Kuo and his fellows tried to conjure up the feel of a time when China grew steadily more enriched by exposing itself to foreign cultures like India, Central Asia, West Asia (Turkey, Iran), East Europe (Hungary) through extensive travel and trade.
"It embraced many non-Chinese cultural elements, from the Buddhist religion to grape wine to Central Asian music," Kuo says.
While the inspiration of Tang Dynasty poets was pervasive, some of the songs the band wrote directly quoted them. For example, the song An De Guang Sha Qian Wan Jian? is translated as "How can we find 10,000 houses to accommodate the poor of the world to make them happy?" - which is a line from Du Fu's poems.
"I'm especially enamored by the poems that have frontier themes: deserts, bloody battles, exotic 'barbarian' loan words, swords. That stuff's metal!" says Kuo.
Commercial Kaiser Kuo is a much asked speaker on both China's contemporary culture and the inte
rnet. Do you need him at your conference? Do get in touch with the China Speakers Bureau.
For a while ending up at Rupert Hoogewerf's Hurun rich list seemed a receipt for trouble. Tycoon after tycoon got into trouble with China's authorities and some ended up in jail. In a new report, here quoted in the China Daily, "The Hurun Report: Rich in Trouble", the firm analyses the track record of Chna's rich and concluded that it is not that bad.
Researchers for the Hurun Report, an annual list of China's rich and powerful, yesterday revealed that 19 of the 1,330 business tycoons listed in the past 10 years are either in jail or are waiting for sentencing on bribery charges.
Names like Yang Bin, Cui Mingjie and Huang Guangyu have appealed much to the imagination of the media, but are not - like sometimes suggested - only the top of an iceberg.
Rupert Hoogewerf, founder and publisher of the Hurun Report, said ethics and the history of the country's economic development are partly to blame for these problems.
"In the '80s and early '90s, private companies in the country were not allowed to have accounts in banks. Difficulties with fundraising led many private businessmen into tax evasion and bribery," he said in the report.
He said that having 1.4 percent of the listed billionaires in trouble is a "normal" ratio for a booming country.
CommercialRupert Hoogewerf is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. If you are interested in sharing his thoughts at your conference or meeting, do get in touch.
(this is a follow up of a set of stories from our monthly newsletter)
Up to not so long ago the speakers business was a pretty localized business. When you would run an Australian speakers agency, your clients and speakers would mostly be Australians. Dutch agencies would run mostly Dutch speakers and UK-agencies focused on UK speakers and clients.
There were exceptions on this rule, mostly from the US. Bill Clinton and other former US presidents like George Bush would be having a nice international speakers' circuit. Tony Blair has joined them recently, although he seems nowadays more interested in other kind of jobs. Alan Greenspan was also doing extremely well, until he got of course with hindsight partly blamed for the financial crisis in the US and the rest of the world.
But those big names would be exceptions, be it well paid. Other people could be a big name in their own country or territory, but that would not guarantee an audience abroad. And while a part of the English-speaking countries could still exchange some speakers, in a country like China there would be a speakers market for some of the big shots, but not for anything less than Bill Clinton. Many speakers find that hard to realize, and we have a part-time job in explaining to experienced speakers that they might not have a market in China.
Reversely, we do see a high interest on speakers from China. Most of our current business is coming from outside China, because of the rising interest the world has in China. What we try to do in those cases - sometimes even at the cost of business deals - is giving those clients a reality check for these international deals. We recently got a request for a motivational speaker, a Chinese Olympic sporter who could address in audience in English. Well, speakers who do not exist cannot be invented.
More limitations. Chinese politicians cannot go out for public speeches after their retirement. And many successful Chinese business people are so busy making real money, they have no time to build up a career as a speaker. Both groups might change, but that will only happen in five to ten years time.
Still, we do a lot of international deals, but mostly with a selected group of Chinese academics, authors and foreigners who got in one way or another a special take on China.
What is it you have to take into account, when you invite speakers from abroad? First, you have to make really sure that the person involved can bridge a possible cultural rift with your audience. Sometimes we do not propose speakers for certain audiences, since you make different jokes for a Chinese audience than for an Australian audience.
Second, you cost will go up. Typically, a speaker's fee doubles to compensate them for travelling time
and because Latin America is so far off, speakers would cost there three times the original costs, when we have to fly them in from China. Even more, speakers expect business class travel arrangements. None of our speakers requests a private plane, but that is also not excluded in some international deals. Of course, 5-star hotels and other additional requirements come on top of that.
The new class of Chinese rich has been so busy in making money over the past five to ten years, they had no time to develop a lifestyle, like the wealthy in Europe and the US could do, says Hurun CEO Rupert Hoogewerf in an interview with The Telegraph. The Hurun report documents for more than a decade the development of China's rich.
