Chicken Curry Jiao

Have you ever tried Chicken Curry Jiao (鸡肉咖喱角,"角" means "corner") in any Chinese bakery? If not, you should try. It's one of my favorite treats,especially with breakfast or afternoon tea.It looks like a triangle shape (or other shapes) with many buff layers, filled with chopped onion, ground chicken breast. It's crisp when you bite the outside layers, then you can eat inside the delicious filling. Because I love it so much that I really want to make it at home. And I did it!

Ingredients:
1 tbs oil
1/3 pound ground chicken breast
1/2 onion,chopped
1 tbs curry powder
one egg, blend well  
one box of buff pastry, about to make 18. (you can find at supermarket)
Direction:
Prepare the filling:
Heat a wok over high heat,add the oil and heat until very hot
Stir-fry the onion, chicken breast for 5 minutes
Turn a medium heat
Add curry powder, blend well until onions become soft
Remove the wok, wait the filling compete cool
 
Prepare the buff sheets
Take the buff sheets out of the box,cut the sheet into squares, totally about 18 squares
Place a small amount of the filling into the middle of each square sheet
Fold  one corner to the top corner 
Stick the two sides of the sheet
Brush the triangle surface with egg wash
Place the pastries on the prepared  sheet pan
Preheat the oven with 400 F,place the pan into the up layer of the oven, about 15 minutes
Ready to serve

Thanks yeqiang.com for the three pictures above

Why Home Depot Struggles and IKEA Thrives in China?

At a time when China’s home furnishings market surged 17 percent, the largest U.S. home improvement company Home Depot has been struggling and closed five stores since it entered the China market in 2006.

Analysts pointed to the fact that a “do it yourself” culture does not exist in China. True.  Because labor costs are relatively low, many homeowners would rather hire someone to do the work than do it themselves. Apparently, Home Depot made the same mistake as some other companies that entered China without understanding the local market, which is often dramatically different from their home market.

Unlike consumers in the West, Chinese consumers have no role model from older generations. Home ownership was non-existent about fifteen years ago. It was then very common for a family, sometimes three generations, to share a 300-square-feet room that they used for sleeping, eating and daily activities. A kitchen was not even a necessity as many people simply cooked in a common area outside their room.

In the last fifteen years, home ownership has gone from practically zero to about 70 percent. However, many people have little sense of how to furnish or decorate a home.  They are very eager to learn from the West. This is one of the reasons that IKEA is very popular in China. Their Western-style showrooms provide model bedrooms, dining rooms, and family rooms showing how to furnish them. Their stylish and functional modern furniture is particularly appealing to young couples.

I visited IKEA in Shanghai. The 360,000-square-foot store was packed with people shopping for furniture and household appliances for their new homes. The store offers more than seven thousand products and features a five-hundred-seat restaurant and a spacious and colorful children’s playground. Some people come to IKEA to experience the Western style of living, or simply for recreation, as if it were a theme park.
While Home Depot reduced its stores in China from twelve to seven, IKEA plans to double the number of its stores from its current eight to fifteen by 2015. In a country where millions of new home owners are added each year, companies cannot afford to lose this potentially huge market. Here are some important lessons that we can draw from the Home Depot case:
    * Chinese consumers need to be educated as they have no role models. They are eager to learn but they need guidance. Companies that invest in educating the market can expect to reap handsome rewards.

    * Pay attention to local customers’ preferences. For example, the kitchen is usually small and considered secondary in a Chinese home. Chinese cooking usually blackens the kitchen with soot and grease and is the domain of an ayi, or household helper, who cooks for the family.

    * Most Chinese homeowners live in condominiums rather single family homes. They do not have a garage that can store tools and ladders. A more appealing package would be pre-designed interiors with installation included.

Since the Chinese consumer market is new and still emerging, companies have an opportunity to rebrand their products and services. For example, GM China has done a better job of truly listening to customers than GM North America has. Many middle class Chinese like to drive their parents around on weekends and some can afford to hire chauffeurs. GM’s Cadillac SLS model addresses the needs of the Chinese market for a roomy, luxurious back seat for chauffeur-driven riders.

