About Me
Who is Gunter Schöch? Why is he going public and
why haven't I heard of him before?
What's with all that China background ? Who finances this?
These and more are answered below...
Cosmopolitan
Born in Germany, at age 16-17, I went to a high school living for 1 year with a host family in Florida, USA. English was the least of the things I learned. My biggest takeaway was that they did many things very differently than what I had learned, yet they lived happy and successful lives. Apparently, there was more than just "one single best way" to do things.
So later, it made me seek any opportunity to further explore the world. I studied 1 year in Madrid, Spain, and a semester in Maastricht, Netherlands, and my professional career took me to South Africa, US, Switzerland, China, France... In total, I have spent 18 years abroad, and counting.
Besides German, I am fluent in English, French and Spanish.
What I found in every country is a similar mix of individuals I like more or less, and things to eclectically adopt for my own life, without necessarily wanting to trade in the whole. This also holds true for China.
I am married since 2002 to a French-Spanish wife, and our 2 sons have German-French passports. We live in Germany and the South of France, on the Spanish border.
One thing I love about this: For centuries, French and Germans went to war with each-other every few decades, and my kids wouldn't even know a side to pick.
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The world evolves and so do I
Things and people aren't always what they appear on first sight. Squint your eyes and look at the island, and you might see something you didn't see before.
But some facts from the past can be pinned down:
Background & Education
In school, my main interest were the sciences. The best career opportunity for physicists being the lack of engineers in the job market at the time, I opted for mechanical engineering at RWTH Aachen, Germany. Realizing during internships how money dominates the "ingenious" in engineer, I also enrolled in business administration. To this day, I am proud having finished two Masters studies in parallel summa cum laude and magna cum laude respectively. One of the two was really hard, and if you wonder which, then you didn't enroll in engineering.
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Strategy Consulting and Débrouillage
Around 2000, the job to land seemed to be strategy consulting or investment banking, if you didn't feel ready for your own startup. Although already bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, I went for consulting. For a few years, it turned out to be the entrepreneur apprenticeship I had hoped for, but soon enough turned into a manager apprenticeship. However, by that time, I had found my niche. You might know the old consultant joke, which is all too true, where the consultant tells his client: "Give me your watch, and I'll tell you what time it is". For my taste, we relied too much on our own clients for industry understanding. So I made a virtue of a necessity, and in 2006 created Débrouillage Ltd.: A competitive intelligence service provider, which researches facts, figures and insights, to allow industrial top management or institutional financial investors make better informed decisions under much reduced uncertainty. We argue with the authority of the true industry experts we speak with, up and down the value chain or other adjacent roles, who hold elements to the puzzle we try to put together.
Considering the size, dynamic, and sometimes opaque nature of the Chinese market, I quickly established an office there as well, staffed with locals only, and where I personally am half of the interface to be ensure success where so many companies even with huge global staff fail. Our ongoing success has proven the concept right.
Over the years, we conducted many hundred projects of typically 4-12 weeks on average. A few selected references.
What I love about my job is the endless learning from true subject matter experts. Finally understanding something is one of the greatest joys in my life.
China
I first came to China in 2004, privately. When I returned professionally, I witnessed not only the obvious growth, but also how Western companies and other actors struggled to understand China. I can't claim I really do, but I do have the openness of mind to soak it all in and draw differentiated conclusions later.
Working on a daily basis with my own local team since 2007, and having made many personal friends, I cannot subscribe to the usual "us vs. them" stereotypes. It is with worry that I look upon the more recent hardening of the relations and that the world seems to drift towards a new building of opposing blocks. No matter what I like or do not like about the West or China, and their respective political systems, it is my strong belief that every country and every people has the right and duty to select what works best for them, and is solely responsible to live with the pros and cons inherent in their choice. Different conclusions are possible, and they may change over time.
I am neither pro nor con, I am simply trying to learn about the trade-offs and aiming to thwart any polarizing black or white, good vs. evil thinking, on all sides.
In fact, for that reason, I also call myself
"the Maverick Diplomat"
I am in nobody's camp but my own!
Teaching
Before understanding something, I am an introvert. You won't find me asking people to follow me if I don't know where to go. So politics is out of the question for me. However, whenever I feel the dopamine kick I get when finally all the pieces seem to fall into place, I feel the urge to share with others to procure them the same experience.
This led me to become a visiting lecturer for the Steinbeis University Berlin, which conducted a joint MBA program with Tongji University Shanghai. After a few years, I turned to online teaching in China through Zhihu to reach many more people. It turned out that people there wanted to know about my views on Germany, Europe, the West and its relations to China in terms of macroeconomics and geopolitics. Some of the people I reached were professional journalists at various newspapers who invited me to write opinion editorials on current major events involving our countries.
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Opinion editorials - Why in China?
What about the West?
Since 2018, I write in China and only starting now in the West, which is deeply paradoxical for 2 reasons:
ONE: Chinese, as I came to find, know way more about us in the West than the other way around.
While we are stuck in stereotypes and prejudices, they sent up to >700.000 students overseas annually. For comparison, all of US and Europe combined send little more than 100.000 to China, and if you look a few years into the past, the mismatch is even much greater. So educating us Westerners is much more needed, right? Right!
In 1989/90, during my high-school year in the US, I was shocked by how little people knew or cared about Europe. Today, I must admit with shame, that we are hardly better when it comes to China. Yet the Internet gives us a much easier path to change that.
TWO: It is precisely the censorship which makes expressing views in China easier because it has the positive side-effect of generally polite netiquette even in controversial discussions. I used to be afraid of the hate and shit-storms in the places where too many abuse their right for free speech to medically crucify those who's views they don't share. Already showing too much interest for the wrong side is suspicious to many.
On the other hand, to my big surprise, I never ran into any serious issues with censorship of my work. My attitude is that freedom also means the freedom to chose your form or government. With the premise that it is not my task as foreigner, but that of the locals, to question the legitimacy of the powers-that-be, I realized I was actually quite free to even compare the pros and cons of various forms of government etc.
The overwhelming part of my work on Chinese internet is completely pro-bono and intrinsically motivated. For full disclosure: In very rare exceptions, some news papers have paid negligible and purely symbolic expense allowances, and I am proud to be fully independent, loyal only to my own beliefs.
The bottom line is: In a world that is drifting apart and dangerously close to armed conflict, a voice of reason, balance and tolerance is more needed than ever. Globally. When , if not now? Who else, if not me?
Who finances the Maverick Diplomat ?
Until now, the Maverick Diplomat is a self-funded passion project.
Generally speaking, the newspapers pay nothing for an opinion editorial, but they do lend their considerable reach to the author who wants to spread his message. So it's non-monetary win-win.
For full disclosure: In rare instances, especially if the initiative comes from the newspaper in need of a comment on a current event, a symbolic allowance might be paid, but before you start dreaming: For that money, you could buy only minutes of my consulting time. It is nothing that could ever entice a hired mouthpiece.
Instead, I have spent a very significant 6-digit € amount in opportunity costs pro-bono over the years to pursue this intrinsic motivation.
Since I would like to spend more time with publishing, I might have to consider other revenue streams such as Patreon, YouTube monetization, book sales etc.
If you like my work, I don't mind being sponsored.
However, one thing is crystal clear:
The moment anybody ever tries to commission a certain opinion that I do not wholeheartedly share, it would be the end of any sponsorship.