Rupert Hoogewerf about his wealthy subject:
They have gone through this tremendous growth period, and all of them have got rich at the same time. But the thing to remember is that they have been working very hard, and developing the country, so they haven't had much time to focus on their lifestyle. Over the past five years on average, and longer in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Guangzhou, there's been a new urge to concentrate on lifestyle, led by the luxury property developers. But compared to their Western counterparts they are still a long way away.
China's wealthy tend to spend their money on collectibles, good that retain their value like big cars, like Mercedes Benz, Audi or BMW, watches and real estate.
They are not as silly as their Russian counterparts. They don't sit in quite as much cash. The yachting lifestyle is absolutely in its infancy. The only places are Qingdao, Dalian and Xiamen and outside Macau in the south. We have no knowledge of a mega yacht yet.
Compared to Tsingtao beer, the largest beer producer in China, is having a tough time in getting hold of China's massive beer market, says Shaun Rein in an interview with Bloomberg. Although market leader, the larger beer brewers only hold 40 percent of the market, while the rest is covered by mostly local producers. While China has in volume a larger beer market than Germany and the US combined, the high-end part is fairly small, as most Chinese beer drinkers get their bottles in the store next door, for a price sometimes less than water. Snow has no branding, cannot sell for a premium since it is perceived as cheap and loyalty of the customers is low, explains Rein. "They will quit if Snow increases the prices." Compared to Snow, Tsingtao has done a much better job in branding itself for the premium market. The clip of the interview is below. CommercialShaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau, When you are interested in having him at your conference or meeting, do let us know.
Most of China's wealthy prefer to live in Beijing, says the latest Hurun report on the country's rich, composed by Rupert Hoogewerf. in a report by the China Daily. The capital city has 143,000 multimillionaires and 8,800 billionaires, compared to 116,000 multimillionaires and 7,000 billionaires in Shanghai.
From the China Daily:
They own at least three dwellings of their own, including a villa, like the 400-sq-m Ziyu Shanzhuang villa costing 24 million yuan, a luxury apartment in the downtown area for work purposes, and a Siheyuan courtyard house probably in Houhai.
Most of them prefer investing in arts and they are willing to spend as much as 50,000 yuan for a year of piano classes, said the report.
The story has a wealth of details about the lifestyle of the Chinese rich. Rupert Hoogewerf sees that his group has become more complex in the way they look at each other:
"During the past several years, the complexion of the rich in China has changed in many aspects," said Rupert Hoogewerf, founder and publisher of the Hurun Report. "Many of them say they want to be a sort of upper class, rather than only being rich."
Foreign medical device makers have huge opportunities in China as the country embarks next year in a gigantic reform of its health-care systems, says Shaun Rein in Business Week, based on research of his China Market Research Group (CMR). One fifth of China's ambitious stimulus packages to flight the downturn is targeting on providing 90 percent of the Chinese citizens universal medical car.
Shaun Rein:
New facilities need equipment and new patients mean more demand for implants, monitoring devices, and diagnostic machines. For foreign medical device companies, China's reforms could prove to be a boon by offsetting lagging demand in developed markets. While the U.S.medical device market has been hit by the financial crisis, China's is estimated to almost double in size between 2006 and 2014 to $28 billion a year, making it a potential growth driver for foreign firms.
In health care, Chinese want nothing but the best, if they can afford it, and that means often foreign medical devices. As wealth increases, wealth related diseases too and now many urbanites pay treatment often from their own pocket. Interviews of hundreds of Chinese doctors and consumers support the idea that Chinese patients prefer foreign made medical devices. Foreign companies will have to work on this market, especially because domestic firms often enjoy a preferential treatment. Rein uses the examples of General Electric (GE) and Medtronic who successfully teamed up with domestic players to capture a part of the market.
Kaiser Kuo does a brave effort to explain the internet in China for the outside world of non-geeks, an almost impossible thing to do. At Chinalogue of Bonlive he talks about BBS's, human flesh searches and how older Chinese can work on the internet anyway.
Commercial Kaiser Kuo is also a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need him at your conference or meeting, do get in touch.
Celebrity author Zhang Lijia tells at Chinalogue of Bonlive about the 1980s, when women started to find their sexuel liberation after Deng Xiaoping started to open China's doors for the outside world at the end of the 1970s and other women's issues.
The summer is drawing to a close, the first full summer we have been in business as a speakers bureau. That means that after a pretty lazy month, requests are hitting our mailbox again, including the first few panic calls for as early as September. Mostly we have a lead time of at least three months and we are already working on assignments for 2010, but sometimes event organizers discover only weeks ahead they are short of a celebrity guest. We are happy to help.
