The Rich Robinson Show - Season 1 - At the Speed of China

Jeremy Goldkorn on the difficulty of breaking into China's media industry

• Rich Robinson

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Jeremy Goldkorn, a writer and editor, started Danwei and is now the Editor-in-Chief of SupChina. Along with Kaiser Kuo, he also hosts the Sinica podcast.
In this episode, Jeremy shares his career journey in China where he lived in a workers’ dormitory to starting to getting involved in Chinese media and the internet. He also shared some of his fun experiences such as riding a bicycle from Pakistan to China.

Key Takeaways:
• White South Africans had two years of compulsory military service.
• 1995 marked the beginning of the great return of foreign companies to China.
• Red Egg was a pirated version of Red Herring run by a Chinese media group.
• Baidu is a Chinese search company.
• SupChina acquires Sinica Podcast.
• Transsion is a mobile phone brand in South Africa owned by a Chinese company.

Best Moments:
- Jeremy talked about his first experience with culture shock.
o So, for a year I basically just had to speak Chinese and got to live in a very sort of Chinese way with a shared shower. The toilet was the first initial culture shock. Once I was over that, I couldn't fear anything because it was one of those-- it was like a huge room of long drop toilets with no walls between the stalls and everybody squatting and  taking a dump, and smoking cigarettes, and reading the newspaper, and having a chat. Yeah. And I'm not a very inhibited person, but I come from a Anglo-Saxon  Jewish cultural background, so this was rather shocking. 05:48.7-06:17.1
- Rich can’t believe that Jeremy had 20 cents when he showed up in China.
o You had 20 cents when you showed up. I wish. 23:57.1-24:00.1
- Jeremy shared that he was born the same year as Elon Musk and threw a funny question at Rich.
o Yeah. Yeah No, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Mr. Musk born in the same year as me, about a hundred miles away from where I was. But I don't really, actually, I shouldn't have said that. I don't like to be reminded of that fact. I mean, "Where's my fucking spaceship company, Rich?" 32:07.0-32:21.5

Post-production, transcript, and show notes by XCD Virtual Assistants




Rich Robinson:

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Rich Robinson Show. I'm Rich Robinson, your host, and this is season one of, "At the Speed of China." Today, Jeremy Goldkorn, wow. It's great to see you, my friend. Hǎojiǔ ó no see. Longtime bùjiàn. Wow. Welcome to the pod.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Yeah. Oh, it's been ages, Rich. It's been ages, I think. I mean, I feel as though it's been almost a decade since we've actually seen each other in the flesh, but you keep yourself active on the internet, so I've been following you from afar.

Rich Robinson:

Well, you keep yourself even more active in the podcast world, and I feel this asymmetrical intimacy, and I love the banter. I just had Kaiser on the podcast, and it's a must to have you on here as well too, my friend.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Well, thank you.

Rich Robinson:

Wow. So, you're in Tennessee right now. I see out the back window there is some snow.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

There's a little bit of snow. Is that snow left? Yeah, it was snowing a little bit last weekend in the Western hills outside Nashville, where I've been living for a few years now.

Rich Robinson:

Lovely town. Wow, that's great. So we got to know each other in Beijing, and you grew up in South Africa. I'd love to hear your sweeping hero's journey of growing up and spending time in China, and what brought you to where you are now.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Okay. I went to China, probably like a lot of us who've met back in the day in Beijing, just to basically get as far away from home as possible in every sense of the word geographically, physically, and culturally. And then I got the bug. I just found it so fascinating living there. And like you, I was involved in entrepreneurial things most of my time then, and the exciting energy of starting things in China always, I found it addictive.

Rich Robinson:

But what was that initial spark like? What was it that brought you to China? Because it was still a little bit of a zig when everybody was zagging when you got there.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

It was 1995. I'd grown up in South Africa, and I'd always wanted to leave as soon as I finished college to avoid the draft. Because when I was a kid, white South Africans had two years compulsory military service. And you might end up shooting people in sort of pro anti-apartheid demonstrators. You could end up in a unit that was tasked to shoot them in the street, basically, or fighting the border war that South Africa was involved in. Not its own border, but the Namibian border with troops — Cuban troops often, Angola troops that were fighting. It was kind of complicated.

