crisis, weiji, contains the characters for danger (wei) as well as opportunity (ji). Their point is to show that the Chinese, unlike pessimistic Westerners, see crises as opportunities for improvement. But the crisis now besetting China’s dairy industry, involving the poisoning of tens of thousands of infants by tainted milk, show that lessons have not been learned (just as many after-dinner speakers have yet to learn that the etymology of weiji does not support their argument: in this context ji simply means “moment”). ..." (2008-10-8)

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