The usual advice for new managers coming to China has been to adapt, and to learn to do things the Chinese way. Don’t bring your expectations and standards to China, the old China hands say. The more time experts stay in China, the more likely they are to argue that China is a unique place, and managers need to understand Chinese cultural norms and mores in order to be effective. I’ve always personally felt the opposite — that international management standards are international standards for a reason, and the more closely a manager adheres to principles used elsewhere, the better off he or she will be. As far as I am concerned, local management practices are mostly irrelevant — unless it has to do with legal issues, such as labor contract law … Read entire article »

Thursday night, I witnessed the birth of an industry — the foreign-made Chinese movie business. In the United States, we don’t think twice about foreigners making English-language movies for American distribution. In fact, some of our greatest producers and directors have been foreigners, and two of our biggest studios are owned by Japanese and French companies, Sony and Vivendi. In China however, until now, all Chinese movies produced domestically have been made by Chinese companies. Until now. In March, China Venture Film’s drama “Milk and Fashion” is expected to hit theaters around China. In it, former “Growing Pains” child star Jeremy Miller is the uncle of a young boy, played by Rothstein’s 17-year-old son Kyle Rothstein, in a coming-of-age story about ballet and fashion. The movie is filmed in Chinese, with even the Western … Read entire article »

A new labor law went into effect at the start of the year, making it more difficult — and expensive –to fire employees. The law also specifies increased additional costs to employers, including minimum wages, overtime and benefits payments. According to the Associated Press , Dongguan’s Taiwan Merchant Association reports that that the cost of doing business in China will rise by as much as 20 to 40 percent. Calvin Chang, general manager of Shenzhen’s Jinghua China Investment Consulting, told Reuters that he expects labor costs to rise by 8 percent as a result of the law. He predicted that companies may move operations further inland in order to remain competitive. There have been massive labor abuses in China. The brick-making slavery scandal was the worst of all those which have come to … Read entire article »

There are many first-time entrepreneurs in China — in many respects, Shanghai is now what Silicon Valley used to be at the height of the dot-com boom.As a result, there are many seminars on how to actually go about starting up a business, and I try to make it to as many as I can.One of the more valuable pieces of information I’ve picked up has been about using personality testing to identify core strengths among senior staffers.In China, these tests can be particularly useful because certain personal characteristics sometimes don’t translate well across cultures.For example, last summer I hired a Canadian manager to help run China operations and do some marketing. He was an outgoing, upbeat person — especially compared to Chinese staffers. I was surprised when he spent … Read entire article »

I’m invariably surprised when, at employee training sessions or staff meetings, none of my Chinese employees ask questions. Part of the reason, they tell me, is that schools don’t encourage students to ask questions – and certainly discourage them from interrupting teachers and professors. This is very bad training for journalists, who have to ask questions and interrupt as part of their job descriptions. There’s nothing worse than a journalist at a press conference who fades into the background. They should be out there, collecting business cards, introducing themselves to everyone, asking questions, arranging follow-up interviews and otherwise working on developing their sources. But if shyness is bad for journalists, it’s murder on sales people. Recently, a friend of mine needed to hire a business development person to find leads and schedule interviews with prospects, … Read entire article »

Christmas is my all-time favorite holiday. I’m not alone, it’s popular with many people, whether or not they actually adhere to the Christian faith. In my family, with its blended background of faiths, we see Christmas as a symbol of what is holy in every child. But, putting aside, the religious significance, the Christmas season has more stuff associated with it than any other holiday I know of. Sure, the Fourth of July has fireworks, flags and picnics, and Thanksgiving has a big meal and a football game. New Year has the ball on Times Square and a big party at midnight and one song that most people only know a couple of lines of, anyway. Chinese New Year is a pretty good holiday, too, with fireworks, red envelopes full of cash, gifts, … Read entire article »

As a journalist, I routinely hear complaints that the news industry is dominated by a few giant multinationals that determine the boundaries of public discourse. I also hear that the news industry is dying, as bloggers now do for free what the media used to do for money. My personal position is that we’ve always had consolidation in the industry – as long as publishers existed, they’ve been growing bigger and merging with other publishers. But we’ve always had competition. First the tabloids and the “yellow press,” mimeographed newsletters, radio and television, alternative newsweeklies, and now the Internet. New companies will always spring up. Some will fail or be swallowed up. Others will remain small, serving a particular niche audience. Some will rise above their humble beginnings and join the ranks of media … Read entire article »

This week, Xinhua reported that the new four-year education plan will extend compulsory nine-year education to 98 percent of children in China’s 410 poorest counties. In 2004, children in those counties received an average of 6.7 years of education each – hardly enough to prepare them to work in today’s industrialized China. Today, the agency reports, nine year education covers 368 of those 410 counties These counties are mostly located in hard-to-reach mountainous areas. To solve this problem, local governments are setting up boarding schools for junior-high level students so that they can get a state-of-the art education. According to Xinhua, the central government allocated 10 billion yuan (1.3 billion U.S. dollars) between 2004 and 2007 to build over 7,600 boarding schools, serving about four million students in a total of 953 counties in western … Read entire article »

This year, Chinese officials began putting some sharp teeth to the country’s environmental regulations. This can have significant implications for the economy – last week, the World Bank calculated that air pollution alone is costing China 3.8 percent of its GDP. Adding in water pollution and non-health impacts of pollution raises that estimate to about 5.8 percent of GDP – a total of about $100 billion. Last month, health officials said last that birth defects in China had increased by nearly 40 percent since 2001, in part as a result of environmental degradation, according to the state-owned China Daily newspaper. Jin Yinlong, a researcher at the Center for Disease of Control and Prevention told the National Forum on Environment and Health in Beijing, that water pollution accounted for 59 percent of 600,000 complaints … Read entire article »

During my trip to Sichuan last week, I met several successful Chinese farmers. The main reason for their success, however, was that they weren’t actually farmers any more. Instead, they were construction contractors, or operated tourism resorts. It’s hard to run a small family farm anywhere in the world, and China is no exception. My home is in Massachusetts, where my in-laws used to run a family dairy farm, with about 100 head of cattle on 90 acres of land. They shut down operations quite a while back, to take regular “city” jobs, and the only thing left to remind us of the farm are a couple of baby cows and a barn full of unused milking machinery. The reason is that it takes either massive economies of scale or a very high-end, … Read entire article »