Rich Robinson:

That sounds like something from the sixties.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Well, it was the eighties. It was the eighties.

Rich Robinson:

I know, right?

Jeremy Goldkorn:

And so I didn't want to get drafted. So I had planned to leave South Africa when I finished university from the time I was a young boy. But in fact, that all changed because Nelson Mandela got out of jail the day I started university. But I'd already had my heart set on just going somewhere else. And as I was studying in college, I ended up traveling in Malaysia, and that really convinced me that China was the place. There was just something about the Chinese people I saw there in Malaysia, which has quite a big Chinese community and very strong Chinese cultural traditions in places like Penang. I guess it was just the thrill of the exotic, it was as simple as that, as base as that motivation may be.

Rich Robinson:

I felt something totally similar, and it's very compelling and it's just magnetic.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Magnetic. So that's what drew me there at first. And then, I actually ended up getting a job teaching English in 1995 for ABB, which is a big Swedish multinational engineering company. They make all kinds of products, from little drives to nuclear power stations, electrical engineering. And it was 1995, the mid-nineties, it was the great comeback of foreign companies to China after the events of 1989. And dung south turn 92 people were contemporaries. So you were sort of in part of the same wave of this incredible sense of optimism as China opened up to the outside world, culturally, but particularly economically in terms of business and encouraged foreign entrepreneurs and businesses to open up. So ABB was helping China to build power infrastructure all over the country. And there were opening a couple of joint ventures at the time. Of course, it was almost impossible to have a wholly foreign-owned company. And they needed to figure out how to get these engineers from Europe to work. Often they were sent as managers of the factories, and they had to work with Chinese colleagues and sort of train them up eventually to lead the factories. And almost all of the joint ventures were with state-owned factories. So they had to take certain managers and staff from the state-owned factories, and they were having terrible cultural problems because they couldn't really communicate, and it was a hindrance to their growth. So they invested quite a lot of money in bringing English teachers around as part of an effort to speak to their Chinese employees and future managers better, and got a job teaching English to engineers at a joint venture factory outside. Well, at the time, it was in the middle of nowhere outside Beijing. It's now just outside the Fourth Ring Road. There were still farmers plowing fields back then. And I lived in a workers' dormitory for a year. So that was it.

Rich Robinson:

With other Chinese or other laoai?

Jeremy Goldkorn:

No laoai, there were no foreigners there.

Rich Robinson:

So that explains your Chinese, because your Chinese particularly good. And I knew that you spent most of your time in Beijing, and a lot of people go in the hinterlands and have no choice but to speak Chinese. So you kind of went into the hinterlands outside the Fourth Ring Road.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

It was just outside the Fourth Ring Road. Yeah, and I was very poorly paid, so I didn't have money to come into the city and hang out in expensive foreign bars, and I didn't really want but I couldn't have afforded it. I had a typical Chinese salary, and I think I was paid 2,500 Yuan a month. Which wasn't too bad by Chinese standards in the nineties, but a couple of hundred dollars basically. And my friends were the other occupants of the workers' dormitory, who were migrant workers, who obviously couldn't speak any English. So, for a year I basically just had to speak Chinese and got to live in a very sort of Chinese way with a shared showers. The toilet was the first initial culture shock. Once I was over that, I couldn't fear anything because it was one of those-- it was like a huge room of long drop toilets with no walls between the stalls and everybody squatting and taking a dump, and smoking cigarettes, and reading the newspaper, and having a chat. Yeah. And I'm not a very inhibited person, but I come from a Anglo-Saxon Jewish cultural background, so this was rather shocking.

