How to avoid conflict and deescalate a volatile situation

This is the draft for one of my recent podcasts which you can listen to by clicking through here. I recently witness a friend mess up a social situation because of her lack of social skills to handle this kind of conflict. There are three characters in this story, I was only a witness and did not take part in the conversation at all. Firstly, there was my friend Ms Li, a young graduate from Beijing who was desperate to get a job in the UK or Europe after graduating from a British university as she really didn't want to go back to China. Then there's Ms Fang, a Chinese lady in her mid-30s from Shanghai who has been working in the UK for a while but still holds on to her Chinese passport despite being eligible for British nationality. Then there's Graham, an Englishman who has done a lot of business in China, he doesn't speak Mandarin but claims to know a lot about China having visited there many times. Ms Li met Ms Fang and Graham when she was applying for a job with Graham to join his company, Graham needed a team of China market experts to help him navigate the Chinese market. Graham has already  hired Ms Fang and there were still a few more vacancies to be filled - note this would have been an ideal job for Ms Li as she was a recent graduate with little practical work experience, however being born and bred in China, she was in a really good position to play this role for Graham and assist Ms Fang. But sadly, Ms Li crashed so badly in that job interview because of her poor social skills over one matter that she felt very strongly about, she got emotional and handled the whole situation poorly. Let me to share some lessons to be learnt from this episode. 

Ms Li had expressed her long term goal of staying in the UK long enough to naturalize as a British citizenship and she would give up her Chinese nationality the moment it was possible - Ms Li had told me exactly why she felt this way. There is a massive oversupply of highly educated young people in China due to their highly competitive education system but there simply aren't enough jobs for these graduates once they entered the labour market. So you have the bizarre situations where the person delivering your packages has a masters degree or the barista preparing your cappuccino has a PhD, so Ms Li was worried that she would end up in the same situation despite being highly educated. If you are from one of the top, elite Chinese universities, if you had perfect grades and if your parents had good connections so they can call in a favour or two when you're looking for a job, then you might be able to get a decent graduate job that you have spent all that time at university preparing for. Furthermore, even in the unlikely scenario that you do get a decent job, the starting pay for graduates in China is very low compared to the West and the working conditions are atrocious compared to the West - new, younger employees are expected to sacrifice everything and work from 9 to 9, 6 days a week and it also means being obliged to always respond to anything your boss asks of you, at anytime, even if the boss wants to call you at 3 am on a Sunday morning, you're obliged to pick up the phone and deal with the matter - no ifs, no buts. So this is a far cry from what she has observed in the West and Ms Li has concluded that the grass is indeed greener on this side of the fence. Her parents are not influential or well-connected, so there is nothing they could do to help her in her job hunt should she return to China, thus Ms Li has concluded that she wants to pursue a future in the UK or Europe instead of China. That is of course, a decision that Ms Li can make for herself - it is her life, her destiny, her decision. I can empathize with what Ms Li has explained to me about why she really doesn't want to work in China but Graham and Ms Fang disagreed with her during the job interview and Ms Li didn't handle that situation well.

Now Graham doesn't appreciate the kind of challenges that Ms Li would face if she returned to China, he is a British businessman with deep pockets ready to invest in China, when he shows up in China there is someone to greet him at the airport and he is treated like a VIP every time - so of course he only has amazing things to say about China given how well he is treated each time he goes there. Allow me to compare two very different trips I took to China as an adult - the first was when I went to Shanghai and Suzhou as a tourist with my husband, I played the role of his guide given that I speak Mandarin, we took public transport, we ate where the locals ate and we didn't get any VIP treatment. I was horrified by some aspects of my trip there, such as the way the locals would spit even whilst in the public bus and there was a spittoon in the bus just for that. I did not have a good time on that trip, it was stressful from the very beginning and I remember the relief I felt when we finally made it onto the bus to take us to the airport for the flight home. The second time I went to China with my husband was when he was invited to speak at a conference by the Chinese government, he listed me as his China market specialist and right hand man, so we were both VIPs of the government in Shenzhen, we were chauffeur driven everywhere during the official working part of the trip, we were allowed to jump the queue everywhere we went and I remember this incident when we wanted to have some ice cream, but there was a long queue for the ice cream stand. Our chaperon flashed some official ID and we were allowed to go right past everyone who had been queueing for a long time, right to the front of the queue and we weren't even allowed to pay for the ice cream - the boss at the ice cream stand refused to accept the payment even from our government assigned chaperone as we were officially guests of the Chinese government. When I had a problem at the hotel, I informed my chaperone who informed his boss, then I saw the two of them march down to the front desk of the hotel and publicly scolded the duty manager for failing to give the distinguished foreign guests the treatment they deserved. It was pretty cool to be treated like a VIP like that, it was in such sharp contrast to that previous trip to Shanghai and Suzhou. Note that Graham would have enjoyed this kind of VIP treatment on every single one of his trips to China, hence that is why he thinks that China is paradise. 

