January 18, 2008 -- McDonald's, like KFC, has been Sinicising its menu, offering up items designed to appeal to Chinese tastes. This would seem to be both common sense and completely unnecessary -- common sense, because McDonald's and KFC did not come here to tap into the expat market, they came for Chinese money. Unnecessary because McDonald's and KFC restaurants throughout China are regularly packed, overflowing with Chinese people happily munching on all their products, Western or Chinese.

Western retailers seem to have gone even further in their Sinicisation. Carrefour's hypermarkets are laid out in a very similar pattern to their Chinese competitors, offering very similar ranges of products. Apart from the French name on the signs, labels and plastic bags, the only sign that you're in a foreign hypermarket is the availability of products that probably only foreigners would be interested in- and such products make up only a tiny percentage of what the stores offer and are very often kept in special, "foreign products" or "imported goods" sections. The alcohol and tobacco section of my local Carrefour is a perfect example. It offers a large selection of wine, both Chinese and imported, but the foreign and imported wines are stacked in separate sections of the wine department. There is no clear segregation, but you go to one row of shelves for Chinese one, and another for imported wine. It's a similar story with spirits- imported spirits such as vodka and whiskey are on this side, Chinese baijiu on the other. Unfortunately their selection of imported beers is much smaller than their range of imported wines- I supposed that is to be expected of a French retailer. Roughly half of the beer row is devoted to Chinese beers, maybe a quarter to foreign beers brewed in China, and the rest to the imported brews.

The Sinicisation does not stop with the range of products on offer, though. Carrefour, like other foreign retailers I've seen, seems to have adopted Chinese work habits, too. Like in any Chinese supermarket, it's often difficult to know just where one should pay for things other than food or drink. The cosmetics department may well have it's own cashier where you have to pay for many of your cosmetics purchases- although not necessarily all of them. In the electronics department, you may have to pay for your MP3 player at the department cashier, but when you ask where you pay for your DVD, you are told to take it downstairs to the main checkout.

Oh, and one aside from my last trip to Carrefour: I picked up a few of the latest Chinese DVDs and was disappointed to see they had only Mandarin sountracks and simplified Chinese subtitles. This is something I often find frustrating when buying DVDs in China, as, to me at least, it reeks of a certain narrow-mindedness: Who said that only Mandarin-speaking, simplified-Chinese-reading Chinese people could possibly be interested in Chinese films? My language skills are more than adequate to cope with such films, although I'll admit some of the details pass me by, but I can think of plenty of people who are locked out of films they would probably enjoy because of this.

Microsoft, though, seems to have taken a different approach. Yes, Windows has been translated into Chinese, and the Chinese edition of Windows XP has several different Chinese character input methods, whereas the English edition has only one. But I was surprised the first time a computer running a Chinese edition of Windows crashed on me and I saw that the "back end"-- all those technical bits that make the pretty front end that we use work, the bits I'm terrified to touch lest I accidentally set my computer to "Self Destruct"-- was entirely in English.

The Chinese are willingly adapting Western culture and technology to their own needs and Western businesses are adapting their operations to Chinese culture. The two are meeting in the middle. The only two caveats I have are that the majority of Chinese, being too poor and rural to afford any Western product or service more expensive than a bottle of Coke, are not taking part in this process at all and therefore remain as stubbornly Chinese as ever, and that there is a certain segment of Chinese nouveau riche who seem to desire the illusion that they are outside China in somewhere generically Western. Judging by the sheer lack of buyers in the malls catering to that particular category of Chinese nouveau riche, I would not advise any Western business to bank their strategy on that sector. And judging by the lack of foreign business in rural China, I would have to advise foreign businesses to look towards the countryside for both production and sales.