Rich Robinson:

After that you're titanium? Yeah. Wow.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Yeah. Yeah, not scared of anything. And then, after that, I went into the city. I had another job with ABB for a while, and then I traveled a lot, and then ended up I did this big bike trip across Xinjiang and I rode a bicycle from Pakistan. I flew to Pakistan and cycled back into China over the CARICOM Highway, then around Xinjiang, Shanghai, and Tibet, and ended up in Nepal. And at that point I was planning to leave China and go back to South Africa, but I had to go back to Beijing to get my stuff from Nepal. And I happened to run into Scott Salad, who you may remember the guy who started Beijing scene, and he invited us. American guy started the first independent English-language media, it was a print weekly newspaper entertainment guy to the capitol, but aimed at foreigners. There were no alternatives to it. There was only really boring state rather than Beijing this week, which was like every week, had like a Peking opera performance and this terrible propaganda bullshit about China and things to do in Beijing that no foreigner was the famous but interested in. And this was this kind of brassy tone, like quite brash, kind of American-style alt-weekly basically. And later, having moved to Nashville, I realized that the founder had basically pirated Nashville scene, which is a still existent out weekly, kind of the weather look and feel in the name, but a very Chinese act of like, out for the time anyway of borrowing a name. So, yeah, but it was a lot of fun, and it was an entrepreneurial thing, it was founded by one guy, and we were running it. I quickly became part of the management of this newspaper, and we were getting shut down by the cops all the time. But nonetheless, it was possible to actually make a business this completely improbable, running an illegal newspaper in Beijing. And even though we were targeted by the police, we never got into any serious trouble. And that got me hooked on doing entrepreneurial things.

Rich Robinson:

Yeah. I think back in that era, it was kind of the era of, "Come on. It's okay. We're gonna do this." And they were just like, "Alright. Okay." It's just like you could kind of get away with some stuff. That is definitely very much not the case now.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

I mean, there was a big tolerance. I mean, not just for foreigners, also for Chinese entrepreneurs, for doing what you want without asking for permission. And then, if you piss somebody off or do something wrong, you say sorry, make nice, and move on, but they did feel like this freedom to just kind of try anything. And honestly, at the time in the 1990s, anyone doing business was kind of you had to kind of break the law. I mean, even the people who made great real estate fortunes, even the internet companies, had to get funding by, like, VIEs which is basically the sneaky way to basically break the law in terms of allowing foreign funding of an internet or media company. So this confined to out weekly. So I don't know if you agree with me. It was pretty widespread.

Rich Robinson:

Oh, I totally agree. I mean, the VIE structure is still being kind of dismantled in some ways, right? It's like they still haven't fully figured that.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

It seems they're getting zeroes about dismantling it, but I mean, many of China's biggest internet companies are still basically VIEs, right?

Rich Robinson:

Variable interest entities for anybody that wants to google that.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

The shtick is this, not the shtick, how do you call it? The scam, the plot of a VIE, I guess, it's the lawyer's shtick who set up the VIE. So it's basically illegal for a foreigner to own a media or internet business in China. So the VIE is a legal structure, it's a Cayman Islands company, so all the Wall Street investors stick the money in the Cayman Islands Company. And the Cayman Islands company has a contract with a local Chinese-owned company that basically says, "Look, you technically own the company, but actually the Cayman Islands company is in charge." Therefore technically, it's a local Chinese company running the media or tech but the ownership is really in the foreign-enlisted Cayman Islands Company. But it's a maneuver, I mean.

Rich Robinson:

Yeah, because you need the internet content provision license, that has to be owned by a local person, and they have to be on the hook. So, yeah. But it's smoke and mirrors, but it works. But I think there's a lot of stuff in China where there's just sort of, "Yeah, we'll just look the other way and you can win." But ultimately, the power could remove the internet counter provision license, and then that could be a problem, right?

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Yeah. They have ways to control it. But even this is changing. I think that was much more tolerated in the past.

