Wow! I was beginning to wonder if China was ever going to make any move to affect the serious plastic bag problem. When you combine a massive population buying daily food and China's lack of eductation on how to care for their environment, you get plastic bags hovering around the cities and running down the streams.
The Chinese Ministry of Commerce is going to implement a law beginning 1 June to force retailers to charge customers for the plastic bags. In addition, a minimum thickness for the bags will be set. Amen.
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I recently had an e-mail from a foreign business person asking me to hunt down a Chinese product. Well, that is basically what we do, so at first sight it looked good. The one strange part of this deal, though, was that it was meant for use in a Chinese factory.
In other words, I, myself a foreigner to China, was asked by another foreigner to find a Chinese product for a Chinese factory, when more than likely, there are dozens of people in that factory who could have done just as good a job as I could have in finding the product since they are Chinese nationals. Funny. Seems like taking the long way around to me. All I can assume is that this deal has more than meets the eye.
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I was pleasantly surprised. I had spent years with that dull fear that one day I would have to engage with the Chinese legal system, a fear of the unknown. We all approach China (and any non-native culture or country) with our own individual issues. Sometimes, I jump up to defend China and other times I am the leading cynic.
When it came to Chinese law and the legal system, I definitely defaulted to the cynic side. Mind you, that was based on nothing but blind fear of something about which I did not have the slightest bit of first-hand evidence. Then I met my lawyer.
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An almost identically named article from Reuters talked about the gains coffee is making in China, not only in the amount of coffee consumed, but the production of coffee beans as well. Chinese homes are increasingly drinking coffee (albeit overwhelmingly instant in the home) and Chinese coffee producers are a strengthening presence in the world coffee trade.
I have talked about the coffee culture in China before, but I was very interested in what this article had to say about China's coffee production. Though only briefly, they did hint toward the same conclusions I see for China's coffee beans.
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Though it may be one of those "don't quit your day job" stories, I have been working to completely revamp my personal website to focus solely on photography. It had plenty of my photography before, but not only did I need a new way to manage the site itself and keep up fresh content, but the photography-oriented weblog is a good way to help me keep from setting my camera down for too long.
We must find a balance, though. How much work? How much play? And when does work become play and play become work? I love photography, but quite honestly, it is very easy for me to become completely consumed with photography, thinking about shots and projects long after laying down to go to sleep and waking up with new techniques to try. I think we do need a hobby, something we enjoy to give us an opportunity to relax a little. If that hobby, however, is just another consuming activity in our lives, it does not accomplish much.
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I have them: Ronaldo advertising photos taken right from downtown Liuzhou, the home of the Golden Throat Lozenge company which is allegedly illegally using Ronaldo's photos in their advertising.
Most of the web pages out there, which I mentioned more in the previous entry about Ronaldo's suit against the Golden Throat company, only talk about the television advertising. That is evidentally what Ronaldo's "people" noticed, but the photos you see here are the first pieces of advertising which I noticed many moons ago, but which still lasts till today.
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What's in a name? Well, everything really! A week or two ago, I received a phone call informing me that there was another business in Liuzhou (our fair city) operating under the same business name. The first thoughts that came to mind were nightmares of a foreigner trying to sue a Chinese person on their home turf. Maybe it is possible, but that is certainly not on my list of things to try in China.
I talked about some of the tricks of doing so only a few days ago when looking at the obstacles for Ronaldo to sue Liuzhou's Golden Throat company. The case for New Frontier is considerably different, but from what I have seen, suing someone is still way over-rated (judging from the United States). Most of the time the victim ends up spending big bucks to win the case, only to never really see the payment of reparations in the end. So, what did New Frontier do?
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Poor Ronaldo. It seems his image in China has been stained by our local Golden Throat throat lozenge company in their television advertising using his smiling face. I am no lawyer, but putting aside my instinctive distrust of Chinese business practice, I still see a few things in this evolving story that nobody seems to have mentioned.