Time to turn also to this months top-10 of most-sought speakers. We saw in July a firm shake-up, apart from Shaun Rein who successfully maintains his leadership position, only under threat of the second on the list, rock star and internet geek Kaiser Kuo. In August we see only one newcomer, Annette Nijs of CEIBS, while others at the top-10 move in position, but remain in the list.
Annette Nijs is a recent addition to the China Speakers Bureau and a good one. China's drive of going global is an important issue, also when we are slightly distracted by an ongoing economic downturn. Nijs has helped CEIBS to open a campus in Africa and - as a former Dutch cabinet minister - she is very well positioned to help China's leading international business school also in improving its ties with Europe, the founder of the school.
In her upcoming book (I have seen the Dutch text, the English one is expected in January) she turns a cliche question on China around and wonders what the rest of the world can learn from China. China's innovation policies is one field, where she might have a case in point.
Without further delay, this months top-10 (with July in brackets)
A veteran of the US-China business, Douglas Maclellan, has joined the China Speakers Bureau. Maclellan has a distinguished career that roots back into the Reagan era. Douglas Maclellan has extensive experience in telecom, pharmaceuticals and other industry. Currently he also is Chairman & CEO at AMDL, Inc, apart from leading his own company.
We are happy to have Douglas on board to further improve the US-side of our speakers business. Maclellan has a longstanding career as a business speaker. You can download a selection of his white papers and other articles here.(pdf)
The world might have feared China was following Russian style of business when it arrested Rio Tinto executives on state-security charges in Shanghai on July 5, writes Arthur Kroeber today in the Financial Times.
By Russia, we mean a country in which ordinary commercial negotiations are routinely subject to interference by state security forces, where foreign companies face constant risk of arbitrary abrogation of contracts and expropriation of assets, and business executives quite rationally fear for their liberty and occasionally their lives.
Fortunately, it appears that a lot of people within the Chinese government were asking exactly the same question, and desperately trying to convince their superiors that the correct answer ought to be “No.”
But it has been a narrow escape, now the Rio Tinto suspects will no longer face a trial for breaking state security but commercial laws, with more lenient punishments. But, warns Kroeber: "China isn’t Russia - but it isn’t yet a modern country either.'
Becoming a successful IT entrepreneur in China, like Marc van der Chijs of the Spil Group Asia, is not easy as many US giants like Yahoo, Google and eBay had a rough time at the hands of the domestic competitors. But Van der Chijs made the grade, first with video sharing host Tudou.com and now as the CEO of a gaming company. He tells in an upcoming book, reproduced in Alibaba.com
He tells about joining his latest company:
“I figured, they know about games and I know something about China, so we might just be able to make it work,” said Van der Chijs. He and the Dutch company set up Spil Game Asia in Shanghai in January 2006.
He worked part-time on Spil Games Asia at first, continuing to run his trading business and help oversee Tudou. But the gaming company’s prospects were so bright that he soon took it on full time.
“Now, we have 75 staff in total, two websites and about 32 million visitors monthly,” said Van der Chijs in late 2008. “Our traffic is about 40 percent of Tudou’s.”
Almost all of Van der Chijs’s staff are local Chinese – people he hired not for their English skills but for their business acumen. “Many foreigners judge their staff by their ability to speak English and they promote the wrong people as a result.”
By the end of 2008, Spil Games Asia was already breaking even. Its revenue came from advertising, which Van der Chijs used for marketing the sites and to attract more users.
The US has announced it will provide a system to work around internet blocks as they are used by for example China's censors. But prominent internet users like Danwei'sJeremy Goldkorn do not think a new US work-around will add much to the many systems that are already around, he told the China Daily, even though his own website had been blocked for a few months now.
Lots of people know how to use proxies to get around Internet blocks, said Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of the Chinese media monitoring website Danwei.org, which was blocked since July this year.
"It doesn't make any difference to me if the US government has a new one. Of interest to me would be for the Chinese government not to block (my website)."
Shaun Rein reacts on an article in the New York Times, describing US youngsters moving to China to find the work they could not find at home. It is not that easy, he says in Forbes. Often government regulations, like in media or telecom, prevent foreigners from taking a position they could get in other countries, even if they would get the required visa. And, despite the high growth, salaries tend to be low, while living costs are going up, at least in the big cities:
Chinese coming out of top schools like Fudan and Beijing University make $500 to $600 a month. To get more than that, young Americans need to prove they really deserve more, which is getting harder and harder to do. Having good English skills is no longer enough.
US citizens now also have to compete with later numbers of returning Chinese from the US, making finding a job where you can use skills acquired in the US even harder to get.
