The China Vortex

I’m in Hong Kong on business, and have had the opportunity to participate in the activities related to the launch of the Creative Commons Hong Kong. Rebecca MacKinnon has done an excellent job, along with some other faculty members from Hong Kong University, in making this a very informative and interesting event. At the event, I met with Angus Lau, who is another twitterer, and has done a lot to keep the Internet a lively topic in the SAR. Most recently, Angus has been active in organizing the recent Open Web Asia event in Korea.

Creative Commons Hong Kong

My takeaway from the Creative Commons Hong Kong event is that Hong Kong is in an excellent position to promote CC in Asia. It’s press is relatively open and free, and it really should be an excellent publishing center, especially for those connecting China and the west. In my opinion, it has not yet realized its full potential. Surprisingly, there are relatively few bridge people, who understand both the west and China as one would think. People fall into their own groups of Hong Kong people, who are interested in local gossip, westerners working for multinationals, and some Chinese from China. To a large extent, they don’t mix with each other as much as they could. This is unfortunate.

In spite of this, there are things I like about Hong Kong:

• Clean safe food
• Clean public toilets
• Real broadband of at least 200K up and down
• MOS Burger

The first three things, I’m sure you can understand.

But, what’s MOS Burger? Put simply, it’s a Japanese hamburger chain. Its hamburgers are delicious, and in true Japanese fashion, they have an eye to detail, taste and preparation which is better than McDonalds. It has stores in Hong Kong, but none in China.

If you are a computer nerd (if you read this blog regularly, you probably are more or less), then MOS burgers are to MacDonalds what Macintosh is to Windows. It’s just better, and it costs more. And I mean tastier, and sits more comfortable on your stomach after eating.

If you order a set meal, you can get a garden fresh salad as part of the C meal. (Maybe that’s why they don’t have the chain in China. Garden fresh salad in China? Ummm, I don’t know…) So, when I get to Hong Kong and after I have had my meetings, my job is to find out where the nearest MOS Burger outlet is.

BTW, if you don’t believe that it tastes better than MacDonald’s, I’d be happy to take you for a taste test.

If there is one thing which most western companies coming into China miss out on is the idea of “trial spots”, or as they are called in Chinese 试点。

So what is it? Basically, it’s a city, place, province or region which is used to try out something experimental which has not been tried before. When China first opened up, Shenzhen was a trial spot for opening up the economy to foreign manufacturing investment. When the experiment succeeded, it was pushed out to the other parts of China. Shanghai and Beijing were opened as tier one cities to foreign companies and employers, mostly in the service sector. When these experiments worked, the opening up gradually started. In most cases, the trial spots were selected by the central, provincial or municipal governments.

Now, there is another little secret. Large SOEs (state-owned enterprises) also often have their own trial spots. Most of the time, these are used to put some of the rising senior-level managers in to try new management practices. They are usually given a city, and a long leash, and are encouraged to try new ways of management. Often these managers are people who have made it to a certain level in a state-owned enterprise, but will not or cannot rise higher because they are somewhat non-conformist, and shall we say, less interested in politics. (Remember that in SOEs, the party also has a say in the selection of candidates for senior positions.)

Frequently, the Chinese way of handling these non-conformists is to give them a “trial spot” where they can experiment in a city or provincial division on their own. If something goes wrong with their experiment, then the damage is limited to their immediate market. If, on the other hand, the experiment was successful and includes practices which can be used on a larger scale, then that person may be promoted to a higher position with greater responsibility. This is how the current leadership of China has been groomed, just to cite an example.

The interesting thing is that many western companies, even consultants, are completely unaware of these practices. They look at their choice of investment areas in western terms, which usually means that which is clear, and out there, in the open.

They don’t study the people.

Instead, they should ask where the different “trial spots” are, and the backgrounds of the people they are dealing with. The right questions to ask for SOEs are:

• “How did this person get to this position?”
• “What is he trying to do?”
• “How is he different?”
• “What do his employees think of him?”
• “What are his goals and his definition of success?”