Rich Robinson:

Yeah. And then, from there, tell us about your journey after that.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

So then I got the misguided idea that it was a good idea to do media stuff in China. So I started and ran a number of different magazines. Some on my own, and some for other people's companies. I was the editor of a Chinese language technology magazine called "Red Egg," which was kind of pirated, "Red Herring," that was run by a Chinese media group. I started another entertainment magazine that Chinese media group bought. It was a bilingual, it was a kind of attempt to be like a post-hipster version of Beijing scene. I don't know, if the old thing that I'd worked on and I worked for a soon-to-fail internet, a quickly failing, I don't know what the right word is a short-lived internet company, a doomed internet company. That was basically hired me as Creative Director. The day NASDAQ crashed the first dotcom boom. And it was a joint venture between Silicon Valley, VCs, and Phoenix TV, which is a public but sort of government backed, government-owned kind of TV station in China. And then I ended up as a partner with some friends running a design agency, and we did advertising and graphic design. And I thought, I'd kind of reached the end of my tether with media because it was just so difficult. And even in those more tolerant times, things was very difficult to do it legally. And the media business is kind of a sucky business, especially Prince is very capital intensive. And this was still early in that days. And anyway, I thought the advertising and design business might be suited to my interests and skills because it's kind of similar to media, but I quickly realized that I'm not very suited to that kind of work, making creative stuff for clients and then dealing with them. And it was driving me so crazy that I started this website, "danwei.org." And basically about the Chinese media business and the internet business. And I was just writing short commentary. It was a blog about the internet business in China and how it was changing and commenting on it, both from a business point of view, but also the politics of it, and that was 2003, which was perhaps the high point of my optimism about media in China. And it was an amazing year because there were things like the Southern Weekly Newspaper doing these incredible investigative reports, the Chinese newspaper, commissioning and publishing, really ballsy stuff. And the internet was just getting going. Blogging had become a Chinese thing with, this mudamay, this sax blogger, wrote this post about a coupling with a rock star in the back alley behind a club, and it went viral basically before we even really used that word. And almost overnight, every Chinese journal had their own blog, and there was all this interesting stuff going on online. That website, we just covered all of these exciting developments, and I ran that for 10 years, sort of growing it into a company that we had podcasts, we had daily news, we did research services for companies that pulled in money. We had some advertising, and yeah, that was quite a fun ride. I eventually sold it to the Video Content. Yeah, we did mentioned before we started recording.

Rich Robinson:

You were really pioneering. You were really your own full-stack media company back when people didn't even know that was a thing, and I was always super impressed by your pioneering experiments and just reach. I mean

Jeremy Goldkorn:

some of it was just lacky timing right there, there was interesting things to write about and report in China before there was as much English-language media attention to it, and none of the big American media companies had these enormous bureaus that they developed in the run-up to the Olympics, that still wasn't a thing. The New York Times, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, they had tiny offices really. The online video was brand new. I mean, when did YouTube start? Was it 2006? 2- '05, right? It started '05 and I think we made the first Danwei videos in late '05 or early '06. And we started making these documentaries about Beijing. There wasn't much out there compared to today, it was very sparse. So the timing was good. There was a growing internet population and a growing interest in China, the Olympics were coming. China was pretty open and free in terms of media. Yeah, those were fun years.

Rich Robinson:

Yeah, I think you're always really terrific at not only grabbing the zeitgeist of what was available to use in the internet but also of China. I think that you were an excellent channeler of China. You see like some comedians that are like,"Oh, he's like a comedian's comedian." Like, the other comics love to listen to him. I think like other China watchers or inside baseball, expats in China would be like, "What you were putting out there?" Right? So I always thought you had a good finger on the pulse.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Well, thank you. Yeah, no, it's good to hear. I was very much invested in living in China and trying to convey some of the experience, and it the pulse was beating hard. You didn't take much to keep your finger on the pulse. You just had to keep your eyes open. That doesn't work as a metaphor, but you know what I mean, the pulse was unavoidable. The pulse was everywhere. It was beating you on the head.

