China inflation: Boiling point?
By Tom Mitchell in Monday’s FT
Last year, auto workers in southern Guangdong province warned the world not to take cheap Chinese labour for granted when they successfully agitated for higher wages in a series of industrial actions.
Last week, Shanghai truckers reinforced that message with a strike of their own. Continue reading »
Beauty and the beast: the health lobby and China’s Big Tobacco
There is Big Tobacco and then, in China, there is very, very Big Tobacco. The China National Tobacco Corp is the world’s largest cigarette maker.
According to the Tobacco Atlas, published by the American Cancer Society and World Lung Foundation, CNTC controls 32 per cent of the global cigarette market – almost as much as the No 2 and 3 companies, Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco, combined. Surprisingly, the global public health lobby has come a long way in China. Continue reading »
Chinese tycoon prefers heritage items and western baubles
Empires like to collect booty. The Romans scoured their realm for strange beasts and other exotica, parading them through their capital. The British helped themselves to the Elgin Marbles, taken from the Acropolis.
But as the economic power of once looted regions grows, treasure can start flowing the other way. In Macao Stanley Ho, the Eurasian gaming tycoon and Chinese chauvinist, has “returned” artefacts to his motherland. Continue reading »
Attendance at the European Central Bank’s fortnightly policy meetings tend to crimp the long-distance travel plans of Patrick Honohan, governor of the Central Bank of Ireland. Taking advantage of the annual August lull back on his home continent, on Monday Honohan was able to speak at a seminar at the Hong Kong Bankers Club and take in its views of the city’s ever changing skyline.
Across the harbour, workers are putting the final touches to the International Commerce Centre, Hong Kong’s tallest – and the world’s third tallest – building. “It’s always some [change] like that when you come to this region,” the central banker said, almost wistfully, before picking out some similarities between his country and fast-growing Asia. Continue reading »
Mongolia races to meet China’s needs
SouthGobi Resources owns the right asset in the right place at the right time. The Hong Kong-listed Mongolian mining company is controlled by Ivanhoe Mines of Canada, and operates the Ovoot Tolgoi mine just 40km from the border with China.
Since March, Oovot Tolgoi has produced about 200,000 tonnes of coal a month, most of it destined for Chinese steel mines and power plants. Continue reading »
China: why are Japanese groups struggling to manage their workers?
Is it mere coincidence that the strikes that have hit foreign carmakers in China have affected only Japanese companies not their US, European and South Korean rivals? Or is there something about Japanese management that has invited trouble?
With the industry internationalising so many practices, the question might seem 20 years out of date. After all, much of what is now regarded as best practice is common to most big carmakers – with a big contribution to raising efficiency coming from Japanese companies, headed by Toyota Motor.
But, as a report by correspondents in today’s FT shows, Japanese executives seem to have had more difficulties handling relations with their Chinese workers than western competitors – perhaps because western companies headed by Volkswagen, have been in China longer and established deeper roots. Continue reading »
China: the US ambassador dodges a few questions
When they built the Sheraton Futian Hotel in Shenzhen, the Chinese special economic zone bordering Hong Kong, they must have harboured an aspiration to one day host US government press conferences. The hotel’s West Lobby could be in Washington, with its wall-to-wall marble and six large eagle statues providing the perfect backdrop for America’s ambassador to Beijing.
Jon Huntsman came south to attend an intellectual property rights forum and was keen to talk about the issue. Unfortunately for him, the assembled press corps – comprised of local media, the Financial Times’ south China correspondent and Plastic News’ Asia bureau chief – were only really interested in labour unrest and the renminbi. Continue reading »
Dispatch from an outpost of labour rights in China
By Tom Mitchell in Xiaolan
The southern outskirts of Xiaolan township are heavily industrialised and home to tens of thousands of migrant factory workers, but few people here know the location of the local chapter of China’s only government-sanctioned union.
Yang Su is an exception. Yang operates an unlicensed motorcycle taxi in the area. When a strike began last week at a nearby Honda supplier, he ferried a few aggrieved employees to the union office.
While the Xiaolan Union Work Committee is no more than a 15-minute ride away on the back of Yang’s motorcycle, it seems much farther removed than that from the gritty streets of southern Xiaolan. Continue reading »
The bubbling Honda worker economy
Large investments by major multinational corporations in China can have some interesting socioeconomic effects at the most micro of levels.
In their infinite wisdom, the ancestral founders of Yili village in southern Guangdong province decided to settle near the future site of a Honda components plant. Only a small, stagnant river separates the two.
When the day shift ends at Honda Lock, scene of the most recent strike to affect the Japanese carmaker’s China operations, Yili villagers spring into action. Continue reading »
Honda in China: a tale of two plants
In China, you can tell a lot about a factory by the company it keeps. The larger the investment, like a wholly-owned Honda transmission factory, the fewer the neighbours. The smaller the project, such as a Honda-linked car lock plant, the less imposing the location. And for the workers , size definitely matters. Continue reading »
China workers’ morale suffers piece by piece
Every T-shirt is ironed at least once in its lifetime – as part of the packaging process. At a large textile plant in southern China, employing tens of thousands of workers, young men iron T-shirt after T-shirt at an amazing clip. Their jerky movements are so quick and efficient, it is like watching a video on fast forward.
They do so for eight hours a day, and longer when working overtime. Their piece-rate pay structure is a function of output. The faster they work, the more T-shirts they iron, the more money they make. Continue reading »
Test drive leads to US road trip for Chinese-made mycar
When Terry McAuliffe, Bill and Hillary Clinton’s favourite fundraiser, first saw a China-made electric car on the streets of London, he decided he just had to take it for a spin. “I’m not a carjacker – can I drive your car around the block?” he asked the startled owner of the “mycar”, a 726kg electric vehicle designed by Hong Kong-based EuAuto Technology.
The owner relented and, after a short test drive, Mr McAuliffe decided his own electric car company, GreenTech Automotive, would track down and buyout the mycar’s manufacturer. Last week, while visiting Hong Kong as part of a delegation led by Gary Locke, US commerce secretary, GreenTech Automotive closed the deal for an undisclosed sum. Continue reading »
Icelandic ash casts a cloud even in Shenzhen
It was mostly an all-G2 affair at the official opening of UPS’ new Asia-Pacific hub in Shenzhen, the Chinese manufacturing centre north of Hong Kong. The Sino-US symbolism on display included a Chinese vice mayor, an American consul general, jazz on the sound system and a lion dance.
Europe, however, was not forgotten at Tuesday’s ceremony. UPS’s business between Asia and the EU is growing at a 40 per cent clip. “I look at my PDA every five minutes to see where the ash is going,” said Dan Brutto, president of UPS International, referring to the latest disruptions to EU air traffic from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano. Continue reading »
UC Rusal’s controversial, but ultimately successful, Hong Kong listing was supposed to be the harbinger of an important new geoeconomic trend. If the heavily indebted aluminium group, controlled by oligarch Oleg Deripaska, could raise $2.2bn on the Chinese special administrative region’s stock exchange, surely other Russian resource companies would follow its lead. Continue reading »
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