If it sounds like questions an intelligence agency would ask when examining the new leadership of a country, then it does because it is just like that. I call this “due diligence with Chinese characteristics”.

And how do you get this information? I find the best way is walk in and ask (In Chinese, of course. Speak English and you only get the official line.)

For the most part, you will never find these people in Beijing or Shanghai unless they have been very successful. These are two highly conformist politically-charged cities, and the only way they make it to these cities is if they are in very senior positions, and their views have been vindicated.

Generally speaking, Chinese, even including the party, are more tolerant of non-conformists. Just don’t look for them in Beijing and Shanghai. Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s reforms, was for many years considered a non-conformist and was punished repeatedly for his views. Eventually, his policies became the mainstream.

So, how will the recent economic problems affect things? Basically, we are going through the collapse of an old world order, and nothing new to replace it has come up yet. The Chinese government, the party and Chinese SOEs will be looking for answers on what comes next to restore order, growth and stability. After all, this is what Chinese social stability depends on.

For Chinese government and party officials, it will be a good time to be something of a maverick. But these mavericks will only survive and prosper if they can come up with the right answers to some very tough questions.

ADMA (Asian Digital Marketing Association) is hosting an event on Thursday October 16 at Hong Kong’s Cyberport called Your Digital Day.

I will be participating in a panel talking about advertising trends and standards in China and Asia, and how they are developing. The moderator of the panel will be David Ketchum. The panel will start at 4:45PM.

If you are in Hong Kong and can make it to the event, please stop by and say hello to me. I look forward to seeing you.

Open Web Asia is a new organization founded by Gang Lu, publisher of Mobinode. Today they are bringing together some of the leading western players in China, Asia, Europe and the US to talk about web trends in Asia, and especially the trend for US and European companies to come to Asia. The venue for this event is in Korea, and brings together experienced marketers from Europe who have successfully made the transition to marketing in China and Asia, such as Web2Asia, which is based in Shanghai.

As part of the event, Open Web Asia is putting together a web survey on what companies in the west are considering coming to Asia to start companies. The survey is about the challenges western companies face when coming to Asia, including cultural, economic, and other issues. The survey starts today (Oct. 14) and will be open for two weeks.

If you are interested in China, business, economics, the Internet and technology, then I highly recommend that you take this survey. All you need to do is click on the button below.

The results of the survey will be announced on November 14, when Robert Scoble, Shel Israel and others come to China as part of the China Web 2.0 tour which is put together by the China Business Network.

I’m sure that the results will be interesting, and I look forward to seeing them.

With all the chaos on world’s markets, it is easy to overlook developments in China. The biggest piece of Chinese domestic news is the decision to give limited rights to land use to China’s farmers. This decision came out of the Third Plenary Session of the 17th Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (三中全会), which is now convening in Beijing.

The overall thrust of this meeting is to focus on the development of rural China, which has not fared so well as the east coast cities. If the cities continue to develop, and the countryside continues to stay poor, you have the recipe for social unrest on a large scale.

The salient points about China’s development are that China has about 1/3 the arable land of the developed economies for farming, and about 500M live in cities, while 800M continue to be rural Chinese. National development plans (many of which were formulated under Jiang Zemin, who came from Shanghai) called for the urbanization of China.

China’s first 30 years of reforms required the development of the eastern coast to attract foreign capital, and to make the companies and the westerners who came to China feel comfortable. Only when they had reached some level of comfort, and were attracted by the market potential would the capital follow. They became comfortable and the capital and trade followed.

And now the westerners living in Beijing, Shanghai and the west expect the Chinese with their nearly US2T in foreign reserves to bail out the western economies? Let me tell you why it won’t happen.

