https://www.scmp.com/rss/10785/feed Samantha has worked at the Post for four years. en https://assets.i-scmp.com/static/img/icons/scmp-meta-1200x630.png https://www.scmp.com The Potala Palace of seven decades ago was both sacred and profane. When the Fourteenth Dalai Lama arrived in Lhasa in 1939 to take up residence as a four-year-old, the winter seat of religious and administrative life was saturated with centuries of monks burning butter lamps and overrun with mice feasting on altar offerings. It was also riddled with intrigue and could be a dangerous place even for a revered child. In his memoir, The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong, Gyalo Thondup, an elder brother of... https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/books/article/1812070/book-review-noodle-maker-kalimpong-dalai-lamas-brother-pens-memoir?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/books/article/1812070/book-review-noodle-maker-kalimpong-dalai-lamas-brother-pens-memoir?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 30 May 2015 14:54:07 +0000 Towards Forgiveness: Sino-Tasmanian Stories From Two Islands by John Biggs Ginninderra Press Two islands, two centuries, and just under 200 pages of shared personal relationships between Hong Kong and Tasmania. That's the big idea behind the collection of short stories in Towards Forgiveness, a book that can be assimilated just as swiftly during a layover at Kingsford Smith airport as during a wait for the 3am ferry to Discovery Bay. The book gets off to a promising start with some colonial-era... https://www.scmp.com/article/1003484/towards-forgiveness-sino-tasmanian-stories-two-islands?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/1003484/towards-forgiveness-sino-tasmanian-stories-two-islands?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 09 Jun 2012 16:00:00 +0000 Traveling the Silk Road by Mark Norell, Denise Patry Leidy and the American Museum of Natural History Sterling Signature If nothing else this book, Traveling the Silk Road - Ancient Pathway to the Modern World, leaves the reader with a new appreciation for camels. The authors of this lavish hardcover present such a magnetic portrait of these shaggy desert ships that it draws the most reluctant urban nomad into the world of a previously repellent animal. The knowledge alone that the dung of a... https://www.scmp.com/article/987448/traveling-silk-road?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/987448/traveling-silk-road?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 10 Dec 2011 16:00:00 +0000 A New Thoughtfulness in Contemporary China by Jorg Huber and Zhao Chuan HKU Press Art criticism runs the same risks as a movie version of a novel - it hardly ever lives up to the original. But in A New Thoughtfulness in Contemporary China - Critical Voices in Art and Aesthetics, editors Jorg Huber and Zhao Chuan have produced a rare thing: a collection of essays that stands on its own as a work of beauty. The Hong Kong University Press publication is an antidote to the international hype that... https://www.scmp.com/article/986037/new-thoughtfulness-contemporary-china?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/986037/new-thoughtfulness-contemporary-china?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 26 Nov 2011 16:00:00 +0000 Consumptionomics by Chandran Nair John Wiley & Sons A global agreement on climate change is doomed from the start. The West, made rich by the consumption-fuelled growth that drives the world economy, will only reduce its environmental impact insofar as it can retain its present ways of life. The effects of the free market's degradation of natural resources are remote and any price seems too high to justify lower growth. But developing countries, particularly in Asia, don't have that luxury.... https://www.scmp.com/article/970991/consumptionomics?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/970991/consumptionomics?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 18 Jun 2011 16:00:00 +0000 Dragon of Life (parts 1 and 2) by Mathew Macau Moon Tiger International There are people who deserve to inherit wealth through their generosity of spirit alone. They are the natural social aristocracy, people who have an eye for quality over ostentation, who appreciate the gentle art of conversation and yet who are willing to take a risk on a new venture. Luke Whitaker, the lead character in Mathew Macau's eight-part Dragon of Life series, has been moulded in this image. The well-educated,... https://www.scmp.com/article/969040/dragon-life-parts-1-and-2?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/969040/dragon-life-parts-1-and-2?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 28 May 2011 16:00:00 +0000 The buildings Michael Wolf photographs are not long for this world. They're an endangered architectural species that may soon only live on in the fossil record of Wolf's pictures. They once thrived in Hong Kong's post-war explosion of commercial activity but have since slid into 21st century decline, thanks in both cases to the city's voracious appetite for change. They're 'corner houses', an indigenous kind of structure defined by little more than the obvious - they sit on the end of a block.... https://www.scmp.com/article/737502/forgotten-corners?