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ChinaGlare – Has Your China Business Become Too China-Centric?

ChinaGlare can diminish the ability to properly assess other markets

ChinaGlare (chī-nə glair): When an Asian regional business, financial opportunity or development of similar magnitude to the economic situation of China at point of WTO entry occurs, but is overlooked due to the over-focusing of an individual or business exclusively upon developments within China as an investment market.”

Op-Ed Commentary: Chris Devonshire-Ellis

Apr. 13 – One of the key peculiarities about operating in emerging markets is one of the issues that makes them so appealing – not only are they exciting from an entrepreneurial standpoint with mass potential markets, but each one possesses a vibrant, almost exotic culture. Just the BRICS alone make up a Lonely Planet traveler’s best dream – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa all wrapped up in one convenient package. Of these, China as an emerging market is arguably the most familiar. A benchmark is to ask someone, say in the United States or Europe, if they have ever been to China and a large percentage will have traveled there personally or will know someone who has. That is less true of the other countries on the BRICS list.

China then, as the most familiar, has also in many ways attracted the most attention. The mysteries of the Orient, a 5,000 year old culture, the still recent days of cultural revolutionary isolation, yet a massive and diverse country, a totally different language, bundled up with a smiling population all seemingly welcoming to foreigners. Shanghai, for example, is a wonderful city yet has developed into a foreigner’s gateway to China – it’s the easy option for Westerners to understand as an introduction to the rest of the Middle Kingdom, almost like a China for beginners. That wasn’t an accident. It exists to ease the passage of foreign businesses and to prepare them for the vastness of its heartland.

Foreign businesses and expats, many of them surfing along the top of the huge waves of globalization and chasing a promised market of 1.3 billion have, often choose China as their first venture overseas, or certainly their first in Asia. Seduced by success, the relative ease of doing business, a low tax rate, and a tolerant attitude to the worst expatriate excesses, it has also developed as a haven for MNCs. Many now generate a large percentage of their profits from their China operations. Interracial marriages have been skyrocketing as ties between overseas expats and local Chinese strengthen, and quite properly many will hear nothing said about what is fast becoming their primary residence. Indeed, over the next 10 years, we will see a new phenomenon arise – Westerners of a certain age choosing to spend their retirement in China, and to live out their days in this most enigmatic of countries.

Continue reading this article on China Briefing News.

 

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