• Successive Chinese regimes have always lost power when they coddled the urban elite and ignored the needs of the countryside. This was how Mao rallied the Communists, surrounded the cities (the strategy was called “using the villages to surround the cities” or “乡村包围城市”), then threw out Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao know this, and know that they need to swivel around and develop the countryside so that the wealth gap can be narrowed.
• The Chinese government will focus on developing a new size of town, which in Chinese is called the 城镇 or village town. This will be mainly a distribution, education and trading center for farmers and their families in the immediate vicinity. Population will be 250-500K.
• For the next 15-30 years, the cities will stagnate in growth. People will not lose their homes the way they do in the US since China does not have foreclosure laws, but their salaries will not go up. Many of the wishes new university grads entering the workforce hoped they had will just become dreams. Somehow they will have to learn to live in this new drastically changed environment.
• The Chinese government is already talking about the development of rural infrastructure including rural insurance, microlending, etc.
• Many young Chinese who would have scoffed at the idea of working in the countryside will now go there, simply because job opportunities in the east coast cities will be limited. This, in turn, will help to clean out the party apparatus in the countryside, which has been seen as generally corrupt.
• Western companies will not benefit too much from this next stage of development because they do not, for the most part, understand how to sell to the bottom 2/3 of the Chinese pyramid. Most only know how to sell to the top 1/3 in the cities. Companies which will prosper are those who sell to the “local local economy”, or bottom 2/3, as Jack Perkowski calls it, as opposed to the “local foreign economy”. The local foreign economy is city-based on China’s east coast; the local local economy is mainly rural and inland.
• The companies which will survive and prosper are the swift pivoters who can quickly learn how to sell to the “local local economy”. This means that they made some money in export manufacturing, but now switch to sell domestically to Chinese consumers in the new inland towns and cities. Not many companies can do this, but those that do will do well. Most will be entirely new businesses, and local Chinese brands will have an advantage.
• This next stage of development will require a lot of money. Those foreign exchange reserves of US2T will be needed by China. Now, if you ruled China and you had the choice of 1) lending the money to the west, which has just acted about as irresponsibly as anyone can imagine or 2) investing the money in China to narrow the wealth gap between rich and poor, city and countryside and keeping your regime in power for more than a half century, what would you do? I think that it’s a pretty easy choice.

China may now have the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves, but that is not what makes a country a superpower. The recent tainted milk scandal has shown that it is still lacking controls in many key areas, and it is far short of being a developed nation. Instead, China is a developing nation with rich reserves it needs for its own development.

In order to become a developed nation with a developed economy, it needs to spend that money on building its own infrastructure and narrowing the wealth gap between the developed cities on China’s east coast and the inland countryside. Any Chinese regime which acts otherwise would be making a very risky decision, and would be putting the future of its own rule in jeopardy.

China can manage without export markets, but it cannot survive if its own countryside is in turmoil.

During the past several years in China, I have spent a good deal of my time explaining to Americans that e-commerce solutions do not have to depend on credit cards. In many parts of the world, such as Germany and Japan, and in China, e-commerce is about building payment gateways to different banks using debit cards or other devices which connect directly to bank accounts.

This was how Paypal started in the US. It is also how Alipay, Yeepay and other solutions work in China. Tencent, a company with a market cap of US$80B, based in Shenzhen uses a subscription payment system which also deducts payments directly from users’ accounts.

As the global Ponzi scheme which started as the subprime credit crisis continues to unwind, defaults on credit cards in the US will shoot up.

In the near future, credit will be given out much more sparingly. American society will very quickly change from a credit-based society to a cash-based society for most transactions. But there will be plenty of honest people who will need to buy, and sometimes they will want to buy online. If they don’t have access to credit and credit cards, how will they buy?

When you think about it in these terms, many of the payment solutions developed in China look more interesting, not just for China, but adapted to suit the needs of Americans who no longer have credit. Most likely these won’t be Chinese companies, but American e-commerce firms who want to develop something suited for Americans and the American market.

