There is no doubt that China’s booming economy takes slower speed amid the global financial crisis. However, foreign companies are still flocking to China for business opportunities.
InvestHK, the Hong Kong department that promotes the city as a place to do business reported Wednesday that it had advised 257 companies setting up business in Hong Kong this year, more than in any other year, according to the International Herald Tribune’s story. But going to China to deal with business is not an easy decision, not only because China is as big as the U.S. and its market is very much segmented, but also because of the under-the-table skills and potential risks doing business in China.
I remember On Sept. 14, 2006, SK-II, the high-end cosmetics product of Procter & Gamble (my previous employer), was found by China’s quality supervision authority traces of two elements that could cause potential side effects such as rashes and liver problems. The alleged quality defect, together with P&G’s stubborn reaction in the first few weeks, triggered a nation-wide negative media coverage. Angry online comments and sporadic outbursts of violence in SK II stores escalated the crisis and forced P&G to suspend sales of SK-II products in China for a few months.
P & G mismanaged the crisis on three key elements: failure to correctly evaluate the influence of the burgeoning Internet; failure to execute local strategy to manage the crisis according to consumer habits; failure to avoid potential political risks in a country with difference political systems.
In the digital times, the crisis spread path both on traditional media and on the Internet, which spreads news and people’s dissatisfaction much faster. This fast track also made SK-II, a brand P&G spent huge amount of money and time to promote, sink in a few weeks. From a PR perspective, I’d like to advise people on managing public relations in China: keeping low-profile; paying more attention to the Internet; quick and accurate response; avoiding political risks. If you can do all these, you can at least avoid the potential PR risks in China.
Honda has cut its annual profit forecast by 62%, Toyota delayed its U.S. plant plan, and the Big Three were still waiting for the rescue plan amid falling global car demand and the global financial crisis. In China, BYD launched a new clean energy car series – F3DM, which is the first electronic sedan in China.
What happened in the automobile industry and what’s the future ahead? None of us knows the right answer right now, just like 50 years ago, everyone was eagerly looking forward to a job opportunity in that industry for no reason.
Car-makers around the world have been announcing lower forecast of sales and profit together with job cuts, and leading US car-makers have been trying to persuade the government to approve a car industry bailout plan.
Everyone is talking about clean energy new model for automobile industry. But after every big manufacturer has Hybrid car series, no one knows if the clean energy cars
can rescue the automobile industry out of trouble.
I’d support the bankruptcy plan of the Big Three, since only on this way, they can get rid of the heavy pressure of retired employees’ compensation and medical aid packages. I’m no idea why in a free market country, there are companies who have to take responsibilities to cover all the retired employee’s compensation and their medical care packages for such a long period.
Additionally, the Big Three haven’t focused on automobile industry for a long time, but investing in the finance field, which made them slump with the crisis. In our impression, automobile industry should be the representative of the real economy, but recent turmoil disclosed that they’ve been involved in the finance economy for a longer time than we expected.
The Culture Revolution has shaped lives of a generation Chinese. Rae Yang, was one of them.
Yang, 57, an associate professor of Chinese language and literature at Dickinson College, is still struggling between the past and the present, East and West, China and America.
When Yang studied at University of Massachusetts for her master and Ph.D. degree in comparative literature from 1981 to 1991, she was asked by her professors and classmates hundreds of times about her experience in the Culture Revolution.
“The baby boom generation shared the same characteristics with me: experimental, free spirited, and politically active,” Yang said. She was encouraged by her professors and classmates to write down her experience as a red guard, a group who denounced adults she considered counterrevolutionaries at that time.
Yang decided to write down her stories in 1985, raising the world’s interest of the tumultuous history. Her memoir, “Spider Eater,” published in 1997 by University of California Press.
“Nowadays, some of my students told me they’ve read my book and chose my courses in Dickson, because they were very interested in me,” Yang said. Although she never proactively talked about her tremendous social upheaval in her native China in her classes, her students asked her very often about the turmoil and her stories.
After Mao’s death in 1976, the party leaders who launched the revolution were sacked, and a new generation of leaders controlled the power of the world’s most populous country. The new government, led by Deng Xiaoping, said officially that the Culture revolution was a disaster, but it prohibited public discourse on the subject. Most Chinese born after 1976 know very little, if any, of the revolution.
Roger Wang was one of the young generations. Wang, born in 1975, working as a senior reporter for 21st Business Herald, remembered very little about the revolution. He talked about his impression, his mother’s memory and the Me-generation’s opinions about the Culture Revolution.
However, while the subject was banned in China, it raised rising interest in the rest of the world. In these years, Yang was invited by Asian Study Association, Asia Society and other organizations for panel discussions about the Culture Revolutions, its reasons and its impact on modern China.
