This an interesting article I found online regarding the Chinese, Chinese culture and business in China.
With more and more business trying to get into the China market, understand the people and culture becomes an important subject of discourse.
When even a Chinese myself finds it difficult to understand the mainland Chinese people, it is not a surprise that Westerners finds it a puzzle.
The following quotes from the article are fruit for some thoughts…
… your own staff underperforms in the Chinese environment with a probability exceeding seventy percent
… will the biggest planet China orbit around capitalism or capitalism orbit around China?
It seems that all the time the Chinese operate as if they were living in the Brave New World. Parallel scenarios are being scanned to a very stretched extend and they play an important role in selecting the best options. In fact the Chinese language itself is at the root of this behaviour.
Read on…
Continue reading ‘China calling:’
The 7.2 Richter scale earthquake in Southern Taiwan caused the disconnection of the Trans-Pacific line, linking Asia with America. Internet access slowed to a crawl since yesterday. It was reported that connection will not return to normal for weeks!
This episode greatly impacted those that host their Internet services outside of China (usually in the US). In my case I can’t get to my emails and website.
Events like this would spur the development of local Internet and to move business critical Internet service locally instead of housing them across the Pacific. But still, with the regulatory environment in China, some may be hasitent to put content in China. It is a far-fetched fear but fear nevertheless.
Before anyone can browse a few blogspot pages after they were discovered to be unblocked, they are blocked again.
Same goes for Wikipedia. This happened as I was browsing! One moment loading, the next moment, connect was reset.
Just like many rules, regulation, enforcement in China, they are changed and re-interpretated regularly.
Following the unblocking of Blogspot, Wikipedia is now also unblocked and accessible from within China. Seems like China is becoming more “open”.
Now if they would just unblock Technorati and Wordpress.com.
So far I had been to the driving range 2 times. Out of a 3 boxes of practice balls each session, a few did fly. 150m with a 7-iron. It was pretty exciting.
I’m picking up golf.
Many people think that when you start playing golf, you are either getting old or getting somewhere. Neither is anywhere near the truth since I saw kids hitting the ball better than me and I’m not quite anywhere near successful.
Since moving to China, I hardly exercise. Last week I finally signed up for a year’s membership at the gym AND went to the driving range twice. A pat on my back. All work and no play make a dull entrepreneur.
Never did I imagine golf could be tiring. The beginner’s excitement is all over me. I’m seeking out all kinds of information to learn more. Should I go for lesson? Get training video? Read books? Practice, practice, practice?
Stay tuned for more of my golf adventure so I go along.
Came across this article that eBay is getting out of China. The report indicate that eBay is planning to sell the eBay and PayPal business in China to Tom.com.
Those following online business in China may recall that eBay brought Eachnet about 2 years ago making the founder (forgotten his name) one of the riches guy in China.
Yahoo also sold their operation to Alibaba last year. And Alibaba again is behind the site Taobao which is eating eBay’s pie in China.
Reading the comment that follows the article, I have to agree that eBay do not know how the fine art of doing business in China.
Also mentioned, the undercurrent of protectionism is very real. Certain policies are unwritten but through execution can legally create barriers. In the offline arena, Walmart is also feeling similar heat.
It is worth noting that there are incentives to grow local (ie Chinese) business that can compete with their foreign, especially US, counterpart.
For the intrepid entrepreneur, it means there are still plenty to do in China.
This may sounds familiar.
You did everything right and was expecting to deliver a job well done to the customer. Then out of nowhere problem came. What’s worst part is that the problem was not caused by you and there is no way you would have anticipated that.
Just this shit happened to me last week and the aftermath dragged on to this week.
We did a job for a client, exceed their expectation, below budget and well within schedule. How perfect can it get? We were going to surprise the customer. But alas, we were suprised instead.
The first sign of storm came when the customer emailed us to say that they did no received the goods at the specified time. We called the shipper and was told it was in the custom processing. That was before the weekend so everyone happily put it at the back of the mind.
Last Wednesday, another email. This time the warning sounded.
Countless calls later we dugged up a whole can of worms. How the whole thing could happen still baffles me. Some might say “Well, it is China.”
Suffice to say some heads rolled but that isn’t going to save us. The goods that was supposed to be in the customer’s hand is now sitting somewhere held ransom! It wasn’t our problem but we got dragged in nevertheless.
More calls and negotiation later, the boxes of goods returned back to our office. By now we are now a week late. Digging into our pocket we sent some of the goods via UPS so that the customer could use them immediately. That arrived today. The rest of the goods is leaving office tomorrow.
Hopefully no surprises this time. But who know, touch wood.
Quality - you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is.
Was Quality something that you “just see” or might it be something more subtle than that, so that you wouldn’t see it at all immediately, but only after a long period of time?
This was the question, If everyone knows what quality is, why is there such a disagreement about it?
- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Quality, something that had occupied my thoughts recently.
How do you describe quality to your staff? Is it as subjective as “the boss likes it” or can an objective standard be applied?
Does culture play a part in the perception of quality. For example, many people still harbour the notion that “Made in China = Inferior Quality”. How can a company in China tackle this issue, both internally and externally?
As usual I was surfing around and clicked on a blogspot blog. The usual drill is,
- open the blogspot blog in another Firefox tab,
- copy the URL into a proxy,
- browse the site through a proxy.
A few minutes ago, something extraordinary happened, the blogspot sites loads!
Has China unblock all blogspot sites?
A quick check on WordPress.com, it is still blocked.
Yet again we are expanding office (again but a good news!). This time we want to be sure we have room for expansion so we are going to get a bigger office.
We found an ideal location however there are more space than we need. So we decide to share the space with another company or even help entrepreneurs.
If you are starting (or planning to start) business in Shanghai and do not want to commit to rental and furniture, this is an option.
We will/can provide
- an official office address
- table
- meeting room
- computer
- admin support
- local knowledge and expertise
Please contact me in private if you are interested.
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