Everyone agrees we are in the age of globalization. The only difference is that in the 1990s globalization meant China welcomed global businesses to set up beachheads in its coastal cities and reach into its heartland.
Today, the word also means Chinese businesses expanding outside China, to do more business by building their own offshore operations.
But unfortunately, Chinese companies going abroad do not get as much help at home as their overseas competitors and partners do. In one area, as I recently found out, help is particularly weak - information people may need to do business globally.
On the surface, there is no lack of it. A search on the online Chinese bookstore of Dangdang.com, one gets 8,783 results about quanqiuhua or Chinese for "globalization". In comparison, on Amazon.com, a search for "globalization" produces 8,124 results.
Not bad. But the Chinese books are mostly translated from English editions that are no longer popular in the West.
Some titles dealt mostly with theories, read only by academic people. The Chinese media and publishing industries seem to have a fetish about theories, almost like a panda's addiction to bamboo leaves. In the West, books place a clear emphasis on practical knowledge.
A search on Amazon for "China business", for instance, one gets 15,559 results, and for "India business", one gets 12,250 results. Whereas on Dangdang, a search for meiguo jingji (US economy), one gets only 1,126 results, and for touzi meiguo (investment in the US), one gets 176 results. A shocking disparity.
What is more bewildering is why book publishers keep supplying the market with boring theoretical tomes and refuse to shift to the presumably more interesting and also more profitable practical business manuals, such as How to Invest in the US or Merger and Acquisitions in the EU.
There are individuals who have first-hand knowledge and are far more useful to local business people other than just theoretical books.
There is no law preventing publishing companies from rolling out more titles on how to buy farms and factories, partnering with sales channels, hiring foreign professionals, and networking with business people in other nations.
What is preventing them? The only explanation, I presume, is that the media and publishing industries are still run by intellectuals out of touch with the realities of the business world today. They are not good at relating real people's experiences and feel they do not need an audience.
One does not have to thumb through the pages of books on globalization to find out how frustrated general Chinese readers must feel. In everyday press coverage, there are many examples.
A search for quanqiuhua (globalization) in the news department of Baidu.com, the Chinese-language search site, plenty of windows will pop up showing or reporting quasi-academic speeches on the "essence of globalization" and its "core significance", its "foundation", and its "leading forces", and so forth.
How can Chinese business executives find any use in such information?
Small wonder that more and more Chinese companies require a high English proficiency among their recruits. Some companies, my friends told me, even require English be spoken at their board meetings.
At first, I could not figure out why. But now I know. What a clever way it is to avoid having anyone quoting from boring books and press articles - and thereby steer the company away from useless information.
E-mail: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn
(China Daily 03/03/2008 page4)
