China Law Blog (aka Best “Chinese Business Blog”) offered 3 posts recently about Chinese companies doing business in America: “Ten Reasons Chinese Companies Fail In The United States“, Why United States Lawsuits Against Chinese Companies Are Trending Up. Just Follow The Money, Why China Companies Are A Litigation Mark (As In Sucker), Part II. To summarize my take-aways, Dan basically is saying that Chinese companies in the US face problems because: Chinese companies purchase sub-standard consultation services on the cheap, which leads them to make many bad decisions. Chinese companies often do everything cheaply- including the hiring of employees – and with a short-term mindset. (More on this point, I recommend Bill Dodson’s article, “China’s Casino Economy“) Chinese companies are not marketing oriented, and hence don’t develop brands, don’t do good industrial design, don’t listen to customers, etc. Chinese companies are being sued more often, in part because they don’t [Read more...]

Stan Abrams at China Hearsay wrote a tongue-and-cheek article about conspicuous consumption in China: justifying yatch ownership. This is an awesome post because it has pictures of hot swimsuit girls on boats. The post is about a China Daily article about how boat-ownership can be considered a business expense. Stan’s common-sense point is basically how stupid and hypocritical can people be to think that yacht ownership is anything other than an ostentatious display of wealth. Furthermore, how can people have the balls to claim a boat as a business expense. I used to spend every weekend at a Western built-and-managed marina near Suzhou because my previous company used the facilities to host corporate off-sites for customers. At the marina, we got to see the local richy-rich guys drive up in Porsche SUVs, wearing popped-collars, a purse on one arm, and really nice eye-candy on the other arm. They would spend [Read more...]

Danwei translated an article in China Computer World called “F–king Tencent” . The article is about how Tencent’s competitors are mad at Tencent for being the King of Shanzhai internet companies: Beginning with its first product, OICQ (the former incarnation of Tencent QQ), which copied ICQ, Tencent has never been able to bury its “copying gene.” First it brought in QQ Show and a line of value-added products from Korea, then it imitated Sina by building a portal website. In online gaming, it copied Ourgame (联众) by developing a platform, and then like Shanda brought in international players, started in-house development (like Netease). Then there was the C2C e-commerce site Paipai, and the third-party payment service TenPay (财付通). Without exception, these were “shanzhai” products, which lies at the root of the hatred for Tencent. I agree with the sentiment. However, all of this were first copied from US high-tech companies. [Read more...]

Dan at China Law Blog made a commentary about an article in Forbes called “Five Reasons China Will Rule Tech”. Dan’s criticism of the Forbes article focuses whats wrong with the article. I will summarize the post to say that the Forbes article says five things that don’t stand up to logical scrutiny. I’m adding my comments to both articles here. Dan says: [according to Forbes article] China’s leadership understands engineering [because] In China, eight of the nine members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau, including the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, have engineering degrees…So what? Running a country is running a country and there is no evidence that those who are better able to design a television are any better at running a country than those who are not. Of course Dan is correct. Jimmy Carter was (at least until George Bush), indisputably the worst American President since [Read more...]

I believe this interactive graphic from Caixin Online adds neccessary data to my earlier post, “Taikongren’s definitive “What’s happening with Chinese Labor” (updated) (h/t to Talent in China). I don’t have anything else to say about this, except I’m thankful to Frank Mulligan of Talent in China for pointing out this to me.

I think I already said I am not going to talk about Google anymore. That is in-part because everyone else has already talked about them. Also, my moral arguments about this topic make some people think that I’m some sort of “China apologist”. Then came the news that China renewed Google’s Google.cn internet ICP license. Cool, I think. China avoids bad press. Google gets to provide some services on Google.cn, and Google maintains the ridiculous picture-link to Google.com.hk. The world is a little happier. And I don’t need to post about it. Or so I thought. I’m just not the type of guy who lets things go. One of my favorite bloggers, Kai Pan, ofchine/divide, recently posted about Mr. Henry Blodget , a media-analyst, getting the Google story wrong.1 At first, I was not interested in his post (sorry Kai Pan) because I now realize that there are many highly [Read more...]

Gilbert B. Kaplan, “Former Deputy Assistant and Acting Assistant Secretary of the U. S. Department of Commerce” wrote an editorial on the Huffington Post titled “Let’s Move the iPad Back to America“. His article was stupid in the extreme. His article was a political commentary, and as such, was written in a way to influence people without enlightening his readers to other facts which Mr. Kaplan was probably aware of. Unless Mr. Kaplan is unaware of the facts, in which case then basically the whole article was not just political but also stupid. When I saw the article today, May 30th, I started to prepare a post about why Mr. Kaplan’s comments are both wrong and hypocritical. However, Kai Pan of China/Divide already finished his post about the Huffington Post article. And as usual, Kai Pan wrote more, and better, than what I would have accomplished. (China/divide seems to be [Read more...]

