I tend to receive a recurring misconception about the Chinese labor market from overseas-based clients. This misunderstanding primarily affects overseas-designed provisional staffing budgets as well as the perceived value of quality of China-based recruitment agencies. In short, agencies are perceived to attempt inflating candidate packages for higher fees. While some rogue agencies do, there is a distinctive trend that the cost of Chinese talent is catching up with…

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Developing a QC Checklist will have an immediate and dramatic effect on your product quality and the understanding level of your Chinese suppliers. The QC Checklist is basically a written guide for your product’s: contents, packaging, color, barcodes, appearance, possible defects, functions, and special requirements. Such a checklist is generally developed with the assistance of a 3rd party quality control company, but by following the points below you can…

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In the meantime the College of Architecture, which sits a ten-minute walk from Chongqing University, had somehow heard of the barbarian with slides of Western-style buildings. Over the course of three weeks I ended up giving four lectures, in front of an audience of specialists, about a subject I had only begun to grasp. In China, faith is definitely put through unexpected twists and turns. It so happened that among the audience were a couple of employees…

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When talking about meetings in the Netherlands people tend to think about a continuous flow of opinions and the exchange of thoughts about specific subjects. People have meetings to ventilate their own viewpoint, to inform one another about processes or to endorse each other with comments and suggestions.

The Chinese meeting culture operates somewhat…

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One of the greatest frustrations for many foreigners when they begin working in China is the inability for many people to say one simple word: no. Saying the ‘n’ word sounds easy, but it is actually, for the vast majority of us, incredibly difficult. Whether one does not have the ability to do something or does not have the time, learning how to politely refuse a task is an essential tool that can both improve productivity and maximise time.

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