10 How to Have the Worst of Both Worlds Shanghai
There may be an even better way of getting a cat to eat a hot pepper. Make the cat a senior vice president for sales at a global hot-pepper conglomerate and promise to open mainland China to hot-pepper imports. I went to Shanghai to see what was taking over Hong Kong, and to Hong Kong to see what was being taken. And in the month I spent visiting these two parts of China, every employee of an international corporation I met said that the “reunification” would be good for business. The corporations are seduced by the idea of 1.2 billion mainland customers. It has become a mantra for marketing departments around the world. “Om, one point two billion.” Management is mesmerized. Right now the board of directors at Boeing is sitting around going, “One point two billion . . . boy, if just one half of one percent of those people bought a 777 . . .” Not that the corporate executives aren’t worried about communist abuse of human rights. They’ve been deeply concerned about this for years. Here is the chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia Ltd., quoted in The Washington Post business section, agonizing about the events of Tiananmen Square: “The border was closed. JCPenney stock went down because their entire fall supply of shoes had to come across the border.” But on July 1, 1997, the day after the Hong Kong handover, Lehman Brothers, Samsung Electronics, Chase Bank, Singapore Airlines, Canadian Airlines, AT&T, Credit Lyonnais, Maxell Tapes, Louis Vuitton, and that White House favorite, the Lippo Group,***** had congratulatory ads in the former colony’s English language papers. And Toshiba had decorated the top floors of its Hong Kong headquarters so that its logo was visible in almost every outdoor TV shot or still photo of the handover ceremonies. No offense to businesspeople, of course, especially if they happen to own
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online