Membership matters

That night, our last in China, the mood levels off. We eat at a western restaurant. Chris Blythe requested this weeks before, anticipating that he’d deserve the break from the hardcore banqueting. The “western” restaurant turns out to be Russian, famous in Beijing since the 1950s. Geoff Wright orders the Kiev. (‘Pumped Chicken With Bread and a Kive [sic] Sauce’). He gets a breaded stick of re-formed chicken on a bed of ready-salted crisps. He eats the crisps. I order a steak casserole. It’s fine, but there is an awful lot of it, served in a tall earthenware pot, and I am to eat it with a spoon. I get the impression this is a Chinese approximation at Russian food, based on faded memories and hearsay. But we’re pleased at least to have had some control over our order, and they serve big jugs of black beer. As we foreigners chug our way through a couple of these, I feel bad for our Chinese friends. They seem ill-at-ease around a rectangular table, with large plates of stodge to get through all on their own. I notice neighbouring tables fall back on familiar forms, dishes getting pushed to the centre, morsels stabbed from each others’ plates and eaten in multiple bites off the fork.

Some things translate better than others across cultures. The CIOB in China is one of these. I’ve been impressed, not only by the number of members here (1800 in Hong Kong and 790 on the mainland) as by how well-placed they are. They lead the highest-profile and most ambitious projects, and steer policy right up to vice-ministerial level. And membership doesn’t seem like just a tag picked up along the way, but a hard-earned distinction. One of the president’s toughest jobs on the tour was to present certificates to new members at receptions around the country. At these festive affairs, they queued to shrug themselves into the three gowns we carted around, mount the stage and have their picture taken with the president. They’d keep him busy hours afterward with more photos in varying peer groups and project teams. In China, he is a genuine celebrity.

Back in London, one consultant with China experience warned: They’ll adopt your methodology and then kick you out. But Michael Brown, chief executive of CIOB International and author of the CIOB’s strategy in China for the past decade, doesn’t believe it. He says the value of CIOB membership in China is that it represents an international qualification. He believes that as China edges closer to the centre of the world stage, the CIOB will continue to have a useful role to play.