English (Deutsch unten)

There are two ways to stand in the middle of traffic.

One: Sanming, Fujian Province, Chinese New Year 1989. An empty intersection. No cars, no pedestrians, no reason whatsoever for a traffic cop to be standing there conducting an invisible orchestra of ghost vehicles through the cold morning air. And yet there he is: back straight, white gloves moving with the precise authority of a man who has been entrusted with the management of the universe, however temporarily and however unpopulated it may be at this particular moment. He is not performing for an audience. He is performing for himself, and for the abstract idea of the system that had placed him there. He is, in the fullest sense of the word, content.

The other: Freiburg, Germany, summer 2026. I have turned the wrong way into a one-way street for approximately twenty meters, realized my mistake, and stopped by the curb. A car coming toward me swerves to block my exit. A man in his sixties, sporting a thick grey mustache, gets out. He is already shouting before his door is fully open. He berates me for my assault on the traffic code with the righteous fury of someone whose personal property has been stolen, whose fundamental dignity as a citizen has been trampled. He photographs my number plate. He vows to report me to the authorities. He is, in the fullest sense of the word, enraged.

I smile politely, thank him, and drive off. I never hear anything further. But I have been thinking about those two men ever since.

The Architecture of Power

The Chinese traffic cop understood something that the German vigilante had entirely forgotten: power is not yours. It is borrowed. It flows downward from a source larger than yourself, and your relationship to it, your dignity, your authority, your sense of purpose, depends entirely on how gracefully you accept that fact.

The traffic cop in China had been given a designated space. An empty space. He had been given a uniform, a set of gestures, and a place in the system. He did not resent the system for making him small. He drew his stature from his precise and faithful execution of its will. The system needed this corner managed, and he was the man entrusted with that task. That was enough. More than enough. It was, in the vocabulary of the Black Heart philosophy, a form of 知足 zhi zu, knowing sufficiency. The man who knows what is enough is never poor.

But here is what made him genuinely remarkable: within those narrow constraints, he had built something. Not a career, not a reputation, not anything measurable by conventional standards. He had built an internal world, a sense of purpose, a form of dignity, a private freedom constructed entirely from the materials the system had given him and nothing more. His rights were not written in a constitution. They were earned, daily, through the completeness of his commitment. His freedom was not granted. It was created.

The German in the one-way street had a different problem. He had been raised in a political culture that told him, repeatedly, that he was the system. That the law existed to protect him personally, and that any violation of it was therefore a violation of him. That his rights were sovereign. This is a beautiful idea. It is also, in today’s rage-filled times, a generator of catastrophic confusion because it produces citizens who experience every social friction as a personal attack, every broken rule as an injury requiring immediate redress, and every fellow citizen who steps out of line as an enemy rather than a neighbor who has made a mistake.

The difference is this: the traffic cop had created his freedom. The German had simply inherited his and mistaken the inheritance for an achievement. He had been handed a system built on centuries of hard-won principles, draped himself in those principles like a king in borrowed robes, and never once asked what responsibilities came with them.

One man built something from very little. The other built nothing from a great deal. The Chinese cop was constructive, personally and socially. The German vigilante was confrontational, unadaptive, and ultimately destructive, eroding the very social fabric his rights were designed to protect.

The Chinese cop was holding society together.

The German had confused himself with it.

On the Surprising Freedom of Submission

This may sound counterintuitive, but bear with it: the traffic cop was freer than the vigilante.

Not politically free. Not free in any of the senses that Western liberal philosophy prizes.

But free in a very personal way: in the specific and underrated sense of knowing exactly what his role was, executing it with full commitment, and deriving from that execution a complete and untroubled sense of self. He was not anxious about his place in the world. He was not measuring himself against his neighbors’ cars or his colleagues’ salaries. He was not outraged by the behavior of strangers. He was a man with a space, and he owned it.

The vigilante, by contrast, was exhausting himself. His sense of self depended on the correct behavior of everyone around him. Every deviation was a threat. Every infraction demanded his intervention. He had appointed himself the guardian of a social contract that nobody had asked him to enforce, and the effort of that guardianship, the constant surveillance, the readiness for outrage, the photographs, the vows, was written in every line of his face. He had become the perfect slave of a world whose true meaning he had never really understood.

The Black Heart philosophy has a name for those who fall into this trap: 庸人自扰 yong ren zi rao, the mediocre man who creates nothing but trouble for himself. He generates his own suffering by insisting the world conform to his expectations of it.

The world, reliably, does not.

The Political Implication

I am not arguing that the Chinese form of authoritarian rule produces happiness. I have spent thirty years in China watching what it actually produces, and the picture is considerably more complicated than either its admirers or its critics tend to acknowledge.

But I am arguing that the current crisis of Western democracies is, in significant part, a crisis of a specific and self-reinforcing pathology: the simultaneous inflation of individual rights and the proliferation of rules and laws designed to micro-manage every corner of shared life. The two feed each other in a destructive loop. More rules produce more infractions, more infractions produce more outrage, and more outrage produces citizens who experience the ordinary friction of social life as a personal assault on their sovereign dignity.

When every inconvenience becomes an injustice and every rule-breaker becomes a personal enemy, civil society does not strengthen. It atomizes. The German vigilante in the one-way street was not protecting democracy. He was the product of a system that had handed him an elaborate map of his rights and a comprehensive list of everyone else’s obligations, and had somehow neglected to mention that neither document was worth anything without the willingness to extend good faith to the stranger making a twenty-meter mistake. He was performing a private theater of righteousness that made him feel powerful for ninety seconds and accomplished nothing except to raise his blood pressure and confirm his own irrelevance.

Meanwhile, in China, a traffic cop once stood in an empty intersection and moved his white-gloved hands through the morning air with the focused serenity of a man who had found his place in the world and intended to occupy it with complete commitment.

Guess which man I found more instructive.

The Black Heart Takeaway

Power is not a possession.

It is a relationship: between you and the context you operate in, between your role and your execution of it, between your expectations and your honest acceptance of what is actually on offer.

The Chinese cop knew this. He had been given very little, and he made something complete from it: a private world of purpose, built from discipline and commitment rather than entitlement.

The German vigilante had been given so much more: rights, freedoms, a democratic system built on centuries of hard-won principles and the sacrifices of people who understood exactly what those principles cost. And what had he made of it? A license to shout at strangers in one-way streets. Rights without responsibility are not freedom. They are a loaded weapon handed to someone who has never been taught to aim.

Know what you have been given. Then build something from it that is larger than yourself. Execute your role with full commitment. Do not mistake the map for the territory, the symbol for the power, or your outrage for your authority.

The cop in Sanming had none of what the German took for granted. He built his freedom anyway. That is the only kind worth having.

From the ongoing memoir A Piece of the Sky. The traffic cop from Chapter 1 remains one of the most instructive people I encountered in thirty years in China. That is why he opens the story.

Here is chapter 1, “The Soloist”, which opens with the Chinese traffic cop finding meaning in his vocation:

Deutsch

Black Heart Power Hack #6

Der Mann, dem die Kreuzung gehörte: Über Macht, Fügung und die seltsame Freiheit, den eigenen Platz zu kennen

Es gibt zwei Arten, mitten im Verkehr zu stehen.

Die erste: Sanming, Provinz Fujian, Chinesisches Neujahrsfest 1989. Eine leere Kreuzung. Keine Autos, keine Fußgänger, kein erkennbarer Grund, warum ein Verkehrspolizist dort stehen und ein unsichtbares Orchester aus Geisterfahrzeugen dirigieren sollte. Und doch steht er dort: Rücken gerade, weiße Handschuhe, die sich mit der präzisen Autorität eines Mannes bewegten, dem das Management des Universums anvertraut worden ist, egal wie vorübergehend und wie menschenleer es in diesem Moment auch sein mag. Denn er spielt nicht für ein Publikum. Er spielt für sich selbst und für die abstrakte Idee des Systems, das ihn dorthin gestellt hat. Er ist, im vollsten Sinne des Wortes, zufrieden. Im Einklang mit der Welt, in der er lebt.

Die zweite: Freiburg, Deutschland, Sommer 2026. Ich fahre auf einer kurzen Einbahnstraße etwa zwanzig Meter in die falsche Richtung, bemerke meinen Fehler und halte am Randstein. Ein entgegenkommendes Auto schwenkt aus, stellt sich direkt vor mich. Ein Mann, Mitte sechzig, mit einem kräftigen grauen Schnurrbart, steigt aus. Er schreit, noch bevor seine Tür vollständig offen ist. Macht mir die Hölle heiß wegen meines Angriffs auf die Straßenverkehrsordnung, mit der selbstgerechten Empörung von jemandem, dem sein Eigentum gestohlen wurde, dessen Würde als Staatsbürger mit Füßen getreten wurde. Er fotografiert mein Kennzeichen. Er schreit, dass er mich bei der Polizei melden will. Er ist, im vollsten Sinne des Wortes, außer sich.

Ich lächele freundlich, bedanke mich und fahre davon. Und denke seitdem an diese beiden Männer.

Die Architektur der Macht

Der chinesische Verkehrspolizist hatte etwas verstanden, das der deutsche Selbstjustizler vollständig vergessen hat: Macht gehört einem nicht. Sie ist geliehen. Sie fließt von einer Quelle her, die größer ist als man selbst, und die eigene Beziehung zu ihr, die eigene Würde, Autorität, der eigene Sinn, hängt vollständig davon ab, wie anmutig man diese Tatsache akzeptiert.

Der Polizist in Sanming hatte einen zugewiesenen Raum bekommen. Einen leeren Raum. Er hatte eine Uniform, eine Reihe von Gesten und einen Platz im System bekommen. Er betrachtete es nicht mit Groll, dass das System ihn klein gemacht hatte. Er zog seine Statur aus der präzisen und treuen Ausführung seines Willens. Das System brauchte diesen Platz gemanagt, und er war der Mann, dem diese Aufgabe anvertraut worden war. Das reichte. Mehr als das. Es war, im Vokabular der chinesischen ‘Schwarze Herz’ Philosophie, eine Form von 知足 zhi zu, das Wissen um Genügsamkeit. Der Mann, der weiß, wann es genug ist, ist nie arm.

Aber das ist, was ihn wirklich bemerkenswert machte: Innerhalb dieser engen Grenzen hatte er etwas sehr wertvolles geschaffen. Keine Karriere, keinen Reichtum, nichts nach herkömmlichen Maßstäben Messbares. Er hatte eine innere Welt aufgebaut, ein Gefühl von Sinn, eine Form von Würde, eine private Freiheit, die ausschließlich aus dem Material konstruiert war, das ihm das System, seine Welt, sein Kontext, gegeben hatte. Aus nichts mehr. Seine Rechte standen in keiner Verfassung. Er verdiente sie täglich, durch die Vollständigkeit seines Einsatzes. Seine Freiheit wurde ihm nicht gewährt. Sie wurde von ihm sebst erschaffen.

Der Deutsche in der Einbahnstraße hatte ein anderes Problem. Er war in einer politischen Kultur aufgewachsen, die ihm wiederholt versichert hatte, dass er das System sei. Dass das Gesetz existiere, um ihn persönlich zu schützen, und dass jeder Verstoß dagegen daher ein Verstoß gegen ihn sei. Dass seine Rechte “souverän” seien. Das ist eine schöne Idee. Sie ist auch, in unseren zunehmend wuterfüllten Zeiten, ein Generator katastrophaler Verwirrung. Denn sie erzeugt Bürger, die jede gesellschaftliche Reibung als persönlichen Angriff erleben, jeden Regelbruch als Verletzung, die sofortige Wiedergutmachung verlangt, und jeden Mitbürger, der aus der Reihe tanzt, als Feind statt als Nachbarn, der einen Fehler gemacht hat.

Der Unterschied ist dieser: Der Verkehrspolizist hatte sich seine Freiheit erschaffen. Der Deutsche hatte seine geerbt, geschenkt bekommen, und dieses Geschenk mit Leistung verwechselt. Er hatte etwas übernommen, das auf Jahrhunderten mühsam erkämpfter Grundsätze aufgebaut war, hatte sich in diese Grundsätze gehüllt wie ein König in geliehene Roben und nie gefragt, welche Verantwortungen damit einhergingen.

Der eine hat aus sehr wenig etwas aufgebaut. Der andere hat aus sehr viel nichts geschaffen.

Der chinesische Polizist war konstruktiv, für sich persönlich wie auch gesellschaftlich. Der deutsche Selbstjustizler war konfrontativ, unanpassungsfähig und letztlich destruktiv, denn er untergrub dabei genau das gesellschaftliche Gefüge, das seine Rechte schützen sollten.

Der chinesische Polizist hielt die Gesellschaft zusammen.

Der Deutsche hatte sich mit ihr verwechselt.

Über die überraschende Freiheit der Fügung

Das mag vielleicht kontraintuitiv klingen, aber es ist so: Der chinesiche Verkehrspolizist war freier als der deutsche Selbstjustizler.

Nicht politisch frei. Nicht frei in einem der Sinne, die die westliche liberale Philosophie schätzt.

Aber frei auf eine sehr persönliche Art: in dem spezifischen und unterschätzten Sinne, genau zu wissen, was seine Rolle, seine persönliche Bestimmung war, sie mit vollem Einsatz auszuführen und aus dieser Ausführung ein vollständiges und ungetrübtes Selbstgefühl zu ziehen. Er war nicht ängstlich wegen seines Platzes in der Welt. Er maß sich nicht an den Autos seiner Nachbarn oder den Gehältern seiner Kollegen. Er empörte sich nicht über das Verhalten von Fremden. Er war ein Mann mit einem Raum, und diesen besaß er. Machte etwas daraus.

