Art of doing business the Chinese way

After many years of incubation, the English version of a best-seller has finally appeared

Ambitious Chinese youngsters have long sought to learn from Western economic theories and best practices. Why don't they tap into wisdom closer to home?

Business expert Zhao Yanchen reckons that not only Chinese but people everywhere can learn from Chinese business practices, and he is on a mission to make sure they do.

Zhao'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 recently been published.

"These are insights and experiences of Chinese entrepreneurs born and bred in China," Zhao says. "I think it gives a fresh, Eastern perspective to Western business people, including those doing business with Chinese entrepreneurs."

The book, he says, answers fundamental questions about a business' gestation, birth, growth and maturity.

Jing Zhao, founder of ChinaWise, a business advisory firm in Chicago that facilitates business and cultural exchanges 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 homegrown 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 of 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, 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 earlier an economics scholar, publishing many influential articles, and became a senior official in 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, but 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 three companies over the next 10 years, he says, and through thick and thin managed 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, he says. With one company he was able to make about 3 million yuan ($495,000; 364,000 euros) in the first two years.

In 2000 he made another big career change, abandoning business and taking up writing.

"I think that 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 to finish writing The Causes of Wealth of People, he says, in the remote Yuanyang Valley, 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 had 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 first 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, and 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 Jing Zhao, who met the author at that event.

Zhao Yanchen says he commissioned a well-known Chinese translator to translate the book, but the translator found it too difficult. He then asked Jing Zhao, 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.

Jing Zhao 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 got literary experts to look at her translation, but found many cross-cultural 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 to 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", and 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."

Zhao Yanchen says that in the past few years the enthusiasm for entrepreneurship has waned in China because many people want stability rather than risk.

"In the past few years the proportion of Chinese college graduates starting businesses has fallen sharply, and the number of new businesses succeeding is also very low, with only one person in 200 succeeding."

The rising cost of living, particularly of housing, means young people are under pressure, he says, but another reason for the failure to succeed in business is the lack of training for business people.

"Around 2006 people thought that as long as they worked hard, they could succeed," he says.

But in recent years, business education and training has promoted the idea that there are many prerequisites for starting out in business, which has killed enthusiasm and the spirit of innovation, he says.

Anyone can be an entrepreneur, as long as they have a dream and understand the essence and laws of starting a business, Zhao says. He is now a guest professor at Tsinghua University and says he wants to help young people realize their dream about business, small or large.

chenyingqun@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 01/10/2014 page22)