In order for companies to succeed in a new market, it’s critical that they study the market and adapt to local conditions. It is still not too late for Home Depot to turn itself around in China.

/written by Helen H. Wang, Forbes/

Real Grapes You Should Try

I always miss the grapes grown in China. They are sweet but not too sweet, with a little flower's aroma, such as roses'. The grapes, however,  I bought in the supermarkets in the United States have no taste but sweet. If you have chance to visit in China, especially during the fall season, I strongly recommend that you'd better try grapes called 巨峰葡萄，or 玫瑰香葡萄.

The Facebooks of China

China's fake Facebooks started as mere copycats but now drive innovation in advertising and gaming. They've also built something unique in their country: a place where people can find love, speak out, and be whoever they want to be.

"Know anyone who has any needs? "

"I'm not sure, I can ask around for you."
"Don't you have any needs?"
"I just want to be with someone I love."
"Really, I'm not bad. Give it some thought."

It was the worst pickup attempt that Dong Jin had ever heard. You might think that something was lost in translation, that surely this sounds better in the original Chinese, but you would be wrong. That all this was unfolding online -- Dong, 26, a Beijing teacher, was being approached by a college student who had just friended her on the Chinese social network Renren -- made it even weirder. Scenes like this (many of them, fortunately, less awkward) repeat themselves hundreds, if not thousands, of times a day on the Facebooks of China.

The real Facebook is not available behind the Great Firewall of China, except to netizens rich enough and technologically savvy enough to buy access to proxy servers, because government censors have blocked it as a foreign threat. Twitter and Google are off-limits too.

In the absence of these web titans, dozens of Chinese copycats have sprung up, but none tell a story of evolving, modern China like the fake Facebooks, some of which mimic Facebook down to page architecture and color scheme. The leading social networks on the mainland are Renren, which, like Facebook, initially targeted the college crowd, and Kaixin001 (kaixin means "happy," and the 001 was added to give a techy feel to the name), aimed at young professionals.

In some ways, social networking in China is much like that in the U.S. It has spread well beyond its original target demographic. Office workers stay logged on constantly. Artists, singers, and secretaries post status updates a dozen times a day from their laptops or their cell phones. Grandmothers grow potatoes on local versions of FarmVille.

As with Facebook, the membership rolls are astounding and growing rapidly. In a 1.3 billion-strong nation where less than a third of the populace is online, Renren claims about 165 million users. A slogan on a chalkboard in an employee lounge at its HQ claims, "Every day the number of people joining Renren.com would fill 230 Tiananmen Squares." Kaixin001 says it has 95 million users.

In significant ways, though, online life behind the Great Firewall is different. For one thing, there is no dominant site. By blocking Facebook, the government has unwittingly ignited an especially fierce and litigious competition between Renren and Kaixin001. The two networks have pushed each other strategically and technologically, devising ingenious new ways to advertise to audiences that are even more saturated by marketing than Americans. Also, according to Netpop Research in San Francisco, Chinese Internet users are twice as conversational as American users; in other words, they're twice as likely to post to online forums, chat in chat rooms, or publish blogs. And to the joy of advertisers and marketers, social media is twice as likely to influence Chinese buying decisions as American ones, which explains why brands such as BMW, Estée Lauder, and Lay's have flocked to China's social networks.

Sites like Renren and Kaixin001 are microcosms of today's changing China -- they copy from the West, but then adjust, add, and, yes, even innovate at a world-class level, ultimately creating something unquestionably modern and distinctly Chinese. It would not be too grand to say that these social networks both enable and reflect profound generational changes, especially among Chinese born in the 1980s and 1990s. In a society where the collective has long been emphasized over the individual, first thanks to Confucian values and then because of communism, these sites have created fundamentally new platforms for self-expression. They allow for nonconformity and for opportunities to speak freely that would be unusual, if not impossible, offline. In fact, these platforms might even be the basis for a new culture. "A good culture is about equality, acceptance, and affection," says Han Taiyang, 19, a psychology major at Tsinghua University who uses Renren constantly. "Traditional thinking restrains one's fundamental personality. One must escape."

Put another way, a lot of people in China have needs -- and one of them is a place to be whoever they want to be.

