I have to claim that all the content belong to my personal opinion; I do not represent anyone and this post does not represent any group or individual's opinion!
It is well known that China has the biggest population ratio in the world and obviously along the development, China also has the most public internet users. This element attracted many big worldwide web companies so that they all want to take some market share from this huge internet market. However, not many worldwide web companies have earned the success they expected. Reason ???? Cultural Differences!
I was born in China and raised in China until my college time came into play. I have gone back to China for visiting almost every year since I came to Canada. During the many years I have been in China, I have traveled lots of places. Since elementary school, I have been sent to private schools away from my parents. I even attended my high school in Beijing. Therefore, I believed that the experiences I gained from China is enough for me to point out at least something (Of course I am not able to talk about all). In addition, I have been studying and working overseas for almost 5 years now and I have known and have been good friends with many people who are from different countries worldwide.
The Society & The Population
The biggest problem I think that causes lots of companies to have no clue what to do about the Chinese big market is that they do not understand China enough. My classmates and even some of my good friends all think communist countries like China share everything with each other equivalently. OMG, I found it was stupid! How do people think like that? It was such a naive thought. "China is a communist country which has special characteristics of China" this is how the society of China is summarized. Why is it still a communist country if people do not share everything they have? Because the nature of human already disagreed with it. Everyone is selfish, although some of people are not as selfish as others, although the level of selfishness of some people are very low, we are still selfish. China can not achieve perfectly communist because of its population, its history and many many more reasons that I personally can not come up with. Think in this way, if there were only 2 people, you and your best friend; if you are not very rich and your best friend is not very poor, you can probably share everything you have with your best friend. Can this still happen if any of the conditions stated above is changed?
The Power & The Population
Some people in China are very unhappy with the Communist Party in China. It is nothing weird or unusual. Because Communist Party is the only party holds the power in China, there must be people unhappy and happy with it. Since elementary school, we have had a class leader from the students in each class. Wait a minute, it maybe another difference between China and Western Countries like US and Canada. We have had a class leader since elementary school, who helps the teachers manage the class. Why can't a teach himself or herself manage the class? Reason 1, we have too many students in each class, my elementary school had 37 students in each class (well, it was the first private school in my hometown, not many people could afford at that time), other public elementary schools probably had 60-70 students in each class. My Junior highschool class had 68 students.... Reason 2, the leadership needs to be educated to students, but reason 1 truly is the main reason. Of course some students are unhappy with how the leader manages but if the leader can stand at his position, it means the people who are happy with him are more than the people who are not. Usually what happens is that this leader will lead the class for the entire 6 years at the elementary school. Will the changing of the leader improve the overall performance of the class or make a lot of differences? Most likely NOT! China is like a big class. If the power was controlled by some other unknown parties, could China have developed as fast as what it does now? Most likely NOT.
I remember at elementary school, each grade of the school had one flag. The class which can obtain this flag indicates that it has been doing the best in the past week. How does the school determines which class gets the flag? There were checkers in each grade, and they do not check the quality of products! They check the quality of students. Those checkers also came from each class in a grade, but the checkers were not supposed to check the students from their own class. They check if students do not respect teachers and other students, if students swear, if students whisper during the class time and if students wear uniform and wear uniform correctly and so on. Generally, schools which are doing well in my hometown all operate like this. I can not summarize what it means and how it is related to knowing the Chinese culture but I believe some of you are able to come up with some thoughts about this.
Economy and The Population
China is well known as a country that was not very much affected by the currently bad economy. People in the US are selling their houses and cars because losing jobs caused them not to be able to afford those objects. What about in China? My parents got a new car in 2009. Popular cars in the dealers are always out of stock and people need to pay extra money to get the cars they want. To encourage people buying cars, car dealers have lowered the price of their cars in the US. This is exactly the same thing happened in China, but why there is still such a big difference? Because western people like to spend the money they will be making in the future at present, whereas Chinese people chose to save money first then spend it on something they want to buy when they have enough. It is an arguable discussion because truly, Chinese people will never enjoy as much as American or Canadian people would. However, if you look at this problem in a big picture. Because Chinese people have money to spend in the bad economy, dealers and stores will not stop selling products to consumers (they are still making money), then people who work at stores and dealers will not lose their jobs, then factories will still have to make products to feed the need from stores and dealers, then people who work at the factories will not lose their jobs either, at the end the people will still make money then start this circle again. Then think of combining how many Chinese people there are with this circle. (At here, I do not want to talk about any sensitive things such as how governments controls the economy very well. All I have talked about is what everyone can easily see.)