Rich Robinson:

The matrix is everywhere. We're all in.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

I mean, I don't know if you remember the feeling of like

getting woken up at like 2:

30 in the morning by a noise outside my apartment and there being a traffic jam of this enormous construction equipment. Like these trucks with these incredibly huge wheels that you never see outside of a mine in Western Australia, like Stack, and Beijing. And that was like, everything was like "Boom." You know, it was a great time to cover China.

Rich Robinson:

Yeah, full-on noisy construction at all hours dropping pipes from scaffolding, like, six stories and it was definitely, wild east. Tell everybody about the whole Sinica startup that's been so fun to watch.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

So, Kaiser, who told me he's been on your show already, I haven't seen it because I don't think you've released these yet.

Rich Robinson:

I haven't released them.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

So, hopefully, don't talk to me too badly and cut up my words to say the wrong thing. Totally raw and unedited, okay. I don't know if that's good or bad.

Rich Robinson:

Yeah. I hope also to get banned by Neil Young as well.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

You're speaking to the wrong guy. If you want Neil Young to ban you, I'm quite, anyway. Yeah, I'm quite a pro-vax of myself.

Rich Robinson:

Yes. Sure. Me too. Me too. No, but actually, Neil Young is an independent artist. He's a YouTuber not the same Neil Young.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Yeah. So what were we talking about, Sinica? Yeah, so the podcast. So Kaiser Kuo, he's a good friend of mine and we still work together. He, at the time, was ending a career in freelance journalism in China and going into he ended up working for Baidu, the Chinese search company for some time just after we started the podcast. But in 2010, we were talking about podcasts, and he was saying there wasn't a good English podcast. There wasn't a good podcast about China. It was still fairly early for the form. It was still a bit early days of blogging, it was like just nerds really were into it and tech people, and kind of other random kind of otaku types. It wasn't a fashionable thing at all. And I'd never heard of Joe Rogan, that's for sure. Back then, it so happened we had a friend who was running another startup business — a teaching Chinese platform — and it was primarily using podcasts as a way to teach Chinese. And people could sign up for a subscription and pay, or there was a certain amount of free content, and he had a problem, he needed publicity. And he knew by this point, Kaiser obviously is ex heavy metal star in China, and had been a freelance journalist, and like me, something of a media whore. So, like both of us could bring some publicity, bring some attention to a startup business trying to learn Chinese. So it was a great match. So we ended up using his studio. David Lankes, his name, great guy now doing something that I don't understand in Crypto Saito. I try to learn, but it's hard. So David also engineered the shows. He did the recording. He edited them, and then he'd put them up on his website. And so it made it very easy to do, and we were just doing it as a hobby. Quite soon after the show, Kaiser started working for Baidu, which was a full-time, pretty stressful job. And I was running Danwei, my website company. So, I also had that as a full-time job, and a couple of years after that, I sold it to The Financial Times, so I was very busy on that. So it was strictly a hobby, but we nonetheless managed to keep it up and pretty regularly on a weekly basis. And it was a show where we would talk about recent news and then usually have a guest, often a journalist, because we knew most of the foreign correspondents in Beijing, to discuss the topic. And then, we'd also bring on sometimes academics and other specialists and sometimes it would be, quirky other people that did some China thing that wasn't really news or foreign policy or, wasn't an academic. And yeah, we did it just for fun. And then in 2016, I had moved to the States by this time. And Kaiser was about to move to the States, and we got this opportunity to work with SupChina, which is what I do now. And so we sold the podcast to SupChina and got a, you know, it was an acquihire basically. And I now, as does Kaiser, work for SupChina. The podcast is a part of the SupChina media empire, my involvement now is much less than it was back then. I'm the editor-in-chief of SupChina, so I spend a lot of my time, on other things but we still work pretty closely together. The podcast is now weekly and much more professional than it was back in the day, as of, David's Beijing home studio, it's still going strong. It's the most popular podcast on China that we know of. Yeah.

