China - worth shelving your ethics for?
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

If you have a bunch of state bureaucracies each meddling in internet regulation and risking hampering its development then the sensible thing is to consolidate them into one accountable body. But when the country facing such a problem is China, that’s unlikely to be all there is to it.

According to China’s State Council, the new State Internet Information Office will “direct, coordinate and supervise online content management and handle administrative approval of businesses related to online news reporting” – as well as investigating and punishing websites that violate laws and regulations. However Reuters points out that it’s unclear how much control the new Office will have over other agencies with fingers in the internet pie.

If you want to succeed in China, you may need to overcome some unique barriers, adds a new report from Forbes Insights on Marketing to the New Chinese Consumer. These include a lack of reliable market research, a lack of operational transparency in the Chinese marketing communications industry and a need to find qualified marketing talent and leadership.

To all of which you could add overcoming the pervasive censorship which for example, as Out-Law points out, bans Facebook from China altogether. Nevertheless, Forbes reports that there are more than 420 million internet users in the country so online marketing can only grow – and, with Chinese consumer tastes expected to “homogenise”, one can cynically calculate that they can still buy western goods on the web even if they can’t use it to join the Jasmine Revolution.

On the business-to-business side, if China is a great global manufacturing centre, it’s scarcely any sort of innovator. It’s set to become the world’s top patent publisher but, as Thomson Reuters intellectual property specialist Dave Brown told the Economist last year (LiveWire coverage here), many of the patents are of dubious value.

But a new book on Chinese innovation, Run of the Red Queen by Dan Breznitz and Michael Murphree of the Georgia Institute of Technology (reviewed in the Economist), suggests that innovation in processes and improvements to existing goods may yield even bigger dividends than pure invention – especially as the Chinese have a vast domestic market to sell to.

Yet problems doing business with China remain. It’s hardly the kind of place to process the personal data that goes hand-in-hand with eCommerce (see LiveWire comment) – and, as LiveWire has also reported in the past,  it’s had a dubious record of restrictive practices when it comes to financial and credit information.

But then there’s those 420 million internet users, in a country where five times more people are learning English than live in England. Perhaps that’s worth shelving your ethical principles for – until you get outed by WikiLeaks of course.

« Blog