From Shanghai-ist, Elaine Chow published a translation of a new letter (original in Chinese here) which Foxconn want’s its employees to sign. I feel its so stupid it can’t be true. Sort of like some of the reality TV shows I never actually watch. Anyway, the letter advices employees to seek help if they need it, contains a bunch of corporate-y pleasant stuff, then ends with this: 3. In the event of non-accidental injuries (including suicide, self mutilation, etc.), I agree that the company has acted properly in accordance with relevant laws and regulations, and will not sue the company, bring excessive demands, take drastic actions that would damage the company’s reputation or cause trouble that would hurt normal operations. I should be more professional in this blog, but the only thing that comes to my mind is “WTF?” So the employee must acknowledge that if said employee kills himself, [Read more...]

Thanks to China Challenges for bringing to my attention to the works of Frank Mulligan at the Talent in China blog. He has some similar domain focuses as me; this makes me very excited. The latest post on at Talent in China is about Job Descriptions (JDs), with a focus on “title inflations”: The difficulties often start with the title. This is very important because of the fact that Chinese professionals cherish the title they hold, and because of title inflation. The logic for Chinese professionals is: “If everyone else has a high title why shouldn’t I have one too? Especially when it is so important to me in the first place.” In the fast-growing China market companies feel they have to succumb to title inflation to get the right people but the result is a mismatch between what the person has to do on the job, and what it [Read more...]

A post from Brian Schwarz of China Challenges brought to my attention this news piece: Mattel getting a waver from the government from implementing 3rd party safety checks1. There is one thing I particularly like about this post… it points out that the toys come from Mattel, not just “come from China”. When the big lead-painted toys scare went off two years ago, everyone was complaining about the poisoned products that “came from China”. This hid the real story, which was that Mattel, in its search for greater and greater profits, decided to not control its supply chain. Thus, Mattel, not the country of the People’s Republic of China, potentially exposed children to lead poisoning. Interestingly, the conservative commentors on the site which China Challenges links to say that the law is stupid for two reasons: 1) that the law hurts small business, and 2) because private laboratories are better [Read more...]

Dan Harris at China Law Blog posted an email from Steve Dickenson; the post is called “China Employment Contracts. Ten Things To Consider.” [Side-point: I think that "Hero Protagonist" in my "AmPharm" case study consulted Steve about his situation and received great advice...which confirmed for me many of the things I was telling him to do] Steve’s email is a list of 10 suggestions he gave his client, quoted below. To save on space, I edited down the wordage to what is relevant to my additions and opinions, but I feel the original should be seen. [...from the intro paragraph] The Chinese system is a contract employment system. This means all employees must be engaged pursuant to a written employment contract and during the term of that contract, it is very difficult to terminate an employee. An employee can only be terminated for cause and cause must be clearly proved. [Read more...]

One of my favorite “magazine” bloggers, Andrew Leonard at Salon: How the World Works wrote a post titled “Fiddling with China’s yuan while the U.S. burns: Look what happened while America whined about currency manipulation: An amazing high-speed railroad network“. Andrew makes the point that the valuation issue is one of “yesterday’s battles” and will not materially help labor and unemployment issues in the United States. But while we focus on this, [IMHO bogus] issue, China has invested where it counts: I’m not saying China’s currency manipulation isn’t a factor in global trade and current account imbalances — it most certainly is. But if instead of running up huge budget deficits because we didn’t make arrangements to pay for our wars and prescription drug benefits and tax cuts and stimulus programs and bailouts, we had been watching our Wall Street money men a little more closely while simultaneously pouring government [Read more...]

Stan Abrams of China Hearsay wrote a post about a China Daily survey which shows that recent college graduates think that they have not learned the professional skills that will help them succeed while in college. To this sentiment, Stan says, in so many words, “duh!” Stan also notes (as most Westerners would agree) that a good liberal education is important. He did not say this, but I think his point is that a balanced education helps prepare the “thinking skills” of young people. He also points out that companies need to do a better job at training. And he also says: All of this is somewhat beside the point, though. The main reasons for the huge unemployment rate in this population includes the large population bump in kids this age (a temporary phenomenon), a greater number of universities (i.e. relatively more grads), and an economy still recovering, in some [Read more...]

Every week I’m trying to add at least one post or article that comes from my research, as well as blog about current events in Chinese business. As far as current events are concerned, I didn’t find anything that was not being covered thoroughly (ie. better than what I could create) by other blogs. However, last week, I noticed a pattern in the articles / blogs / discussions [Summary of this post]As China “closes for business” to foreign companies, It seems that all us expat “China Hands” (note: I mean expats with real China careers, not old drunkards who tell war-stories) are all actually quite useless China appeasers who are soon to be kicked out of China anyway. Except those of us who know what we are doing… we will become more valued and so eventually become the Masters of the Universe! Start with a situation at work. MMCs are [Read more...]

In the hopes of making this blog “great”, I’m continuing my research into other China blogs. Andrew Huber wrote a post at the China Economic Review about “Negotiating lessons we can learn from Google.” Some of his post is obvious and/or common sense from B-school. (i.e. develop a Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement, or BATNA). I think that he stated everything very well. OK. So here is a GAP analysis for me.. I need to learn to write better! What I particularly liked was that he saw what I believe is very obvious about the Google pull-out… yetis not being reported: When Google said it would stop censorship it was actually announcing its intention to leave, since it was obvious that China would not give up any ground on that particular negotiating point. …. A final point worth noting is that most of the more dramatic statements and speculations [Read more...]