Reputation Management Online

It’s one thing for foreigners to trash your reputation and another to do it to yourself.  China has a reputation for producing things cheaply, but also for stomping all over intellectual property, general corruption and being difficult to work with. Nobody said they were inefficient… until now.

An article in the Daily Telegraph in the UK recounts the experience of a British entrepreneur trying to build motorcycles for the UK, and it does not make pretty reading for China.

“Victor is the most dishonest man I have met in my entire life,” says Chris, tersely. “But the problem is that no one takes any direct responsibility. The workers lie to their bosses. The bosses lie to the salesmen, the salesmen are our point of contact, but they don’t know what is going on,” he adds…

…When asked what had happened during the making of the prototype he freely confessed to having lied to Chris. “During all those months, I did nothing. Nothing at all. He asked what was happening, so I emailed him to say everything was fine and sent him photographs from a friend’s factory,” he says.

Businesses often defer to China when it comes to criticising them through fear of the response from the government, but over the past couple of months, there have been a notable number of articles questioning the reality of China’s economic miracle, suggesting that cheap workers rather than efficiency and business acumen lies at the heart of economic growth. Furthermore the yawning gap in business practices is a reality that many visiting businesses prefer to ignore or forget. As commentators have reiterated over hundreds of years: the Chinese, they are different!

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