So which American company would come out with a non-credit card based payment solution? My guess is that it would be the leading e-commerce company, Amazon. I’d bet they are working on it right now.

One of the greatest challenges for the American system of government, and which has been laid bare by the current financial crisis is: “What do politicians do when their constituents ask for something which will win them votes in the short-term, but will prove disastrous in the long-term?” This is a very important question which has not been discussed or debated enough. Instead, most westerners naturally assume that it is better, especially when compared with China’s form of government.

Jack Perkowski, author of Managing the Dragon, has several posts on his blog which talk about the reasons and decisions for the current global credit crisis. They are the best explanations I have seen so far for what is happening and I highly recommend reading them.

For Chinese, home ownership is very important, just as it is for Americans. But Chinese would never think of asking the government to pre-approve their purchases regardless of their credit ranking. In fact, so far, there is no national credit-ranking system in China and many families save hard to make a down-payment for their home (which most Americans would call an apartment). Along with saving for their child’s education, this is the single largest expenditure they will make in their lives. Most RE transactions are cash transactions. And what is most interesting is that the private home ownership ratio (by percentage) is higher in China (70-80%) than the US’s 69% (source: Hoover Institution), even though the US had a system which, until very recently, offered free housing to all comers, without any qualifications. Very ironic that a country which is nominally Communist has a higher rate of home ownership than a country which has a free elected government and until recently, actively subsidized home ownership up to 100%, isn’t it?

This then raises a very good question: “If China has a higher home ownership rate than the US without offering junk loans which have led to the global credit crisis, then what was the whole point of the US incentive schemes, of which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as the leading investment banks were such an important part of?” Jack Perkowski’s articles answer this very well. You see, the US built an ecosystem which turned banks into sales outlets for loans, then bundled these loans up and fed them to the global markets, where they are now causing so much grief.

Politically, and on the legislative level, this was part of a complex scheme which, at the end of the day, amounted to buying off different voting constituencies to win their votes. Which is a fancy way of saying “vote buying”.

With all the overbuilding which has happened in China’s cities, I would shudder at the thought that many of these residences were pre-approved without down payments the American way. This is why although there is overbuilding, the Chinese economy can still ride out the dips better than the US and global economy can.

Looking at the US now, it shows the danger of letting legislators who do not understand the economic consequences of their actions have too much power over complex economic issues.

I was interviewed by China Speakers Bureau re my views on how the global financial slowdown would affect China. You can listen to the podcast here.

Following on the global credit crisis, many have come to me to ask how these changes will affect China. As I have said earlier, China and the US are two sides to the same coin, and it pays to look at them as one economy, as this Newsweek article does. It goes without saying that this crisis will have a profound effect on China, and I’m not optimistic about the capability of the Chinese central government in Beijing to deal with it as quickly as it should. Michael Pettis, who lives and teaches in Beijing, has been a persistent advocate of stimulating more domestic spending from Chinese consumers, and continues to advocate that position. I agree that this is necessary; I don’t think that this will happen quickly or on an even basis. There is a simple reason for this: stimulating consumer spending depends, to a large extent, on the rollout of a national healthcare system; this is something which Beijing has tried to do since the early 90s, all without success. When it comes to the lack of a national healthcare system, the US and China are in the same boat, and the national governments are equally ineffective.