China might be the second-largest consumer market in the world within five years, consumer researcher Shaun Rein tells in this interview with CBS. "Top brands need to look into the needs of consumers,", explain Rein, not only because they have hugely different tastes from the US consumer, also the differences between Shanghai and Sichuan need a thorough research, to avoid huge misses. Water melon flavored potato chips might not work everywhere. More at CBS.
The fact becomes even less remarkable when we recognise that nominal GDP (the appropriate comparator for nominal credit growth) grew just 3.8 per cent in the first half. In other words, 10 dollars of new loans were required to generate just one dollar of economic growth.
In fact China’s first-half growth shows one thing and one thing only: the existence of a powerful state with the ability to commandeer its citizens’ wealth and plough it into more buildings, bridges and roads, with no regard for the return those investments will bring.
China is not having a special systematic strength, Kroeber argues, but might be heading for trouble.
Kaiser Kuo, one of the top-speakers at the China Speakers Bureau, just made another benchmark. Not only is he having his own entry in Wikipedia, today he was also mentioned in the prestigious magazine Foreign Policy as one of the world's top 100 twitterati. Twitter is becoming one of the key tools for communicating, and Kaiser Kuo did make the mark. Congratulations,
The West has not yet a clue about the importance of women in China, both in society and as powerful consumers pushing the economy into the direction of double-digit growth, says Shaun Rein of the Shanghai-based China Market Research Group in Forbes.
Women now contribute about half of household income, up from 20% in the 1950s. Their educational opportunities have greatly grown, and they've entered the white-collar workforce. At my own strategy consulting firm, women outnumber men three to one. They now spend as much as men on luxury consumption, accounting for 50% of luxury purchases from companies like Louis Vuitton and Gucci. A woman, former Vice Premier Wu Yi, ranked by Forbes as the second most powerful woman in the world in 2007, was former Treasury Secretary's Henry Paulson's counterparty during America and China's strategic economic dialogue talks that year.
His firm recently surveyed Chinese women and concludes that those under 35 year are the big spenders of the moment. Understanding that economic force is needed to tap into the consumer business in China, Rein says.
Chinese women are emerging as one of the most confident bodies of consumers in the world. And they have the money to keep on spending. To be successful selling to them, you have to cater to their emotions and concerns more than ever before, even when selling products that men traditionally buy. As Chinese women work harder, raise children at the same time, and pay for their parents, they want to spoil themselves and relax a little. They are willing to pay a premium for safe and healthy quality products that let them do so.
Chinese hackers attacked an Australian film site after a brawl emerged over the showing of a movie on Uigur celebrity Rebiya Kadeer and Western media - with few exceptions - were sure the Chinese government was behind this. Danwei's Jeremy Goldkorn explains why genuine patriotic feelings in China are behind this. "We are all Melburians", became a battle cry against the cyber attack.
In The Guardian Goldkorn explains what the hacker involved told him and what most Western media are missing:
The hacker who vandalised the Melbourne Film Festival website shows an attitude typical of China's urban youth. I tracked him down (not hard – his net handle "laojun" is the same as the name he left on the hacked website) and asked him why he hacked the site and if the government has anything to do with it.
Laojun said that it's "completely normal for a Chinese person to have a patriotic heart" and that the government had absolutely nothing to do with his actions: "On the contrary, I am worried the government will punish me for this." He also noted that he has received many messages of support from fellow Chinese internet users who have added him to their instant messaging contact list or written supportive messages on various internet forums that have discussed the hack.
China's internet users have been supporting the cyber attack, he explains.While many of them do not approve of China's government trying to censor the internet, they find ways around the censorship and actually suspect the government might have good arguments. Jeremy Goldkorn:
You may disagree with Laojun's views on Xinjiang or censorship. You may blame his thinking and the support of his fans on state propaganda or the educational system. But a large – I would daresay majority – of the population of China do not feel that they are Melbournian at all but red-blooded, patriotic Chinese people.
Author Zhang Lijia often describes the growing freedom in China in a rather positive way, while Western media regularly take a more critical approach, the reporter of the Dutch website OneWorld.com asked her during a recent visit to Amsterdam. (Here in a translation from Google.) How does Zhang Lijia explain the difference?
"The criticism is not unfounded but constitutes only a part of the story, she comes largely from fear and ignorance. Of course, in the field of human rights and democracy is still very much to be done in China, but you must understand where we come from come a few years ago we lived in a completely controlled state, the word was not even human rights. I want to show the world that the Chinese are not perplexed and oppressed people, as is often thought, but we work hard with our deployment and development.''
Poet Du Fu via Wikipedia
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