Ronaldo might never have known the better had it not been for another Chinese company approaching him and asking for an advertising contract, on the condition that he first cease his contract with the Golden Throat company of (our fair city) Liuzhou, China. In my mind, though, it is not as simple as that.
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I just found out that what I have been talking about the past few months—providing a more direct route from rural sellers to end buyer and giving an honest wage to the farmer or initial producer who does most of the hard work—is actually a hot topic in the world of global trade and development these days, especially for consumable, specialty products like coffee and tea. So, I want to give myself a big welcome to the world of "fair trade" products.
I have been heading there for some time, but only now find out the name of this brave new world. The object of fair trade goods is to assure that the farmer receives an acceptable wage for the goods produced. Sounds reasonable, right? The problem is that for years, especially with products in such high demand as coffee, the big companies (most of them are not even names you would necessarily associate with coffee) have managed to starve farmers, provide end customers with stale product, and make their billions.
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On a recent trip to Luizhou from our smaller town, I found a humorous, but instructive diversion. Certain sections of the road are toll road. One of the toll booths is located near a village which sets against the highway.
Our driver turned off the road just before passing through the toll booth. The village has set up a little toll booth bypass system. The toll is whopping CNY 7 (less than US$1), but you can go through the informal village toll system for CNY 3!
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What happens when we have a successful business, but an unsuccessful life? What is success? How do we succeed? Though deep down we all know there is much more to life than just how much money we have, we have so few examples of how to live any other way.
There are loads of examples of successful business people, and scanning the shelves of any bookstore will provide dozens of books to help us replicate the same kind of success. Where is the balance, though? Do we even want balance?
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Happy Chinese New Year! This is the beginning of the Year of the Boar (well, "pig", but boar sounds a little better to me), the Golden Year of the Pig, if I am correct. Most years I spend this season in China, in the homes of friends, but this year is a little different. I am in Thailand, spending the New Year in the home of my wife, whose father is Chinese Thai.
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I am assuming my landlord did not read my last weblog entry. Otherwise, he would have seen that I was already softening up to his pleas for finer points of the contract. The whole process makes me think of a comment a friend of mine here in China made about the bargaining process: "just make sure everybody is still smiling."
Though simple, I have found a profound amount of truth in that statement. It means I am happy with my end of the deal and the other person is happy with their end. It is not always that simple, but I still feel this proverb, of sorts, could be applied in more situations that we might initially think.
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Chinese are world class bargainers and will drive the price down at all costs. Foreigners often just do not care about a slightly expensive price if it saves the trouble of beating the last bit out of the seller.
The past few days, I have been working through the last few negotiations before signing a contract to rent a property for a cafe here in Sanjiang County. I thought I had it figured out, and then a Chinese friend jumped in to "help". My friend wants to make sure we have a great deal, but I have begun to wonder what the real "cost" will be of this great deal.
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In his 1996 book The Saints Among Us, George Gallup, Jr., the famous poll-taker, said this:
In other studies we have done, such as financial giving, we found that the poor give a larger proportion of their invome to charity than the rich. Being surrounded by misery, they see opportunities to help on every side. The rich, especially now, with the widening gap between rich and poor, have a tendency to cordon themselves off and therefore don't see much of the grimness of life.
The key to his comments, I think, is the isolation the rich maintain. Nobody quite understands why New Frontier Consulting does what it does, focusing business in areas where the profits are not as healthy as bigger cities. One reason (among many) for our decision comes out in Gallup's comments here.
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Sometimes, it is a little hard to get a straight answer around here. I started a little business project that I thought was going to be a straight forward process, but it has turned into a cultural business learning experience.
The learning experience has brought up an interesting ethical question too, which are the small lessons we would sometimes wish we did have to face. When is something culturally appropriate though technically bending the law, and when it is a matter of right and wrong? As with much of life and business, many of our dealings fall into that wide gray area between the obviously black and white issues.
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Well, I for one am still in the Christmas spirit, and though this has very little to do (on the surface) with business consulting in China or the development of rural resources, I really think this is worth a write before the season is totally gone. I had to laugh when I read reports of a group of Chinese scholars who wrote up a paper to discourage Christmas in China.
