Face and Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg misplays the name game
Some gaffes are more serious than the green hats story and can mark you as a barbarian outsider. When Mark Zuckerberg asked President Xi to name his soon-to-be-born first child it was a clumsy attempt at cultural interaction that turned into an embarrassing setback. Mr. Zuckerberg had spent a year studying Mandarin. He had recommended Xi’s book The Governance of China (Xi, 2015) to Facebook employees. His wife, the pediatrician and philanthropist Priscilla Chan, was of Chinese ancestry and grew up speaking Cantonese. So, when he cornered Xi at a state dinner at the White House and asked him to name his unborn daughter, he must have been feeling pretty good about his chances.
It would seem, at first glance, hard to fault Mr. Zuckerberg for earnestness or effort. Yet he managed to appear foolish and at the same time make President Xi feel uncomfortable by having to fend him off. What went wrong between Mr. Zuckerberg and President Xi? It is difficult to know where to start because there are so many aspects of his awkward entreaty worth pondering. A threshold point apparently lost on Zuckerberg is that, typically, business leaders do not have the same social standing or prestige in China as they do in some parts of the West and especially the United States. Historically, being a businessperson was considered lower in status than being a scholar or government minister, for example, let alone an emperor or chairman of the Party. As a result, President Xi very probably sees himself on the same plane as the presidents, prime ministers, kings, and queens of major world powers. The leader of a business, even one as valuable and famous as Facebook, is, to Chinese perspectives, decisively outranked by such a senior Chinese leader. In short, Mr. Zuckerberg, who would be a much sought-after star at any American dinner party, was severely outclassed and did not grasp how socially presumptuous he must have seemed to Xi.
A second obvious point is that President Xi well understood that Facebook had been aggressively trying (unsuccessfully) to enter the Chinese market for years and he must have felt that the naming request was a rather blunt and unsubtle way of advancing Mr. Zuckerberg’s real, i.e., business, purpose. Xi must also have perceived, with some justification, that Mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook, whether intentionally or unintentionally, would present a challenge to Chinese culture and society, and to the ruling Communist Party (Mozur, Scott, & Isaac, 2017). Xi is well aware that Facebook and other Western social media platforms like Twitter have been instrumental parts of revolutionary activity in other parts of the world, and hence would be anathema to Chinese government leaders’ desire for stability and control (Pye, 1988). President Xi knows that it is easier to control Chinese social media platforms which are functionally as good or better than Facebook. Under the circumstances, Mr. Zuckerberg’s request would have been perceived by Xi as wildly underestimating his intelligence and grasp of the terrain over which Facebook hoped to operate in China.
Most importantly, however, Mark Zuckerberg did not have the right kind of relationship with President Xi. The naming of a child, especially a first-born, is something that is appropriate to ask of an elder relative like a favorite aunt or uncle. It is a special honor that rests on a preexisting and close personal relationship. It was highly presumptuous of Mr. Zuckerberg to make such a request of a person who not only outranked him, but was also someone to whom he was an outsider and had perhaps met once or just a few' times. Assuming that learning a little Mandarin would be a sufficient personal bond with Xi highlighted a lack of cultural Awareness. All these considerations taken together gave President Xi permission to dismiss Zuckerberg’s request, humiliating him by an outright rejection, rather than, for example, letting him dowm easily. (We hasten to add that despite this one significant setback, all is not necessarily lost permanently for Mr. Zuckerberg. He has virtually unlimited resources and access, if he seeks it, to knowledgeable China hands wrho can help him learn how to operate in China the way
Hank Paulson and his tech counterpart Bill Gates before him learned to do. The Mandarin lessons may yet pay off)
Mark Zuckerberg’s high-stakes bid to confer face and smooth Facebook’s business path in China resulted instead in his own personal loss of face in a highly public way. More significant than any personal humiliation Zuckerberg suffered is the fact that by behaving so cluelessly, he marked himself as an outsider barbarian—someone who could not be trusted and who makes a poor prospect for a business relationship. It takes Awareness: a reading of the specific situation and the relationships involved to discern how to properly and effectively promote face. Mr. Zuckerberg failed to understand the importance of hierarchies and closeness of relationships. This is such a complex and central aspect of Chinese ethics, etiquette, culture, religion, and philosophy that we devote the entire next chapter to it. It was a great honor for Mr. Zuckerberg to even meet President Xi, not an opportunity for him to ask a significant personal favor. Mr. Zuckerberg did not have the type of longstanding, preexisting, and personal relationship that would constitute permission for such an ask.
Beyond understanding hierarchies and relationships, another simple but crucial principle to grasp, in order to properly and effectively confer face, is that Chinese businesspeople often see themselves as hosts to Western business executives. Western businesspeople who think of themselves as guests, and of their Chinese contacts as hosts, will have a much smoother time doing business in China (Buderi & Huang, 2006, Hu et al. 2010, De Menthe, 2013, Collinsworth, 2014). Understanding this host-guest dynamic, a savvy executive will be prepared with questions calculated to give the host opportunities to show what they know. By asking informed questions and then really listening to replies, the Westerner can effectively confer face upon their host. As one longtime traveler to China put it:
[Westerners need to understand that respect is much more than a matter of not violating another’s rights; it also includes showing interest in and appreciation of their distinctive way of life. . . . That is to say, it includes things that are about peoples and not just persons.
(Ivanhoe, Interview, 2020)
The Westerner who is able to achieve Ethical Agility by understanding hierarchies and relationships and by understanding their own role and context as guests, will be savvier in conferring face effectively to their hosts. The rewards of such Ethical Agility are great, as they could potentially result in the ultimate influence that comes with being thought of an insider rather than an outsider. To better understand how to put the ideas we have been discussing about Ethical Agility and face into practice, we now turn to a real-world example. A common issue Westerners encounter when doing business in China is maintaining quality and safety in the manufacturing supply chain. In the next section, we focus specifically on safety and efficacy in the chemical and pharmaceutical outsourcing sector, but the principles we describe about how to employ Ethical Agility to help assure the safety and quality of finished products and intermediate ingredients and components are more broadly applicable to other kinds of supply chains.
