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I love fast food, and I love celebrity marriages. Better still, I love celebrity divorces. This week’s announcement about the tie-up between KFC and Mengniu Dairy has everything I need. In June, Mengniu also pushed out Nestle in a deal with Starbucks. Mengniu is the largest milk producer in China, a country not traditionally known

Last week the China Daily explained a new labor law — due to come into effect on January 1 — that ostensibly protects women from job discrimination. Ironically, the way that it does this is to list jobs that are “unsuitable for women.” These jobs including working in mines, cutting lumber, installing and removing scaffolding

It’s not easy to sell computers outside of the big cities, with logistics one of the main challenges. I was at a logistics conference a year ago, where Carrefour president Jean-Luc Chereau showed slides from a typical loading dock (Carrefour has been in China since 1995, and has over 100 hypermarkets in dozens of cities

Outsourcing – services, not manufacturing – is one of the most appealing industries to get into. It doesn’t pollute, and provides white-collar jobs to college graduates. It’s no surprise that China has been enviously looking at India’s progress in services outsourcing and looking for ways to emulate its success. Now the government is putting some

When things stay the same, you do things the same way. When things change, that’s when life gets interesting. Fortunately for businesses in Central and Western China, things are starting to change. For companies that keep up, this is good – more customers, more suppliers, more business partners. Companies that don’t keep up will see

This past April, Chinese regulators started giving permission for foreign banks to incorporate locally. Incorporation means that the bank can do business in yuan and issue credit cards. Previously, foreign banks were only allowed to handle foreign-currency accounts, and were only able to offer credit cards through partnership deals with local partners. Before, the foreign

Three years ago, work took me on a trip out of Shanghai, and my colleagues and I stayed at a decent-looking hotel — one of the best in that area. We were the only people there. When we checked in, the staff acted surprised that we needed things — like room keys. Nobody showed us

China has three major strikes against it when it comes to software outsourcing. The first — and biggest — is that India has already sewn up the industry. It’s got the contracts, the customers, the experience, the employees, the facilities, and the certifications. Home-grown Chinese companies start out far, far behind. But even US and

Actually, the above headline is not true. If you’re reading our publication, you probably have heard of Chongqing – and heard a lot about it. If Beijing is China’s Washington, D.C. and Shanghai is New York City, then Chongqing is Chicago. I used to live in Chicago – the American one. My first journalism job

The residents of Shanghai and Beijing have, by now, gotten used to a superabundance of advertising. On television and on the radio, in newspapers and magazines, in buses and subways, on the streets and in taxicabs and even in elevators. They haven’t reached the level of cynicism of Western audiences, perhaps, but they’re increasingly more

This past February, I visited some outsourcing firms in southern India — Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai. The food, I have to say, was excellent. As a vegetarian, I have to say that I have never eaten as well as I did during that ten-day trip. I was shocked, however, by the state of the roads. Even

As Shanghai and Beijing reach retail saturation, international retailers are increasingly looking to smaller cities as their entry-points into China. According to new research from A. T. Kearney, a Chicago-based management consulting firm, consumers in second- and third-tier cities are ready to embrace Western-style retail concepts and products. The reason? The influence of television, movies

Until the late 1990s, Chinese households and enterprises occupied state-owned property. Average residents had their housing provided for free, through government welfare departments and the housing offices of state-owned enterprises. With the advent of privatization came one of the largest real estate booms the world has ever seen. Also, check out I Buy Pueblo Houses