China thoughts

Anyone who thinks the reason for offshoring to China is to cut costs has a very short-sighted view. You can be pretty certain that costs will remain competitive, because competitive prices make good business sense--but prices will not remain incredibly low. Better reasons for having work done in China are the large number of technical graduates, the large, available workforce, and the enthusiasm for learning and growing. China is producing twice the number of technical graduates per year as India, and many times that of the USA.

English is being taught from kindergarten onwards.
People are making business from anything and everything. If you want it, need it, think you might need it, perhaps may need it somehow somewhen somewhere.... you will be able to find it in China.

(Except for CNN news stories about trouble in Tibet. Those get censored out within a couple of seconds, leaving just a tantalising headline before the screen goes silent grey... "More protests against Chinese occupation in Tibet today" then the censor pushes the button.)

The business skills being displayed in China today are nothing new. Suppressed but never banished during the Cultural Revolution, they have reemerged and are evident everywhere, from the new, Western-facing businesses that have developed in just a few years from small offshore manufacturing and assembly operations for western companies to NASDAQ-listed software manufacturers. They are evident in the young girls selling in the Silk Street market, whose sales, marketing and negotiation skills will have you laughing as you walk away having paid twice as much as you would in San Francisco's Chinatown for something you didn't really need anyway. They are evident in the awe-inspiring architecture of the Beijing Olympic stadium, the opera house, and Shanghai's business district. Don't think of China as a cheap location for business, because it is anything but cheap--it's just lower-cost. For now.

Think this: Hong Kong was not Hong Kong because it was a British Colony. Hong Kong was Hong Kong because it was China with a free-market economy.

And then realise how big China is in comparison to the Hong Kong territories.

Think big.