So what are some investment rules you can use? Let me list seven below:

• Avoid Shanghai and Beijing. Both have excellent universities, and Beijing has central government ministries while Shanghai is the commercial capital of China. In IT, companies have preferred to hire from Tsinghua for smart technology people. But there are major problems with both cities. First of all, staff turnover is too high, and costs are too high. In the past few years, staff have routinely asked for 20-30% raises just to stay in the same company! And with all the western companies constantly going into those cities, there has been a bidding war for staff. We are in tough times now, so do you really want to get involved in bidding wars over your local staff and deal with staff turnover issues? I don’t think so. And when it comes to Internet/IT, I say that the Internet already has become a platform and there is plenty of talent around. Do you really need expensive people from the very best universities in China who may prove a pain to manage? If you don’t, second-tier people who are reliable and don’t ask for huge pay raises are good enough, and maybe even better. When hiring local talent, look for tortoises, not hares. We are heading for much tougher times, and you need a good stable team. Beijing and Shanghai have too many hares. Your most loyal people will be the ones you hired and trained on the job. They will also be the ones who understand local market and conditions and connections.Another major issue about Beijing and Shanghai is that they are geared for exports, especially to the US. Do I need to tell you what happened to that export market?
• Instead of going to Beijing and Shanghai, look at the 20 major city markets in China if you are thinking of selling to Chinese consumers. Now is a good time to get into services for Chinese consumers. Think of cities like Dalian, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Xiamen, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Nanchang, Chongqing, Chengdu, Fuzhou, Kunming, Nanning, Nanjing, etc. If you want to get into China under the radar (in my opinion, always a wise strategy), these are places to look at very seriously. If you need knowledge workers, as in programming or game production or pharmaceuticals, pay special attention to the local universities, and partnering with them to hire their graduating students. If you show the cash and commitment, and can guarantee jobs for their students, you will get multiple offers of good deals.
• Guangdong and Zhejiang are the two largest manufacturing provinces in China. Guangdong’s factories depend on a huge pool of unskilled immigrant laborers, mostly young women, from Sichuan and other provinces. These factories and workers are going to be hit hard because of their dependency on the US market. There is too much overcapacity, too little value-added, and too little profit for most of these factories to move up the value chain. Unemployment in Guangdong and Sichuan will become a major issue. Zhejiang’s factories are mostly family-owned, and it has less reliance on immigrant workers. Because of Zhejiang’s strong private sector and private wealth, they will be able to make the adjustment in market demand from exports to domestic Chinese consumption more quickly.
• If you are a private equity or hedge fund investor, you need to think about investment horizons. In order to make up for the dropoff in exports, Beijing and provincial governments would naturally think of investing more in infrastructure. So far, most of this money has gone into infrastructure, manufacturing and real estate. The problem is that these areas are already built up and have over-capacity. They are really at a loss about what to do. If you can help and offer investments which create jobs and upgrade the skill force, you are in a good position. Be sure to get your money and profit back within 15 years (by 2023). That is because if you are selling to Chinese consumers, you are selling to the current group who are in their 20s – 40s. By 2023, China’s demographics will fall off a cliff because of the one-child policy, and they will be in savings mode instead of spending mode.
• When it comes to modernization, China is crossing a 30-foot chasm with a 20-foot rope, with each foot representing one year. China’s hardware development and infrastructure are very impressive and are the most modern in the world, as the Beijing Olympics showed. The hardest part to modernize is peoples’ mentality as the tainted milk scandal has shown. China’s aging demographics do not give it enough time to cross the chasm, so Chinese will get old before they get modern. When that happens, China will look like a bigger version of Japan, and will have all the problems Japan has today. Just hope that China has a national healthcare system in place by then.
• The wealth gap will become wider over the next 10 years between the cities and the countryside, then stabilize for five years, then shrink as the city worker bees retire in 15 years. Rural infrastructure is less developed, and so far, the Chinese government has made all the wrong moves in rural development by not supporting the development of rural collectives for the farmers. There is an excellent article (in Chinese, h/t to Stan C) about the failure of China’s rural development, and how Chinese rural development will look like the Philippines with large food processing companies employing poor farmers. This organization is partly responsible for the Sanlu tainted milk scandal, and is copied from the US. But the US has a surplus of land and shortage of farmers, while China has a shortage of land and excess of farmers! If you are interested in macroeconomic issues, this is worth more study. Its view converges very well with the view of Yasheng Huang in his new book Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, which I have also mentioned in my previous article.
• The dumb money has already been made in China. It’s time to rebalance your portfolio to make smart money. It can be done, but it won’t be easy. Think smart, work smart, and invest for 15 years. By that time, you should be able to retire.