On October 29, 2008, Yang walked into the Asia Society’s museum to watch the exhibition of “Art and China’s Revolution”, which again raised her complicated memory of the violence, repression, and hardship in the Culture Revolution.
“I was surprised that the paintings were so bright and sunny, because my feelings became increasingly worse as the revolution moved on,” Yang said.
The Communist Party, led by Mao Zedong, launched the so-called Culture Revolution in 1966, to purge the “old ideas” in China’s ancient civilization and promote the communism ideas.
“Initially the Culture Revolution was supported by lots of people, especially the young generation and the powerless people,” Yang said. “At the first time, I thought we were making history for the whole mankind. China is going to set up an example for the rest of world to follow.”
In 1966, Yang was 15 years old, studying at Beijing 101 Middle School. But when the Culture Revolution broke out, Yang ran away from school, and became a Red Guard. With other fanatic teens, she indulged herself into the political revolution by organizing prosecution and denunciation meetings on her teachers, traveling around the country spreading propaganda, raiding homes and inflicting beatings on anyone suspected of political disloyalty.
“I remember an art teacher in my elite middle school was beaten into death, others were prosecuted by students in the public gatherings,” Yang said. She explained her art teacher’s death was still as a mystery now, since rumors spread about the teacher’s sexual harassment with the students before the Culture Revolution, but she had no way to verify them.
The matchboxes, cups, books and posters: all raised Yang’s memory when she visit the Asia Society’s museum for the exhibition. Some of the collections in the exhibition are belonged to Orville Schell, the director of U.S.-China relation center in Asia Society.
Schell worked for The New Yorker magazine in 1970s and visited China in 1975. At this first trip, Schell as a foreigner cannot make friends with Chinese people, who still didn’t have permissions to talk with foreigners.
As a historian, Schell collected artworks in memory of the Culture Revolution. He found out and bought some of the collections in Panjiayuan flea market in Beijing.
However, for Yang, the Culture Revolution history matters for better, for worse.
It brought excitement at first as she firmly believed this is a true revolution that can clean her soul from deep inside. But things changed in 1968. At that year, she volunteered to go to the Great Northern Wilderness in remote rural Heilongjiang province for reeducation.
In Heilongjiang, Yang’s duty was to protect the pigs in a farm from whatever danger might arise during the night and to drive them out three times: at midnight, three o’clock in the morning, and dawn to relieve themselves so they wouldn’t mess up the sties.
“Although my job was protecting pigs from wolves, I myself was scared when wolves lurked in to the grass in the summer time. And in the wintertime, I felt nights were endless with wild wind hovering outside,” Yang said.
Yang named the pigs under her charge as she wrote in her memoir: Capitalist, Prince, Natasha, and so on.
However, in Great Northern Wilderness, Yang started realizing her unselfish society dream was broken down. It was also in Heilongjiang that she witnessed people starving to death in villages. However, the government still claimed there was no one starving in the 1960s except the Great Famine. She was disappointed with the reality of the revolution, which was on the opposite side of the official propaganda. “Lies, big and small, cannot easily hypnotize me,” Yang said.
“A friend of mine with nickname Laomizi was raped by a peasant teacher at a winter night, though teacher Chen’s duty should be teaching us how to do farming works,” Yang said.
Besides the heavy labor works, she was also deprived of reading anything but communism books.
“When the entry exams to the universities restored in 1978, I obtained an offer from Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, studying journalism for a master’s degree. But when I interned at Xinhua news agency, I felt desperate about the political environment and its propaganda news style,” Yang said. So she used a visiting scholar visa to come to the United States in 1981.
“But in the U.S., I felt I was an outsider, socially and culturally, no matter how hard I tried to fit in,” she wrote in her memoir. In 1980s, there were agents the CIA sent to her university to check on her sometimes.
For Yang, after all these years settling down in the U.S., she can now smile and talk about her past years freely. She convinced herself to look back her hardship in the 10 years positively.
“It’s pretty painful, and it’s hard, but I had learned something about real China,” Yang said.
However, Yang was happy because more and more people began to show interest on researching and discussing the history of the Culture Revolution, although it was still a taboo in China for public discussion.
Thanks to Asia Society U.S.- China Relations Center. If you’d like to watch the complete interview with Orville Schell, please click here.
I remember On Sept. 14, 2006, SK-II, the high-end cosmetics product of Procter & Gamble (my previous employer), was found by China’s quality supervision authority traces of two elements that could cause potential side effects such as rashes and liver problems. The alleged quality defect, together with P&G’s stubborn reaction in the first few weeks, triggered a nation-wide negative media coverage. Angry online comments and sporadic outbursts of violence in SK II stores escalated the crisis and forced P&G to suspend sales of SK-II products in China for a few months.
