Who are we still missing at Chinabiz Speakers?

William Overholt

Every day we are adding a few more speakers to our database, although not all of them will make it also to our website, for a wide range of reasons.
William Overholt, one of the opinion leaders on China, is certainly going to be on it. While working on his profile, I realized that I did not start mobilizing the collective wisdom of my readers here.
I have still dozens of potential speakers to go after in the months to come, but possibly you have also an idea of who should be on our speakers' list. Please let me know, of you have some suggestions. Any input is appreciated.

Mr. China is making money

Danwei points at the return of Mr. China Jack Perkowski, the man who inspired Tim Clissold to write his book "Mr. China: A Memoir", a hilarious account of how he helped Perkowski to lose millions in investments in China.

Now, that was far away in the 1990s, although some people estimate that most US companies still have no clue to make money. According to the last rumors Mr. China is now making tons of money and is of course blogging about it at Managing the Dragon.

The qualified staff crisis

China's dazzling economic growth might get off track because of the dramatic shortage of qualified staff, the Economist quantifies. The shortfall: 2,200 new pilots a year. China has fewer lawyers than California. China is short of 160,000 GP's. About 75,000 new business leaders are needed in China in the coming ten years.
And the good people are still running away:

China is even suffering from something of a brain drain. In recent years the Chinese have been able to travel abroad more freely to study and acquire skills. But many do not return. A recent report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences found that between 1978 and 2006, just over 1m Chinese went to study overseas and some 70% of them did not go back. The brightest are often tempted to stay abroad by local employers, because the competition for jobs has become global.

The article says that pay-rates for senior staff in many parts of Asia are higher than for similar jobs in Europe. I have seen no evidence of that (and the Economist just states this as a fact) and until recently at least in China MBA-graduates with some experience earned much less than in Europe and the US.
Much more at the Economist.

Why most US market entries fail

Paul Denlinger is not only a freshly enlisted speakers at Chinabiz Speakers but is also developing as a prolific columnist at his weblog. Today he addresses the failure of most US companies to enter the China market, for sure an interesting topic.

My experience is that there are errors which are repeated over and over again. It gets like being condemned to watch a single Broadway show, over and over again, where the only things which change are the sets and the actors; the lines are the same.

His focus in mainly on IT and media companies, but the message is clear for all: a failing strategy leads to internal warfare and failure:

This puts the China office in a continuous battle with the US headquarters for resources; the Chinese local competitor has no such restrictions on what it can do, and the Chinese company surges ahead in capturing market share, and eventually, revenue. The American company then organizes what can best be called a “strategic withdrawal”, as did eBay.

More at Chinavortex. Later today Paul will also have an article at Chinabiz.

Ben on crappy Chinese TV

Former hairdresser Ben Ross is now co-host of a show at his local TV-station. Just as when he was cutting hair, as a participant Ben comes with valuable observations. It helps of course that he confirms my worst believes about Chinese TV.
Why is it - compared to US TV - so crappy, he wonders. We in Europe always thought US TV was pretty crappy too, so you can imagine. (Now, this is an observation from ten years ago, and European TV seems to have degraded also a bit.)

But another reason I am finding for the severe lack of quality programming in China is massive dilution of the talent pool. Much of this is because the Chinese media is still runs essentially like a 单位 (danwei), the old work units which were the building blocks of Socialism. While private enterprise is rapidly rendering the concept of a danwei job obsolete, government offices, schools, public hospitals, and the media all still operate under the old danwei system.

The people who make the TV are very young and unexperienced, he observes:

Ting Ting does an excellent job preparing the material, and coaching Zheng Zheng [the other host] and my performance. However, she just graduated college this spring…with an advertising degree…and she is the writer for a TV show. I know friends in the US who studied screen writing 4 years in college, waited tables in
Hollywood another 4, and still never got their chance to write anything.

New propaganda material

Available in different formats.

KFC: dare to differ

Our speaker Warren Liu finishes his third installment at Chinabiz on the development of KFC in China. He has brought together nice material about a success story in China, and his result will be published later this month in Chinese.

Main take-away: KFC tries elsewhere in the world to outsource as much as possible, but dared to take in China a different approach. You cannot just take a success in the US and hope it will also work in China:

In order to maximize flexibility in a rapidly growing and highly dynamic market environment, KFC leased its warehouses whenever restaurant expansion required new warehouses or expanded warehouse space. This system of distribution and logistics based on direct ownership and direct management of local assets and leased warehouses provided enormous benefits in terms of maximum flexibility at minimum expense. Above all, this system provided the foundation and the infrastructure for a "growth engine."

More at Chinabiz.

