Just found the article Special Delivery: UPS Moving Ancient Terracotta Army, and had to write a quick post as I think this a great example of how some firms are able to get themselves into the middle of some interesting things.

For those who have yet to visit Xi’an, these warriors are simply an amazing site, and they rank up there with the Great Wall and Forbidden City in terms of cultural significance.

According to the ariticle:

UPS (NYSE:UPS) today unloaded an exhibit of the 2,200-year-old Chinese terra cotta warriors, horses and other artifacts at its West coast air hub in Ontario, Calif., after a long flight from Shanghai.

to make this move possible, UPS actually had to take special care

The U.S.-bound exhibit was packed in 42 specially-constructed crates for movement in the 747-400:

So, for whoever sold this project on behalf of UPS, my hats off to you. In my mind, this is one for the books, and I am sure the people in Nanpu and Atlanta are gleaming over this

Note: for the sake of full disclosure, I was once an intern with UPS and they forced me to shave off my goatee.

Last year Andrew Hupert from Diligence China was kind enough to invite me over to the Itv-Asia office and pepper me with questions about china’s 2nd tier. For a number of reasons, I have just now figured out how to embed (i.e. shamelessly promote) this video.

A few things have changed factually since the video, but I still believe in the fundamental issues that I run through, highlight, and stutter over.

If you have trouble viewing through this post, click over to ITV’s site, but for those in China I should just warn you ahead of time that it is slow no matter how you cut it.

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Last year, specifically last summer, was an inflection point.. some say a tipping point.. for China. news stories surrounding Taihu, Slave labor, product safety, and cardboard dumplings had a huge effect on China’s policy makers.

It is something that I have covered on a number posts on All Roads (Summer 2007: A Catalyst for Environment Change in China and The Real Meaning of Public Hearings in Xiamen), on Crossroads (Xiamen PX: A Turning Point?, and The Relationship Between Pollution and Unrest) , and in presentations

and the Xinhua article Making all draft laws public, a new step to improve legislation quality is in my mind another step in the right direction for China, and China’s policy making mechanism.

Long a proponent that halfpats were the future in China , I recently came on two articles that I think have done a great job of identifying some of the issues that US business persons have with China.

The Fortune article You have 7 years to learn Mandarin is an piece on the fact that doing business in China is changing into doing business with China.

Reaching back to the years of Japan Inc., Geoff Colvin writes

While short-term investors are already cashing in on China’s growth by playing the global commodities boom, smart long-term thinkers are contemplating what happens when China matures from an exporter of cheap goods to a competitor in sectors where the U.S. is dominant - technology, brand building, finance.

To make sure firms/ individuals have a place in an area where China’s GDP is larger than the US (he thinks 2015 - I have my doubts) and when Chinese firms begin buying up or competing with US firms , he writes:

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A native of St Louis, I am used to the fact that my hometown is a 2nd tier US city.

The Gateway to the West, we are famous as a good sports town, the Arch, Anheuser Busch, and a few other things… but it is St. Louis’s geographic position that historically gave St. Louis an advantage.

If you have read the book The Box, or perhaps just read my post 3 weeks ago about the impact on US export opportunities following a shortage of containers, then you will have a basic understanding that geographic position + good logistics can = good business. And so it was with great excitement that I read the article St. Louis places a trade bet on China

Economically, St. Louis is a city that used to rely heavily on large companies like TWA, McDonnell Douglas, Monsanto, and Ford to provide its manufacturing base. the problem with that reliance is that many of these firms have moved, been scaled down, or have shuttered… and so a process of revitalization has been occurring, and it appears that St Louis is returning to its roots:

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With so much going on in China, and only a limited amount of bandwidth, I have created this weekly post to highlight articles that I feel are (1) important, (2) relevant, and (3) interesting.

This week there are 3 articles that I have chosen to highlight as each are quite interesting, they are all relevant, and there are issues within each that I think you the reader should be aware of.

If you have an article that you feel needs to be mentioned, please do so in the comments section. We all have different areas of interest and bandwidth, so I hope you will take some time and post those articles!
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More than anything else, when speaking to investors who know China well, it is China’s ability to seemingly care little about them when releasing regulations that tends to frustrate, irritate, and be of concern to them.

It is something that we saw on perhaps the largest scale last week when thousands of residents and visitors learned to the new visa regulations the hard way. Without warning. It is something that I have seen in action while working in the banking, real estate, and logistics industries.

One of my favorite conversations was with a real estate investor on June 2, 2006 while we were closing in on our deal. he was really shocked by the new taxation rules (5 year over/ under and 70% of new homes must be 97m or less), and essentially said “don’t they realize that they just made our model impossible?”. and the answer was easy for me.. “yeah, they know that, and when they stack our model up to the “China” model.. .they made the right decision”. Even though I personally lost out on the deal, I still stand by that.

After all, the regulations themselves were mature/ strong on their own, and we all knew that changes would be made to take the end off the first round (the 70% rule was eventually looked over by nearly everyone).

Usually, one of the first responses to a change in regulation, is to cry “its not fair”, and this is particularly true when someone has a bit of skin in the game. The regulations rarely offer any grandfathering, can sometimes come without warning, and that can hurt. there is a LOT of room for improvement on how the regulations themselves are released, and last week was just one case of many where someone made the decision without consideration of those who would be most directly impacted.. and how that impact would be felt.

In the case of the recent changes in visa regulations, there were two primary drivers that I think were in play:

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