Join the group
British entrepreneurs can now join a Linkedin group. This group will be used as a platform for British entrepreneurs working in China, or who want to do business in China; directly or via a local contact.
Sebastian Wood CMG, centre, with British entrepreneurs
The British Ambassador to China, Sebastian Wood CMG, welcomed EO Beijing chapter members at his residence on March 31st.
I arranged the event to introduce the new Ambassador to some of the Britons who are building businesses in Beijing. Although a small group, it is a vibrant one and offers the potential to create a support network for other Britons who want to establish a business in China.
The topics ranged from the hurdles faced in setting up in China, trade finance, legislation changes and the obvious opportunities for entrepreneurs in China. The discussion also turned to ways in which British entrepreneurs could help those outside of the UK enter China. These included the organizing of a British entrepreneurs event to coincide with the British Business Awards in Shanghai 2010.
Sebastian Wood was appointed as Her Majesty’s Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China in January 2010.
I’m brittle. Beijing.
Shaving blades scratch and slash
My nose bleeds
The dried blood never leaves
Early or late to bed
My burning eyes always China red
In the Beijing dust lies the future and the past
Brittle Olympian, I will last.
Today is my 43rd birthday. It is also the 4th anniversary of my arrival; the challenge of setting up an office in China for EASTWEST PR a sado masochistic ’gift’ to myself. I wrote this poem after my first week here in my post entitled ‘Great Expectations’. My expectations haven’t been met in many ways but exceeded in others.
I watched the Olympics come and go, not able to make money nor really attend any major events, but feel that the trial of endurance which has the been the subject of a nice little business in China has been it’s own reward. Watching a developing nation display a modern personality whilst managing the internal challenges of economic change has been fascinating. The Olympics were supposed to herald the arrival of the era of China but the Government is wrestling with systemic flaws rooted in both the cultural and administrative fabric of the country.
The challenge of building a nice little media relations business in China for me have been several. I wasn’t connected. My spoken Chinese isn’t functional to communicate on behalf of clients. The industry operates on system of payouts which I am not willing to engage in. The bureaucracy here in China is like quicksand. My Great Expectation was to build a self sufficient PR business in 3 years and then beat a retreat to Singapore to live in palm fringed comfort.
That hasn’t happened. 4 years and over S$500,000 later, not to mention the opportunity cost; don’t let anyone tell you that China is cheap. I took some decisions which meant that EASTWEST just didn’t grow as quickly as I had hoped and planned, investments in time and money which built my social capital in the capital of the middle kingdom. I founded and Chaired the British Business Awards in China with the Chamber of Commerce. Fortunately EggplantDigital allowed me to invest in their agency to give EASTWEST access to some brilliant young web engineers so that we can offer digital PR services. The venture into legal headhunting hasn’t worked. Meanwhile great inspiration has come from the Beijing Chapter of the Entrepreneurs Organization which Richard Robinson and I co-founded in Beijing.
Building a social network and a business infrastructure takes time and is an investment – one that I hadn’t anticipated fully before g having great expectations of my time in China.I realized that I have to shift strategy if the agency is to survive; to offer services not connections. Last year I decided to spin out the KM platform we use and launched AgencyintheCloud.com for clients to have the utilities of PR agency without the costs of consultants. EASTWEST PR will be 15 years old on June 13th and we will unveil a new brand and a methodology for implementing social media strategies for clients; traditional PR is all but dead – for reasons of both corruption and technology.
The least anticipated and yet most wonderful part of my life has been marriage and fatherhood. Erika and I met in 2007 and in 2008 Amity Huan Huan James was born. My blog posts ended Nov 2008 as 2009 became an annus horriblus for me; at work a trusted employee tried to break the company and at home I wrestled with marriage, fatherhood and ultimately taking responsibilty - strange for someone who has employed people since the age of 27. In Dec 2010 Halo Mulan James
was delivered at 3.67kg. With Amity I lost count at changing diaper #1,047, but have restarted the count. I married a woman with a Chinese sign of a Rat, Amity is Pig, Halo is Ox and I am fire Horse. That’ enough farmyard animals for a while – I wonder what the year of the Tiger will bring.
Manzou
Jim
Cambodia for kids
Travelling to Cambodia with our 16 month old daughter, Amity, was a good combination of adventure and convenience. Nearly 2 million tourists visited Cambodia last year to see the Angkorian-era (9th-13th century) Khmer Empire temples at Angkor Watt just outside Siem Reap, and while the town of Siem Reap is becoming more westernized with child friendly food, ATM’s, and the Internet, it still has enough challenges to make it exciting to former backpackers.
