What can multinationals learn from China this year? – Ashley Dudarenok

 

Ashley Dudarenok

Setting up solid eco-systems to facilitate your business, is what China’s companies do right when they go global and other multinationals can learn from them, says strategic advisor Ashley Dudarenok on her vlog. Especially European companies have a rather poor starting position, she adds.

Ashley Dudarenok is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your (online) meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more strategic experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

How Aliexpress goes global - Ashley Dudarenok

  

Marketing guru Ashley Dudarenok interviews Aliexpress's Martin Wang on how his Alibaba' company is developing globally. Aliexpress started to sell products from firms in China to a global market, but now expands and offers its network to local producers everywhere by developing their digital platforms.

Ashley Dudarenok is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your (online) meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

At the China Speakers Bureau, we start to organize online seminars. Are you interested in our plans? Do get in touch.

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China: struggling for its position in the world - Tom Doctoroff

Tom Doctoroff

China gains economic and financial power, but is still struggling to find its place in the world, writes China veteran Tom Doctoroff in the Huffington Post."So China’s road to becoming a “soft” superpower will be long and rocky indeed," he says.

Tom Doctoroff:

Unlike Japan, a cocooned island, China is not apart from the world. Indeed, the country fancies itself the center of the universe, a cultural supernova that sucks in anything in its path. China - as much as civilization as a nation-state - has endured for thousands of years, a feat attributed to natural order. The “idea” of China is, in local people’s eyes, absolute truth. China analyzes, dissects and atomizes the political systems of other nations. It studies Western competitive advantages and applies them to local circumstances. But it is also a country in search of its own Copernican revolution. It remains unable to weave itself through the warp and weft of other societies. 

For example: Other than Huawei, a business-to-business telecommunications company, no Chinese corporation has achieved significant scale in any developed market - Haier’s fifteen percent share of cheap microwaves and mini fridges in the US does not count - due to, among other factors, the inability to balance marketing and sales functions; 

International cuisine is a hit in public settings where middle class Chinese bend over backwards to project an image of cosmopolitan erudition. However, even sophisticated Shanghainese rarely eat foreign foods at home. According to Treasury Wine Estates, only 5% of booming red wine consumption occurs at home; 

Chinese expatriates, particularly men, do not assimilate well. They often return home with a simplistic view that the West “looks down on” them. But reality is subtler. At business schools and in offices, clusters of Chinese retreat into self-effacing, gun-shy cliques reinforcing stereotypes of Chinese men as soft; 

Second- and third generation American Born Chinese struggle to reconcile the imperatives of Chinese heritage - obedience to parents, obsession with “face” - with US individualism. Identity confusion sometimes results in an odd hyper-Americanism; 

Oversees students, acutely aware of the deficiencies of China’s memorization-based education system, nonetheless avoid Western liberal arts like the plague. The most popular majors are still engineering, math and business; 

Starting in 2004, the government opened hundreds of Confucius Institutes to promote inter-cultural “harmony.” Due to a dearth of effective outreach ambassadors, they have ended up as language schools; 

So China’s road to becoming a “soft” superpower will be long and rocky indeed.

Much more in the Huffington Post.

Tom Doctoroff is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more political experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.  

Countering China's narrative on its globalization - Howard French

Journalist Howard French's book Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power is reviewed by the Globe&Mail. Key argument: French counters the Chinese narrative of a benevolent force, unlike the greedy Western colonizators. And on Trump: “When two emperors appear simultaneously, one must be destroyed.”


The Globe&Mail:

French’s account, not surprisingly, runs counter to the official Chinese narrative. Admiral Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch who led a Chinese armada to Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka and the east coast of Africa, is lauded in China as an unconventional explorer. Unlike his Western counterparts, whose voyages were marked by greed, violence and conquest, Zheng, the story goes, was an ambassador of Chinese benevolence. The reality, as French reminds us, is that Zheng’s massive ships were actually troop carriers, whose menacing arrival conveyed a distinctly different message about the nature of the Chinese deal on offer. 

Modern China continues to proclaim this theme of benevolent internationalism, something French challenges with numerous examples. The most chilling is his account of the Chinese navy’s 1988 massacre of flag-waving Vietnamese troops on the disputed Johnson Reef in the South China Sea. The Vietnamese protest is captured on a grainy YouTube video that is suddenly interrupted by Chinese naval gunfire. When the smoke clears, the Vietnamese are, shockingly, gone. It’s worth noting this happened just a year before the Chinese military perpetrated another massacre, this time of student protesters in Tiananmen Square. Nei luan, wai huan. 

China is clearly in the midst of a new period of exuberance and expansion, and, as French makes clear, this inevitably involves friction with the two powers, Japan and the United States, that have come to dominate its neighbourhood over the past 200 years.

In recent decades, Japan, seduced by the lure of the China market and by the friendly pragmatism of previous (and needier) Chinese leaders, played down territorial disputes as it helped to rebuild China. The tables have since turned. All things Japanese are now demonized by China, which evokes past Japanese aggression as it steadily encroaches on the rocky outcroppings that mark the beginning of the Japanese archipelago. 