Der Selbstjustizler hingegen erschöpfte sich. Sein Selbstgefühl hing vom korrekten Verhalten aller Menschen um ihn herum ab. Jede Abweichung war eine Bedrohung. Jeder Verstoß verlangte sein Eingreifen. Er hatte sich zum Hüter eines Gesellschaftsvertrags ernannt, den niemand ihn gebeten hatte durchzusetzen, und die Anstrengung dieser Hüterschaft, die ständige Überwachung, die Bereitschaft zur Empörung, die Fotos, die Schwüre, stand in jeder Linie seines Gesichts geschrieben. Er war zum perfekten Sklaven einer Welt geworden, deren eigentlichen Sinn er nie wirklich verstanden hatte.

Die Schwarze Herz Philosophie hat einen Namen für diejenigen, die in diese Falle tappen: 庸人自扰 yong ren zi rao, der mittelmäßige Mensch, der sich selbst nichts als Ärger macht. Er erzeugt sein eigenes Leid, indem er darauf besteht, dass die Welt seinen Erwartungen entspricht.

Die Welt spielt da leider nie mit.

Die politische Implikation

Ich behaupte nicht, dass die chinesische Form autoritärer Herrschaft Glücksgefühle produziert. Ich habe dreißig Jahre in China verbracht und miterlebt, was sie tatsächlich produziert, und das Bild ist erheblich komplizierter, als entweder ihre Bewunderer oder ihre Kritiker zuzugeben pflegen.

Aber ich stelle fest, dass die aktuelle Krise der westlichen Demokratien zu einem erheblichen Teil die Krise einer spezifischen und sich selbst verstärkenden Pathologie ist: die gleichzeitige Inflation individueller Rechte und die Wucherung von Regeln und Gesetzen, die darauf ausgelegt sind, jeden Winkel des gesellschaftlichen Lebens zu micro-managen. Die beiden nähren einander in einer destruktiven Spirale. Mehr Regeln produzieren mehr Verstöße, mehr Verstöße produzieren mehr Empörung, und mehr Empörung produziert Bürger, die die gewöhnliche Reibung des gesellschaftlichen Lebens als persönlichen Angriff auf ihre souveräne Würde erleben.

Wenn jede Unannehmlichkeit zu einem Unrecht wird und jeder Regelbrecher zum persönlichen Feind, stärkt sich die Zivilgesellschaft nicht. Sie atomisiert sich. Der deutsche Selbstjustizler in der Einbahnstraße schützt keine Demokratie. Er ist das Produkt eines Systems, das ihm eine aufwändige Karte seiner Rechte und eine umfassende Liste der Verpflichtungen aller anderen ausgehändigt hat, und irgendwie vergessen hat zu erwähnen, dass keines dieser Dokumente etwas wert ist ohne die Bereitschaft, dem Fremden, der zwanzig Meter in die falsche Richtung fährt, einen Vertrauensvorschuss zu geben. Der Mann führte ein Privattheater der Rechtschaffenheit auf, das ihn neunzig Sekunden lang mächtig fühlen lässt und nichts bewirkt außer seinen Blutdruck zu erhöhen und seine eigene Irrelevanz zu bestätigen.

Währenddessen stand in China ein Verkehrspolizist an einer leeren Kreuzung und bewegte seine weißbehandschuhten Hände durch die Morgenluft mit der fokussierten Gelassenheit eines Mannes, der seinen Platz in der Welt gefunden hatte und ihn mit vollem Einsatz einzunehmen gedachte.

Es ist nicht schwer zu erraten, welchen der beiden Männer ich lehrreicher fand.

Macht ist kein Besitz.

Macht ist eine Beziehung: zwischen dir und dem Kontext, in dem du operierst, zwischen deiner Rolle und ihrer Ausführung, zwischen deinen Erwartungen und deiner ehrlichen Akzeptanz dessen, was tatsächlich auf dem Tisch liegt.

Der chinesische Polizist wusste das. Er hatte sehr wenig bekommen und daraus etwas Vollständiges gemacht: eine private Welt aus Sinn, aufgebaut aus Disziplin und Einsatz statt aus Anspruchsdenken.

Der deutsche Selbstjustizler hatte so viel mehr bekommen: Rechte, Freiheiten, ein demokratisches System, aufgebaut auf Jahrhunderten mühsam erkämpfter Grundsätze und den Opfern von Menschen, die genau wussten, was diese Grundsätze kosteten. Und was hat er daraus gemacht? Eine Lizenz, Fremde in Einbahnstraßen anzuschreien.

Rechte ohne Verantwortung sind keine Freiheit. Sie sind eine geladene Waffe in den Händen von jemandem, der nie gelernt hat zu zielen.

Es hilft zu verstehen, was dir gegeben wurde. Dann kann man etwas daraus bauen, das größer ist als man selbst. Seine Rolle mit vollem Einsatz ausführen. Anstatt die Karte mit dem Territorium zu verwechseln, das Symbol mit Macht, oder Empörung mit Autorität.

Der Polizist in Sanming hatte nichts von dem, was der Deutsche als selbstverständlich betrachtete. Er baute sich seine Freiheit trotzdem.

Das ist die einzige Art von Freiheit, die es wert ist zu haben.

Aus dem laufenden Memoir “Ein Stück vom Himmel”. Der Verkehrspolizist aus Kapitel 1 bleibt einer der lehrreichsten Menschen, denen ich in dreißig Jahren in China begegnet bin. Deshalb eröffnet er die Geschichte.

Hier ist Kapitel 1, „Der Solist", das mit dem chinesischen Verkehrspolizisten beginnt, der in seiner Berufung Sinn findet:

English (Deutsch unten)

If you want to understand the raw psychological landscape of China, and how it became what it is today, skip the business books.

Start with Jiang Wen’s 1997 urban cult classic Keep Cool (original title: 有话好好说, If You Have Something to Say, Say It Nicely), and read the chapters of my China story covering the 1990s in Guangdong’s Wild South and in Shanghai.

The film first. Shot with jittery handheld cameras and a sweat-soaked pace, the title is a masterpiece of irony. Every character is merely one heartbeat from snapping. They are hyper-reactive, deafened by the roar of sudden, brutal capitalism with Chinese characteristics, and consumed entirely by the friction of the moment. A man tries to chop off a rival’s hand with a meat cleaver over a bruised ego. Nobody in the film is actually keeping cool.

Which is precisely the point.

The film is a precise psychological profile of the so-called 红尘 hong chen “Red Dust” of life and society that I stepped into when I launched my research agency in Shanghai in 1997.

***

The Setup: Two Men, One Company, Zero Shared Understanding of Partnership

My would-be partner Billy was a year younger than me, short, perpetually wreathed in cigarette smoke, with a clown’s grin that would have made him a joke if his fieldwork hadn’t been immaculate. Smart, ambitious, and entirely unwilling to invest a single yuan of actual money into the company we were supposedly co-founding fifty-fifty.

The logic he eventually produced, that his share of the profits should simply be deducted from the investment he had not made, was not stupidity. It was a sophisticated piece of 面子 face management: a way of claiming the status of investor without the inconvenience of being one. When I declined to participate in this creatively fraudulent scheme, his face darkened into the pout of a child denied a toy. Then his father took over.

Billy’s father was a former Red Guard. That single biographical detail explains everything that followed.

***

The Red Guard Playbook: Chaos as a Management Tool

The Cultural Revolution’s Red Guard generation learned survival in a theater of absolute betrayal. Children denounced their parents. Colleagues informed on colleagues. Survival required masking your real intentions behind ideological performance while reading everyone else’s through theirs. The skills this produced were not conventional business skills. They were insurgency skills: the ability to generate calculated chaos, to disorient your opponent, to use institutional muscle as a blunt instrument, and to treat any concession as confirmation that more pressure will produce more.

When Billy and his father realized my agency was generating real revenue, they did not see a business to participate in. They saw a resource to seize. A dozen men appeared in my office. The rented macho among them burned a cigarette into my conference table and delivered the terms of their extortion: fifty percent of all future profits, indefinitely. This was not a negotiation. It was the 敬酒不吃吃罚酒 jing jiu bu chi chi fa jiu maneuver: you were offered terms cordially, you declined, now you drink the forfeit.

***

Three Psychological Roots: Why they Behaved that Way

Westerners often read Chinese hostility or corporate betrayal as greed or outright crookedness. It runs considerably deeper. What I experienced with Billy (and with Benny, my previous employer whose entire accounting operation was a masterpiece of creative subtraction) was the product of three distinct psychological conditions that the 1990s had installed in an entire generation.

1. The Ethical Vacuum

When Deng Xiaoping declared that getting rich was glorious, he dismantled the ideological guardrails of Maoist China without replacing them with anything solid. The old moral framework, however coercive and distorted, was gone. A new legal framework was being constructed in its place, but incompletely and by design. Laws were broadly defined and left wide interpretive space. Rule by man was never fully abolished. The Party placed itself above the law and has never relinquished that position. The result is a system in which the law, and therefore the truth, remain perpetually negotiable, adjusted by whoever holds the relevant leverage at the relevant moment.

In such a space, if the system doesn’t guarantee your security, your only security is to secure it yourself by whatever means are available. Benny ran his company’s cash through his aunt’s creative accounting operation. Billy tried to seize mine. These were not aberrations. They were rational responses to a world without fixed norms, legal, moral or ethical.

2. The Theater of Dominance

In Keep Cool, negotiation happens at full volume and with maximum theatrical force. This was not style. It was strategy. In a world where everyone operates from the same position of fundamental insecurity, the performance of dominance (the cigarette burned into the table, the bunch of thugs, the explicit threat delivered without apology) serves a specific function. It is designed to spike your internal temperature. A panicked opponent makes bad decisions. A panicked opponent concedes.

The Red Guard playbook added a specifically Chinese refinement: legitimacy through institutional muscle. Billy’s father sent workers from his state-owned enterprise. The implied message was that the apparatus of the state itself was aligned against me. In 1997, this was not an unreasonable thing to imply.

3. Utility Over Accord

The so-called “和谐社会 Harmonious Society” that Xi Jinping’s predecessor Hu Jintao would promote as government policy in the 2000s was, at its operational core, harmony as performance. Behind closed doors, the actual operating system was and remains purely transactional utility: a partner is a partner until you have the leverage to become their master.

This is not cynicism peculiar to China. It is the logical endpoint of a system that spent decades teaching people that loyalty was the most dangerous thing you could offer, because it made you legible and therefore vulnerable.

***

The Black Heart Response: The Stillness Gambit

When Billy’s father deployed his campaign, the standard Western script offers two responses: counter-aggression, which feeds the chaos and amplifies it, or panicked retreat, which confirms that the strategy works.

Ancient Chinese ‘厚黑学 Black Heart’ wisdom dictates a third path.

You go still.

Not passive stillness. Deliberate stillness. The clinical refusal to let external chaos dictate your internal temperature. When the threats arrived, I did not yell, I did not panic, and I did not concede. I treated their rage as information rather than an event requiring an emotional response. By staying cold while their world was boiling, I reversed the vacuum. Hyper-reactive predators need your fear to fuel their momentum. When you meet an ambush with unblinking stillness, the performance has nowhere to go. They are left sitting with their own volatility.

In response to Billy’s threats I found Master Chu, a fixer who understood the precise geometry of black (黑道, organized crime) and white (白道, the police who hold the leash), and who had the district police chief deliver to Billy’s father the message that a police cell was available for anyone who found the negotiated solution unsatisfactory. In such cases, everyone finds the negotiated solution satisfactory.

The specific tools were particular to Shanghai in 1997. The underlying principle is permanent: when you refuse to perform fear, you dismantle the script that requires it.

***

Why This Matters Today

The men running China’s global strategy today are the children of the Red Guards. They co-created the 1990s. They remember the vulnerability of a nation systematically humiliated for a century, then spent the Mao decades in ethical freefall. They operate on a foundational belief that the world is a Darwinian arena and that the only permanent security is leverage.

This is not a criticism. It is a description. When you understand that Chinese strategic behavior, in business, in geopolitics, in negotiation, is shaped by this specific psychological inheritance, you stop being surprised by it and start being able to read it.

The 红尘 hong chen “Red Dust” of life and society never truly settles. It just changes what it coats.

***

Three things to remember in such situations - and not only in China:

Control your internal temperature. The performance of your fear is the weapon being used against you.

Find the fracture lines beneath the loud performance. Every theatrical threat conceals a real vulnerability. Billy’s father was a paper tiger who needed a single phone call from a deputy police chief to fold entirely.

Never demand immediate clarity. The moment you need the situation resolved is the moment you have handed over your leverage.

Because, before you can claim your piece of the sky, you need to learn to stand completely still in the middle of someone else’s burning wreck. If you haven’t read Chapter 21, “Partnership with Chinese Characteristics” (and the following “Paper Tigers and Bank Envelopes”) yet, here it is:

This is a regular, analytical Black Heart Power Hack from my serialized, 30-year China memoir “A Piece of the Sky”. If you want to read the described scene, find out what happened next, including the full Master Chu episode, and the Sharon revelation that finally clarified what aligned incentives actually means, subscribe below.

Deutsch

Black Heart Power Hack #5

Die Kunst des brennenden Tisches: Was eine Zigarette, ein Roter Gardist und ein Shanghaier Problemlöser mich über Macht lehrten

Wer verstehen will, wie China wurde, was es heute ist, sollte keine Wirtschaftsbücher lesen.