Rich Robinson:

Indeed. Yeah. And I know that you're less involved, but I love it when you and Kaiser are in this same studio and the banter and the familiarity, and the ribbing. It's just and you guys really know what you're talking about. I just really love it.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Yeah, it's a good dynamic, and we don't really agree with each other on a lot of things. So the show dynamic works pretty well, I think, because when we do it together, Kaiser doesn't like to do very aggressively interrogative interviews of the guests. He and the show has never been about sort of gotcha journalism. It's drawing out a guest. But that can sometimes be a little dry. Our occasional rubbing, hostility, or vehement disagreement sometimes can add some drama. So it worked.

Rich Robinson:

Indeed, it's compelling, and yeah, I'm writing my first book, it's called "At the Speed of China," like at the speed of light. And the rough thesis is that, four years outside of China is a year inside China. And even though there are a few things that may put a little governor or hobble that speed a little bit, it's still sort of running unchecked for better or worse, right? That pace and pulse sort of continues in China today, and I'd just love to get some of your thoughts of like, what if someone asked you about the speed of China, like an anecdote personally or professionally or what, maybe some of the guests on Sinica some of the things you've observed.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I think it's an interesting time, first of all to write a book that because that China speed. I think the height of it is probably passed for a number of reasons. I think China's gonna slow down because, some of it, it just has to, it's tired. It has problems. It has to deal with the problems that are left behind by like three, four decades of you know what Xi Jinping is called"The Barbaric Expansion of Capital." And now, the government certainly wants to slow down a bit, wants to address, inequalities in society wants to reign in the power of the entrepreneurs wants to address environmental damage. So, I believe it's a great time to look back because I think it's gonna slow down a bit, but how much? Maybe not that much.

Rich Robinson:

And there are some pockets where I think it's gonna, you know, increasing in some industries and---

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Highly electric for sure. I mean, batteries and electric cars, it doesn't seem like there's gonna be any kind of slowdown and but yeah, China speed, I suppose it's something that is enabled by a combination of factors that are quite unique to China in enormous population. A good deal of which is still relatively low wage, meaning you can get stuff done that requires a lot of people, and quickly it requires, I mean, it's also an enormous market, so it means that everybody is hungry and willing to take risks because they believe the rewards are big. So when money sloshes around in China, it sells shit a lot of money because people are willing to take big bets that was something that was very apparent to me coming from South Africa. It's a tiny country. I mean, even now, our total population there is somewhere around 60 million people. So that's like three big Chinese cities, and whereas China, even today, with so much hostility coming out of the US and Europe and so many problems that companies have had in China, it's very difficult for any multinational company to resist the lure of China's market because it's just so huge. And if you're gonna play in China, you also, you've gotta play big. I mean, this is a continental power really? It's huge. You can't go there with 20 cents. I mean, I think you and I, well, I speak for myself. I mean, my entrepreneurial day.

Rich Robinson:

You had 20 cents when you showed up. I wish.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

I know I was born with a silver spirit of my mouth.

Rich Robinson:

This isn't a bragging podcast.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

That wasn't actually meant to make myself look good. I look back on it and I think,"What the fuck was I thinking? Idiot." But you know, some people are willing to place big bets, but that means you can get a lot of money. A lot of money is always coursing through the veins of the body, the business in China.

Rich Robinson:

The corporal entity or whatever. Yeah. So, yeah, I know what you, I know what you mean. Yeah. It's like there really is like this, if you're gonna talk about pulse, you're gonna talk about the whole cardiovascular system around that, right?

