The essence of my company

I have worked for power engineering services company SE Energy for over a year and a half now. As my contract draws to a close, I'm going to try and get across what is the essence of the company.

It is a 夫妻店 (fu qi dian), a 'husband and wife shop'. This term normally refers to a small business run by a married couple. Our company, with hundreds of employees and which is involved in the export of Chinese skilled labour to developing countries, should not, by my western way of thinking, be a fu qi dian. Such a big company, my natural instincts tell me, needs qualified, experienced and skilled managers and engineers to ensure all the things mentioned on the website - "Customer Orientated, Professional Services, Safety First" and so on and so on - can actually be achieved, thereby improving company performance, securing more clients, expanding, and generally becoming more prosperous and 'better'.

It took me the best part of a year to realise that this is not true. And, if anecdotal evidence from numerous friends is anything to go by, this type of large-scale fu qi dian is very common. There's nothing inherently bad or evil about it, but for people who like to 'do something properly or not at all', a fu qi dian will turn your hair grey. For our company is merely a vehicle by which the boss and his (second) wife can earn as much as possible while doing their level best to suppress outgoings. Whether things are done properly or not is entirely beside the point. Make as much money, register empty companies that don't actually do anything and spread around the profits so they're not all in one basket.

Chinese companies like to have four-character phrases as the company motto. The unofficial one for one company is pianyi jiu xing 便宜就行, which a colleague came up with and I translated as Keep It Cheap. Nothing else matters, just do it as cheap as possible. I have it written on official company paper on the back of the bookshelf in our office.

What comes across as bad management and decision-making to a western person is actually, from the point of view of the boss and his wife, a good decision. Why? Because it keeps costs down.

The boss' wife is in charge of finance, HR, translation and administration departments. She is, by western standards, completely unqualified to be a director of anything, and her impressive collection of apparently bizarre and stupid decisions is huge. My favourite instance was when we were late for a recruitment meeting because she was asleep in her office. She blamed us, demanding to know why we did not wake her. This year's new translator recruitment has been a complete cock-up from start to finish. The 'flow' of people in and out of our company is very high, because of the low salary. Our best translator had her salary cut last month because of her new salary system. And, mostly because of decisions made by the wife, the quality of the translation department has actually declined over the last six months.

This, however, is irrelevant. It's all about saving money. This year, no one on an annual salary got a New Year's bonus, almost unheard of for a company with lots of projects like ours. The fact that it caused two senior engineers to leave is immaterial. It saved them money, which can be put towards either their children's British education or one of their other companies. Also, with the company being completely owned by them, they see paying wages and salaries as 'giving' employees money, and look for constant ways to get an extra few RMB back off their staff.

Forty-year-old Mr Shi is the other member of our two-member 'Translation Quality Group'. While he might not be everyone's cup of tea with his fondness for talking about countries he's worked in, he's quite a gossip, which is conducive for me learning some interesting things. He asked me what it would take for me to sign a contract extension. I said the boss' wife would have to leave and go and enjoy her money. But this is the one thing that will never happen.

It might indeed improve company performance. But the key point is, if you get an outsider in to run things, there is a very high chance of someone running off with the company's money. Something similar happened in the company in 2008, and similar things happen all the time. The fact is, the boss' wife is qualified by the virtue of being the boss' wife and therefore the safest pair of hands.

It's all about money and trust. "Who can we trust with the money? Only us two. So we'll control everything."

The 28-year-old female manager of HR is a reasonably nice person, but is also a spineless lackey who works here because a) she would not have the title of HR manager in any other company and b) she probably has some 'guanxi' with the boss' wife despite denying it. She told me before that "everyone here is doing temping work". It struck me as odd for the manager of a large company to say this, but it is true. Many Chinese people would rather be "the head of a chicken than the tail of a phoenix", ie, they would rather have their own business and be in charge of it than earn money for people they have no connection with. While in practice this is often hard to implement, certainly a large number of people think this way. Having been here for a while now, I have a lot of sympathy with this.

As for their decision to employ me, a native English speaker, it may seem like a desire to improve the translation department. This was the initial brief I was given. On my second day in the company, the boss requested that I find co-operation opportunities with large European companies. It petered out and came to nothing, but over the course of the next year, I was asked four times to work in the business department. I gently and indirectly refused each time, initially because I wanted to improve the translation department, and afterwards because I didn't want to be to close to the boss, and the chances of this company working with major European power companies are precisely nil.

A large part of my role here is a 'huaping', a vase, a facade. "Look, we have a foreigner, we're a good company." Last October I went to Indonesia for a week. The sole purpose was a one-minute 'ambushing' of the Vice Governor of Shaanxi province who was in Jakarta at the time and was leaving a meeting. The boss' brother is a big cheese in the provincial trade department, so he helped set it up. (It didn't bother me, I got a free holiday to Indonesia.) Whenever important clients come to the company, I get wheeled out to do the interpreting - or more importantly, to just be there.

On completion of my Chinese language learning in summer of 2008, I wanted to find a job in a 'typical' Chinese company, and I was extremely lucky to find just such an opportunity. But I think I have reached the limits of what I can do here. So it's time to move on.