Do not call Wang Xing the Mark Zuckerberg of China. Mark Zuckerberg is the Mark Zuckerberg of China. In 2003, Wang dropped out of a PhD program at the University of Delaware and returned to Beijing to create a local version of Friendster. It flopped. Two years later, he heard about this new thing called Facebook and decided to copy it.

If you want to read more, please click on Fast Company magazine at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/152/the-socialist-networks.html?page=0%2C1

Dreaming in Chinese

I just remember the first time I heard the book Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life,Love, And Language was in the New York Time Book Review section. Since I had the similar experience when I learned English - dreaming in English. And I am curious about how an America woman learned Chinese. So I borrowed the book from the local library and read it. It turns out a very interesting reading experience.

The author Deborah Fallows came to China with her husband and has lived there for three years. She learned Chinese language and characters based on their daily life and the culture context. She mentioned Chinese Pinyin system. There are four tones in the Pinyin system. I believe that it's very confusing to foreigners. For example, 狮，十，使，是, four Chinese characters have the same basic Pinyin letters"shi". But the tones are different. 狮（lion）is with the first tone, shī, a high tone；十（ten）is with the second tone, shí, rising tone；使 （to make）is with the third tone, shǐ, falling then rising；and 是（to be）is with the fourth tone, shì, falling tone.

I think it's also confusing if you heard the word in Chinese, like xīn. It could be the word  新，which means "new", or the word 心，which means "heart". It depends on which context the word is.

When I learned the differences between English and Chinese, I figured out that there is no space between two Chinese characters, but English words do(like "新年" in Chinese, "New Year" in English. ). Ms. Fallow also pointed it out.

The most confusing thing to speak English to me is when I say he/she/it/. In Chinese, they are three different characters 他/她/它 with the same Pinyin -- tā. As a born Chinese speaker, I don't have any problem to say them and never make a mistake on the gender when I heard the word. But once I speak in English, something happened unconsciously.If I say "she", while usually have "he" in my mind. Ms. Fallows talked about this linguistic phenomenon in her book.

Besides the above, the author explained how Chinese people say the directions, how Chinese characters are composed. Anyway, there are lots of knowledge and language learning experience we can read from the book. You also will deeply understand the culture context of China. I am sure that Ms. Fallows has already fallen in love with 按摩 and 拔火罐 of China.  

The daily Chinese:
打包 (dá bāo)：Do you do takeout?
很好 (hěn hǎo): Really good!
不可以 (bù kě yǐ ) : Not allowed
你好(nǐ hǎo) Hello
再见(zài jiàn) Bye Bye
厕所在哪里？(cè suǒ zài nǎ lǐ) Where is the bathroom?
谢谢！(xiè xie) Thanks

Good place look up Chinese Characters at this online dictionary 
You can find the book at amazon.com 

Meet Joe Wong

A molecular biologist walks into a comedy club and goes onstage...

Sounds like the perfect set-up for a joke, right? But in the case of Joe Wong, it actually happened. Joe holds a Ph D in molecular biology, still works for a pharmaceutical company on cancer research and is the comedian du jour in the US, making appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman and Ellen. This March, he's headlining the Radio and TV Correspondents’ Association dinner with President Barack Obama* in the audience.

How does a scientist – they don't exactly have a reputation for comedy – decide to make people laugh? For Joe, the realization came quite late.

“I was in college in China when I wrote two sketches. I thought one of them was quite funny. I never really thought about becoming a comedian until I came to the US.”

Joe went to the US in 1994 to attend university. After the company he was working for in Texas closed its doors, Joe moved to Boston, the mecca for stand-up comedy.

“I didn't even know there was an art form called stand-up comedy until I moved to Boston in 2001. I found out that there were comedy clubs here where people could go onstage and tell jokes. I went to a couple of shows and I was addicted,” Joe said. A few months later, he was performing onstage himself.

Joe grew up in Jilin province in northeast China and discovered comedy at a young age. “I grew up in the 70s and 80s and there was very little entertainment. We didn't have a TV, so I listened to the radio a lot. The programs that I enjoyed the most are xiangsheng or crosstalk.”

Crosstalk is about as close to stand-up comedy as you can get in China. It is performed by two people, one to set up the jokes and another to deliver the punchline.

