@englishbusiness
There are three elements of chinese military strategy, taught to every school child for generations, embedded in this response. Not all understand, but all know these strategies.
Just speaking a language fluently is insufficient to create, grow/sustain, and scale long-term relationships.
You'll need to understand your stakeholders, so you can lead them, influence, them, attract them, as opposed to following trends, which has its advantages and risks. Leaders enjoy the benefit of first kill, while the pack that follows compete amongst themselves for the scraps. This is one of tenets of entrance barriers. While your competitors are fighting over the carcass of last year's kill, you've moved on to the next market or market segment, within your chosen domain(s).
LANDSCAPE AKA BATTLEFIELD
China is not the China most westerners see. It is as diverse and as complicated as Europe in both locations and peoples - aside from the debatable and arguable advantage of centralized control.
HARD OR TECHNICAL SKILLS
2. If you have a business MODEL, it should be long term, difficult to copy, profitable (short term to longterm), sustainable, and scalable. These principles hold true regardless of where you set up shop - but even more so here - as a population density 4-5x that of the USA would logically dictate a competitive environment 4-5x as fierce.
Most successful 1 trick ponies - fail within 3 years. Typically, the first year is sunk cost building up your brand and business. The second year is spent trying to fend off copycats, and the third year is spent shutting down from ludicrously excessive competition, offering poorer cut-rate knockoff services, starving and strangling your baby to death.
That is the reality of competition and we haven't even delved into the force majeur realms of dirty tricks, corruption, and political risks.
Sales take place all over china - but can you survive on their profit margins or in their highly competitive environments until you can establish brand and distinctive differentiation?
Do you have multiple exit strategies, to include catastrophic failure?
SOFT SKILLS
This mostly addresses your short term plan to establish a beachhead, to the longer term organic and ultimately exponential growth. You'll need to have a strong executable technical plan, well trained and loyal staff and loyal stakeholders - but it will ultimately depend on your ability to influence and lead others as a leader and visionary, if you're ever to make it off the beach and push inland.
China is littered with the carcasses of local businesses inspired by brilliant ideas and native level Chinese language abilities.
Bringing a taste of Italy to Yunnan: An interview with Diego Triboli
发布者Ray
Great pictures!
I was first introduced to Cantina through a YFBC meeting (Jeff - thanks for the invite). Great place - great reminder to go find this place again! Phenomenal wine bar!
With 2017 CITM, Yunnan stakes its future to tourism industry
发布者Go Yereth!
China's foreign minister shelves trade concerns, turns to Myanmar's Rohingya crisis
发布者Burma has had several ethnic cleansings a la Bhutan over the last century.
@Alien
Rohingya are a minority in Burma. Of course it's not the solution they want but it's most definitely the solution the current diverse majority of Burma want, otherwise the west's former darling of democracy SKY would've immediately denounced the cleansing as opposed to her deafening silence.
It's a big issue now simply because it's a political pawn between the USA's Obama era China containment strategy and China's strategy for direct land access to the Indian Ocean, to support it's OBOR strategy.
Terrible - yes.
But how many of us REALLY know the religious politics of that area?
China's foreign minister shelves trade concerns, turns to Myanmar's Rohingya crisis
发布者China typically does not interfere in the sovereign operations of other countries on the scale of say other superpowers.
That said - Burma basically missed their window of opportunity to provide energy to power starved China. Yunnan now has a significant surplus of renewable energy that required a Beijing policy to remediate.
We only know about the Rohingya based on rather biased western media coverage. Remember the "Arab Spring" which the media initially gushed over - not so gushy now that we're in the "Arab Winter", eh?
Best solution is probably to try to help the Rohingya settle in a sustainable and humane manner in Bangladesh because Myanmar seriously doesn't want them back. Perhaps POTUS Trump can outsourcing the Great Wall of the USA to Myanmar also...
This article also apparently neglected to mention that Myanmar is or was an Obama era pivot to "contain" China (an utterly moronic, unsustainable, and irresponsible global policy).
China considering plan to make Xinjiang desert a new California
发布者Seems China can also use water resources in addition to economic resources to balance the relationships with India and Bangladesh.
Not a pleasant thought for water-strapped India - but a future reality.