First official day at Chinabiz Speakers

t Today was the first official day of Chinabiz Speakers, the project that might pop up here every now and then. What makes this project special for me is that it also offers an opportunity to test some of the new-media techniques I have been reading, learning and talking about in a very practical way.
The morning began by sending off press releases to media outlets and through mailing lists of different Foreign Correspondents Clubs. The classic press release is more or less passe, but I do think it is for a lot of purposes useful to write up in one page what you are up to and where people can call you. Otherwise, sending off press releases to the old media was only a way to pay tribute to my old occupation, since I do not expect too much off it for our project.
We are - in terms of news - squeezed between 12 million recalled toys and a collapsed bridge. You have to know your place. But where in the past you could only hope somebody would still notice you, today a project like ours can follow the long tail. We do not have to be Harry Potter's to get things done.
Using your networks and relationships is key in the new-media toolkit, building up conversation with your different constituencies. Fortunately, the speakers' business is very much a people's business, even better, people who are supposed to bring in huge networks themselves.
Plan one was to get a core group of now slightly over 30 speakers on a closed mailing list to start forming a group. Some of the speakers do not each other, but some don't.
Plan one also failed, at least today, since the Google mailing lists have a quota of 30 people and by putting 31 on my list, I triggered off the Google spam alarm. My list was not activated and I seem to on a waiting list while a real human being looks at it.
Plan two was the mobilization of my own network. I had prepared emails to my friends and contacts that could be interested in the project and started to blast them off. What I first noticed was how many people are still on holidays: many out-of-office messages came back. What was further striking is the huge number of people who changed email addresses in the past two years. Then the Google spam guards hit again: after 500 emails they thought I should take a brake and they blocked my account for 24 hours. Fortunately, there is still Outlook.
Then we started to reactivate Chinabiz with a piece on KFC by one of our speakers Warren Liu. With over 20,000 subscribers interested in business in China Chinabiz is a network of itself and we are going to ask our speakers, if they are not yet one of our columnist, to join that stable of writers every now and then.
My digitally advanced friends suggested I should also start a group on Facebook. I did so, but this might not yet be the tool for the biggest part of my constituency. But in terms of networks, you can never have enough of them. In less than 24 hours, I have now already 26 members there!
That is very short my virtual marketing strategy for ChinaBiz Speakers. I will report now and then about the results.

Update: Ah, forgot to tell you that ChinaBiz Speakers has of course its own weblog. It focuses more on operational issues but shows also how the network is slowly getting into place. I think.

First speakers bureau in China ready to roll

- For Immediate Release-

August 15th marks the official start of China's first professional speakers bureau, ChinaBiz Speakers Ltd (www.chinabizspeakers.com), a subsidiary of the business information center ChinaBiz Ltd.
ChinaBiz Speakers offers one-stop solutions for companies, industry associations, business chambers and other event organizers looking for professional speakers on China. It provides direct access to distinguished economists, influential business and management experts, dynamic motivational speakers and media personalities, and manages travel and event logistics for their speakers so customers don’t have to.

At its start Chinabiz Speakers has a database of two-hundred speakers and its website lists close to thirty of them. Both numbers are likely to rise fast after the official start. The speakers include Rupert Hoogewerf of the Hurun China Rich list, former Alcatel China CEO Dominique de Boisseson, economist Wen Tiejun, J.Walter Thompson Greater China CEO Tom Doctoroff and many other opinion leaders.
"We have seen a very positive response from the market during our preparations," says ChinaBiz Speakers Managing Partner Scott Shi. "Not only speakers react enthusiastically, we got already quite a number of requests for speakers before our official launch. We are a high-end service provider and we feel that China is now ready for this kind of services."
Chinabiz Speakers has already been providing speakers at board meetings of international companies, factory openings, internal company conferences and for classes of visiting international business schools.

ChinaBiz Speakers starts operation officially on August 15 in Shanghai, contact details are as follows:
ChinaBiz Speakers Ltd
Phone: 0086-21-53510689 Fax: 0086-21-53515517
Address: Room 2701, Huai Hai Zhong Road No.1, Shanghai 200021, China
Email: cbs@chinabizspeakers.com
Web: http://www.chinabizspeakers.com/

Media Contact
Fons Tuinstra
Director, Marketing and Speaker Relations
ChinaBiz Speakers Ltd
+ 86 21 53515689
Fons.Tuinstra@ChinaBizSpeakers.com

Shanghai Skyscraper on fire

Danwei points at images of the Shanghai Word Finance Center on fire. Fortunately the skyscraper, the highest in Shanghai, is still under construction, although it is almost done. Even the Shanghai Daily is now bringing the news. Neither Danwei or the Shanghai Daily has a clue what is happening.
A movie shows the smoke, but rather little activity of the firebrigade to be seen.

Update I : Reuters reports the fire is out and was caused during the construction activities. It seemed to have been a fairly small thing.
Update II: Shanghaiist has it all.