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/737502/forgotten-corners?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 05 Feb 2011 16:00:00 +0000 Vidal: The Autobiography by Vidal Sassoon Pan MacMillan HK$260 Vidal Sassoon has his mother to thank for introducing him to two of his lifelong passions: hairdressing and Israel. Betty was a robust and resourceful woman from a Jewish family that had fled the anti-Semitism of Kiev for London's East End. In the aftermath of the second world war, she cajoled him into picking up the scissors and hosted Zionist gatherings in their home. One was a counter to poverty, the other a... https://www.scmp.com/article/733730/vidal-autobiography?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/733730/vidal-autobiography?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 18 Dec 2010 16:00:00 +0000 The World that Changes the World by Willie Cheng et al (ed) John Wiley & Sons HK$240 Somewhere in the limestone hills of Guizhou, a group of women making handicrafts are wondering how they can market and distribute their products so they can supplement their rural incomes. They have something to sell but not the business skills, the contacts or the seed money to make the value-added venture work. Several hundred kilometres away in Hong Kong, a self-made billionaire launches a... https://www.scmp.com/article/731149/world-changes-world?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/731149/world-changes-world?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 20 Nov 2010 16:00:00 +0000 Michael Chou is fairly sure this is the one. The Champion Auction president is pretty confident that by the time the hammer falls today at the 11th Champion Auction at the Hyatt Regency Hong Kong Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui, the Yunnan Spring 1910 Silver Dragon Dollar will have become what he says is the first Chinese coin to sell at auction for more than US$1 million. 'In private transactions there are coins sold for over a million dollars US. In public auction so far the record is about... https://www.scmp.com/article/722791/antique-silver-dollar-poised-smash-us1m-barrier?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/722791/antique-silver-dollar-poised-smash-us1m-barrier?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 21 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000 Singaporean George Lim began collecting coins in the early 1990s and initially focused his attention on coins and banknotes from the Straits Settlements, Malaya and Singapore. Lim started taking a serious interest in Chinese coins in the early 2000s, and around 2004, when a number of bigger Taiwanese collectors started putting some of their rarer items on the market, Lim got the chance to buy in. 'Some of the big collectors, due to old age and maybe some other reasons, started selling off their... https://www.scmp.com/article/722792/coins-come-full-circle?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/722792/coins-come-full-circle?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 21 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000 It's a frosty Beijing morning but the Gaobeidian traditional furniture street just off the Jingtong Expressway is buzzing with the sound of circular saws. There is the smell of sawdust as carpenters apply their tools to everything from classically inspired opium beds to full-length screens weighed down with heavy decoration. Sellers have flung open the doors to their cavernous emporiums and the first of the day's buyers have started the daunting task of sifting through thousands of items in... https://www.scmp.com/article/709179/you-dont-need-be-chair-professor?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/709179/you-dont-need-be-chair-professor?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 20 Mar 2010 16:00:00 +0000 What does a poet do when verse fails him? For Qiu Xiaolong, the solution lay in crime fiction. It was 1997 - just under a decade after the mainland writer and poet left to study literature in the US and two years since he had made his first visit back to his hometown of Shanghai. Qiu wanted to express his thoughts about the historic changes he observed in Chinese society, but poetry proved too personal. He needed a broader canvas, so over the next few years he set out using his adopted... https://www.scmp.com/article/703469/crime-times?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/703469/crime-times?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:00:00 +0000 It is testament to the reach of Chinese fiction that the translated works of its living writers can be found on the shelves of bookshops within and well beyond mainland shores. In the New Edition Bookshop, a popular bibliophile haunt in the port city of Fremantle in Western Australia, a translated copy of mainland-born Xiaolu Guo's voyage into the past, Village of Stone, sits near Xinran's migrant worker tale, Miss Chopsticks. Closer to home, at the Beijing Bookworm cafe, a magnet for the... https://www.scmp.com/article/701133/word-go?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/701133/word-go?