Lai See | China is like the EU; provinces are its member states

Many business people come to Hong Kong hoping to crack the so-called China market, not appreciating perhaps that it is not "one" but many different markets. Even taking on a province can be a daunting proposition. Five of the mainland's provinces have populations bigger than Germany's, the largest nation in Europe with 82 million individuals.

Even people in Hong Kong forget how big neighbouring Guangdong is. With a population of 104 million it is bigger than most Asian countries, the exceptions being India, Indonesia and Japan. With a gross domestic product of US$842 billion it is exceeded only by Japan, India, Australia and South Korea, and is about the same size as Indonesia's (US$847 billion). Its economy is more than twice the size of Thailand's GDP (US$346 billion) and four times the size of the economy of the Philippines.

For a company targeting Britain, there are only two cities with populations of more than one million. Even the US has only nine cities of more than one million people. Guangdong has 21 cities with populations of more than one million. China, says Hong Kong consultancy Strategic Access, is more like the European Union, rather than the US, in that it is a networked group of independent economies that have similar rules but can operate quite differently.

Part of the reason for misunderstandings over the scale, size and nature of the mainland's different economies is the fault of the mainland government, the consultancy says. In seeking to present the mainland as a "unified and harmonious single nation", its leaders are reluctant to dwell on its reality as "a huge, diverse, fragmented federation of poorly integrated economies in which even domestic companies face perilous challenges from domestic competitors".