Some tips for first time China travelers Pt. 2

Travelling accessories

Make sure you buy a fanny pack for your wallet and passport.  There is very little violent crime in China but pickpockets abound.  I have known at least one person who had their passport stolen and she had to wait two weeks before the US Consulate could arrange a replacement for her. So be careful about this especially in crowded areas.  Fanny Packs are the way to go. Check with your airline regarding luggage restrictions and take over a half-empty suitcase if you can. You will do a lot of shopping in China and will need the extra suitcase for your return trip home.  Also make sure to take an adapter set with you.  You may need to use your hair-dryer or recharge your digital camera. China uses 220v and there are several types of plugs in use in China so you should buy an adapter set instead of a single adapter.

Food & Water

The restaurants in the hotels can be quite good. But they are expensive.  You will save a lot of money if you eat outside your hotel.  The food can be just as good and you will experience the thrill of eating in a real Chinese restaurant.  There are usually lots of restaurants around the hotels and these are recommended as they tend to be a little friendlier and may very well have menus in English, given their proximity to the hotels.  But do yourself a favor and try to get out of the hotel to eat.  The one exception is Breakfast.  The Breakfast buffets in the western style hotels are wonderful and a great way to start your day in China.

The water is fine. Bottled water that is.  But only drink the bottled water that you have bought in a drugstore chain or hotel kiosk. The reason ?  There is fake bottled water in China too.  And make sure not to complain about the water or food when you are in China.  This will not sit well with locals.

Taxis  

Getting around by taxis is cheap.  But trying to hail a taxi in a big city like Shanghai or Guangzhou can be a challenge.  And even more so if you are a foreigner.  Many cab drivers will not pick up foreigners because they know most foreigners cannot speak Chinese and you can easily spend an hour or two trying to hail a cab around rush hour.   So choose a hotel that is near a subway or public transportation line or hire a guide to take you around.

Hire a guide  

If you are going to China for the first time and will not be on a group tour then I would highly recommend trying to line up a guide beforehand.  One way to do this might be to look on Craigslist for the city where you are headed to see if there are some students offering guide/interpreter services.  A quick check of Craigslist Shanghai shows plenty.   You may be able to interview some candidates on Skype and make a decision that way.  Needless to say, you do not want to pay anyone anything before you have met them.  You can also ask the Concierge where you are staying if they can recommend a guide.  But finding a guide on your own on CL is probably much cheaper.

Keep your complaints to yourself  

In China you will encounter a lot of situations that will make you shake your head.  But at no time should you get angry or articulate your dissatisfaction to people.  The one exception would be in the hotel where you are staying. In short, tell yourself not to be an Ugly American when you travel abroad.

 

 

 

How to schedule new vendor visits when in China

I got an email the other day from someone who was headed over to China to inspect an order and wanted to find out how they could perhaps meet some new vendors while they were over there. They were not leaving themselves much time as they were set to leave in 24 hrs when they emailed me. I told them that the best thing to do was to line up these visits well before their trip but as that did not happen this time, there were still two things they could do as follows:

1.) Do a vendor search by province and city on the Canton Fair website.  The website allows you to do this and it is very helpful if you want to locate vendors in a specific city, as this person wanted to do.  You can then type in the keyword for your product and you will get some results.  For example, when I typed in “toys” for Dongguan City in Guangdong Province I got 14 results. I think you can do the same on Alibaba.

2.) Work through the concierge at the local hotel. Depending on which hotel you are staying at in China concierges will do everything for you and this would include looking up factories that might be of interest to you. Of course they won’t be able to do much beyond giving you a name and number, but really that is all you need to begin. If the vendor has booked the hotel for you then you don’t want to ask the concierge for help with a project of this nature. The reason is that the hotel would most likely report to the vendor that you were looking for other vendors and your vendor would not be happy. I have seen this happen before. Vendors get possessive with their customers, especially if your orders are big, and they always want to keep an eye on you to make sure you are not running off to the competition on your off day. However, If you have booked the hotel yourself it is probably safe to ask the concierge to help you locate other vendors while you are in China. You can also perhaps ask someone in the hotel business center to do this for you but you would probably have to pay them for this.