Schau dir Jiang Wens Kultklassiker von 1997 an, “Keep Cool” (Originaltitel: “有话好好说 Wenn du etwas zu sagen hast, sag es nett”) und lies die Kapitel in der “A Piece of the Sky” Story, die meine Jahre im Wilden Süden Guangdongs und in Shanghai in den späten 90ern beschreiben.

Der Film zuerst. Mit handgehaltenen Kameras und schnellem Tempo gedreht, ist der Titel ein Meisterwerk der Ironie. Jede Figur ist nur einen kurzen Herzschlag vom Zusammenbruch entfernt. Hyperreaktiv, taub vom Lärm des plötzlichen, brutalen Kapitalismus mit chinesischen Merkmalen, völlig vom Reibungsfeuer des Augenblicks verschluckt. Ein Mann versucht, einem Rivalen mit einem Fleischerbeil die Hand abzuhacken, nur wegen einer gekränkten Eitelkeit. Niemand in diesem Film bleibt cool.

Und genau das ist der Punkt.

Der Film reflektiert die psychologische Architektur des sogenannten 红尘 hong chen, dem “Roten Staub” des Lebens und der Gesellschaft, in die ich hineintrat, als ich 1997 in Shanghai meine Marktforschungsagentur gründete.

***

Die Ausgangslage: Zwei Männer, eine Firma, null gemeinsames Verständnis von Partnerschaft

Mein kurzzeitiger Partner Billy war ein Jahr jünger als ich, klein, dauerhaft in Zigarettenrauch gehüllt, mit einem Clownsgrinsen, das ihn zur Witzfigur gemacht hätte, wäre seine Arbeit nicht tadellos gewesen. Klug, ehrgeizig und unwillig, einen einzigen Yuan echtes Geld in die Firma einzubringen, die wir zu gleichen Teilen gründen wollten.

Die absurde Logik, die er schließlich produzierte (sein Investitionsanteil solle einfach von einem Gewinn abgezogen werden, den er nicht erwirtschaftet hatte) war keine Dummheit. Es war ein raffiniertes Stück 面子 “Face” Management: die Rolle des Investors beanspruchen, ohne die Unannehmlichkeit zu haben, einer zu sein. Als ich ablehnte, an diesem betrügerischem Schema teilzunehmen, verdüsterte sich sein Gesicht zum Schmollmund eines Kindes, dem man ein Spielzeug verweigert. Dann übernahm sein Vater.

Billys Vater war ein ehemaliger Roter Gardist. Das erklärt, was folgte.

***

Das Drehbuch des Roten Gardisten: Chaos als Managementinstrument

Die Generation der Kulturrevolution, und vor allen Dingen die Roten Gardisten, lernte das Überleben in einem Theater des absoluten Verrats. Kinder denunzierten ihre Eltern. Kollegen informierten über Kollegen. Überleben erforderte, die eigenen wahren Absichten hinter ideologischer Performance zu verbergen und gleichzeitig die wahren Absichten aller anderen durch eben diese Performance zu lesen. Was das hervorbrachte, waren keine konventionellen Geschäftsfähigkeiten. Sondern die Fähigkeit, kalkuliertes Chaos zu erzeugen, den Gegner zu desorientieren, institutionelle Muskeln als stumpfes Instrument einzusetzen und jedes Zugeständnis als Bestätigung zu behandeln, dass Druck immer mehr Druck erzeugt. Solange, bis der Gegner zusammenbricht.

Als Billy und sein Vater erkannten, dass meine Agentur echten Umsatz generierte, sahen sie kein Unternehmen, an dem man teilhaben wollte. Sie sahen eine Ressource, die man beschlagnahmen konnte. Ein Dutzend Männer tauchte in meinem Büro auf. Der Miet-Macho unter ihnen brannte seine Zigarette in meinen Konferenztisch und überbrachte seine erpresserischen Bedingungen: fünfzig Prozent aller künftigen Gewinne, auf unbegrenzte Zeit. Das war keine Verhandlung. Es war das 敬酒不吃吃罚酒 Manöver: Man hatte mir höflich einen Toast angeboten. Ich hatte abgelehnt. Jetzt sollte ich den Straftrank zu mir nehmen.

***

Die psychologischen Wurzeln

Westler lesen chinesische Undurchsichtigkeit, Verrat oder gar Betrug als Gier oder schlichte Kriminalität. Es reicht erheblich tiefer. Was ich mit Billy erlebte (und mit Benny, meinem früheren Arbeitgeber, dessen gesamte Buchführungsoperation ein Meisterwerk kreativer Subtraktion war) war das Produkt dreier psychologischer Bedingungen, die einer ganzen Generation einprogrammiert waren.

1. Das ethische Vakuum

Als Deng Xiaoping erklärte, reich zu werden sei glorreich, demontierte er die ideologischen Leitplanken des maoistischen China, ohne sie durch irgendetwas solides zu ersetzen. Der alte moralische Rahmen, wie repressiv und verzerrt er auch war, existierte nicht mehr. Ein neuer Rechtsrahmen war im Aufbau, unvollständig und auch absichtlich so gehalten. Gesetze waren weit gefasst und ließen großen Interpretationsspielraum (was auch heute weitestgehend noch so ist). Das Prinzip der “Herrschaft des Menschen” wurde nie vollständig abgeschafft. Die Partei stellte sich über das Gesetz und hat diese Position nie aufgegeben. Das Ergebnis: ein System, in dem das Gesetz, und damit die “Wahrheit”, dauerhaft verhandelbar bleibt, angepasst von demjenigen, der im entscheidenden Moment den relevanten Hebel hält.

In einer solchen Welt, in der das System keine Sicherheit garantiert, ist die einzige Sicherheit, die man sich selbst verschafft, und zwar mit allen verfügbaren Mitteln. Benny ließ das Firmengeld durch die kreative Buchführungsoperation seiner Tante laufen. Billy versuchte, meine Firma zu kapern. Das waren keine Ausreißer. Es waren rationale Antworten auf eine Welt ohne feste Normen, weder rechtliche noch ethische.

2. Das Theater der Dominanz

In “Keep Cool” findet Verhandlung bei voller Lautstärke und mit maximaler theatralischer Wucht statt. Das war kein ästhetischer Filmstil, sondern bewusste Erzählstrategie. In einer Welt, in der alle von derselben Position grundlegender Unsicherheit aus operieren, erfüllt die Performance der Dominanz, die in den Tisch gebrannte Zigarette, das Dutzend Männer, die explizite Drohung, eine spezifische Funktion. Sie soll deine Innentemperatur hochjagen. Ein in Panik versetzter Gegner trifft schlechte Entscheidungen. Ein in Panik versetzter Gegner gibt nach, gibt schließlich auf.

Das Drehbuch des Roten Gardisten fügte eine spezifisch chinesische Verfeinerung hinzu: Legitimität durch institutionelle Muskeln. Billys Vater schickte Arbeiter aus seinem Staatsunternehmen. Die implizite Botschaft: Der Staatsapparat selbst stellt sich anscheinend gegen den ausgesuchten Gegner. Und genau das ist die Implikation.

3. Nützlichkeit statt Einigkeit

Die sogenannte “和谐社会 Harmonische Gesellschaft”, die Xi Jinpings Vorgänger Hu Jintao in den 2000ern als Regierungspolitik propagierte, war im Kern Harmonie als Performance. Hinter verschlossenen Türen war und bleibt das tatsächliche Betriebssystem reine Transaktionslogik: Ein Partner ist nur solange ein Partner, bis man den Hebel hat, sein Meister zu werden. Das ist kein Zynismus, der China eigen wäre. Es ist der logische Endpunkt eines Systems, das Jahrzehnte damit verbracht hatte, den Menschen beizubringen, dass Loyalität das Gefährlichste war, was man anbieten konnte, weil sie einen lesbar und damit verwundbar machte.

***

Die Schwarze Herz Antwort: Stille

Als Billys Vater seinen Feldzug entfaltete, bietet das übliche westliche Drehbuch zwei Antworten: Gegenangriff, der das Chaos nährt und verstärkt, oder panische Kapitulation, die bestätigt, dass die Strategie funktioniert.

Die alte chinesische Schwarze Herz Weisheit schreibt einen dritten Weg vor.

Man wird still.

Nicht passiv still. Bewusst still. Die klinische Weigerung, externes Chaos die eigene Innentemperatur diktieren zu lassen. Als die Drohungen kamen, schrie ich nicht, ich geriet nicht in Panik, und ich gab schon gar nicht nach. Ich behandelte ihre Wut als Information, nicht als Ereignis, das eine emotionale Antwort erforderte. Indem ich kalt blieb, während ihre Welt kochte, kehrte ich das Vakuum um. Hyperreaktive Räuber brauchen deine Angst als Treibstoff. Wenn man einen Hinterhalt mit regloser Stille begegnet, hat die Performance nirgendwo hinzugehen. Sie bleiben mit ihrer eigenen Volatilität sitzen.

Dann fand ich Meister Chu, einen Problemlöser, der die genaue Geometrie von Schwarz (黑道, organisiertes Verbrechen) und Weiß (白道, die Polizei, die die Leine hält) verstand. Er ließ den Bezirkspolizeivorstand Billy’s Vater die Botschaft überbringen, dass eine Zelle für jeden bereitstehe, dem die verhandelte Lösung nicht zusage. Wem das passiert, findet jeder die verhandelte Lösung zusagend, ob Roter Gardist oder nicht.

Die spezifischen Werkzeuge waren dem Shanghai von 1997 eigen. Das zugrundeliegende Prinzip ist zeitlos: Wer sich weigert, Angst zu performen, demontiert das Drehbuch, das sie verlangt.

***

Warum das heute wichtig ist

Die Männer, die Chinas globale Strategie heute steuern, sind die Kinder der Roten Gardisten. Sie haben die 1990er mitgestaltet. Sie erinnern sich an die Verwundbarkeit einer Nation, die ein Jahrhundert lang systematisch gedemütigt wurde und dann die Mao Jahrzehnte im ethischen Freifall verbrachte. Sie operieren auf der Grundüberzeugung, dass die Welt eine darwinistische Arena ist und die einzige dauerhafte Sicherheit der Hebel ist.

Das ist keine Kritik. Es ist eine Beschreibung. Wer versteht, dass chinesisches Strategieverhalten in allen Lebensbereichen von diesem spezifischen psychologischen Erbe geprägt ist, hört auf, davon überrascht zu werden, und beginnt, es zu lesen.

Der 红尘 hong chen “Rote Staub” des Lebens setzt sich nie wirklich ab. Er legt sich nur auf neue Oberflächen.

Drei Dinge, die man sich in solchen Situationen merken sollte - und nicht nur in China:

Kontrolliere deine Innentemperatur. Die Performance deiner Angst ist die Waffe, die gegen dich eingesetzt wird.

Finde die Bruchlinien unter der lauten Performance. Jede theatralische Drohung verbirgt eine echte Schwäche. Billys Vater war ein Papiertiger, der einen einzigen Anruf eines stellvertretenden Polizeivorstands brauchte, um vollständig einzuknicken.

Fordere keine sofortige Klarheit. In dem Moment, in dem du die Situation gelöst haben musst, hast du deinen Hebel abgegeben.

Fazit: Bevor du dein Stück vom Himmel beanspruchen kannst, musst du lernen, vollkommen still inmitten des brennenden Wracks eines anderen zu stehen. Wenn du noch nicht Kapitel 21, “Partnerschaft mit Chinesischen Merkmalen” (und das darauffolgende “Papiertiger und Bankkuverts” Kapitel) gelesen hast, hier ist der Link:

Dies ist ein regelmäßiger, analytischer Black Heart Power Hack von “A Piece of the Sky”, meiner 30-jährigen China Story. Wenn Du lesen möchtest, was mit Billy als nächstes geschah, einschließlich der Meister Chu Episode, der Sharon Enthüllung, die schließlich klarstellte, was “aufeinander abgestimmte Interessen” in China wirklich bedeuten, abonniere:

English (Deutsch unten)

Most people treat uncertainty as a horror scenario. They spend their entire lives and vast amounts of emotional capital trying to build fortress-like structures of “safety” and predictability.

They cling to the “Script”, which is invariably defined and written by other people’s expectations, because it promises a tomorrow that looks exactly like today. Which is, for instance, a reason why some stay in toxic relationships, while others never find the courage to realize a business idea or change directions.

But the Script is an illusion, other people’s expectations are not your life. And when reality inevitably tears them down, those who demanded absolute “clarity” are the first to fall apart.

Understand the fundamental paradox: Uncertainty is psychological horror, but it is also the ultimate vector of personal power.

The Horror: The Mind’s Default Trap

Human psychology is hardwired to view the unknown as a predator, a danger. When a situation loses its clear coordinates, the brain doesn’t just see a lack of information, it projects its worst nightmares into the mental and emotional vacuum.

We dread uncertainty because it forces us to confront our own lack of control. It exposes our psychological fears and anxieties. If you enter an uncertain environment demanding immediate clarity, you make panicked concessions. You look for quick, desperate exits. You blame whoever and whatever you can.

In Chinese Black Heart wisdom, a target who cannot tolerate uncertainty is a target who is already defeated. They will walk willingly into a trap just because the trap promises a definitive answer.

