Between Jugaad and Shokunin, China has a Third Way

As an Indian who spent many years in Japan, I concluded that each country suffered a deficit of the other’s forte. India had made a virtue of its chaos, by elevating jugaad – the art of the improvised fix – into something approaching a philosophy. Jugaad is about ingenuity under pressure: bending rules, making do with what's available, patching tears on the fly. And it is about as un-Japanese as being late to an appointment.

Japan’s animating spirit of “shokunin” is a sharp contrast. This is the relentless pursuit of perfection through the honing of a single craft embodied in, for example, the sushi chef apprentice who must train for ten years before being allowed to cut the fish, or the sake brewer who at night only dreams of yeast. The shokunin is aware that perfection is inevitably elusive, but regardless, must never be given up on.

In the realm of business, however, the shokunin insistence on flawless process can hamper the ability to be nimble and innovative; to improvise when the situation demands it. The Indian penchant for jugaad, meanwhile, makes it difficult for businesses, and society more broadly, to achieve standardisation, reliability, and no-corners-cut excellence.

There were moments when the Japanese devotion to process produced scenes of almost sublime absurdity. When we moved to Tokyo with our two cats – both microchipped and documented within an inch of their lives by veterinarians across three nations – the entry of one of them, Tofu, caused a minor diplomatic incident.

The problem: we had listed her colour as "grey" on the entry form. Strictly speaking, she was multicoloured, her grey flecked with occasional taupe, a fact that sent the cat immigration officer into an escalating meltdown.

"Grey," he murmured, examining Tofu with the wrinkled-brow intensity of Hercule Poirot aboard the Orient Express. "Grey," he repeated, each iteration trilling higher in pitch. Within minutes, a parliament of colleagues had assembled around the cat for an impromptu standing committee on feline chromatics. (She was cleared. Phew.)

In India, on the other hand, rules had the heft of morning mist. For example, according to the Motor Vehicles Act, a national-level law, drivers must not use horns excessively or unnecessarily, on pain of fines.

The country, in fact, has finable regulations against littering, public urination, and spitting. Somewhere, the pantheon of Hindu gods is probably tittering at the irony.

It is difficult therefore not to conclude that each country could benefit from becoming a little more like the other: which is to say, a little more like China. In Beijing, my current home, the zeitgeist is a blend of Indian-style improvisation and Japanese process-discipline.

China is somewhere that takes short cuts where these are reasonable and holds the line where it matters. This combination of flexibility and rigour makes it a formidable force both economically and strategically. It also, I should add, makes Chinese cities great places to live: safe but surprising, orderly but never sterile.

Shared bicycles

In Beijing, I get around mostly by shared bicycle. They are plentifully available across the city, unlocked by scanning a QR code within one of the super apps – WeChat or Alipay – that serve as the digital architecture of everyday life.

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Hop on, ride to your destination, park and lock with a second scan. The bicycles are almost never faulty: brakes checked, gears maintained, the scanning and locking process seamless. Their traceability, combined with citywide surveillance, means theft and damage are rare. They are, in miniature, the shokunin ideal applied to urban logistics.

But actually riding them around gives you glimpses of the irrepressible, bottom-up, jugaad spirit of the average Chinese person that survives the canopy of surveillance and top-down rules. Zebra crossings exist on a purely theoretical plane. Cyclists ride the wrong way up a street with the nonchalance of Balenciaga runway models.

There is great ingenuity on display, particularly in the smaller cities, but also occasionally in Beijing, when it comes to rigging two- and three-wheel vehicles with a smorgasbord of accoutrement from fans and umbrellas to enclosures made from PVC pipe and shower curtain material.

Shared bike parking is geofenced. You are supposed to lock your bike within a designated area, and if you are even slightly outside the marked boundary, the system refuses. So far, so Japanese.

What I have discovered, however, is that if you persist – ignoring the refusal and attempting to lock the bike a third or fourth time – the system eventually capitulates. China, revealing its more Indian side, allows for loopholes – it just makes you work for them.

A combination of jugaad and shokunin

The Beijing shared bike system did not arrive fully formed and is in fact the perfect example of China’s blend of jugaad and shokunin. Initially, it erupted onto Chinese streets (in the mid 2010s) in a state of pure jugaad: a free-for-all in which dozens of competing companies flooded cities with bikes simultaneously, chasing market share like a gaggle of greyhounds at the dog races.

At its peak, Beijing alone had 2.35 million shared bicycles, nearly double what the city could sensibly absorb. The results were predictable. Bikes were abandoned in the middle of pavements, tossed into shrubs, dumped in rivers. Photos from the period show vast bicycle graveyards on the outskirts of cities with thousands of turquoise and yellow bikes piled on top of each other, the rusting wreckage of startup dreams. Taxpayers were eventually handed the bill for clearing 25 million abandoned bicycles.

And then, with the unsentimental efficiency that characterises China at its most shokunin, the state stepped in. Regulations were imposed, fleet sizes capped, companies forced to hire maintenance staff and standardise their parking. The market consolidated from nearly seventy players to three, absorbed into the superapp ecosystem. The bikes that survived are the ones I use today: well maintained and digitally tracked.

It is, in miniature, the story of China itself: let the chaos do its creative work, extract what functions, then impose the discipline required to make it last. The blend of jugaad and shokunin that neither India nor Japan (nor most of the world) has yet managed to combine, seems to come to China naturally. The “middle kingdom” is perfectly situated mid-way between the two.

None of this to imply that China is faultless. There are domains, especially political and artistic expression, where the country’s particular calibration of flexibility and control extracts a price that greater efficiency does not offset. The jugaad-shokunin synthesis is not a utopia. But it is a competitive advantage.

Meanwhile for those of us in Beijing, merrily pedalling the wrong way up a one-way street on a shared bicycle while the surveillance cameras blink overhead, it is something more immediate than insight: just a very good way to get around.

Journalist and writer Pallavi Aiyar brings the Indian perspective to understanding China. With ‘Writing on the Great Wall’, she places her eye on China’s economy, its culture, its government and its people. Aiyar has spent more than two decades studying China, having lived there from 2002 to 2009, and again from August 2025.

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