Even more worrisome is China’s growing rivalry with its most formidable adversary, the United States. China is rapidly acquiring the weapons and technology to make it highly risky for the U.S. Navy to operate in the western Pacific, an ambition furthered by China’s construction of military airstrips on artificial islands in the South China Sea. French ominously quotes another Chinese aphorism: “When two emperors appear simultaneously, one must be destroyed.”

More in the Globe&Mail.

Howard French is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you interested in more strategic advisors at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Globalization 3.0: One Belt, One Road - Sara Hsu

 Globalization 3.0 calls financial analyst Sara Hsu China´s ambitious ambitious expansion program One Belt, One Road, in TripleCrisis. Backed by over a trillion US dollar in funding, the program covers 900 projects in 60 countries. Globalization 3.0 is here to stay, says Sara Hsu.

Sara Hsu:

While China’s expansion of the Silk Road and Silk Maritime Road does not directly challenge the power of the United States, some Americans have viewed this program as a threat.   American analysts have viewed the Silk Roads as a challenge to US dominance overseas. American officials have opposed the cooperation of Western nations with China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Even President Obama has opposed China’s expansion of trade overseas. The fact is that a stronger China will carry more influence, which may detract from the hegemony normally imposed by the US. China’s increased economic integration with the rest of the world in particular will create a dependency on the eastern nation that will enhance its global legitimacy. 

To date, much of the globalization process has been a force that has been dominated by the United States, and the fear that China will challenge this power has been underscored in the media. Expansion of Chinese firms overseas, financing of critical infrastructure and pipeline projects by Chinese institutions, cooperation of Chinese researchers and firms on technological development and implementation, and improvement in diplomatic and civil relationships between Chinese and foreign individuals and institutions all stand to greatly promote China’s influence across Europe, Asia and Africa. As China’s reach expands, American economic dominance will have a rival, and the potential loss of American financial and/or political support will carry less weight. The RMB will become more important, reducing dollar supremacy. 

If Globalization 2.0 was, as Thomas Friedman has asserted, (Western) companies globalizing, Globalization 3.0 is non-Western forces globalizing. Globalization 3.0 looks more international, more cooperative and less one-sided. It is hoped to be a more peaceful and inclusive globalization. This changes the power balance between the global North and the global South. If there was any question that the face of globalization is changing, China’s dramatic One Belt One Road program reinforces the fact that Globalization 3.0 is here to stay.

More in TripleCrisis.

Sara Hsu is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´request form.

Are you interested in more experts on China´s outbound investments? Do check our list here.  

US IT programmers for a China price - Bill Dodson

Bill Dodson

The pendule of globalization is now moving towards the US, notes Bill Dodson in his weblog, where IT programmers cost a much as those in China. An analysis of the moving IT market in the eyes of Bill's American friend:

“They sharpest ones (in India) took their money and left. And the country hasn’t cultivated the rest.” She was enthusiastic about the Dutch, who are producing some “amazing” technologies, she said. She’s also working with a Finnish team. “The Finns are doing some cutting-edge stuff,” she added. So what else is there to do during those long, cold, dark winter days, I wanted to quip (but didn’t). I asked her about the Chinese software team she had been working with six months ago.

“They were so-so. Nothing really sparkling. And now, because the economy in the States has been so bad, American developers are now costing me about the same price.” She gave me an example. “A Chinese team leader quoted me a price of 300 rmb per hour for a programmer. That’s more than $20 and hour: I can get a really good American programmer for that price – and we’ll have a cultural affinity that I’ll never have with the Chinese, even though they may just be a fifteen minute drive down the road from me (in Suzhou).”

Commercial
Bill Dodson is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need him at your meeting or conference, do get in touch.

Related articles

• China inside out - Bill Dodson (chinaherald.net)
• Is Groupon conquering China? No way - Paul Denlinger (chinaherald.net)
• Baidu's window on China - Kaiser Kuo (chinaherald.net)

Chinese company buys Europe's backdoor

Schwerin-Parchim airport

The tidbit of news had almost escaped my attention: Linkglobal buys a German airport. I had never hear of the Beijing-based Linkglobal nor its owner Pang Yuliang. Most media did not mention it or in a very small article, but airports you do not buy like a commodity, and certainly not airports in other countries.
The XFN-article mentioned few details. The bankrupt airport in the former DDR was bought for one billion Renminbi or 100 million euro and included all operational rights. The airport is located between Hamburg and Berlin; it was bought at an auction earlier this year.
Fortunately, German media had a few more details. The airport is going to focus on cargo, but might also include weekly fights to Zhenzhou in Henan province, where Pang comes from. So that is no solution for the currently overpriced passenger connections between China and Europe.
Pang Yuliang paid 30 million euro for the airport, but is expected to invest another 70 million euro in the region, notably in production units, who will focus on processing Chinese products meant for Europe. On the agenda are textile, computers and other products.
The investment is tiny compared to the one in Blackstone, There are no big names involved, but for China's stealth globalization this might be as important.