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Dan's China diary - day 3
Expats and expensive dinners...

By Dan Ilett

Published: Thursday 08 June 2006

In May 2006, silicon.com senior reporter Dan Ilett travelled to China, seeking to get behind some of today's most interesting tech and business stories. This is his warts-and-all diary, which appears daily this month. For in-depth coverage of this fact-finding trip inside China, including analysis and exclusive stories, click here.

Monday 8 May, Beijing

Time to get to work. I get up early and make my way to north Beijing to meet Micah Truman, CEO and co-founder of an email marketing company, Madeforchina.com. One of my contacts at the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) in the UK put me in touch. The company is well linked to the business scene in Beijing.

Micah's been here for more than 10 years and Susan says his Chinese is excellent. Like me, he studied Japanese at university but found his way to China pretty early on to work in the south of the country.

He points out most visiting journalists tend to portray life in China and the foreigners who work here as whacky. He's not a fan of that. He tells me it shows they haven't really grasped what any of this is about. People are doing business like in any other country - it's just part of life, he says.

Post-interview, Susan and I have a couple of hours to kill before the big interview of the day with two men from the Olympic Committee and Atos Origin. We end up in a café. I'm paying. Susan tells me that what she orders will be more expensive than what I have - even though it's the same dish. I look at her suspiciously.

"It's an American thing, isn't it?" she says.

Never heard of such a concept. Apparently you take someone to one of these double-priced places to impress them. It has almost nothing to do with the quality of the food but the amount of money you are willing to spend on that person. Flashing cash about appears to go a long way over here. It does anywhere but you might get a few more smiles and doors opened for you here than anywhere else.

Susan tells me that when doing business with the government it is customary for a company to take the officials out to a very expensive dinner, pay in cash and show exactly how many notes are being used to pay the bill. Shows how much you think of the government, apparently.

Eat duck tongue for lunch and interview the Olympics people.

Back into town to meet Andy Tian - a very switched-on ex-MITer now working for Google. He returned to China a couple of years ago after spending some time in Silicon Valley.

Andy talks about internet marketing in China as a myth - with only 110 million computer owners in a country of 1.3 billion people, you are only talking about five major cities in China that you can call the 'internet population'. And with 400 million mobile phone owners, there's a lot more scope there.

Andy later takes us to a bar called Bed. Susan and I are invited to a bikini party. Nearly all my stereotypes of China are blown away.

Dan's feature on the 2008 Beijing Olympics and its IT will appear on silicon.com in mid-July.