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 12 Dec 2009 16:00:00 +0000 The figures are pink, mainly faceless, dismembered men in various degrees of pudginess, each sporting an orange dunce cap while standing on a raised red platform against a stark grey stage. They seem to be part of a grotesque performance but have been frozen in action in a still from a Flash computer animation work called Opera. The satirical image was conjured up by multimedia artist Wu Junyong, 31, from Fujian, and, according to Artnet.com, a digital print of it can be yours for around... https://www.scmp.com/article/699042/new-media-art-draw-portfolio-managers?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/699042/new-media-art-draw-portfolio-managers?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:00:00 +0000 The past came to Wang Gang like snowflakes. It was 1999 and three years since he had started, but not finished, writing English, the book that was to become his best-selling coming-of-age tale. Wang, by then a published author and television producer, was nearly 39 years old and, as he recalls, wandering around the campus of his former school in Urumqi, Xinjiang, he already felt like an old man. 'It was winter when I returned there,' he says. 'It snows quite hard and the snow remains fresh and... https://www.scmp.com/article/699026/through-past-darkly?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/699026/through-past-darkly?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:00:00 +0000 In China, the land of big numbers, 70,000 would not normally rate a mention, except that it represents a chasm in talent where it counts. According to Gerry Davis and Steve Langton, authors of Redefining Leadership - Competing in Asia in the 21st Century, the figure is the estimated shortfall in 'globally capable' mainland executives. The imbalance in home-grown supply and demand at the top looks set to persist for at least the next decade and will confront each company seeking to establish or... https://www.scmp.com/article/693797/skills-shortage-forces-firms-dig-deeper?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/693797/skills-shortage-forces-firms-dig-deeper?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 27 Sep 2009 16:00:00 +0000 Steve McKee writes from personal experience about being stuck. After 10 years in the advertising industry and as the co-founder of a leading regional firm, he had just collected an award for being one of the fastest-growing private businesses in the United States. It should have been a crowning achievement but McKee was uneasy. Back at the office, sales were down, staff were leaving and the company was failing to garner interest in its product. The firm was just spinning its wheels and nobody... https://www.scmp.com/article/692399/response-critical-stuck-companies?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/692399/response-critical-stuck-companies?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 13 Sep 2009 16:00:00 +0000 Mainland screenwriter Xie Xiaodong usually waits four weeks for government censors to rule on one of his scripts. With his new movie, Invisible Killer, set for release on the mainland on Friday, officials kept him waiting more than five months before giving him the green light. But then he is dealing with a controversial subject: so-called 'human flesh' internet searches, or renrou sousuo, which harness the power of the online community as an investigative force. Although cyber vigilantes have... https://www.scmp.com/article/690551/theyre-wired-mob?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/690551/theyre-wired-mob?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:00:00 +0000 It was to have been the biggest deal in Australian corporate history. In return for injecting US$19.5 billion into cash-strapped Rio Tinto, state-owned alumina producer Aluminum Corp of China (Chinalco) would have doubled its stake in the Anglo-Australian miner to 18 per cent. The deal collapsed but it represented a broader offshore push by mainland state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to secure access to natural resources. It also raised questions overseas about the links between the buyers and... https://www.scmp.com/article/690478/global-push-casts-light-state-firms?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/690478/global-push-casts-light-state-firms?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 23 Aug 2009 16:00:00 +0000 Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus made a big social impact by helping small businesses. In 1974, with the country battered by a string of catastrophic famines, natural disasters and a devastating war of independence, Yunus sowed the seeds for the microfinance movement by extending small loans to village women making handicrafts. The loans were an alternative to the high rates charged by local moneylenders and enabled many women to make major improvements in their living conditions. As an... https://www.scmp.com/article/689340/conscious-capitalists-look-beyond-profit?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/689340/conscious-capitalists-look-beyond-profit?