The Power: Camus and the Fuel of the Living

Albert Camus famously argued that living within the absurd, unpredictable friction of the world is precisely what keeps us alive. When you stop demanding that the universe organize itself around your comfort, a liberating clarity takes over.

Read more

English (Deutsch unten)

美人计 mei ren ji, or “Beauty Trap”, functions by weaponizing a target’s ego, their existential, emotional or sexual impulses to ensnare them.

This is precisely what happened to my Canadian boss, Randall, in Taipei, a white trash specimen of limited capacity whose toxic mix of power, greed, and horniness led to his downfall. Lily, a young advertising executive from Shanghai, became his mistress at the height of his power. She cajoled him into a position of total vulnerability, which she then deftly and ruthlessly exploited for financial gain.

Read about this compelling example of “Beauty Trap” in Chapter 18:

Let’s have a brief look at the origins, psychology and application of the Beauty Trap, in various spheres of human interaction:

In Chinese strategic thought, the Beauty Trap is an ancient, systemically integrated psychological weapon. As the 31st of the “Thirty-Six Stratagems” dating back to the Ming Dynasty, its core mechanism is described clearly: “When the enemy is strong, weaken his body. When his commander is wise, undermine his will. By using beautiful women, you create division, exhaust his energy, and cloud his judgment.”

In modern politics and business, and sometimes regular social relationships, Beauty Trap operates as a clinical tool for compromise, information leverage, and operational control.

The Original Philosophy: From Temptation to Entrapment

It’s not a simple “honey pot” designed for immediate blackmail. Instead, like so many things in China, it is a longer-term psychological conditioning process that unfolds in four calculated steps:

Step 1: The Vulnerability Scan. Long before an approach is made, the target’s psychological profile, domestic friction, and ego are scanned and mapped. The strategy targets the ego, not the libido, as the latter is merely an executional element (and not always resorted to).

Step 2: The Placement. The agent appears organically as a newly introduced assistant, consultant, or guide. They mirror the target’s intellectual interests, offer deep validation, and make themselves appear indispensable.

Step 3: The Compromise. The trap is sprung when the target is physically or emotionally isolated, for instance, within the alcohol-fueled, mandatory hospitality of business banquets.

Step 4: Securing the Handle, or 抓把柄 zhua ba bing. Compromising evidence is collected and stored indefinitely, with the ultimate objective being the acquisition of leverage and manipulation.

Modern Application

Corporate Warfare: In negotiations, Western partners or rival executives are steered into compromising situations. Once the ba bing, the handle, is secured, it is used implicitly, far away from media headlines. A sudden, unexpected concession on intellectual property rights, tech transfers, valuation, etc., is frequently the result of a quietly brandished handle. The target compromises their company interests to protect their personal reputation and career.

Internal Politics: Inside the Party, the Beauty Trap is utilized in factional power struggles. High-level officials routinely keep so-called 二奶 er nai, another name for “mistress”, as status symbols. Tolerated during periods of political alignment, these relationships are meticulously documented by internal discipline and security apparatuses. When a purge or anti-corruption campaign occurs, the evidence is weaponized. It provides a clean moral justification to remove an official without exposing deeper systemic fractures. This is why fallen officials’ sexual misbehavior is often heavily publicized after their conviction.

Espionage & Elite Capture: When applied to foreign diplomats, politicians, or tech executives, the objective is long-term compliance. Once compromised, the asset is told the evidence will remain buried unless they provide seemingly low-level information. Over time, the asset is slowly boiled into a full-scale espionage tool.

The “Black Heart” Psychology of Survival

To understand the clinical effectiveness of this weapon, let us look through the lens of ancient “Black Heart” wisdom, the pragmatic calculation of power operating beneath polite society.

The Weaponization of “Face”, or 面子 mian zi: In the West, a scandal might end in an acrimonious divorce or a public relations apology. In the collective, face-driven hierarchy of China, the loss of mian zi is a fate considered worse than death, because it leads to serious damage to one’s social standing, family honor, and political utility. As a perceived result, the threat of exposure carries ten times the psychological leverage.

Read about the power of Face in Chapter 21:

The Absence of Moralism: Westerners view honey pots as a dirty, dishonorable trick. In the hyper-pragmatic mindset of Chinese strategy, there is no moral shame in using the Beauty Trap. If you fall into the trap, the fault lies entirely with you, the victim, for being weak, arrogant, and undisciplined. The strategist who deployed the trap is praised for their clinical efficiency.

Ultimate power belongs to those who view human desire not as a vice to be judged, but as an operational vulnerability to be scanned, managed, and exploited.

Also, bear in mind that a Beauty Trap actually requires no sex. It functions just as effectively on a purely emotional frequency, where the perpetrator systematically scans and fulfills the target’s emotional or psychological deficits. The ultimate objective is identical: to gain access to certain “secrets”, to acquire the ba bing handle, and secure an unassailable position of permanent leverage, manipulation and control.

Read about it in upcoming chapters when, years later, I had to fight a war of a completely different nature.

DEUTSCH

Black Heart Dispatch #3: The Beauty Trap

美人计 mei ren ji, die „Beauty Trap“, funktioniert, indem sie das Ego sowie die existenziellen, emotionalen oder sexuellen Impulse einer Zielperson als Waffe nutzt, um diese zu verführen und in die Falle zu locken.

Genau das passierte meinem Boss Randall in Taipei, einem Prachtexemplar von begrenzter intellektueller Kapazität, dessen toxische Mischung aus Macht, Gier und Geilheit zu seinem Untergang führte. Lily, eine junge Werbemanagerin aus Shanghai, wurde auf dem Höhepunkt seiner Karriere seine Mätresse. Sie umschmeichelte ihn, drängte ihn in eine Position totaler Verwundbarkeit, die sie anschließend skrupellos ausnutzte.

Lies diese fesselnde Episode in Kapitel 18:

Ein kurzer Blick auf die Ursprünge, Psychologie und Anwendung der Beauty Trap in verschiedenen Bereichen:

In der chinesischen Strategielehre ist die Beauty Trap eine uralte, systemisch integrierte psychologische Waffe. Als 31. der „Sechsunddreißig Stratageme“, deren Ursprung bis in die Ming Dynastie zurückgeht, wird ihr Kernmechanismus klar und deutlich beschrieben: „Wenn der Feind stark ist, schwäche seinen Körper. Wenn sein Kommandant klug ist, untergrabe seinen Willen. Indem du schöne Frauen einsetzt, säst du Zwietracht, erschöpfst seine Energie und vernebelst sein Urteilsvermögen.“

In der modernen Politik, im Business und manchmal auch in ganz normalen sozialen Beziehungen fungiert die Beauty Trap als klinisches Werkzeug für Kompromittierung, Informationshebel und operative, manipulative Kontrolle.

Die ursprüngliche Philosophie

Es handelt sich hierbei nicht um eine simple „Honigtopf“ Operation, die auf sofortige Erpressung abzielt. Stattdessen ist es, wie so viele Dinge in China, ein langfristiger psychologischer Konditionierungsprozess, der sich in vier kalkulierten Schritten vollzieht:

Schritt 1: Der Scan. Lange bevor eine Annäherung stattfindet, werden das psychologische Profil des Ziels, existentielle oder emotionale Spannungen und das Ego analysiert. Die Strategie zielt immer auf das Ego, nicht auf die Libido. Letztere ist lediglich ein ausführendes Element.

Schritt 2: Die Platzierung. Der Agent oder die Agentin taucht organisch im Umfeld der Zielperson auf: als neu eingeführte Assistenz oder Guide. Sie spiegeln die intellektuellen Interessen des Ziels, bieten emotionale Validierung und lassen sich als unentbehrlich erscheinen.

Schritt 3: Die Kompromittierung. Die Falle schnappt zu, wenn das Ziel physisch oder emotional isoliert ist, beispielsweise im Rahmen geschäftlicher Essen (wo oft Alkohol im Spiel ist), Besichtigungen, etc.

Schritt 4: Das Sichern des Hebels, 抓把柄 zhua ba bing. Kompromittierendes Beweismaterial wird gesammelt und gespeichert. Das Ziel ist die Erlangung von Druckmitteln und Manipulationsmöglichkeiten.

Moderne Anwendung: Corporate Warfare

In Verhandlungen werden westliche Partner oder rivalisierende Manager systematisch in kompromittierende Situationen manövriert. Sobald das ba bing, der Hebel, gesichert ist, wird er implizit eingesetzt, also weit weg von Medienschlagzeilen. Ein plötzliches, unerwartetes Einlenken eines westlichen Managers bei geistigen Eigentumsrechten, Technologietransfers oder Firmenbewertungen ist häufig das Ergebnis eines im Stillen vorgezeigten Hebels. Das Ziel opfert die Interessen seines Unternehmens, um den eigenen Ruf und die Karriere zu schützen.

Moderne Anwendung: Politik

Innerhalb der Partei wird die Beauty Trap in fraktionellen Machtkämpfen genutzt. Hochrangige Funktionäre halten sich oft sogenannte 二奶 er nai, ein anderes Wort für Mätresse oder Zweitfrau, als Statussymbol. Solange man politisch auf einer Linie liegt, werden diese Beziehungen toleriert, gleichzeitig werden sie jedoch von den internen Disziplin- und Sicherheitsapparaten akribisch dokumentiert. Kommt es zu einer Säuberungswelle oder einer Antikorruptionskampagne, wird das Beweismaterial als Waffe eingesetzt. Es liefert eine saubere moralische Rechtfertigung, um einen Funktionär zu entfernen, ohne tiefere systemische Brüche offenzulegen. Das ist der Grund, warum das sexuelle Fehlverhalten gestürzter Beamter nach deren Verurteilung oft massiv publiziert wird.

Moderne Anwendung: Spionage & Elite Capture

Wenn die Beauty Trap auf ausländische Diplomaten, Politiker oder Tech Manager angewendet wird, ist das Ziel langfristige Gefügigkeit. Einmal kompromittiert, wird der Zielperson signalisiert, dass das Material vergraben bleibt, es sei denn, sie liefert scheinbar harmlose Informationen. Mit der Zeit wird das Opfer langsam weichgekocht, bis es als vollwertiges Spionagewerkzeug funktioniert.

Die „Black Heart“ Psychologie des Überlebens

Um die klinische Effektivität dieser Waffe zu verstehen, müssen wir die Beauty Trap, wie sie in China eingesetzt wird, durch die Brille der „Black Heart“ Weisheiten über die menschliche Psychologie betrachten.

Die Instrumentalisierung von „Gesicht“, 面子 mian zi: Im Westen endet ein Skandal vielleicht in einer schmerzhaften Scheidung und einer PR-wirksamen Entschuldigung. In der kollektiven, gesichtswahrenden Hierarchie Chinas gilt der Verlust von mian zi als ein Schicksal, das schlimmer ist als der Tod, da es den völligen Ruin des sozialen Status, der Familienehre und des politischen Nutzens bedeutet. Als logische Konsequenz besitzt die Drohung der Bloßstellung eine zehnmal höhere psychologische Hebelwirkung.

Einen fesselnden Einblick in die Macht des „Gesichtswahrens“ bietet Kapitel 21:

Ohne Moralismus: Westler betrachten “Honigtöpfe” oft als schmutzigen, unmoralischen Trick. In der hyperpragmatischen Denkweise der chinesischen Strategielehre existiert keine moralische Scham beim Einsatz von Beauty Trap. Wenn du in die Falle tappst, liegt die Schuld ganz allein bei dir, dem Opfer, weil du schwach, arrogant und undiszipliniert warst. Der Stratege, der die Falle gestellt hat, wird für seine klinische Effizienz gelobt.

Die ultimative Macht gehört eben jenen, die das menschliche Begehren nicht als ein zu verurteilendes Laster betrachten, sondern als eine operative Schwachstelle, die man scannt, verwaltet und ausnutzt, wenn es sein muss.

Hinzu kommt, dass die Beauty Trap keineswegs sexueller Natur sein muss. Sie funktioniert ebenso effektiv auf einer rein emotionalen Frequenz, auf der der Stratege systematisch die emotionalen oder psychologischen Defizite oder Verlangen des Ziels scannt und füllt. Das Endziel bleibt identisch: Zugriff auf bestimmte „Geheimnisse“ zu erlangen, das ba bing, den Hebel, in die Hand zu bekommen und sich eine unangreifbare Position permanenter Einflussnahme, Manipulation und Kontrolle zu sichern.

Mehr dazu liest du in den kommenden Kapiteln von “A Piece of the Sky”, als ich einige Jahre später einen “Krieg” von einer ganz anderen Art führen musste.

English (Deutsch unten)

I couldn’t sleep.

These men were not bluffing. Billy’s father had the power and the means to force me into paying his son, and he could do so with an impunity that felt almost casual. They could destroy my business in an afternoon. They could have someone hurt me. And there was, as far as I could see, nothing I could do about it.

When I told Yin, she suggested I negotiate a reasonable 分手费 fen shou fei, a separation fee, and move on. Sharon agreed. There was no point in waging a war I couldn’t win, a fight that would drain the very energy I needed to survive. I was working fourteen hours a day on projects. The industry was heating up and the competition multiplying. The first generation of genuinely talented Chinese professionals were leaving the multinationals they’d joined in the early nineties to start their own operations. Fighting Billy’s father was not an investment in my future. It was a way of not having one.

So when they arrived the next day, I was ready to offer a face-saving exit fee and close the theater.

After smoke-massaging the inside of his cheeks for a full minute, Tough Guy delivered his terms with the gravity of a funeral director. “You and Billy agreed on a fifty-fifty partnership. He wants his money for the past two months, right now. And he’ll stay on board as an investor partner. That means every quarter, you pay him fifty percent of the profits.”

