Foreign Entrepreneurs in China – Part 2/2

January 24, 2011

In the PBS documentary of foreign entrepreneurs in China we discover (when the US financial crises hit the world causing more than $64US trillion in global loses while those who caused the crises walked away with fortunes) China experienced a slowdown in economic growth in 2008.

One foreign entrepreneur, Ed Hung, talks of the clothing store he co-founded, NLGX Design, which opened in Beijing in 2008.  He said rent was still increasing.

Ed Hung was born and raised in San Francisco. His business partner, Michel Sutyadi, was born and raised in Germany.  They met in Beijing while studying Mandarin in 2005.

Ed Hung says modern Beijing is becoming a consumer culture.

Then Doug Ma, a co-founder of Go Tour-ING, talks of how the global financial crisis (which was started in America) has affected business.

In the spring of 2008, Dough Ma left his job at an investment bank to travel. He wrote a post for Jet Set Zero in July 2009, and said, “It has been quite a challenge starting up Tour-ING. For one thing, it has been a tough year for the tourism industry. Less people are traveling due to the global economy and the outbreak of swine flu has hindered a lot of travel plans.”

Brian Sloan, CEO of Robotic Blow Job, says the toys he manufactures and sells seem more popular in hard economic times since people spend less money going out and stay home more so they need a method of self-entertainment.

Return to Foreign Entrepreneurs in China – Part 1 or discover China’s Sexual Revolution

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Foreign Entrepreneurs in China – Part 1/2

January 23, 2011

Young and Restless in China was filmed over a period of four years starting in 2004 for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

Paris Franz, a student, blogger and writer with a passion for history, art and travel, wrote a post about Young and Restless in China for Suite 101.com.

This two-part segment is about foreign entrepreneurs in China. I plan to also feature other segments of this PBS Frontline documentary because it demonstrates how much China is changing. The more I learn, the more it appears that there is more freedom in China than most people outside China are aware of.

Franz wrote, “The film highlights what is unique about China at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

“The entrepreneurs – starting up tailoring, hotel and internet café businesses – are full of optimism, supremely confident that their hard work is going to make them rich. As one of them says, China today is “the land of opportunity.”

Part One starts with “there is this misconception of China that it is not modern, that it is still changing, but if you come and see with your own eyes you will discover that (urban) China (where about 500 million people live) is as modern as any city in the world.

One entrepreneur says, if you visit Beijing and see the architecture, you will see that it is leaps and bounds ahead of the US.

Another entrepreneur says, China is a melting pot for all types of entrepreneurs in Beijing… For young entrepreneur it is cheap to start something new in China compared to the US.

In fact, as the economic tide turns against the west, younger, foreign talents are taking their entrepreneurial ambitions to China because the market is right for starting a business.

One American entrepreneur says he graduated from law school at Penn State in 2005. He then talks about how he arrived in China to create, manufacture and sell his own brand of sex toys and fetish clothing.

Learn more about Doing Business in China and/or read about Bob Grant’s (one American businessman) Love Affair with China and its People.

Another voice is expatriate Tom Carter and his China Backpacker Diaries.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

High-Tech Entrepreneurs Thrive in China

January 22, 2011

This post is taken from China’s 360 Series and is about Zhongguancun, China’s Silicon Valley, which is located in Beijing’s Haidian District and was first developed in the late 1990s.

Here are a few pictures of the concrete, glass and steel canyons of Zhongguancun taken by Steve Hsu, a professor of physics at the University of Oregon.

Prior to this post, I’ve read several times in the Western media that China doesn’t have a chance to match California’s Silicon Valley because China lacks freedom. This is simplistic thinking.

The Chinese have every economic freedom that many Americans do except two — total freedom of religion and limited political expression if it is considered a threat to the central government and the stability of China’s economic progress.

It isn’t as if these few limits to freedom are a secret since they are part of China’s Constitution, which is taught in the public schools.

Other than that, since money and freedom are linked, the growing Chinese middle class has as much freedom to live the same consumer lifestyle many Americans do.

In fact, a 2010 survey by the California Voter Foundation found that 51 percent of nonvoters (in the US) grew up in families that did not often discuss political issues and candidates.

This is evidence that total freedom of religion and/or political expression is not necessary for entrepreneurial innovation to improve lifestyles and consumer freedom.

If you still doubt that China can compete with America, I remind you of the recent PISA results where China’s Shanghai teens earned first place in every category tested while the US ranked 23rd of about 65 nations tested.

