Balding Out

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: July 20, 2018 at 1:30:46 AM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Balding Out
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal. A long essay, but worth the read if you’re interested in 
> someone’s perspective on China and the U.S.  DLH]
>
> Balding Out
> By Christopher Balding
> Jul 17 2018
> <http://www.baldingsworld.com/2018/07/17/balding-out/>
>
> I am leaving China. After nine years working for the HSBC Business School of Peking University Shenzhen Graduate 
> School as a professor teaching international trade, negotiations, and ethics, I am leaving China.  In early November 
> 2017, the HSBC Business School informed me they would not renew my contract.  In March 2018 they informed me they 
> wished to sever all ties by April 1, 2018.
>
> I leave thankful for the time I spent in Shenzhen, China, and working with elite students in China. Despite technical 
> protections, I knew and accepted the risks of working for the primary university in China run by the Communist Party 
> in China as a self professed libertarian.  Though provided an “official” reason for not renewing my contract, my 
> conscience is clean and I can document most everything that demonstrates the contrary should I ever need to prove 
> otherwise. I know the unspoken reason for my dismissal. You do not work under the Communist Party without knowing the 
> risks.
>
> Living in China over the past nine years has been an amazing experience both personally and professionally. Working 
> in China as an academic is like being placed in the greatest economics, finance, and business lab which has been 
> shockingly unexplored. In addition to doing some academic research, I felt blessed to write and speak for different 
> organizations from Bloomberg to Foreign Policy.  For someone who suffers from academic ADD (a difficulty spending 3 
> years on a paper that will appear in print 2-4 years later), I felt blessed to be able to dive into Chinese data 
> everyday exploring aspects that most in my position simply do not get to explore.
>
> Watching the change first hand while diving into the data and being able to write about it has been a profound 
> privilege and honor. I felt a profound responsibility to get it right and tell you what I was seeing and hearing. I 
> still remember the first time I got an email from someone at Bloomberg who would ultimately edit a lot of my work, I 
> thought for sure it was a spam email. I did not even respond for a few days because up until that point I thought my 
> Mom was probably the only person reading my work.
>
> Personally, two of my three children have been born here (one under the wildest of circumstances which I must relate 
> at a later date) and they have grown up attending Chinese language elementary schools. One of the things I am most 
> proud of for my time in China is that my children speak, read, and write age fluent Chinese and whenever they see 
> Chinese children in airports or on playgrounds in Shenzhen interact seamlessly.  When I first came to China, my focus 
> was international trade and I wanted to live overseas for a while but knew relatively little about China. Though we 
> told ourselves, we will stay until it was time to go, we probably though we would stay 3 years and leave. Nine years 
> later, our family is glad we came and bittersweet to be leaving.
>
> For many months as I looked at different options, both in China and globally, I struggled with where exactly to go. 
> For personal and professional, I hoped to stay in China, Hong Kong, or Asia.  However, after quietly sharing my 
> situation with a small number of people and some things I was told unrelated to my personal situation, it became 
> abundantly clear that I could not stay in China. China has reached a point where I do not feel safe being a professor 
> and discussing even the economy, business, and financial markets.  Better to leave on your own terms than being 
> deported after receiving an 8-10 year visa.  As a result, I have decided to leave China.  I will announce my future 
> plans, projects, and activities later though I am quite excited about where I will be going what I will be doing.
>
> I want to make perfectly clear that any complaints I wrote about in any forum are reflective only of my concerns 
> about the illiberal, authoritarian communist government of China and not the Chinese people.  Most professor 
> colleagues, even those I would consider pro-Party, were good colleagues whom I enjoyed talking, debating(yes, it 
> happens behind closed doors and I learned a lot from them) and working with.  The Chinese friends I made outside of 
> the work place from people we met in overlapping social circles to neighbors to parents of my children’s school mates 
> were always friendly and helpful ready to assist a foreigner struggling to navigate some of the basics of life in 
> China.  My children whether at Chinese language schools or local rec centers, were always treated well and made 
> friends.  I will use strong language about the authoritarian communist government but I do not want that in anyway to 
> reflect upon the Chinese people.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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