These days, the China price that is not seriously negotiated is too high. In fact, if you’re not fiercely negotiating, you might as well buy from American vendors.

Case in point: I wasn’t in my right mind yesterday when I paid 25 yuan (US$3.67) for a paperback first published in 1955 by John F. Kennedy. That’s highway robbery considering I bought it not on Amazon.com, but from…

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When the complexity of a product increases, the complexity of the selling process increases proportionally. Especially in the business-to-business sector, the selling of products to Chinese buyers is a complicated and time-consuming business.

Once negotiations start, we in the West want to know what kind of product we can get for what investment. Having a specified price index helps to motivate us…

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Following on the global credit crisis, many have come to me to ask how these changes will affect China. As I have said earlier, China and the US are two sides to the same coin, and it pays to look at them as one economy, as this Newsweek article does. It goes without saying that this crisis will have a profound effect on China, and I’m not optimistic about the capability of the Chinese central government in Beijing to deal with it as quickly as it should.

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Talk everywhere is of crisis and panic emanating from the US financial centers. Yet in China, a different yet familiar kind of crisis is playing itself out. 

Because of strict regulation and an overwhelming domestic focus, as FT.com put it, Chinese financial institutions are not overly exposed to US subprime-related assets or firms, yet China’s overall economy, with its reliance on exports and with China’s…

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“The most difficult staff to find for our manufacturing operations have been good QC people and good financial managers,” a British manager said recently during a round of beers at the local Blue Marlin. We were bemoaning the point that QC managers with draconian approaches to imposing quality processes and testing on production tend to drive away the good engineers, while QC managers that just want to fit in get nothing achieved.” Meanwhile, “We’ve had …

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