Thus his perspective on China is completely different from Ms Li's perspective and that's why when he meets someone like Ms Fang who has decided to hold on to her Chinese passport, he thinks she has made the right decision. Ms Fang has a completely different reason to do so - her story is quite different, she is an only child and her motivation to hold on to her Chinese passport is primarily her desire to one day return there to take care of her parents when they get old. There is a significant age gap between her parents with her father being much older than her mother, Ms Fang knows that her father will probably pass away sooner than her mother and her mother is not the kind of woman who would know how to take care of herself when that day comes. After all, her father is a rich, successful businessman whilst her mother is a relatively uneducated housewife. Thus Ms Fang's motivation to hold on to her Chinese passport is not so much a belief that China will dominate the world's economy in the near future, not at all, it was simply her desire to fulfil her filial duties regardless of the state of the Chinese economy in the future. But Graham seems to have totally glossed over that detail and he only hears what he wants to hear - as a British businessman who has invested a lot in China, he seems to want to believe that Ms Fang's decision to hold onto her Chinese passport is purely an economic and political decision. 

So when Ms Li revealed to Graham and Ms Fang of her desire to stay on in the UK to try to eventually naturalize as a British citizen, Graham told her point blank that it was a bad idea and referred Ms Li to Ms Fang who has been here for a long time but still holds onto her Chinese passport. Ms Li then got into an argument with Graham, she assumed that Graham didn't know enough about China and she then started telling Graham all the problems and challenges associated with youth unemployment in China today. Graham got extremely insulted when Ms Li made that assumption given that he had imagined that he knew a lot more about China that most British people, but to be fair, he had been seeing China through rose-tinted lenses. You see, Graham gets the VIP treatment in China, but ordinary citizens like Ms Li don't, far from it. But regardless, Ms Li offended Graham by telling him that he was wrong - that is a cardinal rule in all social interactions, never ever get into situations where you tell the other party, "you're wrong, I'm right, you are mistaken and you should listen to me, you must change your opinion on the issue as I know better than you." That's very confrontational and oh dear, Ms Li did it when the man who was potentially her future employer and boss - she couldn't have picked a worse time to have committed that social faux pas. It was at that precise moment that the job interview totally derailed - Ms Li wouldn't back down as she thought she knew far more about China (well, she was born and raised in Beijing after all) than Graham. Ms Fang just stood back and did nothing to rescue Ms Li in that awful situation as Ms Fang knew that Graham was her boss, it was not in her interest to take the wrong side in that social interaction. We have a saying for this in Chinese: 见风使舵 Basically, she knew she had nothing to gain by trying to take Ms Li's side, so she just stood back and whilst Ms Li dug her own grave in her terribly misguided attempts to change Graham's mind. Needless to say, Ms Li didn't get the job after that car crash of a job interview and the feedback that I got from Graham and Ms Fang afterwards was almost entirely negative. Oh dear, so how should Ms Li have handled this situation then? 