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 09 Aug 2009 16:00:00 +0000 Soyabeans are dropping in Chicago as speculation mounts that China will release stockpiles, a British school group has left swine flu quarantine on the mainland and soaring property prices in the country have prompted calls for banks to be cautious about lending. And that is just in the last half-hour. Welcome to Twitter, the micro-blogging site that self-described social media expert Joel Comm claims can help businesspeople promote products, build a brand and generate interest in their... https://www.scmp.com/article/687992/tweeting-your-way-business-success?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/687992/tweeting-your-way-business-success?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 26 Jul 2009 16:00:00 +0000 Just over two years ago, residents of the lakeside city of Wuxi flooded the city's supermarkets in search of bottled water. A massive blue-green algal bloom outbreak in Wuxi's famed Lake Tai had contaminated tap water supplies for millions of the city's inhabitants, setting off waves of panic buying. The emergency was blamed on a number of factors, including raw sewerage pumped directly into the lake and the proliferation of polluting industries around the water source. But the crisis also... https://www.scmp.com/article/686647/banking-potable-water-asset-class?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/686647/banking-potable-water-asset-class?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 12 Jul 2009 16:00:00 +0000 The United States corporate landscape is littered with the still-warm wrecks of poorly managed companies, but if any aspiring or existing directors of mainland boards were looking to the American experience for pointers to improve their organisation's governance, they would do well to consult Texas-based Ram Charan's Owning Up - The 14 Questions Every Board Member Needs to Ask. Charan insists that the corporate world has irrevocably changed in the past two years and it is not enough for board... https://www.scmp.com/article/685192/post-crisis-pointers-board-members?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/685192/post-crisis-pointers-board-members?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:00:00 +0000 It took just three decades for China to transform itself from an economic backwater into America's banker. Since the reforms began in the late 1970s, China has posted average annual gross domestic product growth of more than 10 per cent, helping pull millions of Chinese out of poverty and securing the country's position as one of the world's biggest economies. In The Ascent of Money, British historian Niall Ferguson outlines the financial mechanics of the mainland economic miracle but also... https://www.scmp.com/article/682959/how-china-became-americas-banker?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/682959/how-china-became-americas-banker?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 07 Jun 2009 16:00:00 +0000 Few forces drive marketplace change like a prolonged economic slump. As consumers struggle to make more from less and reassess their habitual decisions, suppliers battle to keep up with the trade-offs and ahead of the competition. The changes are generally continual and dramatic, with fortune favouring the financially fit and flexible, according to Peter Steidl, author of Survive, Exploit, Disrupt, Action - Guidelines for Marketing in a Recession. In this era of evolutionary commerce, it's... https://www.scmp.com/article/682161/early-warning-still-best-defence?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/682161/early-warning-still-best-defence?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 31 May 2009 16:00:00 +0000 It seemed like a straightforward idea at the time: enlist a factory in Shantou apparently desperate for business to produce soaps and shampoos at a bargain basement price, sell the output overseas through a personal network of retailers and watch the profits grow. What could go wrong? The idea belonged to Bernie, the head of consumer products firm Johnson Carter. He had tried making his line of Galaxy Grape and Crazy Cherry bubble bath elsewhere with little luck and, like others before him,... https://www.scmp.com/article/680633/playing-game-situational-advantage?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/680633/playing-game-situational-advantage?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 17 May 2009 16:00:00 +0000 It is a measure of how much China looms large in the minds of business analysts that barely a page goes by without a reference to the mainland in a book heralding the decline of US economic might. In When Giants Fall, Michael Panzner sets out to tell the American reader that the days of US dominance are over and that any businessman worth his weight in inflation-hedging gold needs to prepare now to survive the days of chaos ahead. However, the book is equally an extended essay about China's... https://www.scmp.com/article/679072/challengers-us-dominance-lie-wait?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/679072/challengers-us-dominance-lie-wait?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 03 May 2009 16:00:00 +0000 It has been just under 20 years since Belgian Jack Leblanc heeded a call to go to China and arrived in Chongqing with a suitcase of science books to teach at a university. The freshly minted nuclear physics graduate had abandoned the prospect of a car and a house in the Brussels suburbs for the unknowns of the teeming, riverside metropolis. Since then, Leblanc has gone from teaching computer science on a pre-internet mainland campus to refining his version of the art of the deal in one of the... https://www.scmp.com/article/677456/starters-road-map-world-business?