There was no need to negotiate further.

Read more

English (Deutsch unten)

.

Here is a list of key characters that appear in this epic story, and as they appear in chronological order. This list is updated with every new chapter:

Zhang Bin: my first close Chinese friend, a student at Beijing university, who I first met as a student in Beijing, who took me to his home in Sanming for Chinese New Year 1989. He taught me that everyone has a “Piece of the Sky” reserved for them, but which one has to fight for.

My Mother: who raised me with conscientious motherly love, but who later succumbed to an emotional midlife crisis that tore herself and, sadly, our bonds apart.

My Stepfather: my mother’s second husband, an emotional wreck that always considered me a nuisance.

Hugo: my mother’s long-time soul mate and, eventually, third husband.

Wei: my post-divorce girlfriend in Shanghai during the 2010s.

Chai Lei: one of Zhang Bin’s fellow students and a protester on the Square in 1989, who would eventually climb the ranks in Beijing’s political machinery.

Mrs Wang: one of my Beijing university tutors during our university exchange year in China (1988-89), and who first stoked my interest in Chinese thought and philosophy.

Yanwen: Zhang Bin’s fellow student who, shortly after the June 4 events in 1989, entrusted her protest diaries to me, which I took back to London. I guarded and returned them to her 32 years later, when I finally managed to locate her again.

Xiufen: a young woman I met in Beijing shortly before the June 4 events, and then again when I returned to the capital shortly after. My first crush in China, although we never got together.

Li Juan: my erudite young tutor at the Stanford Center in Taipei (1991-93), who became a mentor (and brief lover) during my student days in Taiwan, and who introduced me to the ancient Chinese Black Heart wisdom.

Theresa: my girlfriend in Taiwan in the early 90s, and the great love of my life. Our relationship lasted only little more than half a year, until she was suddenly diagnosed with cancer and died shortly after.

Chairman Liu: my first boss who recruited me to build up a small trading company in Tainan, Taiwan. Entrepreneur, gambler, risk-taker.

Bernie: my mother’s long-lost half-brother from East Germany, a dreamer and pretender, and husband of Rita.

Rita: Bernie’s wife, an unemployed middle-aged ex-civil servant in East Germany, who Chairman Liu and I briefly hired as our procurement liaison in Germany.

Wushu: A friend’s relative in Guangzhou, a failed businessman, trickster and pretender, who tried to act as an ‘advisor’ to my fledgling attempts of building a trading business in the Wild South.

Yin: Wushu’s niece from Foshan, near Guangzhou, who became my girlfriend when I moved to Guangdong and, eventually, my wife.

Ah Chun: Yin’s older brother, who I hired as a driver. A loser whose theft lead to the collapse of my first entrepreneurial activities in the Wild South.

Ren: the boss of Foshan Leather Co in the Wild South, who I approached as potential first customer.

Hu: Foshan Leather’s import manager who introduced me to the ‘shark pond’ rules of the Wild South, and who made me understand what Win-Win actually meant (and means) in China.

Jacky: Manager at Antonio Leather, a customer who became the only trustworthy friend of mine in the Wild South.

Kurt: export manager of my East German tannins supplier whose products I was selling in the Wild South.

Shine: son of a Party official and self-made entertainment mogul in Guangzhou, who introduced me to the inner workings of the machine that fueled China’s economic miracle and eventually propelled the nation towards today’s superpower status.

Rod: Asia-Pacific boss of the American market intelligence company that hired me for an executive position in Taipei and who then sent me to Shanghai where I stayed for 25 years.

Heather: my immediate superior at the market intelligence firm in Taipei who, when her romantic advances towards me hit a wall, tried to discredit me, an attempt that turned into a disaster for her, as I successfully applied the power of Black Heart wisdom that I had learned from Li Juan.

Randall: my boss at the market intelligence firm in Taipei, a corrupt and philandering American who saw me as competition for the leadership position of the firm’s fledgling mainland business, and who tried everything to stop me from being sent to Shanghai.

Jimmy: deputy boss of the same firm, a gay Taiwanese who hated Randall and who became my closest friend during that year working in Taipei.

Benny: manager of the firm’s Shanghai branch, the epitome of greed and incompetence, which lead to his downfall not long after I moved to Shanghai.

Billy: Benny’s competent and ambitious fieldwork manager, who then wanted to become my equal partner in a new venture, after Benny’s downfall.

Sharon: Billy’s assistant and very competent fieldwork manager, who eventually joined my firm in Shanghai.

Master Chu: A lawyer and self-styled "Robin Hood" in Shanghai who specialized in negotiating with both thugs and the police, a man who specialized in resolving social and economic friction, including the intimidation I faced while establishing my own company.

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Deutsch

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Hier ist eine Liste der Hauptfiguren, die in dieser epischen Geschichte vorkommen, in chronologischer Reihenfolge ihres Erscheinens. Diese Liste wird mit jedem neuen Kapitel aktualisiert:

Zhang Bin: Mein erster enger chinesischer Freund, Student an der Peking Universität, den ich während meines Austauschjahres in Beijing kennenlernte, der mich zum chinesischen Neujahrsfest 1989 in sein Elternhaus nach Sanming mitnahm. Er lehrte mich, dass jeder Mensch sein eigenes “Stück vom Himmel” für sich reserviert hat, um das man jedoch kämpfen muss.

Meine Mutter: Sie zog mich mit gewissenhafter mütterlicher Liebe auf, erlag dann leider einer emotionalen Midlife Crisis, die sie selbst und unsere Mutter-Sohn Bindung zerriss.

Mein Stiefvater: Der zweite Ehemann meiner Mutter, ein emotionales Wrack, das mich immer als Störfaktor betrachtete.

Hugo: Der langjährige Seelenverwandte meiner Mutter, ihr dritter Ehemann.

Wei: Meine Freundin in Shanghai während der 2010er Jahre, nach meiner Scheidung.

Chai Lei: Einer von Zhang Bins Mitstudenten und Demonstrant auf dem Platz des Himmlischen Friedens 1989, der später im politischen Machtapparat Beijings aufstieg.

Frau Wang: Eine meiner Tutorinnen an der Peking Universität während meines Austauschjahres, die mein Interesse an chinesischem Denken und Philosophie weckte.

Yanwen: Zhang Bins Mitstudentin, die mir kurz nach dem 4. Juni 1989 ihre Protesttagebücher anvertraute. Diese nahm ich mit nach London und gab sie ihr 32 Jahre später zurück, als ich sie endlich wiederfinden konnte.

Xiufen: Eine junge Frau, die ich kurz vor den Ereignissen vom 4. Juni in Beijing traf und dann erneut bei meiner Rückkehr kurz darauf, meine erste Schwärmerei in China, obwohl wir nie ein Paar wurden.

Li Juan: Meine hochgebildete Tutorin am Stanford Center in Taipei, die während meiner Zeit in Taiwan zu meiner Mentorin wurde und mich in die klassischen chinesischen Black Heart Weisheiten einführte.

Theresa: Meine Freundin in Taiwan, und große Liebe meines Lebens. Unsere Beziehung dauerte nur ein etwas mehr als halbes Jahr, bis sie plötzlich eine Krebsdiagnose erhielt und kurz darauf starb.

Chairman Liu: Mein erster Chef, der mich rekrutierte, um ein kleines Handelsunternehmen in Tainan (Taiwan) aufzubauen. Unternehmer, Spieler, Risikoträger.

Bernie: Der lange verschollene Halbbruder meiner Mutter aus Ostdeutschland, ein Träumer und Hochstapler, Ehemann von Rita.

Rita: Bernies Frau, eine arbeitslose, ehemalige Beamtin aus der DDR, die mein Boss, Chairman Liu, und ich als unsere Beschaffungskoordinatorin in Deutschland einstellten.

Wushu: Ein Bekannter in Guangzhou, gescheiterter Geschäftsmann und Trickster, der sich als eine Art Berater anbot, bei meinen ersten Versuchen, ein Handelsgeschäft im Wilden Süden aufzubauen.

Yin: Wushus Nichte aus Foshan bei Guangzhou, die meine Freundin und schließlich meine Ehefrau wurde.

Ah Chun: Yins älterer Bruder, den ich als Fahrer einstellte; ein Verlierertyp, dessen Diebstahl zum Zusammenbruch meiner ersten unternehmerischen Aktivitäten im Wilden Süden führte.

Ren: Chef der Foshan Leather Co. im Wilden Süden, den ich als potenziellen ersten Kunden ansprach.

Hu: Importmanager von Foshan Leather, der mich in die Gesetze des Haifischbeckens des Wilden Südens einführte, und der mich lehrt, was „Win-Win“ in China wirklich bedeutet(e).

Jacky: Manager bei Antonio Leather, mein bester Kunde und einziger vertrauenswürdiger Freund im Wilden Süden.

Kurt: Exportmanager meines ostdeutschen Gerbstofflieferanten, dessen Produkte ich im Wilden Süden an Lederfabriken verkaufte.

Shine: Sohn eines Parteifunktionärs und Selfmade Entertainment Mogul in Guangzhou, der mich in die inneren Abläufe jener Maschinerie einführte, die Chinas Wirtschaftswunder befeuerten und die Nation zur heutigen Supermacht machten.

Rod: Asien-Pazifik Chef des amerikanischen Marktforschungsunternehmens, das mich für eine Führungsposition in Taipei einstellte, und der mich ein Jahr später nach Shanghai schickte, wo ich dann 25 Jahre blieb, mich selbst und die Welt veränderte.

Heather: Meine direkte Vorgesetzte in Taipei, die versuchte, mich zu diskreditieren, nachdem ihre romantischen Annäherungsversuche scheiterten – ein Versuch, der für sie zum Desaster wurde, als ich zum ersten Mal erfolgreich die Black Heart Weisheiten anwand, die Li Juan mir beigebracht hatte.

Randall: Mein Boss in Taipei, ein korrupter, schürzenjagender Amerikaner, der mich als Konkurrenz für die Leitung des neu entstehenden Festlandgeschäfts der Firma sah und alles versuchte, um meine Entsendung nach Shanghai zu verhindern.

Jimmy: Stellvertretender Chef derselben Firma, ein schwuler Taiwanese, der Randall hasste und während meines Jahres in Taipei zu meinem engsten Freund wurde.

Benny: Manager der Shanghaier Niederlassung, der Inbegriff von Gier und Inkompetenz, was nicht lange nach meinem Umzug nach Shanghai zu seinem Sturz führte.

Billy: Bennys kompetenter und ehrgeiziger Feldforschungsleiter, der nach Bennys Sturz mein gleichberechtigter Partner in einem neuen Unternehmen werden wollte.

Sharon: Billys Assistentin und hochkompetente Feldforschungsleiterin, die schliesslich in meine Firma in Shanghai eintrat.

Meister Chu: Ein Anwalt und selbsternannter Robin Hood in Shanghai, der zwischen den Triaden und der Polizei vermittelte. Spezialisiert auf wirtschaftliche Konflikte, wie jene Einschüchterungsversuche, mit denen ich bei der Gründung meiner eigenen Firma konfrontiert wurde.

[Diese Liste wird mit jedem Kapitel erweitert]

English (Deutsch unten)

I was now ready to 下海 xia hai, to put out to sea. In the language of the 1990s, this meant quitting the safety of a paycheck to dive headlong into China’s private enterprise shark tank.

Two clients gave me the courage. An international crop protection firm offered a simple choice: Join them as an employee or start my own shop. Either way, they wanted me to help them. An American car giant entering a Shanghai joint venture needed someone to decode the Chinese consumer and find them a brand positioning in a market that hadn’t existed a year earlier. The timing was right. The demand was there. I just needed to move.

I would be thirty the following year. Confucius famously declared: 三十而立 san shi er li, at thirty, a man should stand on his own feet. I took the Sage at his word. I suspect that two and a half thousand years ago, however, he didn't have to navigate the issue of registering a foreign-owned market research firm in a country where most service industries were still off limits to laowai.

I relocated to a smaller, cheaper apartment downtown, where a spare room served as temporary headquarters. It smelled of instant noodles, tea, and ambition. I had to move fast: register a business entity, convert the residence permit, generate enough revenue to feed myself and Yin before the last scraps of my dignity evaporated.

Billy invited me to dinner to meet his parents and to propose a partnership. I would be the face of the company, taking care of high-level research, client aquisition and relationships, the business strategy. He would run the back office and fieldwork. His father, a mid-level executive at a state-owned enterprise, would help open doors to urban industry leaders and rural communes alike. Sharon would come in with a five-percent stake, free of charge. Billy and I would each put up half the starting capital, roughly ten thousand US dollars between us. “I just need a week for my dad to liquidate some stocks,” Billy said.

I had no reason to doubt him. He’d been a reliable colleague for two years. I emptied my savings on computers, a printer, a fax machine, and the first month’s salaries for all three of us. The car client came in with two more projects almost immediately, which was excellent news and a cash flow crisis simultaneously, since we had no business license, no corporate bank account, and clients don’t pay until a month or two after completion, and only against official tax invoices.

“New projects are coming in fast,” I reminded him a week later. “Where’s your share?”

“No worries!” he chirped. A phrase that, in China, reliably foreshadows problems.