What works in America may not necessarily work in China

Joe describes his comedy as intelligent and observational. “I know a lot of ethnic comedians in America make fun of their ethnic roots – Asians make fun of Asians and Italians make fun of Italians. My comedy is slightly different. It's more about observing American culture from an immigrant's point of view.”

His ethnicity, of course, is part of the routine. “People here are not so used to seeing Asian comedians onstage. I have to say something about my heritage, otherwise, people will keep thinking about it. It's good to say something up front to make people feel comfortable. That's why when I got on Letterman, the first thing I said was 'So, I'm Irish' and basically joked about my ethnic background a little bit. People could laugh and forget about it, then I can move on with my jokes.”

As Joe found out firsthand, though, the jokes that American audience lap up won't necessarily be appreciated by the Chinese.

“I went to Beijing in 2008, which is where all the stand-up comedy happens. I performed at one of the theaters on a Sunday afternoon. I basically translated all my jokes from English to Chinese. Maybe only about two jokes got a strong response. They were play-on-logic jokes, those that don't rely on cultural context.”

In China, a joke from a hundred years ago will still be appreciated by the audience. In the US, jokes have to be new, current and very up-to-date.
One reason could be that there are differences between the American and Chinese brands of humor. Joe points out that in China, humor has more tradition. A joke from a hundred years ago will still be appreciated by the audience. In the US, jokes have to be new, current and very up-to-date. There's also more sarcasm in American humor. Plus, the audience have different expectations.

“In America, they expect stand-up comedy to be very fast-paced; they want to laugh every 10 seconds. In China, you can spend more time setting up the joke, taking your time before delivering the punchline. The audience is not in a huge hurry. They're basically drink tea and eat some peanuts while listening to the jokes.”

A constant struggle

Joe has also made his mark in China. He was on CCTV and has been featured on radio, newspapers and magazines there. His parents, who still live in China and have never been to the US, didn't see the behind-the-scene struggles that Joe faced.

“It's been eight years and a lot of hard work, especially because stand-up comedy is not as popular as it was back in the 80s. It's a labor of love; I didn't make money for years and years. A lot of times, to perform onstage at a comedy club, you have to bring your own audience. As an immigrant, I didn't know anyone in this country, so I ended up talking to people on the streets in winter, trying to convince them to watch the show. The beginning was really tough.”

Joe is currently trying to develop with other comedians a TV series that reflects Asian-American life. “If you watch all the TV shows in America, there's not a single one that's mainly about Asians in the US. In the mid-90s, there was a TV sitcom by Margaret Cho, but it was very short-lived. It's a long shot. It's very hard to get a TV deal and people tend to watch reality shows more than scripted TV shows nowadays.”

Whether he pulls it off or not, Joe will probably continue on trying to make people laugh. “I just love humor. That's kind of the way I see life. You know, in this world, we had Hitler who killed millions of people and the great humanitarian Mother Teresa. But in the end, they both died. That, to me, is the biggest joke. I'm here to harvest jokes from everyday life. That's how I see the world.”

  / Written by Geni Raitisoja /

*President Obama canceled his appearance at the event. US Vice-President Joe Biden was the guest of honor in his stead.

How To Make Baozi

If you've ever been in any Chinatown anywhere in the world, your curiosity might have been piqued by the sight of snowy white buns being kept warm in steamers. Baozi, or steamed bun, is one of the staples of Chinese cuisine, served by street vendors and enjoyed anytime of day. It is a popular breakfast dish in China.

The Origination
According to China Daily, Zhuge Liang (181-234), a military strategist from the Three Kingdoms period (220-280), is credited with inventing the baozi. He and his troops were on an expedition to south China when his army caught a plague. Zhuge made a bun shaped like a human head from flour, pork and beef. The bun, called mantou (flour head) was offered as a sacrifice to the gods and was later given to the soldiers to cure their illness.

The name stuck in parts of southern China. In Shanghai, steamed bread, either with or without filling, is still called mantou. In northern China, though, people call the bun baozi, as bao means wrapping.
The thought of steamed bread -- for in essence, this is what baozi is – might not seem appetizing to the Western palate. But it really is worth a try. There are as many types of baozi as there are fillings, and only the imagination can limit what you can put inside these buns.

