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By Root 5446 0

behind multiple curtains and amid much subterfuge, and that hasn’t changed. Foreign companies rightly fear that Chinese partners, customers, or suppliers will steal their technology or trade secrets or simply pick their pockets. Testy relations between China’s Communist leaders and the United States and other democracies requires that politics be an integral part of business plans. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 and the country’s desire to transform local companies into global leaders is bringing more international practices into China by the day. But I still see foreign executives confidently breeze into China only to be run over by their Chinese competitors, the Chinese government, or their Chinese partners—or sink themselves through various combinations of unrealistic expectations, impatience, and lack of common sense. The more business in China changes, the more it stays the same. As a journalist, I have traveled the entire country and enjoyed a front-row seat for this historic drama. As a businessman, I’ve been involved in the power plays, the complex negotiations, and the political intrigues that are a routine part of doing business in the country.

This book is intended to show rather than tell what it is like to do business in China. There are no simple formulas or magic solutions. Only by showing the sometimes complex details of how certain deals came together or fell apart, how the people involved viewed and treated each other, how politics and prejudices tainted expectations and outcomes, will I be able to convey to you the nuances that have made China such a frustrating yet rewarding place for so many foreign businesses. Each chapter begins with a simple introduction of the characters and situation. Next, in an overview section, I put the characters and situation in their proper context. The story then unfolds as a straightforward narrative. At the end, in a section entitled “What This Means for You,” I explain how what happened in this chapter can affect how you do business in China. Finally, I summarize—pithily, I hope—many of my own observations in a takeoff on Mao’s Little Red Book.

Demographers may quibble with the title: China’s current population is 1.3 billion. But it is the round “billion” that matters, that threshold number that symbolizes the vast and untapped continental-size market, the teeming Chinese masses waiting to be turned into customers, the dream of staggering profits for those who get here first, the hype and hope that has mesmerized foreign merchants and traders for centuries. The title is my tribute to another American journalist-turned-businessman, Carl Crow, who lived in Shanghai for twenty-six years and in 1937 wrote 400 Million Customers, a rich trove of anecdotes and insights about the Chinese people and doing business in China, much of which still holds true today. I share Crow’s deep respect and admiration for, as he put it, “the interesting, exasperating, puzzling, and, almost always, lovable Chinese people.” My goal for this book is to also share Crow’s ability to convey timeless insights and commonsense lessons about Chinese business practices, and the deeply ingrained thinking and behavior patterns of Chinese people, through a combination of scholarship, grassroots experience, lively narrative, and good humor that transports the reader deep into the China business world.

Please enjoy the journey.

James McGregor

Beijing, 2005

Introduction

A Startup and a

Turnaround

With one foot firmly in the past, and the other stepping into the future, China is simultaneously the world’s largest startup and turnaround.

I PRESUMED THAT WEARING a Peking Opera outfit in the land of pinstripes would get some attention.

There I was, in New York’s World Financial Center, standing before nearly all of Dow Jones’s top executives in a mahogany-paneled conference room, wearing a hat like a silver chandelier, a wispy beard that went to my knees, and a blue-and-gold embroidered silk robe that billowed like Cinderella’s dress.

It was early 1994 and after