Finally, it is a good idea if you are spending any length of time in a city or going back repeatedly to get to know some locals, perhaps a student who is looking for some translator work. This person can then help you on inquires of this nature and may be able to do things for you such as booking hotels and transportation. In fact when you go to the Canton Fair you will see hundreds of students outside the main hall looking for translator work during the fair. Knowing locals like this can be extremely helpful as you develop your business in China.  Just remember that if you do hire someone to help you out on a regular basis then you need to do so in accordance with the labor laws in China.

Book Review: Age of Ambition, Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China. By Evan Osnos

I always enjoyed Evan Osnos’s articles on China when he was the Beijing based correspondent for the New Yorker. Osnos lived in Beijing for eight years and speaks Chinese, two attributes that informed his writing on China which I have always found to be informative and entertaining.

Osnos’s recent book on China, Age of Ambition, Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China is every bit as good as his writing in the New Yorker. He paints portraits of some of today’s most well-known dissidents including Ai Wei Wei and Chen Guangcheng as well as the popular anti-government blogger Han Han. And there are profiles as well of figures who have risen to become part of China’s elite, including a lady who runs China’s most popular dating site and a prominent journalist. In some instances these are the typical rags-to riches tales that are recounted so often in books on China nowadays and in this respect  Age of Ambition mirrors other recent books on China. Osnos’s book stands out, however, because he has access to many of China’s most central figures, by virtue of his assignment in Beijing for one of America’s most established magazines. For this reason we are often on the receiving end of the Government’s attempts at coercion and censorship, sometimes successful, often not. And that is what this book is really about, China’s hectic change and the Government’s attempts to keep up and to keep order.

There are also very good sections about the China Bullet train disaster, an accident that was very much owing to corruption, and a well-publicized incident in the South in which a small girl was hit by a car and no one came to her aid. These were big news stories both in China and overseas and Osnos gives us riveting accounts of both.

Still there are weaknesses. The Age of Ambition would have profited had Osnos spent a few months in 2^nd or 3^rd tier cities feeling the pulse of rural China which still makes up over 50% of the population. For example how effective are the Government’s efforts to curb freedom of expression in cities other than Beijing and Shanghai, where Osnos seems to spend most of his time ? In fact Osnos focuses almost exclusively on establishment figures in modern day Beijing, Starbucks or upscale office buildings being the setting for many of his interviews. A portrait of a textile factory owner in Jinagsu grappling with issues such as pollution and labor unrest would have been preferable to the portrait Osnos gives us of the blogger Han Han who, as both fervent anti-government blogger and amateur Formula 1 driver, obviously has some credibility issues. Osnos glosses over the hypocrisy of Han Han and his often banal blog posts and seems more dazzled by Han Han’s celebrity.

Osnos is also overly critical of China’s progress. He lambasts the Government’s censorship efforts, without acknowledging that mob unrest has a long history in rural China going back to the early Nineteenth Century and that Government fears about internet rumors fanning mob violence are in some cases well-founded. Religious cults, for example, pose a far more serious threat to political and social order in China than they do in more advanced democracies like the US or Japan and China has good reason to worry. Osnos moreover belittles China’s achievements in science and technology, not to mention the achievements of a couple of the individuals he has befriended and whom he profiles. He mocks the English teacher Michael’s attempts to master English and yet he portrays Michael as a friend.

Like other more recent writers on China, Osnos lacks the perspective of someone who was present in China in the 1980s and early 1990s when the country was mired in backwardness and had yet to experience the fruits of the Deng reforms. China was one of the poorest countries in the world then. Today it is one of the richest. Development on that scale means big problems and yet too many writers on China today, Osnos being one of them, focus on the problems and seem to forget the achievement, an achievement that long-time China watcher Henry Kissinger calls the “miracle of our time. “

A first visit to China

My client from Toronto is back from his trip to China. This was his first trip to China, and in fact first ever visit to Asia. It sounded and looked like he had a great time ( from the glow he exuded on our skype call). And although he was less than enthusiastic about the vendor he had gone to see, he nevertheless regarded the trip as a success.

