And this may also be a Hong Kong buyer, who (unlike buyers from mainland China) would have no qualms about flashing a prized catch such as this in the face of Xi Jinping’s “common prosperity” campaign.
The auction house was specifying, all day long, when a bidder was from HK or “China.” I took them to be genuine and consistent.
People may joke about Chinese buyers but they have some of the deepest pockets in the world and have become a major force in the auction world.
For clarity of intent, and I can’t speak for anyone else, but for my own part I was not speaking lightly when I said:
In any number of contexts, in my experience, the Chinese have very different
social norms around money and making payments due.
I am a partner at a global top 50 law firm, with offices in China (and HK) and have represented many prominent Chinese companies over the years, on several occasions accumulating multi-million dollar bills. When it comes to retrieving payment for those bills, there has been few parallel experiences from any other country - and, I have never heard of a non-Chinese law firm with a notably different experience (though Chinese law firms, apparently, may be treated differently). I am placing no intrinsic morality to that circumstance, only recounting it as a known and observed difference in business culture.
Separately and as a vignette of what are, in my experience, different social norms around money in the west vs. China: I was once in a business meeting, and during a momentary break I mentioned off hand that I had just closed on the purchase of a new house. Without missing a beat and with no particular inflection, the counter-party’s business lead casually asked “how much money did you pay?” Being from the west, I was momentarily taken aback by the question - until my Chinese colleague explained that openly questioning the monitory value of such things, even if/by strangers, is essentially commonplace (at least enough that my Chinese colleague thought it a complete misunderstanding). Here again, I’m ascribing no intrinsic morality to this circumstance, but instead - almost sociologically - noting the difference in social norms.
May I also suggest everyone to cool it on the anti-Chinese undertones with the suggestions of money laundering and non-payment. I'm no fan of the Chinese government, however with a 1.4 billion hugely diverse population, and the highest density of billionaires, an already huge and growing interest in watchmaking and collecting, I don't think some of the comments are acceptable.
To be fair, the money-laundering comments have I think been entirely agnostic to geographic location; instead, the “bit” is simply that anyone paying $3.5M for that watch has got to be up to something (granting a certain degree of tongue-in-cheek to the discussion).
Further, while in this instance the discussion has been about China because the winner was Chinese, China is far from the only country known to have disproportionate numbers of publicized disagreements with auctions houses for “failures” to pay (Russia, India, the Middle East, South America, Indonesia - may have all raised the same commentary). Though in many instances, there were likely as much “failure” of the auction house to navigate certain cultural differences along the way.
That said, I appreciate your injection and caution that we might be more careful in mentioning these important nuances so as not to be mistaken.