Getting to Cambodia is fairly painless from Beijing. We flew from Beijing to Phnom Penh on China Southern Airlines CZ324 which departed at 0800 and arrived at 15:05 which meant that Amity traveled during her naptime. You can get a visa on the Internet or pay US$25 on arrival – but take 2 photos with you. We over nighted in Phnom Penh and then hired a driver and car for the 4 hour drive to Siem Reap. The cost was US$65 which was double the cost of 6-7 hour bus journey and gave us the option for pit stops. Once in Siem Reap, population circa 90,000,there is a wide range of hotels starting at backpack hostels at US$12 to 5 star Hotel de Paix at US$750. We elected for Hotel Mysteres Angkor which was on the east side of the Siem Reap river, which was a mistake; access was via a temple and burial grounds, the neighbourhood was noisy and they placed us in a suite with a spiral staircase – not ideal for a toddler! Always ask the question about location and if the room is toddler friendly.
Getting to the Angkor Archaeological Park takes 20 minutes from Siem Reap by Tuk Tuk and we planned 4 days to cover the 400 square kilometer park. Tickets are sold for ($20), three-day ($40) and seven-day ($60) visits. To see the park for 4 days but only pay for 3 we took the hot air balloon ride that is just inside the park but for which one doesn’t need a park ticket. From 200m up the tether great yellow balloon gave a fantastic view at sunset (6:40) and it was safe for Amity, who was more excited by the earth bound chickens running around the ticket office. There were also elephants, monkeys and all manner of animals in the park, some to ride.
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We moved hotels to the Shanta Mani on the west side of the river by the old market. We used the mornings to tour the Park by TukTuk as it was cooler for Amity, returning home each day for lunch, pool and naptime. In the late afternoons we went back to the Park carrying Amity in a backpack. There is a good aircon restaurant in the park opposite the Angkor Wat which serves fruit juice and both western and Asian food and that proved a safe haven on the second day. A tour around the park can take 2-5 hours depending on how adventurous the parents and patient the toddler – Amity stood up to 3 hours before melting down, saved only by the icecream vendor.
After 3 days of visiting Temples we had had enough of history and went on a boat tour on the Tonle Sap, Asia’s largest freshwater lake, some 15km south of Siem Reap. We paid US$20 per person (Amity rode for free) for a boat ride that navigated past a Vietnamese boat people floating village including a school. 
Sunset on a floating restaurant and then back up the estuary to a magical dusky tuktuk ride with Amity fast asleep to the soothing sounds of a tropical evening. We checked into the luxury of the Foreign Correspondents club and felt we had arrived home.
Cambodia is a manageable holiday with a toddler but it is worth deciding how much you want to trade convenience for cash. Our holiday for 7 nights amounted to around US$3,000 including flights, car, accommodation, passes and food. It could have been done for half as much but with greater amounts of patience. The people of Cambodia have lived with many more hardships than we did, and the people we met were welcoming and hospitable. We all felt safe both in the daytime and nighttime. For an alternative to Thailand or Indonesia, I would recommend Cambodia – Take suntan lotion, mosquito repellent, and a some shades. 
For a useful guide www.canbypublications.com
Beijing Diary 9th Nov 2008
“Life is what happens to you while you are making plans,” I believe John Lennon once said, and in the last twelve months fatherhood, Olympics, a start up, trying to keep the Duke of York entertained and marriage have made me change my plans and kept me from writing this diary.
Amity Huan Huan James celebrated her first birthday party at the XYZ art gallery, oblivious to much but the enormous chocolate cake and the clown; for Wei and I this was a milestone in our relationship, our second anniversary. I wrestled for 6 months with the reality of fatherhood including diapers at dawn, impossible to button up baby outfits and not being who I used to be, but Wei has been a guiding light to the concept and reality of a fun and happy family. Fortunately we share many basic parenting philosophies such as not having the baby sleep in the bed, a common practice in China, and accepting the sweet and the smelly parts of parenting. Wei works with the art gallery, and thought it would be fun to have lots of toddlers around the contemporary paintings; I nervously checked for chocolate fingerprints after the last of the diaper brigade were wheeled out.
The police and army brigades have also left the streets of Beijing post Olympics and as the winter leaves turn auburn the city is becoming a pleasant place to live. A revised vehicle restriction policy is keeping 600,000 cars per day off the roads and a policy of moving from coal to oil fired power stations could also be contributing to the clearer skies. It could also be that factories shut down for the Olympics are finding the global recession has created a perfect economic storm from which they can’t recover. In Beijing huge office buildings are now being completed but there is very much a post Olympics sentiment in the market and both residential and commercial landlords will, I hope finally taste their own medicine.