My personal favorite from the paper they wrote is that Christmas is an encroachment on traditional Chinese holidays by Western "soft power." That makes me wonder who is making, selling, and buying all the Christmas decorations and paraphernalia in the stores in China? I doubt the CIA has some cunning plan to soften up China with Santa beards.
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I cannot quite put it all together myself, but somehow, a fire here in town yesterday put me to thinking about Christmas spirit. We play up the holidays so, every year producing new feel-good movies, and old classics doing their best to light a small fire of Christmas spirit in us all. I am already jumping ahead of myself, though.
Yesterday, Christmas Eve, though few around here know what that means beyond having a few strange decorations for sale in the supermarket, the fire truck came rumbling through town headed straight for the Sanjiang Drum Tower. When I looked out the window and saw smoke rising from about the right (or wrong, I guess) spot, I grabbed my camera and ran to the site.
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Southwest China has attracted a multitude of non-profit organizations, and in the past few months, the Chinese government has stopped renewing the registrations for these organizations (at least the smaller ones). Many of them are turning to business. What is going to happen with the non-profit minded folks flocking into the business world?
Many plan on continuing very similar activities, but start a business to do so. Is it just me, or does that not make much sense? Sure, organizations often use businesses to actually complete some projects, but can a strategy which is funded become a strategy that brings in money? Non-profits tend to have money flowing out, not in.
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What happens when you are a tea farmer from the Chinese countryside and your buyer receives shipment of your tea, disconnects his phone line, and disappears without paying? That is exactly the situation of a Dong friend of mine right now.
I do not want to suggest this is a common occurance, but once is enough to cause very serious damage. What can a rural tea farmer do when the buyer is half way across the country? What affects will this leave on the local economy? How can crop theft be avoided?
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Am I just a romantic, or does anybody actually have original ideas anymore? If a company produces a product with some ingenuity, creatively approaching the market with something new or innovative, they are only copied by some factory in China. As my generation would say, "Where's the love?" On the other side, there is the expression, "All's fair in love and war"...and international trade.
In many industries, manufacturers are afraid to spend anything substantial on research and development because it will all be for nothing when the product is copied. Or better yet, the innovative company will be labeled as controlling and secretive by the public, when all they want to do is have a fair chance at earning back what they have invested into developing a product.
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Tourism or electric power? That is the struggle between residents and officials in the public in Guizhou Province's Xingyi City. The government wants to build a hydroelectric power station that would put scenic spots under water. I cannot say this is the first time I have heard this issue come up.
It is a tough issue, really. Not building a dam preserves the current scenic beauty which brings in tourist money, and building the dam provides tax revenue of around $14 million Chinese yuan (USD 1.7 million) per year. Actually, come to think of it, that sounds like more of an ethical issue than anything else. Those who have the power to say if the dam is built are also the same ones who would profit from the building of the dam.
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I have now started up the "board of accountability" for New Frontier Consulting. Everybody seems to have a different idea of what the board is, and for good reason. We know what a regular board is, but a so called board of accountability it is not exactly an established idea. Really, we are defining what it means, at least, defining what it means for us.
The initial purpose of the board was accountability. We wanted collegues who could warn us of upcoming troubles and keep us along the straight path. Beyond that, though, I hope for so much more from the board. I hope it can become a breeding ground of ideas and inspiration.
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I just returned home after a few weeks of travel to find a family of foreigners peering into my apartment. A random, happy, white family, whose picture was undoubtedly stolen off some website, is now pasted on the advertisement for a new housing development going up across the intersection my home.
So, why did the Beauty Shores Business & Living District paste up a family of foreigners on their advertisement? It is certainly not aimed at Sanjiang County's booming foreign population, because there are only two of us, my wife and me. In the simple words of our neighbor, "because foreigners are rich."
