http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2014-01/13/content_17231625.htm
Doing business the Chinese way
By Chen Yingqun (China Daily) Updated: 2014-01-13 09:57
After many years of incubation, UK version of a best-seller has appeared
Ambitious Chinese youngsters have long sought to learn from Western economic
theories and best practice, so why don't they tap into wisdom closer to home?
The business expert Zhao Yanchen reckons that not only Chinese but people
everywhere can learn from Chinese business practices. He is on a mission to
make sure they do.
Zhao Yanchen's book The Causes of Wealth of People, a best-seller in China over
the past 10 years, is based on Chinese people's experiences of starting
businesses in the country.
An English translation of the book has just been published.
"These are insights and experiences of Chinese entrepreneurs born and bred in
China," Zhao Yanchen says. "I think it gives a fresh, Eastern perspective to
Western business people, including those doing business with Chinese
entrepreneurs."
The book looks at what laws are inherent from the time a project is chosen, he
said, adding that it answers fundamental questions about the gestation of
business, birth, growth and maturity.
Zhao Jing, founder of ChinaWise, a business advisory firm in Chicago that
facilitates business and cultural exchange between the United States and China,
says the book's publication is well-timed, particularly for those who have
business dealings with China.
"In China, many home-grown businesspeople are a mystery to Westerners," she
says. "They have been highly successful in the past few decades and are now
going global, so it is important for Westerners to understand how they think,
how they handle business and make decisions."
Lloyd Shefsky, a clinical professor on Entrepreneurship at Kellogg School of
Management at Northwestern University in Illinois, says the book provides not
only lessons on setting up and operating new ventures, but also interesting
perspectives on business and entrepreneurship in China, as well as Chinese
culture generally.
In the foreword of the book, he writes: "Not everything in this book is
directly applicable in other countries, but you can increase your understanding
of entrepreneurship in your country by constantly comparing and asking why a
practice or principle is different in China."
Zhao Yanchen, 59, a native of Jilin province, is widely recognized as the
founder of the entrepreneurship discipline system in China. He chairs China
Entrepreneurship Intelligence, a national organization that promotes
entrepreneurship.
He was once an economic scholar, publishing many influential articles and
became a provincial departmental-level official of Hainan province. But in 1989
he gave up his position and went into business.
"When I was a scholar, I wrote and lectured about economics theories to
entrepreneurs and students, mainly based on collected materials and cases from
China and overseas," he says. "But I knew that one's horizon and depth of
knowledge is limited by one's experience.
"When I realized that all my theories and writings were of little interest to
anyone, I decided to go into business and experience the market economy after
reform and opening-up began in the 1980s."
He set up four companies over the next 10 years through thick and thin,
managing not only to survive but to turn a profit. He did that through methods
such as adjusting the scale of operations, reducing costs and innovating. With
one company he was able to make about 3 million yuan ($495,000) in the first
two years.
In 2000 he made another big career change, abandoning business and taking up
writing.
"I think there are some inner rules about how to make a company and a project
grow out of nothing, then survive," he says. "I wanted to write down my
thoughts so people could learn from my failures and success."
It took him three years and 14 days to finish writing The Causes of Wealth of
People in the remote Yuanyang Valley of the Huangshan Mountain in Anhui
province. The only book he took with him was Tao Te Ching (or Daodejing) by Lao
Tze, the founder of Daoism, which he thought would have great impact on Chinese
culture and people's behavior.
After the book was published in 2004 he received more than 10,000 letters from
readers, he says. He has since written 18 more books to illustrate ideas he
expressed in the book and explain how to put his ideas into practice.
He came up with the idea of translating the book in 2006 when an
entrepreneurship wave swept across China. That year at Tsinghua University he
attended a dialogue with US scholars about entrepreneurship.
"There was an enthusiastic audience in the hall, and they treated him like a
rock star," says Zhao Jing, who met the author for the first time at that event.
Zhao Yanchen commissioned a well-known Chinese translator to translate the
book, but the translator found it too difficult. He then asked Zhao Jing, who
grew up in China, but has lived in the US for more than 15 years and had
started a business. For the past 10 years she has been teaching Westerners and
Chinese how to deal with each other and their respective countries.
Zhao Jing says that she used to think she clearly understood both Chinese and
Western cultures and that translating the book would be easy, but she was in
for a surprise.
"It's relatively easy for someone who understands both cultures to read the
book. But for pure Westerners it is very difficult because the book is
particular to China and its culture, so how to translate it properly left me
perplexed," she said.
She got literary experts to look at her translation, but found many
cross-culture problems, which they thought too difficult to solve. So she
turned to her husband Joseph Cesarone, who had helped in revising her
translation projects before.
"When she took this book on, it sounded intriguing, given both my long-standing
interests in economics and in China, as well as my new and growing interest in
entrepreneurship," he says. "Upon first reading the book I knew that it would
not be an easy project, but I knew it would be a very interesting, worthwhile
and rewarding endeavor."
Cesarone says they have worked on it periodically over two years, and he
contributed about four months on it full-time.
One thing that made the translation difficult is that it is written in a rather
poetic and free-form style, which they wanted to preserve as much as possible
without losing the meaning or confusing the reader. That was a delicate balance
to achieve, he says.
There are also many Chinese cultural references that were used to make a point
or to add humor, which by themselves would be lost in translation to most
Western readers. They had to add explanatory text here and there without it
becoming a distraction.
Finally, there are various novel concepts in the book, such as "soul capital"
and "root capital". They were keen to ensure these terms were translated as
accurately and consistently as possible, Cesarone says. "To me, the most
interesting parts were Mr Zhao's personal anecdotes of his own entrepreneurial
efforts and those of other entrepreneurs whom he assisted, as well as the
Eastern philosophical underpinnings to his theories, such as the Tao of
entrepreneurship and the relevance of Sun Tzu's Art of War to entrepreneurial
efforts."