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/677456/starters-road-map-world-business?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 19 Apr 2009 16:00:00 +0000 Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said it best last week when he told a nightly news programme in the United States that the world's economic centre of gravity was shifting to the Asia-Pacific. The Putonghua-speaking former diplomat said China represented a huge opportunity for all in the 21st century, and it should not be simply viewed as 'all threats and all risks'. Anil Gupta and Haiyan Wang make a convincing case that India is also a growing core global business hub and the two... https://www.scmp.com/article/675204/place-china-india-core-firms-strategy?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/675204/place-china-india-core-firms-strategy?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 29 Mar 2009 16:00:00 +0000 To get a sense of the risks in the unfettered US credit default swap market, imagine a vast unregulated airline industry where flights take off without air traffic or ground controls. The contractual relationships between two parties are like flights between two destinations - apparently free-standing arrangements that are really part of an immense, interdependent network that demands government intervention to function sustainably. John R. Talbott uses the analogy in Contagion - The Financial... https://www.scmp.com/article/673500/tracing-root-global-meltdown?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/673500/tracing-root-global-meltdown?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 15 Mar 2009 16:00:00 +0000 In the end, mainland insurance monolith China Life Insurance decided not to put up its hand for the Asian operations of bailed-out American International Group (AIG). A China Life representative said on the weekend that due to the company's 'own arrangements', it was not putting in a bid. If China Life had gone ahead and bought the assets, it would have been a meeting of what Stephan Binder and Joseph Luc Ngai describe as one of the most valuable life companies by market capitalisation in the... https://www.scmp.com/article/671773/superior-products-key-success-insurers?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/671773/superior-products-key-success-insurers?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:00:00 +0000 Liu Qiongying's capacity for hard work and entrepreneurialism was evident at a young age. As a child, she helped her mother look after the family farm in Sichuan province by carting well water, and when she was still in her mid-teens, Ms Liu marshalled the cash and resources to open her own shoe shop. Today she stands at the helm of Aiminger Leather Goods Manufacturing in Chengdu, which at last count had three shoemaking factories and more than 3,000 employees. Ms Liu's rags-to-riches story ... https://www.scmp.com/article/670077/entrepreneurs-share-their-success-secrets?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/670077/entrepreneurs-share-their-success-secrets?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 15 Feb 2009 16:00:00 +0000 The path to serious individual wealth on the mainland last year was paved with home appliances, property, steel and solar technology. Other sources of the biggest-known personal fortunes were pig feed, dairy products, textiles, shipping and direct sales. The richest, Gome Electrical Appliances Holding's founder Wong Kwong-yu built up a business with outlets in 160 mainland cities before reportedly coming under a cloud for alleged stock market manipulation. Across the Pacific in the United... https://www.scmp.com/article/668619/road-super-riches-littered-quitters?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/668619/road-super-riches-littered-quitters?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 01 Feb 2009 16:00:00 +0000 With one billion-plus customers, an expanding economy and a rising middle class, the mainland market has largely been seen from outside as a potentially profitable numbers game. The financial turmoil aside, the country is still a major long-term prospect and so it is hardly surprising that foreign companies are continuing to try to stake a claim of their own on the mainland. But in his CFO Guide to Doing Business in China, Ching Mia Kuang points out that for all the numbers to add up, chief... https://www.scmp.com/article/666665/why-cfos-need-sweat-books?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/666665/why-cfos-need-sweat-books?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 11 Jan 2009 16:00:00 +0000 There was a joke doing the rounds before the US presidential election that no matter who won, the winner would wake up and demand a recount. Reading Peter Schiff's The Little Book of Bull Moves in a Bear Market, you can understand why - he sees no immediate or medium-term prospects in the economic future of the United States. Schiff is so down on the US economy that towards the end of the book he suggests that it might be a good idea to stockpile cornflakes, motor oil and other household... https://www.scmp.com/article/665212/us-investors-best-bet-abroad?