A bit of advice on doing business in China

January 14, 2013

An expatriate living in China sent me a copy of The Australian’s Goodwill Offers a Rich Yield by Greg Rudd.  The commentary was published in that newspaper back in May 2009.

However, what Greg Rudd says is just as important today as it was then regardless of the few negative voices that left comments.

I find it interesting that the negative comments from such as “lao de lao ren” and “RN of Canberra” may be from ignorant individuals that do not realize that the US Founding Fathers despised “democracies” and built a “republic” where only white male property owners (excluding Jews) could vote—about 10% of the 3.9 million people counted in the first U.S. Census of 1790, and 90% were farmers.  That number included almost 700,000 slaves in the land of the free. That means about 320,000 may have been eligible to vote.

“RN of Canberra” even compared China to Hitler’s Nazi Germany, which isn’t even close. There is no comparison. Today’s China is a much safer place to live than Nazi Germany was and there are no signs that China plans to go out and wage war against the rest of the world or set up gas chambers and start killing people as the Nazis did.

Both “lao de lao ren” and “RN of Canberra” express that China should become a democracy. Well, the CCP has about 80 million members and they do vote in addition to the 600 million rural Chinese that vote in elections for village political posts such as mayor. That’s more than 10% of the population.

In fact, the first time the US was officially called a democracy was by President Woodrow Wilson more than a century after the US was founded. Why, after the Civil War, veterans were known as the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR)—not the Grand Army of a Democracy.

Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both said democracy was no better than mob rule, which explains why the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College to select presidents and why George W Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore but became president anyway.

Greg Rudd offers some advice about China in his commentary.

He says, “My mother taught me when you walk into someone’s house you shouldn’t be rude. You may not like what you see sometimes, and advice and suggestions can be given in the right spirit and in the right atmosphere, but always remember it is not your house.

“When we are in China’s house we should show respect and when they are in our house they should show respect.”

Greg Rudd is managing director of GPR Asia, based in Beijing. GPR advises on investment and joint ventures.

GPR Asia works with Asian companies who wish to invest/joint venture/merge or acquire companies in Australia and/or with Australian companies that wish to invest/joint venture/ merge or acquire companies within the Asian region.

Discover more about Doing Business in China

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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The Yue – 9,000 years old

January 8, 2013

Music in China is traditionally associated with ritual observances and government affairs.

In 1999, Chinese archeologists unearthed what is believed to be the oldest know playable instrument, a seven-holed flute fashioned 9,000 years ago from the hollow wing bone of a large bird.

To establish the age, a U.S. chemist at the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory analyzed data from carbon-14 dating done in China on materials taken from the site.

The 9,000-year-old flutes were “exquisitely-crafted” from the wing bone of a red-crowned crane.


Music from the Book of Songs

In The Book of Songs, an ancient collection of Chinese poetry from the 6th century BC, the three-hole Yue is the most frequently mentioned wind instrument, but by the Tang Dynasty (618 – 906 AD), the Yue had all but vanished.  Source: China Daily

Discover more with The Hsiao (Xiao) – Chinese Flute

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Indiana Jones, make room for Irene Blum

January 7, 2013

Ballantine Books sent me an advanced, uncorrected proof of Kim Fay’s The Map of Lost Memories. Because I’m not going to check or read the finished book, note that the final novel may have been revised.

After reading the uncorrected proof, I think Kim Fay’s novel is brilliant at times, average at times and sometimes falls flat then revives to be brilliant again repeating the cycle. In fact, Fay’s descriptions were so vivid they transported me to Shanghai, Saigon and Cambodia, and I could smell and see these exotic places—some I have visited and Fay’s descriptions rang true.

The main character in The Map of Lost Memories is Irene Blum, who in 1925 slams into the glass ceiling and is passed over for a job she deserves, the curatorship of the museum where she grew up and then worked. Instead, the job goes to a man who has the proper credentials even though he does not have Irene’s experience or global connections.

This leads Irene to steam across the Pacific to resurrect her career by finding several copper scrolls that record the lost history of Cambodia’s ancient Khmer Empire (802 – 1431 AD).