Chinese failing the language test

Paul Denlinger at the ChinaVortex brings up an interesting issue: Chinese were by there US or European employers assumed to be fluent in Chinese. Only when the Goldman Sach's proposed co-head for China Richard Ong failed that language test, the investment bank discovered what some of us already news: many Chinese do not speak Manderin.
Even within China, where five major languages are being spoken, the China Daily annually brings the news that more than half of the Chinese actually speak Chinese. For those brought up outside China, without the compulsory Chinese education, that percentage will be much lower. For example in the Netherlands, the majority of the Chinese comes from the region of Wenzhou and mostly spoke at home their wide variety of local dialects. A special language institute in Hangzhou helps them to learn Chinese when they come for business of other reasons to China.
Paul Denlinger certainly touches on a hot topic. He will in the future write more regular about this and other topics for Chinabiz, as he is becoming one of our core speakers.

Is the Shenzhen Big Brother project going to work?

In China there is never a shortage of crazy big plans and the intention to use Shenzhen as a guinea pig for a massive monitoring of the population, as here reported by Bloomberg, seems one of them. All its residents get a residence card with chip with all the information you need on it, including for example "one-child conditions" and "personal credit history". Additional 20,000 camera's equipped for facial recognition will come on top of that project.

About $390 million will be invested for the project in Shenzhen. The government plans to first use the technology in Shanghai and Shenzhen, then adopt the identity cards in 660 cities if the pilot program is successful.

While it is a scary enough development to be watched, the chances of this becoming a success in China seems rather slim. A rather small place like Singapore could perhaps be able to do so, but how would that work in a country with 1.3 billion people where 150 million migrants are an important part of the economic system? In a country that is terribly short of government funding for education, health care and policing? It would only work if China would be a police state, and it is not.

The details of Chen Liangyu's case

The financial magazine Caijing explains the finer details of the wrongdoings of Chen Liangyu, Shanghai's former party secretary. The bigger political picture gets a bit lost here, but by actually including Chen's parents in the story - although they only add emotion, no facts - makes clear that we are going to see quite a lot of his very special court case.

In an apartment in the Luwan district of Shanghai, an old couple has saved a well-worn newspaper dated July 27, 2007. The headline reads, “China's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection Answers Reporters on Chen Liangyu’s Serious Violation of Principles.”
“We know nothing more than what was printed in the paper,” said the husband, Chen Genghua, an 86-year-old retired engineer,as his wife, Li Mouzhen, bears a look of sadness and distress.
The person mentioned in the headline is Shanghai’s disgraced former party secretary, who has been embroiled in a multi-billion yuan pension fund scandal. Chen is also the eldest of the couple’s three sons.

Launching the Chinabiz Speakers Weblog

We have silently launched the weblog that goes along with the - soon-to-be launched - Chinabiz Speakers Bureau. It is still in a very early phase and much construction work is getting done. But I'm getting more confident that we can officially launch this week.

Who is reading the China Daily?

I'm not, not even their own editors read it, illlustrates ESWN with a nice screenshot, but somebody must have discovered this. The China Daily picked up a sentence from Reuters that would normally have been sanatized in a report on the Olympics:

"Security was tight around Tiananmen Square, where troops crushed pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 with huge loss of life, as crowds gathered for the celebrations."

Of course, we cannot blame them for not reading their own propaganda, but it looks like somebody is going to shop wood for a while in one of the few forests taht have not yet been cut down.
More at ESWN.

Mark Schaub's book now at Amazon

It took a while before the publisher of Mark Schaub, one of our speakers at Chinabiz Speakers Ltd, took his successful book to Amazon, so it was not easy available for many potential readers. Publishers have to dive Amazon a discount of 30 percent and that does not make them happy, but in the end is this online quasi-monopolist hard to avoid if you want to sell books.
I have praised his China: The Art of Law already enough. Stern warnings like Mark Schaub gives about doing business in China are very much needed in a time when foreign investors keep on running into this country, and often into problems that could have been avoided.
Yesterday I helped him to move into his new and beautiful located house in the French Concession in Shanghai. No, I'm not developing a new line of business, but Mark is also a good friend, so do not call me if you have to move too.
His Spanish style house in a quiet compound in the middle of the old city is also on our books as an informal meeting place for meetings for five to fifteen people, organized by through our Speakers Bureau. Together with Mark and possibly other speakers it creates a much nicer atmosphere for informal discussions than even the best hotels in town can create. More details are here.

China: The Art of Law - Chronicling Deals, Disasters, Greed, Stupidity and Occasional Success in the New China

Chen Liangyu, a real Jiang man

Chen Liangyu

Ahead of the corruption trial of former Shanghai party secretary Chen Liangyu, Howard French summarizes the political side of this prosecution, a part that will most likely never be part of any public proceedings.
Chen was the man of the mega-projects, focusing on mega growth, the mantra of Jiang Zemin. He followed the Jiang Zemin line even when the new central government under Hu Jintao had decided to a drastic policy change and became both a political and an economic liability.
His plan to give Shanghai a beach, his plan to extend the useless maglev to Hangzhou, the World Expo in 2010, the Formula One, his tennis complex of USD 290 million.
The cancellation of the extension of the maglev in May under public pressure was the signal the days of Chen Liangyu were really over.