Nr. 8, June 2007 |
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Dear Reader, In this edition we’ve included some comments we received last week. We look forward to including your comment, opinion or question next week! So head over to our site, and don’t be shy – we always love to receive the notification in our inbox that somebody posted a comment! Feature article Advanced Golden China tips  To Jim van Drunen Littel the Netherlands were always going to be too small. Bilingually raised and working for one of the best known consumer goods companies in the world, he goes international in 1986. Successfully managing a territory stretching from India to Japan for a large tobacco company, it is then time to realise other personal ambitions. Starting his own enterprise and learning Chinese, those are his goals. Van Drunen Littel goes back to university and lives with a Chinese family for several months to get a good understanding of the Chinese culture. In the meantime he’s working on getting One2Call started: Interpretation, City Directions, Yellow Pages, Lonely Planet and lots more. All in one phone based service. In between calls he gives us a few golden tips. "First of all it’s useful for every foreign businessman in China to have insight into Chinese communication. A mistake we Westerners make in meetings is to listen too much to what the Chinese do say, and not enough to what they dón’t say. Knowing verbal and non-verbal communication is, in my experience, more important in China than Read the rest or post a comment >> China Expert Guest Blog A (Consumer) Storm in a (Foreign) Coffee Cup  Starbucks seems to be everywhere in China’s big cities (it has around 200 branches) and locals and expats alike can be found reading, meeting and drinking the high-priced hot stuff. The success of Starbucks in China has been hailed as a victory for a foreign consumer brand, and proof that urban Chinese consumers will spend money for the right product / service / experience. All well and good, except it is never that simple for that long… Following a story on the blog of CCTV anchor Rui Chenggang (described by Rebecca McKinnon at RConversation as one of “China’s A-list Journo-bloggers”) , the Chinese blogoshpere recently erupted in a nationalistic attack on the coffee giant, whose outlet in the aptly named Forbidden City was seen to be Read the rest or post a comment >> China Expert Guest Blog How do you keep your Intellectual Property secret when it’s your sales pitch?  The ex-pat manager’s conundrum in China: how do you protect your IP when your IP is both your product and your sales pitch? For many service-oriented businesses, the very ideas that they are guarding from being stolen must be displayed and discussed in order to promote their business. No one will buy a design or consulting service if they have no idea about what the designer or consultant is talking about. But once that designer or consultant describes his creative ideas, he is in danger of having those ideas pilfered. What can you do to protect yourself but still get your brand ‘out there’? First of all, get used to the idea that your designs, models, concepts and IP will get adapted by others. That’s what being a market leader is all about. You have to find ways to Read the rest or post a comment >> Facts & Figures Military defense You never know when these statistics might prove to be of value to you. So without further ado, here's our weekly top 10. Top 10 countries with the highest budget for military defense (in $)
(Source: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, ‘the Military Balance 2005-2006) China Expert Guest Blog Chinese Lawyers: The New Generation  One of the senior partners of my consultancy Silk Road Advisors is a Chinese Lawyer. Ms. Zhang is certified to practice law in China, not in the States. She typically takes on corporate cases that Western international law firms gain on behalf of their Western clients, but for whom the practice can only do so much in moving agreements through government channels. Also, many of the Western law firms prefer to stay within the city limits of the First-Tier cities, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai. She prefers to stay outside the city limits of the First-Tier cities: the noise, pollution and overall pushi-ness of Big City China doesn’t impress her, though she is a native of Beijing.She has been doing some work for a Shanghai firm on behalf of a client in a second-tier city in Jiangsu Province. She is assisting in the dissolution of a joint venture between a Read the rest or post a comment >> Last comments Comment? Post it! Since we receive many interesting comments on our Web site, we thought we should pay some more attention to them. Therefore we have listed the last three comments for you. Feel free to post your comments as well. Marco Hamers in reply on: Doing Business in China Dear Anyialsup, although you give a clear description of the two concepts "guanxi and mianzi", I find it a bit out of date and not bringing anything new to the existing literature available.It is easy to talk about guanxi to and audience who... Chaudhary Afzal in reply on: Imortant Issues in Entering China Market We are interested to know more about two regions namely: SHANGHAI AREA and Autonomous regions bordering with Pakistan Cities like Urumqi and Kashghar. Tom King in reply on: Plenty of Space in Shanghai We have extra space, about 10000 sm, light industrial space. We like to lease out the space. The location is in BaoShan district, Shanghai. 30 minutes from downtown, 50 minutes from Pudong Airport, 30 minutes from... China Expert Guest Blog A World With Hans Mes  10 Hints and Tips from a sculptor’s point of view: 1. Decide whether your product is unique or it is better than others to know if you can create or compete in your field. Nice book: The Art of Warfare. 2. Get experienced in reading Chinese faces and expressions in attitude and language. 3. Always ask a Chinese co-worker to correct your mistakes or give a secret hint if you don’t do things the way they expect. 4. Be aware of different sensitivity in China. What we judge as nice or bad doesn’t mean that they think the same and vice versa. 5. Respect women and leave an empty space if possible in the metro for instance. 6. Chinese children are the main capital of Chinese people because they only have one. 7. You may be praised for dirty or difficult work while many Chinese people do the same job without any respect because they aren’t foreigners. 8. Be gentle and forgiving even if ranking isn’t at stake; always act as a gentleman. 9. Consider China as Read the rest or post a comment >> China Expert Guest Blog Man man chi  Imagine, you are in China and you want to enjoy the traditional Chinese cuisine at an authentic Chinese restaurant. In your travel guide you find a restaurant ‘you have to visit’ and you make a reservation. Then the waitress hands you the menu: its in Chinese!Want to know what it is you just ordered before actually eating it? Shanghai Rainbow Consulting made a special visitors menu in Chinese, which will help you out in that typical Chinese restaurant. Read the rest or post a comment >> |
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