This is a comic example of the Chinese people's impression of foreigners to help bring up a deeper issue of worldview and how it applies to foreigners working in China (in any capacity).
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The pent up frustration of workers in Bangladesh textile factories finally reached the boiling point. The costs of living have been rising and the workers' salaries have remained the same. Unfortunately, the workers' repeated demonstrations finally turned violent.
A BBC World report on cable television interviewed a factory manager who said that bargain pricing on the racks in America and Europe were putting on the pressure which brought about the situation in Bangladesh. I am just guessing, but that sure seems like a very intelligent manipulation of media to difuse the problem.
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Small business faces a tempting problem. When struggling to find an acceptable profit margin (or to find any profit at all, for that matter) cutting legal corners is an all too tempting solution.
Some talk I have heard recently suggests a "board of accountability" for small businesses or even individual entrepreneurs. This is not a board as a legal or managerial body, but rather an "advisory council" or group brought together to help make the business reach its full potential while staying within all ethical and legal boundaries.
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I was recently talking to an Asian entrepreneur who has fashion clothing shops, both in her own country and in a Western country. As she spoke about her business, she spoke of the methods she uses to get around paying customs duties and the false values she places in invoices.
Her ability to sell fashion clothing for cheaper than her competitors has gained her a bit of a reputation. It is great that she is using her entrepreneurial spirit and Asian connections to help her break into markets in a way others can not, but the moral cost it too great.
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It seems a weekly occurance that some company in the United States or Europe is blasted by reporters and workers' rights groups about unethical practices used in their overseas factories. Apple is only the newest target, clothing and shoe companies are the most frequent targets.
I am not here to blame these companies; they have had plenty of that. They may well have knowingly allowed factories to provide them the best price for an unknown human price. Those that do have auditors and actively seek to keep these factories in line face a tough challenge, though. A recent International Herald Tribune article reports "institutional approaches to deception." In other words, these factories work together to falsify reports, fool auditors, and train employees what to say when the "sweatshop snoops" come around.
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Governmental intervention is the solution, says a new report out from Oxfam International and Water Aid. They argue that the necessary scale needed to alleviate global poverty lies in the public services provided by governments. They place special emphasis on the role of rich countries and the World Bank.
The report speaks specifically of services such as providing training and salaries for both teachers and health workers and developing national water and sanitation systems. Oxfam's Bernice Romero has an inspiring goal: “Within a generation, for the first time in history, every child in the world could be in school, every woman could give birth with proper health care, everyone could drink clean, safe water, and millions of new health workers and teachers could be saving lives and shaping minds."
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The story is as old as China's development surge. Migrant workers from the countryside move into the big cities to find work, but leave their children behind with grandparents or relatives.
The Deputy director of the China Youth Research Center, Sun Xiaoyun, gave her "solution" to the problem in a China Daily article: "If kids can go out [to the cities to work] with their parents together, many problems will disappear." I sit silent, dumbfounded by such lack of insight.
Of course! But stating generalized, unrealistic, shallow solutions is not going to do anything to actually solve the problem. Moving to understand these problems on a deeper level and come to much more workable conclusions does not take much work. At the very least, we should ask the right questions. Do these rural workers want to leave their children behind? Do they want to travel to some unknown area to toil for meagre wages in hopes of helping their family survive? If not, then why do they?
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Chinese migrant workers and today’s global workplace collide in an all new way. Chinese workers emigrate to other countries, set up Chinese style factories (read: long hours, seven day work week, low pay) in Western countries to retain the coveted “Made in Well Known Western Country” tag.
Spiegel online has a very interesting article about Italy-based, Chinese-manned textile factories producing low (and even some high) quality clothing from Italy’s well-known textile city, Prato. After the initial odity wears off, we start to wonder why and how this style of business has become synonymous with Chinese culture.
In the words of Popeye, “I ams what I ams.” You cannot separate the people from the culture, the programing that drives them. Chinese culture is very insular by nature. And man is very greedy by nature. You mix the two, and you find Chinese factories, separated from the outside world, focused on making money by any means.
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