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/665212/us-investors-best-bet-abroad?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 28 Dec 2008 16:00:00 +0000 If you read The Global Consultant just for its rare direct references to China, the mainland would appear to be populated by pragmatic Confucians hosting the Olympic Games and beset by nightmarish airports and environmental problems. The book seems to mention Bangkok and Sri Lanka more often than the world's fourth-largest economy. With that in mind, would-be global consultants with an interest in the mainland are better off looking at the general ideas instead of the specifics Alan Weiss and... https://www.scmp.com/article/663831/useful-tips-guide-wont-make-you-rich?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/663831/useful-tips-guide-wont-make-you-rich?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 14 Dec 2008 16:00:00 +0000 It's an ambitious idea, but if it takes off, bloodless medicine may allow mainland hospitals to overcome the national blood shortage and help reduce blood-borne infectious diseases. The term 'bloodless medicine' is a bit misleading - doctors do not perform 'dry operations' but, through a combination of techniques that rely on drugs and machines before, during and after surgery, they are able to greatly minimise the amount of blood lost during procedures and do away with donor transfusions. 'This... https://www.scmp.com/article/662567/bloodless-coup?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/662567/bloodless-coup?utm_source=rss_feed Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:00:00 +0000 When Guangdong officials gathered for a closed-door meeting last month, a provincial think-tank told them they needed to cut red tape and overhaul the province's industrial structure if they were to take the next step to development and survive the economic crisis. The idea was to encourage five of the province's cities to focus on their own economic specialties, moving away from the decades-old sole emphasis on manufacturing to value-added sectors such as financial services and... https://www.scmp.com/article/662104/taking-leap-making-serving?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/662104/taking-leap-making-serving?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:00:00 +0000 Like art, we know globalisation when we see it. It's Coca-Cola in Xinjiang, the Holiday Inn in Sanya and the credit crisis that bleeds from Wall Street to Iceland to a shire council in middle England. To its detractors, breaking down trade barriers spells doom and allows multinationals to trample on the interests of smaller players. But to its advocates, the borderless marketplace is the answer to every country's economic ills and the best thing since the invention of capital. Despite the... https://www.scmp.com/article/660473/globalisation-case-misplaced-fear?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/660473/globalisation-case-misplaced-fear?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 16 Nov 2008 16:00:00 +0000 Alittle over six years ago, two former top managers and an ex-chairman of listed retailer Zhengzhou Baiwen were handed suspended jail sentences and ordered to pay fines of up to 50,000 yuan (HK$56,700) for inflating the company's profits. The trio helped compile and release false financial reports to shareholders and the public, behaviour the Zhengzhou Intermediate People's Court was quoted as saying seriously damaged the interests of shareholders. The case was one of the rare instances at the... https://www.scmp.com/article/658704/signpost-dodging-corporate-minefield?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/658704/signpost-dodging-corporate-minefield?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 02 Nov 2008 16:00:00 +0000 When the global financial crisis is done and dusted, somebody will need to take stock of how Asian bankers weathered the storm. If Peter Hoflich does take up the challenge, it will make a neat companion piece to his book, Asia's Banking CEOs - the Future of Finance in Asia. The book's release comes just over a decade after the region's banks faced their last major shakedown, the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Eleven years ago, a lack of development meant the mainland's banking system was largely... https://www.scmp.com/article/656961/bankers-who-call-shots-future?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/656961/bankers-who-call-shots-future?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 19 Oct 2008 16:00:00 +0000 China Fireworks is a reassuring read in turbulent times. As financial titans fall and asset values evaporate, the investor can take refuge in the knowledge that there is still dramatic wealth to be made in the world's fastest-growing economy. Author and money manager Robert Hsu, a self-described 'momentum' advocate and 'one of the leading experts on investing in China's economy', shows the reader the way to those riches and an entirely new level of investing. His confidence in the mainland's... https://www.scmp.com/article/655201/momentum-investor-shows-way-riches?