If you need more information specific to your fund/company/situation, you can contact me from the About page.

What a difference a month makes!

Just a little more than a month ago, China was basking in the afterglow of the Beijing Olympics, and the US still had an investment banking sector. Now, all China news has been taken up with tainted milk scandal, and the US consumers have changed from spendthrift junk-buyers into wondering whether they will have enough money to buy Campbell’s soup. (Last Monday, when the Dow went down 777 points, Campbell Soup was the only stock to go up. Can you say dark days ahead?) At the same time, Americans have come close to openly rebelling against the Bush administration-backed Paulson plan to bail out the banking sector and create liquidity in credit markets.

In the meantime, economists and politicians are debating whether this is the beginning of a recession or depression. Let’s just say that it’s going to be bad.

In China, the bad has different roots, in how the dairy industry has been systematically thinning milk, then loading it up with melamine so that it doesn’t look protein-deficient (it is). In fact, the problem is systemic, and is not just limited to the dairy industry. This is something which runs throughout Chinese society on a wide systemic basis because local officials are judged only on quantitative results instead of quantitative and qualitative results.

Wall Street and China took different paths, but both ended up with the same sack of shit. The trouble is that this sack of shit affects the whole society in both the US and China, and the rest of the world.

Now, if the problems were not systemic, all you would have to do is hire a PR firm, and they would quickly put together a PR campaign, the public would gradually forget, and everybody would get back to their merry business.

But it’s not that simple.

Recessions/depressions are like forest fires; they destroy a lot of the accumulated undergrowth and excess, providing an opportunity for new growth. We are now going through such a forest fire. It is likely that it is only just beginning. But it is worth thinking about what are the new flora and fauna which will grow and flourish in the environment which comes afterwards.

Here are my thoughts:

• Transparency will be the rule instead of the exception. Instead of talking about quality, companies and government officials will need to show it.
• The Internet and modern IT will turn into a transparency enabler. Think of webcams in dairy processing and manufacturers’ plants in China which anyone can log into anytime. Think of US members of congress listing all the contributions they take and publishing their meeting calendars, live and online.
• For companies, proof of quality. This means that it won’t just be ads and PR. They will need to show how they create quality. A big question for service companies: “How do we show quality in what we do for our customers?”
• Creating quality is no longer a one-way communications process, it will be two-way. Consumers will challenge the companies and governments, and they better have good answers ready. Smart companies will think of ways to weave some of the criticisms into product/service input and incorporating it on a near real-time basis.
• We are witnesses to the crumbling and collapse of an old way of doing things, and the rise of a new way. Education systems all over the world have not prepared people for this, especially the business schools. If you are a newly-minted MBA, good luck!
• An awful lot of companies in China are not going to make it. Many of them don’t deserve to make it. But there will be refreshing new companies with new ideas and who are committed to quality and value. Most of them will come from the private sector. Keep your eyes on Zhejiang for new ideas, companies, products and services! In my opinion, Beijing and Shanghai are vastly overrated and are not truly representative of China. They are still like the Treaty Ports of old: they have enough Chinese to make westerners feel like that they are in China without having to make a major adjustment in lifestyle, and enough ministries and public buildings to make the Chinese officials feel comfortable and in control. The relentless drive to lopsided urbanization at the expense of the countryside which Yasheng Huang puts forward in his book Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State, is a view which is sometimes discussed among Chinese, but which most westerners are not aware of. China is just now beginning to pay the very high price of this lopsided development.
• There is going to be a lot of money to be made in helping the old companies make the transformation to the new value economy. Most of them won’t make it, but they are going to spend a lot of money trying. If you’re in change management and know how to market, you’re going to make a killing.