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Chinese people just work hard despite the fact that, you know, supposedly traditionally, business people are looked down on, I mean, in China, in 21st century China, that's not the case anymore. People, they are obsessed with education. So, people get educated, and there is an incredible ability to just put the hours in, whether it is to study engineering or to just start a company or work for somebody else's company. Americans, I've realized since moving here, they like to sort of joke about French and Italians taking 6 weeks of summer holiday. And it is true that Americans also work very hard. This is a hard-working country. There's not a lot of public holiday. As for like government mandated, like paternity leave and stuff. Forget about it. But Chinese people really work hard and I noticed coming to America, the only places where I find the same kind of willingness to eat bitterness as they say in Chinese, is among the immigrants. Like most Americans, they're just not gonna get out of bed at

5:

00 AM and go and do some shitty job for a low amount of money. It's just very difficult. Whereas, China, there's a lot of people who are willing to do very hard work, and I shouldn't maybe that gives the wrong impression talking about waking

up at 5:

00 AM and going to dig a ditch. That's actually not even really what I'm talking about. I'm thinking of people in white collar jobs, engineers.

Rich Robinson: Doing a meeting at 11:

30 PM in the China world you know, lobby, right?

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Right. And then, afterwards, still going out for a drink with a business connection and schmoozing them and trying to like get do some deal done. I mean, that kind of thing. It's just people are extremely driven. So I think that's a huge factor in being able to get things done quickly. I mean, with the only exception really of Spring Festival, you almost never get an answer in China."Well, we can do that, but after this holiday or after this, unreasonably long period of time that I need to do whatever it is I do."

Rich Robinson:

Yeah. And even that's efficient with Chinese New Year. They just roll up the sidewalks for 10 days or something like that. And everybody knows that they're out. So then it's even aligned nationally on that big chunk, right? Which doesn't even really exist in the West so much. Maybe that summer holiday, July, August. But it's not, it doesn't overlap so well. Yeah. So there's a brutal efficiency in that even.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

And of course, I mean, all of this is made possible by a government, which since it's recovered from Maoism has been hell-bent on developing China's economy. So they've encouraged what you're calling "The China Speed." It's been a part of government policy essentially since 1978, maybe you could say. Well, since the early 80's anyway.

Rich Robinson:

Yeah, indeed. And I think, there are some things where, we look at the high, I've talked about this before, the high speed rail, like what's really to be learned from that? Probably not that much from other nations in terms of, "Hey, let's just claim this lamb by eminent domain and let's put billions of dollars into this infrastructure and it doesn't matter that this swamp land has got some protected species in there. We'll gonna build it." But you know, yeah. So, that's not really, something that is even, necessarily all that helpful to look at. I think it's good to be aware that there is this enormous high speed rail system, but you know, the Gigafactory being built in 168 days with Tesla, right? And being able to like, move all of those permits and set up beneficial tax structures and to have, everything aligned. So, the government is in sync with the commercial side. I think there are, I think there are lessons to be learned around that. And there are some broad, reasons with the, like you said, the sky, the size of the population and the market and the government push and the GDP per capita. But I think that there are other, methodologies that people use for speed both for better and for worse. That can be learn from. But in any case, the number one purpose of the book is just awareness, because that China speed is going to inform and compete with people globally, even if they don't want to go into China.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's everybody is gonna have to deal with it sooner or later. Especially if you're in business or and it's being, increasingly exported to the rest of the world. Not just in--

Rich Robinson:

Your home continent of Africa has seen a lot of that.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Absolutely. And I think there's still a great deal of misunderstanding in the West about China's in the West. I mean, I kind of hate that word, but you know, a lot of the English reporting on China in Africa has got this, sort of, lack of sophistication about it. And it tends to see China as a malign actor who's just trying to get countries stuck in debt traps and then take over their ports and stuff like that. And it underestimates some of the incredible things China has been able, Chinese companies have been able to do as well as the Chinese government. The government and state owned companies obviously build infrastructure, but you know, I mean most popular mobile phone brand.

