“China knocks the ego out of you.”
I love this quote by Christine Lu.
Her talk last week was very inspiring. Christine is not only the founder of The China Business Show. She is also involved in a number of exciting internet ventures in China.
Recently she took a group of venture capitalists and internet entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley to China to meet their local counterparts. She named the tour Geeks on a Plane.
Although she worked in Shanghai and has travelled many times to China, Christine doesn’t want to be called a “China expert”.
She believes that “the more you deal with China, the humbler you become”. She says that the longer you stay in China, the more you begin to recognise just how huge and diverse the country is.
Christine gets a charge out of those people who spend a couple of years in the country and call themselves China experts. She calls it the “Marco Polo complex”.
I can certainly relate to this phenomenon from my days in Eastern Europe. And something else Christine mentioned made me laugh and took me back to my first months in Prague. She said that she doesn’t do second-tier cities in China because she doesn’t “thrive by carrying around her own toilet paper”.
There was a time in the autumn of 1990, when shops in Prague were out of toilet paper. So… (and here I have a confession to make…) we would go to international hotels…and stock up on toilet paper!
Amazing … how adventures seem to be about the smallest things!
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