I prescribed myself a dose of diversification in the last year, investing into an internet marketing company and launching the British Business Awards. Eggplant Digital was founded by 2 very bright but under funded British lads and so it made great sense to restructure their UK company under Singaporean jurisdiction and use our China company to house their team. Eggplant Digital (www.eggplantdigital.cn) was able to make a significant contribution to the marketing of the British Business Awards (www.britishbusinessawards.cn) which I proposed to the Chamber of Commerce in November 2007. A year later on November 6th 2008 over 380 people attended the gala dinner. As Chairman of the Awards I was seated next to Prince Andrew with the role to keep the Duke of York interested enough to postpone his planned early departure, an event which would have embarrassed the British Ambassador Sir William Ehrman, Cheng Si-wei of the National Peoples Congress and the Deputy General Sun of the Ministry of Commerce.
At dinner I asked his Royal Highness what he found most remarkable about China. “The level of transparency in the way that they share their problems now” he stated. Cheng Si-wei replied that the leadership had learnt a great deal about the benefits of openness during the Sichuan earthquake earlier this year. They realized that they could not contain the news and embraced the idea of showing the human face of China. International reaction with aid and support had vindicated their policy. No one at the table pursued the topic. The Duke was bemused that an owner of a Rolls Royce in China would be obliged to take the same test as a truck driver due to the length of the luxury car, an issue that I had to confess had not affected me yet in my endeavours.
Perhaps I should have rented a Rolls Royce to take Wei to the registry office to get married. A monk at a temple in Shanghai told Wei’s mum that the 30th October was an auspicious date to get married – the only issue was that I learnt of this on the 24th. I had already submitted myself to the British Consulate for the ‘Certificate of no encumbrance’, which cost a princely RMB1450 and took 45 days to process (Wei’s American letter took one day and cost RMB200), and am very much in love with Wei but had hoped we could get hitched after the Awards. However, the auguries of an orange robed mystic are not to be challenged. Wei and I hurriedly took the mandatory ‘together photo’ at a local Kodak shop and proceeded to the registry office in northern Beijing. We arrived at 11:45 am and woke up the blue suited official, a pair of lifeless China miniature flags clothed in plastic adorning her desk. For a kings ransom of RMB9 the Chinese Civil Administration glued our Kodak moment into red booklets, stamped our documents, and muttered something about the need to notarize our vows outside of China to be useful. By noon Wei and I were married.
‘They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom,’ wrote the Chinese sage Confucius. I presume that he wasn’t referring to one’s wife, but the last 12 months have brought constant change with lots of happiness. I wonder what happened to the wisdom.
Manzou
Jim
One World One Dream
Beijing Diary 3rd August 2008 On my 39th birthday when I landed in China on 25th January 2006 I had conspired to build my empire quickly and easily in readiness for the Olympics and then to make my fortune in these two upcoming weeks. I was very much mistaken on all counts. The Opening Ceremony finds me having made significant inroads into establishing the company here, and two more besides, but it has taken significantly longer and more expense that I had planned, the saving grace being the joys of fatherhood and finding in Wei, a wonderful partner.
We’ve spent the last six months wondering whether Beijing would really manage to shape up to expectations for ‘One World, One Dream.’ The controversy surrounding the torch relay was countered by the global sympathy over the Sichuan earth quake. The subsequent immorality of local officials stealing aid monies, and worse still the silencing of parents who are in arms about the substandard quality of their schools which lead to unnecessary deaths, has left observers including me wandering which way to turn. One of the central questions for me is whether the Olympics herald a great change in perception or a great act of self – deception. Opposing reports by the China Daily and Hong Kong Standard of a Hong Kong reporter assaulting a police officer during the latest tickets fiasco were illustrative of the dichotomy taking place in the media.
This week when an Olympic official likened the Beijing pollution to sitting in a ‘steam bath’ I think there was an incredulity tempered with anxiety; Beijing really does need the games to be a success. I had made the mistake of believing that these Olympics were about fun and business and sport, but they are about much more than that. They are about China’s arrival on the international scene but at a time when internally the conflicts taking place are huge. I sometimes ask myself why the Government, which is all powerful, needs to pander to the international audience, but then it occurred to me that perhaps this is because the international respectability may come to counterbalance the negative domestic sentiment building around issues such as wealth inequality, inflation and pollution.
It is the pollution that is making Wei and I most worried for Amity, as she crosses the 9 month mark and her surroundings become our main consideration. I calculate that we are close the 1,350 diaper’s changed mark, which makes us a net contributor ourselves to the local problem. Fatherhood is great, although I would have to admit to finding the need to put someone else first not easy for me; I have a terrible nagging feeling that I am being left behind all the time. Wei is a natural mother and I think too that women just get their emotional centre wrapped around the baby better than men do; not a pc thing to say but after 40 I resolved to be less defensive about these things.