Rich Robinson:

What's an example of that? Like, yeah, because I think, obviously whatever was happening post-colonialism in Africa wasn't really working. So, there has to be something, another approach.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

I mean just about, name a country in Africa and you can find a highway or train like Kenya and for example, a train system that has been financed and built by China and Chinese companies. And often it is of course connected to resource extraction. Congo with a huge central African nation that provides the setting for the heart of darkness, but also much of the world's necessary ingredients that go into mobile phone batteries, carport, cobalt, and there's a lot of infrastructure development that is enabling the access to these minerals. But it's not just that. I mean, the private enterprise is pretty astonishing too. I was gonna say "Transsion" is a mobile phone brand that most Americans have never heard of. It's the biggest mobile phone brand in Africa, and it's by a Chinese company. And part of the reason is they've adapted to local tastes ranging from adjusting the cameras and the software for the cameras to deal better with black skin to, providing complimentary music streaming services that exist outside of the Apple YouTube universe, but are tailored for African tastes. So, Africa's certainly getting a dose of China speed. And a lot of my contacts in Africa, some of whom have been guests on Sinica podcast, and people I've known for years. Often find western media to be kind of lecturing and hectoring about China and they sort of resent it because for many people in Africa, they feel that, "Well, at last somebody's showing interest, and then coming along with money and projects and then...

Rich Robinson:

Yeah. Teaching us how to fish, not just giving us fish, right?

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Africa as a nation, as a continent of consumers and customers, not as a basket case, that should be the target of aid.

Rich Robinson:

Yes. Right? Yeah. And there is some dignity around that. And of course, you know it's business and yes, there is extraction of---

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Labor exploitation. And of course, they're all backed up by the same government is locking up Uyghurs. And I mean, you can always get angry about China if you want to. I'll give you a million reasons in my day job, we do news about China.

Rich Robinson:

But then, I think it clouds people's views of the reality. And also, you know what I think what can be learned as well too, right? Like I kind of look at, what's happening in China is a little bit of a Sputnik moment in a way that, I think the West has to step up its game a little bit because I don't think the piece of innovation is gonna slow down and that's super, your other compatriot, Mr. Musk, his, I love his tweeted. He's like, "At the end of the day the piece of innovation is all that matters," right? And it actually really is true. And if you can move more quickly, for better or worse, then you're just gonna be able to have more cycles of experimentation that then lead to innovation, right? That's really the crux of everything, right?

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Mr. Musk born in the same year as me, about a hundred miles away from where I was. But I don't really, actually, I shouldn't have said that. I don't like to be reminded of that fact. I mean, "Where's my fucking spaceship company, Rich?"

Rich Robinson:

Oh, that's funny. Yeah I love eight. No fun. Waiting around to be a millionaire, that AC/DC song, and he's like, "Oh yeah. Get you a fucking jumbo jet off my airport," right? And it was like, get where's my fucking spaceship? Yes, indeed. Hey, that's great. Hey, Jeremy. I'm gonna let you go, my friend. That's great. Thank you for your time. I really love what you've built up and been able to really make that strong connection with China, based in Nashville. What a lovely Who fun town

Jeremy Goldkorn:

I mean, I gotta say I've been remote working since 2015. So the pandemic in some ways hasn't really changed my professional life that much, but I'm really glad everybody else is too now.

Rich Robinson:

Yes.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

It's a weird time to be doing this also, there are fewer and fewer journalists left for foreign media in China. So, there's a lot of, trying to figure out how to operate remotely has been a big challenge. Fortunately, we have a lot of great writers and sources who are able to operate in China, but it's, you know, the technology and it's been accelerated by the pandemic has made this strange geograph location for running a China website possible.

Rich Robinson:

Possible. Indeed. Yeah. And me, being able to be based here the island of the gods, right?

Jeremy Goldkorn:

In Bali. Yeah, look, it's a beautiful tropical plants outside, behind you there.

Rich Robinson:

I can poke back there. Yeah, it's a not fake.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

It's not fake. See, can I poke? No.

Rich Robinson:

New normal. So, hey all the best love and good vibes from Bali, and thanks once again my friend.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

Thanks Rich.

Rich Robinson:

Great.