More Paid Holidays, Please

Chas Freeman, President Obama’s choice for Chair of the National Intelligence Council, withdrew his candidacy last week.

I admit to taking a personal interest in this as Freeman has written an endorsement for my book. But, most importantly, he is a smart and engaging individual. He was also President Nixon’s translator in Beijing and a former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. In short, he has a remarkable resume for today’s challenges.

I was reminded of this while in Beijing last month. I heard that Freeman had only recently passed through the city. A friend of mine, an academic at Beijing University, was left deeply impressed: “Freeman can even tell a good joke in Chinese”, he said. This might seem like a small thing. But it’s not. It’s a rare skill.

I mention this because, in my view, we need more people who can tell a good joke in Chinese, or Arabic for that matter. Why? Because you can’t tell a good joke in a foreign language unless, like Freeman, you truly understand the culture.

It highlights an issue that I believe has a bearing on relations between the United States and the Silk Road countries. How so? It’s simply not that easy for the average American to travel to a Silk Road country let alone stay long enough to learn how to tell a good joke.

Let me explain. The average American worker enjoys 2-weeks paid annual vacation. The average European worker, by contrast, enjoys 4-weeks or more. Personally, after working hard for 50-weeks, I would spend the first week recovering on the couch, and only then thinking about where to travel in the second week.

The problem is you can’t go far in one week. It’s certainly difficult to travel to any Silk Road country: it takes 11-hours to fly from Los Angeles to Beijing, and about the same to fly from New York to Cairo. So, it’s no surprise then that sixty-five percent of Americans travel to Canada and Mexico as opposed to China or Egypt.

I’m arguing partly tongue-in-cheek, but I do believe that the time a person spends abroad has an impact on the way they see the world. So, the difference between 2- and 4-weeks paid leave matters for the Silk Road countries and their relations with the United States.

The same rules apply for the Silk Road countries. In fact, what strikes me about the rise of the new Silk Road is how important individuals, rather than companies, are to the story―it is the Syrian traders who regularly visit China to buy consumer goods for hungry domestic consumers, or the Chinese entrepreneurs who are setting up “China Towns” across the Middle East who are the real economic force behind the region’s rise.

Not so in the Western countries that increasingly rely on big corporations like Wal-Mart to purchase goods from China, or a small group of executives from Airbus to sell planes to Saudi Arabia. So, I’m left wondering whether America and Europe is losing its ability to tell a good joke in either Chinese or Arabic, and what bearing that will have on relations with the Silk Road countries as they grow in economic and political influence.

So my vote is for more paid holidays―it wouldn’t be the most unpopular decision and it might just help build links with the Silk Road countries.