Another week passed. Then another. I was running so low I had to ask the agricultural client to wire payment to an accounting firm in Hong Kong, which would have meant a humiliating courier run: fly to the territory, withdraw the cash, carry it back to Shanghai like a cartel mule. The client said they’d try, but there were approval processes. I was too embarrassed to press further. I considered refusing new projects.

Eventually Billy appeared with a proposal of such dazzling originality that I briefly wondered if I’d misheard.

“Business is great, right? We’re making a profit!”

“We’re spending money, Billy. We haven’t received a single yuan yet. Put up your share. Today.”

“It’s simple,” he said, leaning in as though sharing a classified state secret.

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English (Deutsch unten)

Yin arrived in Shanghai and we began the daily routine of being husband and wife for the first time since picking up our marriage certificate on the Day of the Dead fourteen months earlier.

The friction started almost immediately.

It wasn’t the long hours I spent at work. It was a straightforward imbalance of needs that neither of us knew how to manage. I had few expectations of married life. Yin had a specific list. Since we were new to the city and had no social circle, she looked to me to fill every gap in her existence: her social life, entertainment, primary mood regulator, everything. Since leaving London I had grown accustomed to the reflective quiet of living alone. The constant pressure of her emotional demands felt increasingly claustrophobic.

Within a few months, Yin was spending most of her time in the guest room. One evening I walked in and found her sitting on the windowsill of our twenty-fourth-floor apartment, the window wide open, her legs dangling over the edge into the smog. When she turned to look at me, her face was a collage of anger and grief I didn’t recognize.

“Shall we go for dinner at the Sichuan restaurant downstairs?” I asked, keeping my voice flat and calm, the way you talk to someone standing a little too close to the edge. Her face twisted into a wide, mirthless grin. She swung her legs back inside, climbed off the sill, and dropped onto the bed with a laugh. “Leave me alone. I’m having fun.”

These shifts became the new normal. One night I heard a rhythmic thumping from the guest room, like a tennis ball hitting a wall. I opened the door and found her on the bed on all fours, banging her head against the plaster in a slow, methodical rhythm. She heard me, stopped, and smiled.

The thought that she might be mentally unwell crossed my mind for a moment. I pushed it away immediately. I wasn’t ready to admit that my wife might be emotionally unstable, because that observation implied I had made a serious error of judgment. That I had married a woman I didn’t properly know, on impulse, in a moment of existential desperation. Better to protect the version of events in which my judgment had been sound, even as something cold and leaden settled in my chest.

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English (Deutsch unten)

Shanghai was an oven. A layer of construction dust trapped the air, staining the sky like a bloodshot sponge.

I arrived the day after my twenty-eighth birthday, with a new contract in my pocket: Director of the Shanghai office, with a raise. It had been a grinding year in Taipei: apprehension about Yin’s patience, about the Foshan mortgage, about the money I owed my mother, about the future in general. Signing that contract had felt like opening a door in a windowless room and walking out into the air. I spent my first few days firing faxes to every regional client I had cultivated, marking territory: mainland China was now my jurisdiction.

^{[Arriving in Shanghai, 1996]}

I knew Randall would not let go of what he considered his territory without a fight. Rod had blocked him from the Shanghai lead and given me the China brief instead, which Randall experienced as a castration. He was seething. He still held legacy clients in Taipei as his excuse to cross the Strait, which meant he could haunt Shanghai with a plausible reason, delegating his focus groups to whatever junior he’d dragged along while spending his days and evenings with Lily and scanning for weaknesses in my position. He wasn’t an intellectual heavyweight, but he had the narrow, patient cunning of the genuinely vindictive. Shine, the entertainment impresario from my Wild South days in Guangzhou, had once reminded me: “Lowlife scum can be dangerous. Never underestimate the reach of a small man in a corner.”

The first piece of sabotage had already been laid before I arrived.

Benny, the Shanghai office manager, had found me an apartment on the city’s outskirts: dark, tiny, and cheap in the way that signals contempt rather than economy. I was not going to stand in the dust every morning fighting for a cab to spend two hours in traffic. My contract stipulated a downtown allowance, so I hired a broker and within an afternoon found a decent place near the office. When I asked Benny to sign the lease, he stared at the figure as though it were a death warrant.

“What’s the problem, Benny? It’s within my contractual budget.”

He took a long drag from his cigarette, the kind of drag that buys time while the mind assembles courage. “It’s my company paying your salary. And your rent. All of it.”

I pointed to the contract. “Is that your signature, Benny?”

An awkward pause. Another drag. “Randall asked me to sign that. But it’s not valid here. It isn’t my letterhead. It’s their company name, not mine. Without my letterhead and business license, you can’t get a work permit.”

“Then why did you sign a contract on their letterhead?”

“Randall’s idea,” he said, with the shrug of a man who has spent years performing helplessness so convincingly that he has started to believe it himself.

The reality landed with the particular unpleasantness of something that should have been checked in advance. The Shanghai office was not a subsidiary. It was a front. Foreign market research firms were still barred from legal operation in China in the mid-nineties, so Rod had handed Benny a pile of cash to register a private Chinese shell company, rent an office, and stick the foreign company’s logo on the door. The world was invited to believe this constituted “wholly owned China operations.” In reality it was a locally owned sweatshop at which Benny processed their projects cheaply while they decided what to pay him.

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In the landscape of high-stakes business and human interaction, direct confrontation is a rookie mistake - and in a culture like China to be strictly avoided. It’s loud, it’s messy, considered unprofessional, and it alerts your enemy to your defense.

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In 1995, China performed one of the most radical psychological pivots in modern history. Something that happened not in a secretive Beijing government chamber, but in a television commercial aired across southern China.

A distinguished silver-haired Frenchman stands atop the Great Wall of China beside his Chinese business partner. He delivers a line that would be on the lips of every entrepreneur in Southern China: 不到长城非好汉, “You are not a real man until you have climbed the Great Wall.” The bottle of Martell XO Cognac gleams in the foreground. Cut to black.

Check it out, here’s the original TV ad:

The line was a direct subversion of a famous Mao Zedong quote. In its original context, it called men to revolutionary sacrifice. In the hands of a French cognac brand, it called them to the bar. The genius, and the cynicism, was in the seamlessness of the transfer. National pride, masculine identity, and a Western luxury product collapsed into a single image. Every man in Guangdong province who saw that ad felt the pull. Every man who bought a bottle believed he was answering it.

I watched this happen from the inside. My contact Shine, an entertainment impresario from the Wild South, introduced me to the VIP rooms of the new China: vaulted private chambers in restaurants and clubs where XO Cognac was not a drink but a currency, a declaration, a social contract conducted in poured glasses and the clinking of aspirations. One city official at a dinner explained the new order with the blunt clarity that only the genuinely drunk can produce: “Nobody cares about Party morale anymore. What matters now is being able to hold your drink.”

He was not joking. He was announcing a political and social shift.

The Death of the Ideological Martyr

For four decades, the Chinese Communist Party had asked its people to subordinate the self to the collective. Private ambition was suspect. Personal display was bourgeois. The virtuous citizen disappeared into the mass.

Then new Party Chairman Deng Xiaoping said getting rich was glorious, the dams broke, and what flooded through was not gentle prosperity but a tidal surge of pure, unapologetic ego.

The ideological martyr did not retire gracefully. He was replaced overnight by the narcissist consumer, a figure who measured his worth not by his sacrifice to the state but by his alcohol consumption in front of witnesses. French XO Cognac was the perfect vehicle for this transition because it combined the two things the new China craved simultaneously: Western validation and Chinese pride. You were not importing a foreign luxury. You were using it to climb the Great Wall.

The Party official who declared that drinking style mattered more than Party style was not rejecting the system. He was announcing what it had become.

Power to the People – Or to the Brand?

When a status symbol becomes the benchmark of human worth, identity becomes a commodity alongside the product. If you are not seen consuming the right things, you cease to exist in the social register that matters. The XO bottle on the table was not a drink. It was a vote in a continuous election for relevance.

This is, on one reading, a story of extraordinary adaptability. The Black Heart philosophy prizes exactly this capacity: the ability to shed an obsolete identity, read the new environment accurately, and reposition without sentiment. The Chinese businessman of the mid-1990s who pivoted from revolutionary cadre to VIP room operator in a single decade was demonstrating a form of strategic genius. He thrived.

But the shadow side of that pivot is a hollowing of the interior.

When identity is anchored entirely to what you own and how you are perceived, it becomes dependent on the stability of the environment providing the mirror. And environments are not stable. Markets crash. Status symbols go stale. The man who defined himself by his XO Cognac in 1995 needed a bigger bottle by 1998 and a yacht by 2008 just to maintain the same feeling. The container keeps changing. The man inside it stops developing.

The Black Heart Audit

The lesson is not to reject ambition or status. The lesson is to know which game you are playing and whether you chose it.

The moment you find yourself aching for a status symbol you did not know you needed until someone showed it to you, you have become a guest in someone else’s marketing plan. You are not riding the tiger. The tiger is riding you.

The Black Heart philosophy requires two simultaneous capacities that most people apply only separately: the tactical ability to play the status game with full commitment, and the strategic clarity to know it is a game. You participate in the performance when it serves you. You step back from it the moment it starts to define you.

The question to ask yourself, regularly, honestly, without flattery, might be this: Are you adapting to the environment in order to shape it? Or is the environment slowly printing a version of you that you did not design, and charging you your own soul for the privilege?

In 1990s China, an entire generation answered that question without realizing it had been asked.

From the ongoing memoir A Piece of the Sky. Chapter 13, “Riding the Tiger”, covers China’s Wild South in its full, unhinged glory: the cognac, the KTVs, the officials, and the strange moment when I realized I was no longer afraid.

DEUTSCH

Black Heart Power Hack #1

Den Tiger reiten: Wie eine Nation ihre revolutionäre Seele gegen eine Flasche XO-Cognac eintauschte

1995 vollzog China einen der radikalsten psychologischen Schwenks der modernen Geschichte. Er fand nicht in einem geheimen Regierungsgebäude in Beijing statt, sondern in einem Fernsehspot in der südchinesischen Provinz Guangdong.

Ein distinguierter, silberhaariger Franzose steht oben auf der Chinesischen Mauer neben seinem chinesischen Geschäftspartner. Er liefert eine Zeile, die bald jeder Unternehmer in Südchina auswendig aufsagen konnte: 不到长城非好汉, “Wer die Große Mauer nicht erklommen hat, ist kein richtiger Mann.” Eine Flasche Martell XO Cognac glänzt im Vordergrund. Schwarzblende.

Hier die Werbung auf YouTube:

Die Zeile war eine direkte Subversion eines bekannten Mao Zedong Zitats. In seinem ursprünglichen Kontext rief der Satz Männer zur revolutionären Opferbereitschaft auf. In den Händen einer französischen Cognac Marke rief sie sie an die Bar. Das Genie, und der Zynismus, lag in der Nahtlosigkeit des Transfers. Chinesischer Nationalstolz, männliche Identität und ein westliches Luxusprodukt mutierten zu einem einzigen Bild. Jeder Mann in Guangdong, der diesen Spot sah, spürte den Sog. Jeder Mann, der sich eine Flasche kaufte, glaubte, ihm zu folgen.

Ich beobachtete das alles von innen. Mein Kontakt Shine, ein Unterhaltungsimpresario aus dem Wilden Süden, führte mich in die VIP Räume des neuen Chinas ein, gewölbte Privatkammern in Restaurants und Klubs, wo XO Cognac kein Getränk war, sondern eine Währung, ein gesellschaftlicher Vertrag, der in eingeschenkten Gläsern und dem Klingen von Aspirationen vollzogen wurde.

Ein Stadtbeamter beim Abendessen erklärte die neue Ordnung mit jener Klarheit, zu der nur wirklich Betrunkene fähig sind: “Niemand interessiert sich mehr für Parteidisziplin. Was zählt, ist, seinen Schnaps halten zu können.”

Er machte keine Witze. Er verkündete eine politische und gesellschaftliche Verschiebung.

Der Tod des ideologischen Märtyrers

Dreißig Jahre lang hatte die Kommunistische Partei Chinas ihr Volk gebeten, das Selbst dem Kollektiv unterzuordnen. Privater Ehrgeiz galt als verdächtig. Persönliche Zurschaustellung war unerwünscht. Der tugendsame Bürger verschwand in der Masse.

Dann verkündete Deng Xiaoping, reich werden sei glorreich. Die Dämme brachen, und was hindurchflutete, war keine sanfte Prosperität, sondern ein Flutschwall purer, unverblümter Egomanie.

Der ideologische Märtyrer trat nicht würdevoll ab. Er wurde über Nacht von einem narzisstischen Konsumenten ersetzt, einer Figur, die ihren Wert nicht mehr an ihrem Opfer für den Staat maß, sondern an ihrem Konsum vor Zeugen. XO Cognac war das perfekte Vehikel für diesen Übergang, weil er die zwei Dinge vereinte, nach denen das neue China gleichzeitig hungerte: westliche Bestätigung und chinesischen Stolz. Man importierte keinen fremden Luxus. Man benutzte ihn, um die Große Mauer zu erklimmen.

Der Parteifunktionär, der erklärte, Trinkstil sei wichtiger als Parteistil, erklärte das System nicht als irrelevant. Er offenbarte, was es geworden war.

Macht dem Volk oder der Marke?

Wenn ein Statussymbol zum Maßstab menschlichen Wertes wird, wird Identität zur Ware neben dem Produkt. Wer nicht gesehen wird, wie er die richtigen Dinge konsumiert, hört auf, im gesellschaftlichen Register zu existieren. Die XO Flasche auf dem Tisch war kein alkoholisches Getränk. Sie war eine Stimme in einer permanenten Wahl um Relevanz.