Regarding the vendor, my client said his impression was that this was a very big and a very busy vendor and that they probably regarded my client as a “small fry.” The vendor took my client to lunch twice but there was no official welcoming banquet and the head of the sales dept, who had approached my customer first at the NYC Gift Fair earlier this year, was absent for much of the two days my client was in Ningbo. Anyway, it certainly does not sound like they rolled out the red carpet for this father–son “delegation” who had travelled all the way from Toronto. I told my client that this was not a good sign. And in fact I have never heard of anything like this where a foreign guest was not taken to dinner by their hosts upon their arrival in China. But it may just be a sign of changing times in China where foreign importers are not accorded the same VIP treatment they have become accustomed to over the years. And many Chinese companies have overhead too. It may be that in these tough times extravagent, wastful banquets for customers are on the way out ( let’s hope not !).

Another couple of worrisome signs are that the vendor changed their pricing on my client’s product, telling him the very competitive prices he had given him before were based on a higher MOQ. My client seemed irritated by this but, as I had already warned him that something like this might happen, he seemed to be able to “process” it and move on. And the vendor also lengthened the lead time from 45 to 90 days. This is also very concerning. 90 days is a very long lead time for this product, most of which is automated product.

My client seemed to be at a loss about what to do. So I asked him what his gut feeling was. He said his gut feeling was that he wanted to give them an order. He likes their quality, their facility and they seem responsive and friendly enough. I told him that was fine and that these are definitely good points he does not want to ignore. But a first order should be as small as possible. See how it goes. If the service is good, then look at increasing your order. But he should anticipate that there will not be quick solutions to problems if they arise ( because they are big and he is small) and he should be very careful about the lead time. In China when a vendor gives you a lead time you should always tack on 2-4 weeks because China orders just always seem late for one reason for another. In other words, if he orders product with these guys and they have given him a 90 day lead time it may be 4-5 months before it rolls into his distribution center in the US.

Other interesting observations on his trip.

My client spent much of his career working in London but he said he found Shanghai much bigger and much more intense. He seemed overwhelmed by Shanghai. But having spent seven years there I can understand that. Shanghai is nothing short of overwhelming. I find it much more intense than Tokyo where I have spent the last three years. I would add that whereas the Tokyo energy just wears you down, the Shanghai energy invigorates you.

The train station in Ningbo was chaos. Yes, I believe that. Train Stations in China are very crowded and chaotic. You walk in the door and your heart sinks as you wonder how you are going to manage to buy a ticket. The experience can drain you in minutes. So always book your train tickets in advance ( preferably through a hotel concierge) and arrive at the station early because it may take you some time to find the right queue ( or what is supposed to be a queue).

The jet lag on his return really got to him. He travels a lot to Europe but the Toronto – China trip was just so much longer.

The food in China was wonderful. So true and one of the best things about travelling to China. Chinese food in China is an experience unlike any other. Westernized Chinese cuisine just does not cut it, no matter how “authentic” it is said to be. After eating Chinese food in China, you will return to your own country a Chinese food snob.

Haggling in the local markets was challenging and exhausting but fun. Yes, it is true. But if you go to China you definitely want to leave yourself a day to do this. It may be the highlight of your trip. And, as my client pointed out, the knock off LV bag you buy in China for next to nothing may be better quality than the original !

The complexities of global trade and the risks of forecasts

I met with a Chinese vendor today who just happened to be in Tokyo on a sales trip. We had lunch and he was explaining to me the challenges his industry – medical supplies – faces. His company does a lot of business overseas, it supplies Walgreens/CVS and Wal-Mart and many other big stores in the US and Europe. And his company has a significant presence here in Japan.

As regards his Japan business, the vendor explained to me that following the March 2011 earthquake his company, and other companies like it, saw a big spike in business. Many Japanese companies, medical supply and other, placed big orders for first aid supplies with their vendors in China. The reason is that sales of first aid supplies in Japan rose dramatically after the earthquake, as one would expect. The inserts in the morning papers at that time were full of advertisements from local home centers for first aid supplies and even now if you walk into a home center here in Tokyo you will see a significant section for disaster relief supplies. The problem though is that people have stopped buying these supplies now and companies here are saddled with excess inventory. Chinese vendors seeing a big increase in their orders from Japan two years ago, started to over-produce and now they face the same problem: too much inventory. So the Japanese are not buying and the Chinese cannot get rid of their inventory, causing many companies to go out of business.

I thought this was very interesting because it shows how hard it is to predict consumer behavior and how risky it can be to make assumptions.