Allow me to compare this to another situation that I had found myself in last year in 2024, this was during the run up to the American election and the showdown between Trump and Harris. For the record, I really dislike Trump, his popularity baffles me but of course, since I am not American, my opinion on the matter really doesn't matter to anyone. However, I met someone at work who was in fact an American and not only that, he was a huge fan of Trump. Let's call this American guy Barry - I knew I could never be honest and tell him exactly how I felt about Trump, I had to maintain some kind of working relationship with this guy no matter how I disagreed with his political views. So what I did was simply ask him a series of questions - "What did you like most about Trump's first term? Which one of his policies stood out for you? Why do you think he picked JD Vance as his running mate? What do you think will be Trump's legacy? If you were to design the perfect presidential candidate, what would that look like? Which personality traits would be most important to you?" So you see, these are not loaded question with simple answers but in order to answer these questions intelligently, you need to know quite a lot about Trump and I suspect Barry is the kind of American voter who simply defaults to supporting the Republican party without actually bothering with the facts and details. So without telling Barry outright that he was wrong to support Trump, I was at least able to expose the fact that he didn't know all that much about Trump's policies at all. At no point did I criticize Barry or even make a statement - I simply played the card of a non-American who wanted to learn a lot more about Trump's American supporters. Note that at no point did Barry turn to me and ask, "so Alex, what do people in the UK think about Trump?" No, Barry wasn't interested at all in my opinion, at least not on the topic of Trump. If I had done what Ms Li did and tried to tell Barry that he was wrong, then it would only lead to conflict and that was exactly what I wanted to avoid as I had to deal with Barry at work, I needed to maintain a cordial working relationship with him. We were never going to become good friends, but I wanted to at least avoid any kind of conflict. 

Note that I wasn't just a doormat who agreed with everything Barry said (he actually mostly used Trump's language to make fun of people who disagreed with Trump), I had achieved the best case scenario: I exposed Barry's lack of understanding of the topic whilst pretending to be very interested in learning from him about American politics. I knew I could never change Barry's mind on the topic, I knew I was never in a position to teach Barry anything yet at the same time, I wasn't going to simply agree with everything he said just because he was an American: I forced him to justify everything he said and back it up with evidence, something which he really struggled with and had to take his phone out to look up information on Google. I don't think Barry was even that interested in making me a Trump supporter - he just wanted a platform to air his views and people like Barry like hearing the sound of their own voices during a conversation. A day later, we ran into a mutual friend and Barry said to this mutual friend, "Alex and I had a great discussion about Trump and American politics yesterday, Alex is a really smart guy." Really? I don't claim to be an expert on American politics but I know how to play the social game well and manipulate people like Barry into liking me even when I find his political views downright abhorrent at times. At the end of the day, I accept that I will always encounter people who disagree with me - not just about politics but about any topic under the sun - but the moral of the story is to always avoid the knee jerk reaction to enter an argument about it because you can rarely change the opinion of the other person. Ms Li needed a job from Graham, so without telling Graham that he was wrong, she should have simply asked him a lot of questions, "you seem very optimistic about the economic prospects of China, which sectors would show the greatest growth over the next decade? Do you think second and third tier cities will see a real boom in the coming decade or will this wealth and growth be concentrated in the three first tier cities? What do you admire about Xi Jinping's leadership and why? Xi Jinping is already 72 years old, who do you think is going to take over from him when he finally decides to retire and why? How would you feel about Li Qiang as a possible successor - do you think he is credible and why?" There can be so many questions that Ms Li could have asked Graham to expose the huge gaps in his knowledge about China and to remind him that she was an expert on the topic, but no she chose to be confrontational and started to argue with him. 

Both Ms Li and I found ourselves in a situation whereby we felt the other party was very misguided and plain wrong, however, I navigated that tricky social situation carefully with respectful questions whilst Ms Li did the opposite and stepped on every single land mine. Barry walked away from that interaction with only great things to say about me whilst Graham was so unimpressed with Ms Li's behaviour he refused to hire her. I don't even think that Graham's decision is that wrong - what if Ms Li encounters a colleague or client at work who voices an opinion she vehemently disagrees with, would it lead to yet another heated argument and conflict or would she have the social skills to deal with that and deescalate the situation? I don't want to be too harsh on Ms Li as she is young, but it is possible to stand up for yourself and challenge the other party without screaming, "you're wrong, I'm right, listen to me and I demand that you change your mind!" So what do you think? How would you have handled such a situation then? Thank you so much for reading.