Das ist, auf der einen Seite, eine Geschichte außerordentlicher Anpassungsfähigkeit. Die Schwarze Herz Philosophie schätzt genau diese Fähigkeit: eine obsolete Identität abzustreifen, das neue Umfeld präzise zu lesen und sich ohne Sentimentalität neu zu positionieren. Der chinesische Geschäftsmann der 90er Jahre, der in einem einzigen Jahrzehnt vom Revolutionskader zum VIP Raum Betreiber pivotierte, demonstrierte auf seine Art eine Form strategischen Genies. Er gedieh.

Aber die Schattenseite dieses Schwenks ist eine Aushöhlung des Inneren. Wenn Identität vollständig daran verankert ist, was man besitzt und wie man wahrgenommen wird, wird sie abhängig von der Stabilität des Umfelds, das den Spiegel liefert. Und Umfelder sind nicht stabil. Märkte brechen zusammen. Statussymbole werden schal. Der Mann, der sich 1995 über sein XO Cognac definierte, brauchte 1998 eine größere Flasche und 2008 eine Yacht, nur um dasselbe Gefühl aufrechtzuerhalten. Der Behälter wechselt ständig. Der Mensch darin hört auf sich zu entwickeln.

Das Schwarze Herz Audit

Die Lektion lautet nicht, Ehrgeiz oder Status abzulehnen. Die Lektion lautet, zu wissen, welches Spiel man spielt, und ob man es sich selbst ausgesucht hat.

In dem Moment, in dem man sich nach einem Statussymbol sehnt, von dem man nicht wusste, dass man es braucht, ist man zum Gast im Marketingplan eines anderen geworden. Man reitet nicht den Tiger. Der Tiger reitet einen.

Die Schwarze Herz Philosophie erfordert zwei gleichzeitige Fähigkeiten, die die meisten Menschen nur getrennt voneinander einsetzen: die taktische Fähigkeit, das Statusspiel mit vollem Einsatz zu spielen, und die strategische Klarheit zu wissen, dass es ein Spiel ist. Man nimmt an der Performance teil, wenn sie einem nützt. Man tritt einen Schritt zurück, sobald sie beginnt, einen zu definieren.

Die Frage, die man sich stellen sollte, regelmäßig, ehrlich, ohne Schmeichelei, lautet: Passt du dich dem Umfeld an, um es zu gestalten? Oder druckt das Umfeld langsam eine Version von dir, die du nicht entworfen hast, und berechnet dir dafür deine eigene Seele?

Im China der 1990er Jahre beantwortete eine ganze Generation diese Frage, ohne zu merken, dass sie gestellt worden war.

Aus dem laufenden Memoir “Ein Stück vom Himmel”. Kapitel 13, “Den Tiger reiten”, beschreibt den Wilden Süden in seiner vollen, ungezügelten Pracht, den Cognac, die KTVs, die Funktionäre und den seltsamen Moment, in dem ich merkte, dass ich keine Angst mehr hatte.

English (Deutsch unten)

Taiwan didn’t allow mainland Chinese nationals to visit the island at the time, which meant I spent a significant portion of my salary on monthly flights to Hong Kong, then the train to Guangzhou, then a cab to Foshan to spend a weekend with Yin. I was supporting my wife, remitting money to my mother, and feeding myself in whatever order the arithmetic permitted. Ambition and tireless work substituted for most other nutritional requirements.

Yin was managing a friend’s small restaurant and bar, staying busy, deflecting her father’s increasingly pointed questions about when exactly his son-in-law planned to show up and be a husband. During one of my weekend visits I carried her home on a bicycle through a sudden, savage thunderstorm. The rain was warm and blurred my glasses. Yin clung to my back, a delicate weight, her arms tight around me, her head against my shoulder, her breath at my ear. I felt, for those minutes on the bike in the rain, genuinely invincible. Those weekends together during my year in Taipei turned out to be the best days of our entire marriage. I didn’t know that then, of course. You never do.

In early 1996, Yin called to tell me a residential development had broken ground near her parents’ home and that she had already signed a purchase contract for a one-bedroom unit. Down payment due immediately. I couldn’t see how I was going to absorb the additional load, but a Chinese husband who cannot house his wife is not considered respectable, and I knew exactly what her family would make of any hesitation. “No beers at the Green Bar for a while,” I told Jimmy. “Until you help me get a raise.” He laughed. “I’ll buy the drinks. I don’t want you to lose your wife.”

I made the down payment, kept remitting money to my mother, and did not starve. But I was clear about one thing: a salaried career was simply a more comfortable set of shackles. The chain kept pulling, the direction was someone else’s, and the only sensible response was to bide my time, sharpen my blade, and get to Shanghai by summer. Yin and I would reunite. I would build my network until I felt confident enough to run my own operation, achieve financial independence and gain genuine control of my life.

The obstacle was Randall.

Every time I requested involvement in a mainland project, he manufactured some urgent task in Taipei to pin me to the island. The frustration accumulated with the quiet persistence of water trying to find a crack in the concrete.

Then, one evening, the office fax machine began to spill a secret. A sustained deluge of handwritten messages from Shanghai, decorated with hearts, arrows, and what appeared to be teardrops: “I love you, Randall!” “Can’t live without you!” and further variations on this theme, each signed by “Lily.” The receptionist had already left. The love letters cascaded from the overloaded tray and spread across the floor like autumn leaves, available for the reading pleasure of anyone still in the building. Jimmy picked one up, studied it with the expression of a man who is not surprised by anything, pulled me into his office, and poured a whiskey.

Randall had been dredging the crowd of Judy’s Too, a notorious Shanghai dive bar, for the better part of a year before he flew straight into the center of Lily’s carefully assembled web. She was a junior employee at an ad agency, playing the long game with the patience of someone who understood that Randall’s real weakness was not his sexual appetite but his ego.

To understand Lily, one has to understand the particular moment China occupied in the mid-nineties. The country stood on the cusp of an era of what looked like unlimited possibility. Good news, of course. The bad news came in two parts. First, all 1.2 billion inhabitants wanted their piece of the growing pie. The daily social competition was already so ferocious that a few years later, when Hu Jintao succeeded Jiang Zemin at the top of the Party, the government felt compelled to launch a ‘Social Harmony’ campaign, an official reminder to the population that empathy and mutual support were, in fact, inherent human traits. Second, life and fortune in China had always been a volatile game, prone to sudden, unannounced collapse, a historical lesson encoded so deeply that it had produced a national temperament: pragmatic, calculating, and relentlessly focused on whatever specific goal one had decided to pursue. Sentimentality was a luxury reserved for people whose futures were insured. And for modern Westerners whose idea of civilization rested comfortably on the accumulated glory of bygone days. Like everyone else in China, Lily had no time for a hated, destructive past. Her focus was fixed, unwavering, on the future she had decided to build for herself. She wanted what hardly any Chinese husband could yet provide: social standing, money, a lifestyle with a foreign passport attached. And she pursued it with the discipline of a portfolio manager.

She built Randall a mirrored room where he could admire himself at leisure. Then she locked the exit. After six months of conducting herself as his mistress, she wanted marriage. Which created a complication Randall had apparently forgotten to mention: the wife, the children, and the mortgage in Taipei, the youngest child barely two years old.

The latest intelligence from Shanghai was that Lily was pregnant. And that she intended to keep the baby.

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A strange apprehension snaked up my throat as the plane began its descent into Taipei.

An absurd fear that Chairman Liu’s loan sharks might be waiting. They had let me go after that brief, scary episode on the highway, but in the light-headedness of descent I found myself wondering whether they had concluded I was Liu’s silent partner, someone who had helped him spirit suitcases of cash out of the country. I breathed deliberately and reminded myself that Liu’s problems were not mine, that I had a job, that I was a man who could handle whatever was waiting at the terminal. I told myself to stop catastrophizing.

No goons were waiting to hack me to pieces with machetes, as they did in Taiwanese gangster films. Only the ordinary indifference of an arrivals hall.

I took a cab to Heather’s apartment. Heather was my direct superior, a Scottish woman in her late thirties with the clipped energy of someone who has been trying too hard to stay young for slightly too long. She had offered me a guest room until I found my own place, with a warmth that felt genuine enough. She was one of those people who laugh at their own jokes before the punchline has landed, filling the space where the listener’s reaction should be with their own amusement.

Being back in Taipei felt immediately right. Theresa’s ghost had faded. I had filed the memory of her, the love, the loss, the pain of those months, into a closed chapter, and the filing felt clean rather than repressed. I could look back on it with tenderness. I no longer lived there.

My new colleagues were mostly Taiwanese, with a handful of laowai whose Chinese ranged from serviceable to decorative. The office was spacious and comfortable. Randall, the country boss, was an aging American hippie who had transferred his nicotine habit from cigarettes to Nicorette gum at his wife’s insistence and was now addicted to both. He leaned back in his leather chair with his feet on the desk. “Your Chinese is excellent, I hear. I want you running focus groups. We do a lot of them.” He chucked another piece of gum into his mouth. “Shanghai is exploding. I’ve got more projects there than I can handle.”

Good, I thought. Shanghai was the destination. Getting there was my project.

I met Jimmy, the deputy boss, a gay Taiwanese man in his early thirties whose permanent good humor operated less like a personality trait and more like a well-maintained professional instrument. He was streetsmart, a natural rainmaker. He played the guitar, sang and worshipped Hongkong superstar Leslie Cheung. We became close quickly, spending Friday evenings at the Green Bar, a beer garden nearby where Jimmy would eventually take the stage and sing Cantopop ballads that left people genuinely moved.

Determined to make myself indispensable enough that they would have to send me to Shanghai, I worked with an intensity that surprised even me. Within a few months I was running projects for international clients. Randall and I were the only laowai whose Chinese was sufficient for focus groups, but while Randall could speak the language, I inhabited it. I read original transcripts, analyzed the nuances, wrote research reports in Chinese. I was so absorbed that I forgot to look for my own apartment.

Heather didn’t appear to mind. In fact, she began making it clear that she didn’t mind at all: a touch here, a bedroom door left conspicuously ajar when I worked late, advances that escalated from ambiguous to direct. A colleague told me later that she had apparently consulted the stars before my arrival and concluded I was her ideal match. The feeling was, to put it gently, not mutual. She reminded me of certain Western expatriate women I had encountered in Hong Kong, women whose romantic options had effectively contracted in a market where Western men sought Asian women and most Chinese men found Western women categorically improbable as partners. Her advances were not offensive, simply inconvenient and beside the point. I was a recently married man whose professional focus was, for once in his life, entirely undivided.

I took a day off, found a place, packed that evening.

“You know I have a wife in China,” I said, standing in the doorway with my bag. “Everyone at the office knows.”

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Lunch with my mother and Hugo had become a theater of the absurd.

Her emotional crisis had migrated into an Ayurvedic diet of spectacular grimness. Three times a day she shoved spoonfuls of half-cooked grains and what looked like raw grass into herself, radiating a bitterness that made the already bleak kitchen feel even more austere. She looked ten years older than her age, and had become convinced that this regime would extend her life to a hundred and twenty. It occured to me that the prospect of that many years of this particular quality of life was its own argument against it, but I kept the thought to myself.

“You really think this,” I gestured at the brown glob in her bowl, “is going to make you live longer?”

She tapped a book beside her plate, almost violently. “Ayurveda!” The cover showed a wiry old man in Bavarian lederhosen, smiling in a way that suggested expensive dentistry. “He’s ninety-one!”

“Ayurveda is from India,” I said. “That man looks like a fairground huckster selling erection sprays to incontinent pensioners. Why are you falling for this?”

She burst into tears, rose, and walked out of the kitchen, bent forward like a woman twice her age. Hugo slammed his linen serviette on the table, presumably because that is what one does in such moments, and hurried after her.

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I arrived at my mother’s place on a warm summer afternoon.

Ten minutes later I was seated in her smoke-filled study, being subjected to the familiar liturgy of my own inadequacy. I said nothing. I kept my head low and let my eyes sweep the room to count the floor tiles, a private act of self-preservation that had served me well in that house before.

“Dreaming of getting rich,” my mother said, her voice carrying the particular authority of someone delivering a verdict they have spent years preparing. Trying to make ends meet, went through my head as I tracked the tile count.

She took a drag from her cigarette, the tip glowing with a focused intensity that matched her expression. “When you were barely two years old, I remember it so clearly. You took a candy, unwrapped it, put it in your mouth. Then you saw another candy on the table, a different color. You decided you liked that one better, spat out the one in your mouth, and shoved the new one in.” She almost choked on the smoke.

My crime, apparently, was being who I was. According to her, I had been born with a rotten core, a diagnosis she had arrived at when I was still a toddler and revised upward with each passing year. For a dark moment I felt the urge to ask why she hadn’t simply outsourced me to a foster home, or a church-run institution for children who had strayed beyond correction. She could have saved a fortune on a failed investment. Instead I nodded briefly.

Hugo studied me from his armchair with profound distaste and the particular glint of a man who has been waiting years for his judgment to be confirmed. “Traders are economic parasites,” he announced, with the conviction of a provincial preacher addressing a congregation of cows. “Unlike farmers and workers who produce real value.” Not in the mood to defend the service economy, I murmured something about finding a job as quickly as possible and repaying the loan. I went upstairs and fell into the kind of deep, dreamless sleep that arrives when you have finally stopped falling and landed somewhere solid, however hard.