Irene’s first stop is Shanghai where she is sucked into the power struggle between the nationalists and communists and barely escapes with her life. Her next stop is Saigon and from there she travels to Cambodia with her motley crew, visits Angkor Wat and then is off to discover a lost temple in Cambodia’s rugged northeast near Laos that may be the rival of Angkor Wat.

Along the way, she collects a crew of dysfunctional allies each with his or her own agenda. There is the drug-addicted Simone Merlin, who appears to be a dedicated communist out to save the poor Cambodians from being exploited by the French colonial powers.

Then there is Louis, a world renowned scholar of the Khmer civilization and Angkor Wat, who was a childhood friend and former lover of Simone.

Irene also finds romance with the mysterious Mark Rafferty, who is linked to her mentor Henry Simms, a wealthy and powerful old man dying of cancer and another reason why Irene is racing to find the copper scrolls that will reveal the history of the Khmer empire ruled by Jayavarman VII (1125–1218), the last of the great Angkor kings.

At one time, the Khmer Empire was one of the most, if not the most, powerful empires in Southeast Asia. In fact, recent satellite images have revealed that Angkor Wat, the capital of the Khmer Empire, was the largest pre-industrial urban center in the world at that time.

However, history reveals there will always be empires that rise to flatten other cultures and countries and then fall. For example: the Aztec, Han, Inca, Roman, Spanish, French, British, Greek, Persian, and Egyptian. I doubt that the future will ever see Italy rise to equal the Roman Empire.

The Khmer Empire of Jayavarman VII was no different.

I enjoyed this novel and if you enjoy an Indiana Jones adventure, this book is for you. At the end of the novel, I had a feeling that we may see more of Irene in subsequent novels as the adventure continues.

Discover China’s Three “Journeys to the West”

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Romance of the Three Kingdoms

December 10, 2012

When I was a kid, I loved reading historical fiction like those about Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan. I still do. I also see historical movies and for that reason, I bought the movie version for the Romance of the Three Kingdoms—an epic from China’s history.

Don’t let the title fool you. This story is not about romance as Westerners think of it. It’s about the romance of politics, war and conquest. There’s even a love story with sacrifice.

The novel was written in the 14th century and was more than a thousand pages long with 120 chapters. The translated English version is longer. After the Han Dynasty collapsed (206 BC to 219 AD), China shattered into three warring kingdoms.

This story is about how China was reunified as one nation again. I’ve seen it once and plan to watch it again. The DVD version has 84 episodes and runs for more than fifty hours. It has even been made into a game.

Before starting this epic, you may want to read these posts to have a better understanding of the behavior of the characters.

Discover the First of All Virtues or Honor Chinese style in addition to the meaning of Face.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Mao and Snow

December 3, 2012

During one of our trips to Shanghai, China, my wife and I went to see a film called Mao Zedong and Edgar Snow.

Edgar Snow (1905 – 1972) was an American journalist known for his books and articles on Communism in China and the Chinese Communist revolution. He is believed to be the first Western journalist to interview Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong, and is best known for Red Star Over China (1937) an account of the Chinese Communist movement from its foundation until the late 1930s.

The film was in Mandarin and wasn’t subtitled, so I had to watch carefully to understand what was going on. I Googled the move and found little about it on the Internet.

However, I discovered that Edgar Snow’s wife threatened to sue China if the movie was released but that didn’t stop the Chinese.

There’s no doubt that Mao had to have charisma to lead so many men in battle for so many years to win the civil war.


Edgar Snow and Mao

However, Mao changed after he became a modern emperor, and the power corrupted him. The evidence—the results of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the purges that killed so many.

There was a positive side too.  Mao’s success in the CCP’s war against poverty, the increase in life expectancy that almost doubled during Mao’s rule and the health programs that were implemented such as the bare foot doctors. The reason so many Chinese still think of Mao as the George Washington of China was because life after 1949 was better than life before the CCP won the Civil War.

Students of China may want to see this movie, but the only place one may buy a DVD of this movie is probably China.

When Edgar Snow came down with pancreatic cancer, Zhou Enlai dispatched a team of Chinese doctors to Switzerland to treat him.

The next best thing would be to read Snow’s book about Mao, Red Star Over China and/or discover about Health Care During Mao’s Time.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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