Rhetorical tweaking allows companies like Wal-Mart to function in varied, international socio-political contexts. The company makes it apparent that the profoundly and conveniently universal nature of the service industry’s core values, as revealed in Leach’s text, move freely between markets, cultures and borders of all kinds. We can judge by the success of multinational retailers that the same kind of individualism articulated in Wanamaker’s management policies work at an international scale. The fundamentals of individualism play on different value systems in China to achieve the same effect. An article appearing in The China Journal describes the corporation’s construction of the ideal modern workplace for the individual; “Wal Mao” discusses the official rhetoric of individualism applied to both customer and salesmen. A shift in this rhetoric is required to elicit the individualizing effect from English to Chinese. Wal-Mart’s ten rules (written by Sam Walton), individualizing in their English versions (“Celebrate your success, Listen to everyone in your company, Swim upstream, Motivate your partners…”), are re-condensed in the target language and strategically used to ensure commercial success by ideological consistency. “In Chinese, however, the mundane tone of ‘ten rules’ is replaced by ‘ten laws’ (shige faze) or ‘ten great laws for success of the cause’ (shiye chenggong de shi da faze). Similarly, the tone and associations of the translated laws shift form what might be glossed in English as a ‘language of marketing’ to a Chinese vocabulary tinged with distinctly ‘revolutionary’ connotations” (Davies 10).
Sam Walton and Chairman Mao Hand-Wave (cropped). The China Journal. By Andrew Kipnis and Luigi Tomba. Contemporary China Centre. Canberra: Australian National University, 2007
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