I saw no point in offering any explanation. The challenges I had faced, how China actually worked, the theft, the reasons I had been forced to borrow money from them. The fact that I had acquired a wife. To explain the Wild South, or the brutal mechanics of Guangdong in 1994, would have been like trying to describe the color of fire to people who had spent their lives in an ice cave.

Their ignorance was not a gap to be filled. It was a position.

* * *

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Months bled away.

No income, and my mother calling periodically to ask about repayment. Wushu, in one of his rare moments of contact with reality, suspected Shine was simply using me as a trophy. “He wants a foreign face to make his operation look international,” he said. “The laser tag thing is just an excuse.”

I decided to force his hand.

“My partners in Shanghai are moving fast,” I told Shine, deploying my fledgling Black Heart skills with the confidence of someone who has just read the manual but not yet run the machine. “They’re building amusement parks in Pudong. They want an exclusive distribution deal for the whole country.”

There were no partners in Shanghai. There was me, a fax machine, and a growing sense of desperation. Shine studied me, looking for the tell. He found whatever he was looking for, smiled, lit a cigarette, and suggested we become national distributors together. “We’ll sell dozens, maybe hundreds of systems to officials who need to move their cash. But first, I need a demo venue here in Guangzhou.”

We signed the contract. Shine would pay the UK supplier directly, and I would receive a commission generous enough to clear most of my debts. I returned to Foshan to wait for his bank to open the letter of credit. 天时地利人和 tian shi di li ren he, the stars had aligned. Or so I told myself, while the sand continued to shift beneath my feet.

* * *

My younger brother Patrick arrived for a visit. He loathed the construction dust, the shoving crowds, the smog, the relentless animal energy of a nation in the process of remaking itself. “Why are you wasting your life in this shithole?” he asked.

“I’m building something.”

“Yeah, well, make it work. Mom and Hugo have decided to disinherit you. They’re done with you.”

It was a cold, precision-guided blow. To my mother, I had become an irredeemable failure. Not the diplomat or professor or corporate executive she had envisioned, but something considerably less legible and considerably more embarrassing. She had decided I was on a downward trajectory and acted accordingly.

What shook me was not some withheld inheritance. With three brothers and a mother who never earned much more than enough to keep the family afloat, there would not have been nothing to inherit anyway. What shook me was the realization that our bond was more fragile than I had understood. She had walked away from my biological father before I was born. For the first four years of my life it had been just the two of us, a closed circuit of mutual dependence that I had always assumed had welded us into something permanent. The bedroom door closing at four had already introduced the first doubt. Now, watching me drown in the fog of my own failed ambitions, she had decided to close another door. Permanently, and from the inside.

The pain mixed with a particular kind of angry bewilderment when I considered Ah Chun. A man who had stolen my survival money and then returned with empty pockets and a shrug, who had previously squandered his mother’s savings on schemes of breathtaking stupidity, including an attempt to sell premium Japanese condoms in a country where they were distributed free of charge under the one-child policy, and who nonetheless retained his position as the family’s untouchable, deified son. “He’s their only son,” Yin told me. “They don’t care what he does. He is family.” She continued to maintain a cordial relationship with him. It was not a position I could argue with, only register with the depleted recognition of someone who has finally understood that certain things simply are what they are.

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The ceiling was moving.

A grey concrete slab, shifting like a slow swamp above my head, until the world clicked into hard focus. Morning sun poured through the open window. I turned my head and squinted into it.

Yin and her mother were sitting in creaky wooden chairs beside the hospital bed, watching me with the patience of people who have been waiting a long time and are trying not to show how worried they were. They had found me passed out in the rattan chair. When I didn’t respond to their attempts to wake me, they called an ambulance. The hospital had pumped my stomach. A nurse came in, took my pulse with the brisk efficiency of someone with a long shift ahead, and told me I was fine. There had been only a few pills in my system. The whiskey had done the rest. I was released an hour later.

I didn’t spend time on the why. I had not acted with any clear intention. I had simply arrived at a state of complete indifference to what happened next, and the indifference had made certain decisions for me. Now, in the morning, I felt nothing. No sorrow, no anger. My chest felt scraped clean. Emotions seemed, in the circumstances, like an unaffordable luxury.

There were things that needed to be handled.

* * *

As soon as I got home I called my mother. I said nothing about the theft, the rattan chair, or the stomach pump. In the volatile theater of our relationship I had learned to present only the information that would produce the outcome I needed. “I’m being squeezed on cashflow,” I told her, my voice flat and businesslike. “Clients are slow to pay but the supplier won’t wait. I need a personal loan to tide me over.”

She wasn’t happy. “The settlement cash from my mother, Hugo and I were going to use it for urgent renovations.” She paused. Her son, the one who had, in her opinion, failed to put his education to any constructive use, needed part of the inheritance she had fought so hard to secure. She agreed to the loan, but it arrived wrapped in a layer of resentment that had its own particular texture. I didn’t care. I needed the money to pay the bills.

There is a Chinese phrase for this kind of predicament: 骑虎难下 qi hu nan xia, when riding the tiger, it is hard to get off. Every nerve in my body was screaming to jump, to run while I still could. But China has a particular way of handling those unfortunate riders: if you try to pat the beast goodbye and ask for understanding, it offers you a choice between death by a thousand cuts and immediate disembowelment. So you stay. You cling to the fur of an animal that doesn’t care where it’s running, with nothing left but a fast-diminishing figment of hope.

Jacky called a few days later. Not with an order, but with the news that my German supplier had contacted Antonio’s sourcing manager in Hong Kong and offered to sell directly. A blatant breach of our exclusivity contract. Worse, Jacky told me they had offered Antonio prices lower than what Rita and I had spent months negotiating.

I called Kurt. He sounded bored. “The bosses say you’re not moving enough volume. China is a big market. They don’t see why they should limit themselves to a small boat.”

“Try explaining that to a court. You sabotaged me with inflated prices.”

A pause. Then, in a lower voice: “Here’s something you should know. We can offer Antonio lower prices because we don’t have to pay Bernie on those sales.”

“Pay Bernie for what?”

“Your loyal employee’s husband came to us last year. Said he knew someone in China who could move our tannins. Negotiated a kickback for himself. Five hundred Deutschmark per container. The old way, just like before reunification.” Another pause. “You didn’t hear that from me.”

Everything went still.

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Completed at the end of 2016, the film became an instant viral hit on iqiyi.com, racking up millions of views within a few days before the “Ministry of Thought” stepped in. Like my previous series on China’s so-called left-over women, “Men, Impossible”, it was scrubbed from the net.

China has a low tolerance for stories that peel back the veneer. This is one of them. Enjoy. Link below.

Also, on this page you will find other films I wrote and produced:

“Buzz Cut” - a film on what ’justice’ means in China;

“Men, Impossible” - a web-series on so-called ‘Left-over Women’ in China (from 2014), with a distinctly feminist time that became a viral hit but disturbed patriarchally-minded censors;

“Windbound Souls” - my most recent 45-min documentary that I produced in Germany, on the fates of two brothers who struggled to find their respective places in the world - like I did during my early years in China;

”Brain Science” private viewing Link:

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I had a few thousand dollars left and needed to start generating revenue fast.

I asked Rita to push the tannin supplier for exclusive Greater China distribution rights and lower prices. She had settled into her new role with impressive ease, perhaps because it offered considerably more excitement than three decades in an East German communist ministry.

^{[My first Laptop, a small, crash-prone IBM computer that I used to type out faxes and product introductions for Chinese customers. China had already developed a Chinese character input system]}

Hu, Foshan Leather’s import manager, came by the same day to collect his administrative fee in cash and present a favor. His nephew, a seventeen-year-old school dropout from Wuhan named Little Huang, needed a job. I explained that without a registered branch in Foshan I couldn’t legally hire anyone. Hu smiled at this in the manner of a man who cosiders your argument entirely beside the point. “He doesn’t need a contract. Just a salary. Two thousand yuan a month. And I’ll make sure the customs inspectors don’t fine you twenty times that for wrongly declared goods.”

I welcomed Little Huang as my first employee in China. He spent his inaugural paycheck on a secondhand motorbike and a haircut, and thereafter appeared at work with the irregular frequency of someone who considers punctuality a personality choice. I didn’t assign him responsibilities. I didn’t expect any. He was, as I had come to understand these arrangements, a human tax I paid to stay in the game.

* * *

Before the containers arrived I flew to Germany to meet the supplier and sign the distribution contract. I never saw the two co-CEOs, but I noted their identical BMW 7 Series limousines parked outside the building, a synchronized display of shared status that proved they had reached the top.

Instead I met Kurt, the export manager, who spent most of our meeting explaining how he had been cheated out of the company during the reunification turmoil. The Treuhand privatization agency had appointed him as interim manager. Him! Then two others had talked their way into company ownership for nothing. “Now they’re millionaires. And me? A salaried employee with five mouths to feed.”

I shook his hand, signed the contract, and left. He was the type of man who had allowed a specific injustice to colonize so much of his interior life that there was no room left for anything else. The past as a place of permanent residence. China had shown me a different possibility. After Tiananmen, the country had performed what amounted to a collective decision: stop debating the past. Not resolve it, not modify it, not reconcile it, simply declare it operationally irrelevant and redirect all available energy toward an aspirational and feasible future. It was brutal. It was also, in purely practical terms, spectacularly effective.

Germany, I thought while looking at Kurt’s office building through the windshield of my rental car, was going in the other direction. A country that had once rebuilt itself from rubble through sheer productive will was increasingly resembling a museum of its own former achievements. The writing had been on the wall for a while. Nobody seemed to be reading it.

I registered a small export company in Germany to handle the distribution formalities. Bernie put up the copper plaque with the solemnity of a man dedicating a cathedral. I expected the neighborhood dogs to respond accordingly.

I spent a day with my mother before flying back. Hugo observed drily that I was “too young” to be my own boss. I didn’t argue. I felt, for the first time in a while, as if I was steering rather than being steered. It was a small feeling, but I was determined to hold onto it.

* * *

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I arrived in Guangzhou the following afternoon and didn’t recognize the city.

Barely three years since my last visit, the place had transformed into a commercial powerhouse on steroids. Advertising covered everything. Billboards choked the windowless sides of residential blocks, spilled over balconies, colonized every available surface. Every square inch of sidewalk concrete was plastered with crude stickers hawking services ranging from clearing blocked pipes to liberating the spirit (and certain bodily fluids) via massage. The streets were a continuous collision of motorbikes, red cabs, and creaking public buses, all swerving around elderly people on Shanghai Phoenix bicycles who were doing their level best not to be martyred by capitalism with Chinese characteristics.

The traffic cops, a category once celebrated - and decorated - for its decorative quality, now looked like men trying to hold back a real flood with their bare hands.

^{[Guangzhou 1994. Hongkong-style taxis, buses, scooters, bicycles and advertising everywhere]}

The noise was physical. Drivers shouting, bus ticketers screaming at cyclists, and the deafening, distorted screech of Cantopop blasting from monstrous shopfront speakers that someone had clearly positioned to inflict the maximum possible suffering on passersby. The air was a thick soup of gasoline, sweat, and cheap perfume, but underneath the smog drifted the irresistible scent of Cantonese dim sum cuisine floating from alleyway kitchens that stayed full and operating around the clock.

A few years earlier China had felt like an impoverished relic, quiet and stuck, with the air of a place that had given up on tomorrow. Now it pulsated with a predatory energy, an impatient, collective drive to incinerate an unwanted yesterday and build a glitzy future out of stacked banknotes.

The place was a psychedelic vortex, and I was being pulled in with a smile on my face.

* * *

Wushu’s apartment was on the top floor of a hideous low-rise that some greedy developer had plonked into the old city. The entrance looked like a factory gate. There were no lifts, and the windowless corridors felt like a prison ward, heavy with the stale stench of rotten fish from the wet market below. But when we stepped through his front door, a completely different world opened: a luxuriously spacious living room, a private bar, and a long balcony featuring an artificial waterfall and a collection of delicately pruned bonsai trees.

That was his life now. Raising miniature trees.

Wushu had gone broke a few months earlier, and this apartment was the only thing of value he had left, along with his enormous Motorola “brick” phone, which he had owned since I first met him four years earlier and which had once drawn envious stares across every dim sum restaurant in the neighborhood. Now it was simply a stage prop, an oversized plastic monument to a better period. But Wushu clung to the wreckage of his former glory with a grip that suggested he had not yet received the news that the party was over.

He was a wiry man with a small frame and a head that appeared disproportionately large, a quality amplified by a carefully blow-dried, voluminous hairdo. Whenever his phone rang at a restaurant, he would rise from his seat so the entire room could observe him shake his head at the screaming device in his outstretched hand. “Why am I so popular?” he would exclaim, before launching into a loud, theatrical conversation about fantastic deals, phenomenal profits, and the general magnificence of his global business operations.

^{[Wushu in Guangzhou: His wife had given birth to a girl ten years earlier, and despite the One Child Policy, Wushu wanted a son. How he managed to have a second child without a birth permit -- and how he avoided the government's draconian financial penalties for doing so -- remained, like most things about Wushu, pleasantly unclear.]}

I discovered later that his global empire was powered by domestic theatrics: his wife would dial him from home, then set the phone down and go about her business, folding laundry, watching television, doing whatever one does while one’s husband performs a million-dollar symphony to an audience of strangers in a dim sum restaurant. Every call. Every time. The man was a virtuoso of a world in which reality had no place whatsoever.

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