Easing the way for Kiwis in Shanghai

Pam Dunn gets invitations galore in her job. "We eat a lot of sea slugs, you know. Food in this culture has such importance. If you don't eat the food, it's a form of disrespect." Picture / Kenny Rodger

Pam Dunn doesn't do stuffy, distancing diplomat-speak. Asked for an interview, the consul-general's response is immediate and welcoming.

"No problems with an 'our woman in Shanghai' story," she writes in an email, "so long as it doesn't portray us as Pimms-drinking, cocktail-going types ... "

You won't catch 43-year-old career diplomat Dunn swanning around at any event unless it brings New Zealand good business or polishes the national image.

There's no shortage of invitations. In a country where everyone wants to know the top people so they can ask favours later, our woman in Shanghai is a popular draw.

"Eating for Queen and country," says Dunn, laughing in her standard corporate office high above Shanghai's 17 million people.

"We eat a lot of sea slugs, you know. Food in this culture has such importance. If you don't eat the food, it's a form of disrespect."

Her role is to assist our economic interests in Shanghai, "a First World city in a Third World country" serenaded by jackhammers and choked with traffic and people. She might smooth the path through communist China's notorious bureaucracy for a new business or find out why an incoming New Zealand container has been stopped at the border.

Dunn estimates about 2000 Kiwis are living in her patch, which includes Shanghai and its neighbouring provinces Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui. That area contains about 200 million of China's 1.3 billion population.

The New Zealanders there - a good number of them Asia-born Kiwis - are generally in business with companies such as Mobil, Alcatel and ACNeilsen. Kiwis also fill the increasing demand for English-language teachers, choosing an OE in Asia rather than London. It's a trend Dunn applauds.

She also assists travellers who need help after, say, a passport loss or an accident and keeps an eye on those who fall foul of the law. However, it's not her job to bail out miscreants.

"A lot of them think a New Zealand passport is like a magic wand and that the Government's going to come in," she says, rolling her eyes. "Probably too many movies."

Dunn says many Kiwis arriving to live in China expect the country to be some North Korean-style totalitarian state with nothing but peasants in paddy fields.

But Shanghai is the high-rise city where East meets West, and has done since the 1930s. Then, it was an enclave for non-Chinese socialites, swindlers, missionaries and pimps, known to the rest of the world as the "the whore of the Orient" or "the Paris of the East", depending on your viewpoint.

When the communists came to power in 1949, China started shuffling to a more dour beat, the populace repressed by what Dunn calls Mao Zedong's "nuttiness".

In the past decade or so, with a different breed of leader, China has started allowing greater personal and economic freedoms.

In 1990, authorities decided to develop swathes of paddy fields in Pu Dong, Shanghai's east, into a 570sq km "special economic zone", a place for Western companies to take root.

Fifteen years has seen an astonishing transformation, particularly in construction, though other infrastructure, such as a legal system, remain shaky.

As in other Chinese cities, an increasingly sophisticated middle class has arisen - as well as vast gaps between rich and poor, mass redundancies and an increase in prostitution.

Dunn, married to teacher Ross Dunn, 43, and mother to 5-year-old Caleb, possesses an intelligent, genial breeziness. She speaks Cantonese, learned as a child, and the country's unifying language, Mandarin, which she learned at Victoria University.

Her forebears arrived in New Zealand from Canton in 1914.

Wellington-born, she grew up speaking Cantonese with her grandparents, but with her siblings would "chatter away in English. I think in English and I dream in English".

She returned to her roots in 1995, paid by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, to spend two years improving her grasp of Mandarin.

In those days, Beijing, a city of grand socialist streets set out in grids and grandiose socialist monuments, was closed by 8pm, even the restaurants: "They turned the lights off and booted you out."

Everyone was a state employee, recalls Dunn, and the standard response to requests for assistance was "mei you" - can't do. More like can't be bothered, says Dunn. "You'd ask for a can of Coke and there's rows and rows, and the woman just says, "Mei you". There was that state-run mentality: why should you work hard when the person next to you is going to get the same pay?"

She would return to New Zealand for holidays with a shopping list: cheese - "it was like gold" - and toilet paper: "The quality was abysmal, you know."

Media censorship was strict. "We used to get English-language newspapers and the China section would be ripped out."

Things have changed so swiftly that Dunn has to remind herself these anecdotes date back just a decade.

However, China, still frightened of the masses mobilising, still censors the media - Dunn is used to seeing CNN television broadcasts vanish for several minutes at a time, and Prime Minister Helen Clark was censored as she talked, diplomatically by New Zealand standards, about human rights in China on the channel at the end of May.

Various internet sites, including the BBC, are blocked, and native Chinese using certain words in emails, text messages or phone calls can expect a visit from the police.

But, says Dunn, "Chinese will tell you that this is the best time ever for them, for their living standards, for the quality of life. I think they are really concerned to preserve that and not to have that jeopardised."

No one wants to go back to the years "when neighbour narked on neighbour" and all lived in fear.

The past casts a long shadow, however, and that can interfere with New Zealand business.

"Sometimes, you will wonder why you're not getting anywhere when you're dealing with bureaucracy, and once you get to know people, you will find Mr X isn't going to approve anything Mr Y wants, and [the reason] goes back to the 60s."

 

Can Dunn see a time when China, ruled by the Communist Party since 1949, might move towards one-person, one-vote democracy? "Not in the foreseeable future."

There are lines that must not be crossed, like organising politically against the Government.

"Protests here are about everyday things, like housing relocation and lay-offs.

"Environmental activists are allowed to be more outspoken. The boundaries are slowly expanding.

"But then something will happen, and the Government will slam down.

"You expect this kind of zig-zagging in China's development.