Time magazine reported, “Chinese classrooms have more students, but teachers make more money than in the United States and there is a huge emphasis on problem-solving skills.”

This 2008 video takes us to a lab in Tsinghua University in Beijing where students are discussing solar technology.

Ye Yuming, an award-winning student at Tsinghua University said, “China lags behind other countries in the solar power industry. The solar PV will help us improve and break the monopoly held by foreign businesses. The solar PV has great market potential, especially in China. The market size is huge.”

What Ye Yuming said was true at the time but two years after he made that statement, China became the world’s largest solar power manufacturer.

Feng Jun, a Chinese entrepreneur, set up one of China’s first private high-tech companies. Today he is president of AIGO. He says, “1992 was the year the real reform of China began.” By 2008, AIGO was one of the top ten camera manufacturers in China. He says that 20% of profits go to profit sharing and the other 80% goes into research and development.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Black Market Mooncakes

January 21, 2011

In September 2010, I wrote a post about China’s Mid-Autumn Festival, which is also the time of year for giving and eating mooncakes. At the time, I had no idea that Haagen-Dazs sold the most sought after modern version of this Chinese traditional treat.

However, recently my wife learned from a friend in China of the popularity of Haagen-Dazs and mentioned the mooncakes, so I did some “scooping” for this post.


Mooncake Mania for China’s September Holiday

Kai Ryssdal reported in September for American Public Media’s Marketplace that China’s mid-Autumn Festival and tradition of eating mooncakes has become an underground business possibly worth billions.

Marketplace’s Shanghai correspondent Rob Schmitz says mooncakes carry about a thousand calories and most of the cakes bought are gifts as a way to show respect to business partners and people you want to be close to.

Imagine the size of the market—more than a billion people, which explains why Starbucks, Nestle and Dairy Queen got into the business of selling mooncakes in China.


2009 Haagen-Dazs Chinese Mooncake Commercial

In fact, Haagen-Dazs sold 1.5 million boxes of mooncakes in 2009, and when these popular mooncakes cannot be found, buyers turn to black market, back-alley vendors, much like scalpers for popular US sporting and music events.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China Cultivating Consumers

January 18, 2011

Robert Lenzner, a Forbes columnist, writes for the Huffington Post, “China Hopes to Double the Value of Yuan-to-Dollars Within Ten years.”

Although Lenzner spends most of his words on the value of the yuan-to-dollars, the real story is China’s goal to become a consumer driven economy that does not depend on exports to survive.

I’ve read this before.

To achieve this goal, in recent years, China has spent more money in Brazil and South Africa then it has received back in trade. In fact, everything China has done since 1980 points in this direction.

It appears that the plan was to use cheap exports to prime the consumer engine that, if successful, will power China for decades avoiding the mistake Japan made.

In 1980, only 20% of the Chinese people could read. Today that number is more than 90%. In 1980, most of China lived in poverty—at least 80 or more percent. Today, according to the World Bank, only 10% of Chinese live in poverty. Recently, many factory workers won large raises and China’s government, for the first time, supported this move toward higher earnings.

Tom Doctoroff, also writing for The Huffington Post, says, “The Chinese will never spend freely. Savings rates will always be higher than in the West. There is no question China’s consumer economy will expand as incomes rise. So will purchasing power.”

However, Alan Wheatley, Global Economics Correspondent for the News Daily writes, “Chinese consumption is, in fact, strong. It has grown by more than 9 percent a year, after adjustment for inflation, over the past decade. China overtook the United States in 2009 as the world’s leading automobile market. The real-estate market is on fire, swelling demand for appliances and furniture. China is No. 2 in sales of luxury goods.”

Even though many Chinese will still save and spend less than most Americans, spending spread across China’s huge population may help China to achieve a different kind of consumer economy from the US where the consumer pays cash and doesn’t run up credit card debt. The key is to raise the standard of living of about 800 million rural Chinese, which China’s most recent economic plan is focused on.

In the next thirty years, if China succeeds in rural as it has in urban China, this means its economy will eventually outperform the US by huge margins in all economic sectors. It’s all in the numbers and China’s population is about five times that of the US.

Wheatley says, “The task for China’s policymakers is to lift that proportion by boosting wages, speeding up urbanization and building a social safety net so people do not need to save so much for a rainy day.

“Consumption will be the story of the next five to 10 years, and because we’re talking about a fifth of humanity, it will have a huge impact on global business,” said David Gosset, director of the Euro-China Center for International and Business Relations at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai.

Learn more of China’s Middle Class Expanding

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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