The Education & The Population
There is no need to talk about how school educate students because at the end, it is just the same thing as any other countries; plus I already talked a little bit in the "The Power & The Population" section, but let's talk about the education from parents.
American people and Canadian people believe that Chinese people are not open enough. I certainly agree but it depends on from which way you are looking at the openness. Let me ask you this question, have you ever dated with a Chinese boy or girl? Have you ever hanged out with a Chinese person for so long that you could say that you know him or her very well? No matter what your answer is, we all certainly agree that the education from parents is very very important, but I could certainly say that the education from the parents in China is more important than the education from school. My dad always tells me "If you wanna be successful on your career, you have to know how to become a good person". There are some differences about this topic between China and US/Canada.
For example, it is clear that eventually when kids grow big, they will all have girlfriends and boyfriends, and they will all know everything about sex. However, none of the Parents would want their kids to think about this too early because it maybe a bad influence to their studying and living, even in the US and Canada. However, maybe American and Canadian parents think they do not have to be too worried about this as long as they tell their kids "not to"! It is different in China; Chinese parents can not only tell their kids "not to" because of the population. When the population raises, the bad influence gets worse. Let's think in this way: if there were only two people and one person believes in something and trying to convince the other person to believe in it, the second person will probably believe in it or probably not, so there is an equal possibility of being influenced or not; but if there were four people and two of them believe in something and two of them don't, and if the first two people try to convince one person from other two then the other, the possibility of the second two people being influenced got much higher. You will probably say "I will never just believe something when people just tell me to", but if you think about this to a kid. Kids are much more easily influenced. That's why Chinese parents have higher responsibility of educating their kids to not badly influence others and to not be badly influenced. In other words, Chinese kids need to be watched tightly.
The Average Salary & The Population
When your thinking about opening a business in China, what you are looking at is the population. You might think "China has 1.5 billion people, if every of them buys my product, I will make so much money", but usually you will always question yourself "How many of them will actually buy my product?" It is well known that usually it depends on the quality and price of the product. People usually say something like "you get what you paid for" and ideally, the quality is proportional to the price. However, the ideal case needs to be broken in China.
Chinese consumers do not make as much money as American and Canadian consumers do. At this point, I am talking about average salary. There is surely people in China making billions of dollars a year and that amount of people is actually quite a bit if you compare with the amount of the rich people at the same level in the US or Canada; but comparing to 1.5 billion Chinese people, that amount is very very small. If you are targeting at the Chinese rich people, you can skip this section absolutely but keep in mind, if you are just targeting the rich people in China, then the 1.5 billion population doesn't really make much difference for your business anyways. To state this, the amount of Chinese people who make less than average salary is much much more than the amount who make more than the average. The key to win the business in China is to know how to make the money from the poor people.
For instance, years ago, Microsoft was almost equivalent to a monopoly in the computer operating system market. All of the computers on the market came with Microsoft windows at that time. Their windows 95 was sold for 89 dollars in the US. It wasn't expensive at all if you think about that Microsoft had invested billions of dollars on it. To many Chinese people, that 89 dollars at that time could feed a whole family for a month. If you argue that we should not talk about that period because not many people owned a personal computer， we will talk about 2009. In 2009, the average salary in China per-person is approximately 3500 Chinese yuan, which is equal to about 500 US dollars. Windows 7 home premium on Microsoft.com is listed 199 US dollars for the Full version and 119 for the upgrade version. Would you buy a windows 7 home premium if you only make 500 dollars a month? What does it the high price cause? Answer is: cracked software and even an alternative which will cost less or nothing, like linux system. Not to surprise you, a cracked version of Window7 perfessional in China is sold for about 3 US dollars, which may have problems but price is already much more important than quality in this case. but Microsoft is very smart about that, they have been selling home basic version which only costs 399 Chinese yuan (about 60 US dollars) to encourage the Chinese market.
I just hope that my experience will give some of you a hint when you want to open a business in China. Please forgive me if the content is not very well organized and maybe even not easily understandable. I will continue to write if I have more time