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/655201/momentum-investor-shows-way-riches?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 05 Oct 2008 16:00:00 +0000 Executive coach Frank Gallo could have used a professional guide when he arrived in Beijing eight years ago from the United States to work for an international human resources consulting firm. The credentialed leadership adviser had a wealth of experience to draw on but he struggled like any newcomer in his initial efforts to negotiate a fair price for a fair day's work with his mainland clients. In the end, Gallo's realisation that he was not playing by his clients' rules came from a... https://www.scmp.com/article/653514/doing-hard-yards-pays-coach?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/653514/doing-hard-yards-pays-coach?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 21 Sep 2008 16:00:00 +0000 The Qianmen branch of Beijing's Kentucky Fried Chicken operations has the distinction of being a piece of culinary history. It was there where more than 20 years ago KFC first planted its flag on the mainland and began rolling out a fast-food network that today extends into almost all of the country's administrative regions. In the beginning, some wondered aloud whether mainland diners would really go for the Colonel's recipe or be prepared to pay to eat at a quick-service restaurant, to give... https://www.scmp.com/article/651850/chewing-over-kfcs-fast-food-revolution?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/651850/chewing-over-kfcs-fast-food-revolution?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 07 Sep 2008 16:00:00 +0000 In the beginning there was Web 1.0. Producers created websites, consumers looked them up through portals and advertisers bought display space. Then came Web 2.0. Consumers started driving content, people linked up through social networking sites and marketers began losing control of what happened onscreen. Any second now, there will be Web 3.0. In all likelihood it will search for meaning, it will perform tasks on our behalf and cater to ever more niche groups. The digital will become personal... https://www.scmp.com/article/650254/brave-new-digital-world-explained?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/650254/brave-new-digital-world-explained?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 24 Aug 2008 16:00:00 +0000 As elite athletes and sports fans converged on Sydney for the Olympics eight years ago, representatives from the Australian design firm Woodhead International were sitting down to lunch at a business networking event with Singapore Airlines executives and officials from the city state's government. At some point, the conversation turned to plans for the interiors of Singapore's new Changi Airport terminal. Building on its experience in a similar job for the Sydney International Airport, Woodhead... https://www.scmp.com/article/648647/gold-grabs-after-games?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/648647/gold-grabs-after-games?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 10 Aug 2008 16:00:00 +0000 Just six years ago, the mainland did not have a single US-dollar billionaire. That all changed last year when the Hurun Report's annual rich list counted more than 100, putting the mainland second only to the United States in terms of this kind of extreme wealth. The list's publisher, Rupert Hoogewerf, said the wealthy were reaping the benefits of rising property prices and a burgeoning stock market. The new super rich are the tip of an iceberg of 195 million people on the mainland who,... https://www.scmp.com/article/646831/50-million-shoppers-cant-be-wrong?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/646831/50-million-shoppers-cant-be-wrong?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:00:00 +0000 Mixed results for city's effort to improve skills The automated voice on the meter said it all: 'Thank you for taking Beijing taxi, and your advice on our service is appreciated.' It was an oasis of comprehensible English in an otherwise Putonghua cab and part of the city's drive to become the very model of a modern, major international metropolis. In the past few years, Beijing has sought to get rid of its quirky variations of English and create a population of conversational anglophones in... https://www.scmp.com/article/645465/english-improving-fits-and-starts?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/645465/english-improving-fits-and-starts?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:00:00 +0000 Before there was Buick, Hyundai or Honda, there was Volkswagen. From around the late 1980s, the German car giant's Santanas were synonymous on the mainland to sedan, and even today a random sampling of five cars on Beijing roads will include at least two Volkswagen models. Martin Posth, a former member of the Volkswagen and Audi executive management boards, played a large part in the brand's growth in China. In his first-hand account of the early years, 1,000 Days in Shanghai, Posth... https://www.scmp.com/article/645154/vw-conquers-long-and-winding-road?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/645154/vw-conquers-long-and-winding-road?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:00:00 +0000