Comments on: Little house on the Chinese prairie: Have midwestern values moved to Beijing? http://www.mercurybrief.com/2009/10/little-house-on-the-chinese-prairie-have-midwestern-values-moved-to-beijing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=little-house-on-the-chinese-prairie-have-midwestern-values-moved-to-beijing Dispatches from Global Messengers: myths, fables, lessons Sat, 02 Feb 2013 16:21:22 -0500 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4.1 By: Cory M. Grenier http://www.mercurybrief.com/2009/10/little-house-on-the-chinese-prairie-have-midwestern-values-moved-to-beijing/comment-page-1/#comment-232 Cory M. Grenier Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:36:39 +0000 http://www.mercurybrief.com/?p=800#comment-232 Bob, you are correct that Chinese are inherently hungrier and overtly more ambitious than Western counterparts. Many only children have been prodded by impoverished parents and grandparents to study hard and achieve financial success. From a young age Chinese students must compete at every level and strive to attend one of the top tier universities like Tsinghua University or Peking University. Only a small fraction of the massive population will ever make it. Once graduated Chinese continuously focus on gaining new skills - English training, international job assignments, higher education and presentation training are all highly sought after. It is common for spouses to encourage each other to make any sacrifice necessary to acquire greater job skills, education in order to achieve faster upward mobility. As a result Chinese jockey for position in firms more passionately than in the West. And Chinese are also vigorously competing with their economically competitive Asian neighbors - Japan, S. Korea and Taiwan. Simultaneously white collar Chinese employees must add more value than lower cost alternative Asian employees in Vietnam, Thailand or India. But I am not confident the next legendary entrepreneur will come from China. Most Chinese multinationals have gained enormous market share primarily by using low-cost innovation to tweak existing products developed in the West and selling them to the domestic market first and later globally. For example China's largest appliance manufacturer, Haier, didn't invent the mini-refrigerator, but it has leveraged its cost base to provide innumerable color choice, low cost security touch pads to secure drinks from thirsty college buddies, and unbeatable price points to capture a majority of the US mini-refrigerator market. In addition, many of the low cost innovation is achieved not only by the skill of China's engineers, but by wide income disparities propped up by unenforced labor laws, subsidized energy use, and hidden environmental costs that are not accounted for. This is a recipe for many Chinese to become extremely wealthy, but I don't believe it is an environment conducive to producing the next Benjamin Franklin and Howard Hughes. I believe a strong legal framework, transparent and free flow of information, enforced environmental laws, and more cross disciplinary education that encourages risk taking and depth of experience is needed to incubate the kind of entrepreneurs we've learned to lionize in the West. Cory Grenier Beijing www.chinavation.blogspot.com Bob,
you are correct that Chinese are inherently hungrier and overtly more ambitious than Western counterparts. Many only children have been prodded by impoverished parents and grandparents to study hard and achieve financial success. From a young age Chinese students must compete at every level and strive to attend one of the top tier universities like Tsinghua University or Peking University. Only a small fraction of the massive population will ever make it. Once graduated Chinese continuously focus on gaining new skills – English training, international job assignments, higher education and presentation training are all highly sought after. It is common for spouses to encourage each other to make any sacrifice necessary to acquire greater job skills, education in order to achieve faster upward mobility. As a result Chinese jockey for position in firms more passionately than in the West. And Chinese are also vigorously competing with their economically competitive Asian neighbors – Japan, S. Korea and Taiwan. Simultaneously white collar Chinese employees must add more value than lower cost alternative Asian employees in Vietnam, Thailand or India.

But I am not confident the next legendary entrepreneur will come from China. Most Chinese multinationals have gained enormous market share primarily by using low-cost innovation to tweak existing products developed in the West and selling them to the domestic market first and later globally. For example China’s largest appliance manufacturer, Haier, didn’t invent the mini-refrigerator, but it has leveraged its cost base to provide innumerable color choice, low cost security touch pads to secure drinks from thirsty college buddies, and unbeatable price points to capture a majority of the US mini-refrigerator market.

In addition, many of the low cost innovation is achieved not only by the skill of China’s engineers, but by wide income disparities propped up by unenforced labor laws, subsidized energy use, and hidden environmental costs that are not accounted for. This is a recipe for many Chinese to become extremely wealthy, but I don’t believe it is an environment conducive to producing the next Benjamin Franklin and Howard Hughes.

I believe a strong legal framework, transparent and free flow of information, enforced environmental laws, and more cross disciplinary education that encourages risk taking and depth of experience is needed to incubate the kind of entrepreneurs we’ve learned to lionize in the West.

Cory Grenier
Beijing
http://www.chinavation.blogspot.com

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