In one of the last great entrepreneurial acts that I had last year I booked a Villa the Commune, and we are going to make good use of a bad decision. As part of it’s amazing security procedures the Government made over 124 visa application changes in the last 6 months, Olympic ticket purchases have been literally a lottery (another one I didn’t win) and finally traffic bans are making logistics a nightmare. Apparently hotels are at 60-70% capacity instead of the 90-95% anticipated, and many people have left Beijing. The Villa is emblematic of my attempt to make money by setting up in time for the Olympics – it was a great idea but logistics and sentiment have left me with an expensive picnic spot by the Great Wall.
Wei and I will go, along with Amity and our friends, celebrate our engagement. While in Singapore overlooking the Symphony lake on Thursday 24th July I proposed to Wei. It was a magical moment under the stars. As we travel the world to start new lives we do have only one world to live in and one dream to share it with. I will watch the Olympics with quite a different view to that which I had imagined, but a happier and healthier one I am sure. That is as long as these blue skies remain overhead. Man zou
Guide Dogs
Over lunch an English friend of mine asked whether I had noticed anything different about how I was being looked at by Chinese people; I wasn’t sure that I had but it was one of many comments on the rising tension that is building up in Beijing as Chinese see foreigners as undermining their national credibility. What had started out as an Olympic year full of promise is turning out to be one of potential PR pitfalls for China and international governments alike.
In the gym two old ladies were overhead talking of boycotting Carrefour due to their affiliation with Nepal, and the other remarked, “what shall we do, all of the goods they sell are made in China.” I heard Jack Perkowski, author of ‘Managing the Dragon’ and the financier in the ‘Mr China’ book, speak of the auto industry growth in China. In the Olympic year China will manufacture over 10m cars, he claimed, and for the first time ever will manufacture more cars than the USA. In 2002 China manufactured 2m cars. New models were on show at the Autoshow here this week which attracted 82,000 visitors on the first day and apparently 16,734 domestic and overseas journalists from around the world.
By FRANK CHING
Business Times – 16 Apr 2008
NEW, liberalised regulations governing the work of foreign journalists were introduced by China last year, but it is clear that there are many problems in the implementation, some of which are being deliberately introduced by officials, including the police.
The Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC), in a press release in January, agreed that the new regulations had ‘improved overall reporting conditions for foreign journalists’, but said that there had been more than 180 reports of journalists being obstructed in their work in the 12 months since the introduction of the new rules.
Pillow Biters
119 days to the Olympics
April 11, 2008
There are only 119 days to the Olympics and in truth it has been been a surprising couple of months since I last wrote from Beijing. The nasty pollution that chokes pedestrians on the streets of Beijing has been matched by the nastiness of the atmosphere surrounding the torch relay, creating an increasingly polarised sentiment around the Olympics.
Apparently the torch relay was masterminded by Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, in 1936 to demonstrate Nazi supremacy in Europe, and it has been used to highlight the plight of Tibet, invaded by the Chinese in 1959. Coverage of the attempts to snuff out the torch in London, Paris and San Francisco on CNN were interrupted on our screens, and the papers have been critical of the nations that are hosting these demonstrations. Over lunch a friend told me that one of her young female Chinese staff asked “why are people foreigners doing this to us,” while a group of more militant Chinese set up www.anti-cnn.com to “expose the lies and distorted facts in the western media. This promoted a wag to set up anti-anti-cnn.com. On a more serious note one of our American clients that purchased a Shanghai based banking finance software company last year found itself on national television accused of using its software to undermine the Shanghai stock market which fell by 5.5% this week.
Huan Yin Lai Beijing
Becoming a father is at once a uniquely personal and yet almost universal experience when our daughter was born at 03:30 on Saturday 27th October, in a procedure that dates back to Roman times, and which is still a breath taking event.
If ever a couple want to discover a level of shared and mixed emotions, then being together in a surgery theatre during child birth has to be one of the most powerful ways to do that. The medical staff at the Beijing United Family Hospital was quick to install an IV drip on Wei’s wrist within 15 minutes of our arrival, but as our birth plan called for minimal intervention Wei bravely had it removed. Suite #7, softened by oil lamps, Buddha bar music and flowers, was a tender place for us to decide at 02:00 that we had no choice but for Wei to have a Cesarean having laboured for 24 hours. I sat at Wei’s shoulder while the 8 green-clad staff followed the masterful instructions of Dr Brooks, although I was unnerved when he implied certain parts of the procedure hadn’t been done prior to his arrival; in fact the nursing staff all avoided calling the imposing Dr Brooks until 02:00 when midwife Sarah eventually insisted that they do so – he wasn’t happy at being called when our baby, LP, was already in distress with a heartbeat racing at 175 bpm, nor I suspect because we had woken him.