Correspondent Bill Marcus tells us how in China you can make good money simply by being a white westerner.
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LISA MULLINS: Now to a very different story about ethnic differences in China. This one has to do with skin color, and it comes to us from Bill Marcus, an American reporter based in Shanghai.

BILL MARCUS: In China, there’s a special market for white, native-English speaking Americans.

PHILIP TANG: Having a white face in my company is very important for us. It’s kind of impression. Okay, say impression whether you are internationalized or not.

BILL MARCUS: That’s Philip Tang, regional manger for Cotik, a Hong Kong based architectural design firm. Tang hired me, a white guy from suburban New York, for the day.

PHILIP TANG: So we need somebody, okay, who can speak very good, English, and also who can demonstrate a very good, okay, business mind, or marketing sense. Because, okay, this is the critical chance, or the one and only one opportunity for us, okay, to sell ourself.

BILL MARCUS: I went into a room in downtown Shanghai, shook the hands of a wall of blue-suited Japanese, sat behind a table as big as Montana and said I’m Bill Marcus, Business Development Director for Cotik, let me tell you about our company. Then I narrated a power point. Tang had written the script.

PHILIP TANG: They are not looking for a local company. They’re looking for an internationalized company.

BILL MARCUS: I must have done a good job because Cotik won the contract to design the office layout for a Japanese firm moving into Shanghai’s new World Finance Center.  In America, this is fraud, but in China, it’s marketing.  To me, earning the equivalent of 300 dollars for the afternoon was deception, so I gave some to charity. My brother said I shouldn’t kid myself, I was still stealing. But white foreign experts in China are routinely approached to sell everything. One friend, an actress from New York City named Christy Shapiro, was a famous Italian home designer for the day. Christy doesn’t speak Italian and can’t fake an Italian accent, but that didn’t matter. The Chinese she was talking to in English didn’t understand English anyway. When a man tried to question her on a matter of substance, her employers whisked her away promising the questioner that he would be provided with a detailed written response at a future date.

JOHN VAN FLEET: We’re selling our faces. We’re selling our ancestry. The fact that we’re white people, that’s what we’re selling.

BILL MARCUS: That’s another friend, John Van Fleet. He used to fill in as a priest at weddings.

JOHN VAN FLEET: The weddings that I have participated in, have all been in English, at least, my role as the faux priest, precisely because they wanted that foreign aspect.

BILL MARCUS: But all that may be changing. Daniela Barrera of the marketing consultancy Publicist in Hong Kong says a survey last winter of more that 1,500 Mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong consumers, showed demand is falling for the promise of quality that John, Christy and I have been selling.

DANIELA BARRERA: This economic crisis is actually making them understand that some of their, you know, traditional values are actually better than some Western values that they’ve been considering as inspirational in the past.

BILL MARCUS: In terms of China, Wall Street blew it for all white people?

DANIELA BARRERA: Technically for the white in finance, [LAUGHS] not necessarily as much for other sectors, say for instance, luxury.

BILL MARCUS: So, there’s still some hope if I ever decide to sell, say,  Ferraris. For The World, I’m Bill Marcus in Shanghai.

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