How to make baozi
Ingredients
DOUGH
1 ½ cups warm water
3 tsp dry yeast
2 Tbsp white sugar
4 cups white bread flour
½ tsp salt
½ tsp sesame oil
FILLINGS
There are the classic fillings of pork and beef, of course. Marinate some pork, with fat, if you can get it, in a mixture of soy sauce, sugar, ground black pepper, cooking wine, salt, ginger powder or fresh grated ginger, chopped green onion, sesame oil. How many each seasoning you should put in depends on your taste. You can adjust. You may add some cold water to make the fillings softer.

You could also try using oriental meatballs with salted eggs, duck meat, shredded chicken or even just vegetables,or red bean paste for filling. In Cantonese cuisine, there is cha siu baau, a steamed bun filled with barbecued pork.
Making a dough
1. Stir the yeast and 1 tablespoon of sugar into 1 cup of the warm water. Let stand for 15 minutes. Skip this step if your yeast does not need proofing (it will say so on the packet)
2. Sift the flour and sugar together.
3. If you pre-mixed the yeast, add to the flour and the rest of the sugar in a mixing bowl.
4. If you didn't pre-mix the yeast, mix flour, salt if desired, and the sugar, then mix in yeast in a mixing bowl.   Add 1 cup of the water in a steady stream, mixing constantly.
5. Mix together. The dough will begin to form a ragged clump. If the dough does not stick together, add a small amount more water.
6. Knead dough for 5-10 minutes. The dough will stiffen, and should spring back slowly when indented with a finger. The surface should be smooth and slightly shiny.
7. Coat the bottom of a large bowl with the sesame oil to give a thin film, and place the dough in the bowl. Roll over so it is coated with the oil.
8. Allow dough to rise and double in volume in a warm place for 1-1½ hours, or in a cool place like a fridge for 2-3 hours. A slow rise in a cool place will produce a finer texture.
9. Punch dough down. If you wish at this point, you can allow it to rise and double again, in a warm or cool place, and punch down again. A double rise also results in a finer, more tender texture.
10. Form into a large pancake shape.
11. Divide the dough into two long rolls, and cut each into 6 pieces.
12. Roll each piece of dough into a ball. If you are making plain baozi, go straight to Step 19 now. If making filled baozi, then flatten each ball into a 6-inch disc.
13. Shape the disc so that it is significantly thicker in the centre than at the edges.
14. Position one hand as if you were holding a normal drinking glass, and place a disc of dough over the top.
15. Using two fingers, push the centre of the disc down by about 1 inch.
16. Place 1 dessert spoon of filling into the well you just made in the dough.
17. Still holding your hand in position, use your other hand to fold the edges of the dough together, in a sort of pleated fashion.
18. Pinch edges together and twist (so that you twist a small portion at the top right off) to close the baozi.
19. Place baozi on cabbage leaves or directly in the steamer, 3 inches to a side.
20. Allow to rise in warm place 1 hour. The dough should end up springy to the touch.

 Cooking
1. Place buns in a steamer. Try to position so they do not touch one another. It will almost certainly require several batches to steam all the buns, unless you have lots of steamers, or a very big one. You can put them seam up (opening flower effect) or seam down (smooth, round top).
2. Steam buns over gently boiling water for 20 minutes.
3. After this time, remove the pan and steamer from heat, but don't remove the steamer from the pan, or lift the lid of the steamer. By allowing the steam to subside gradually like this, you prevent the dough from collapsing on contact with the cold air.
4. After a few minutes, carefully lift the lid and remove the bun gently from the steamer.
5. When cool enough to handle, remove parchment paper from bottom of buns. Serve warm.
 /Originally written by Geni Raitisoja, adapted by Qing, thanks for the photo contributors 

How EBay Failed In China

In 2004, eBay had just entered China and was planning to dominate the China market. Alibaba was a local Chinese company that helped small- and medium-sized enterprises conducting business online. Most people in the West had barely heard about it.

When eBay entered the China market, Jack Ma, founder and CEO of Alibaba, was alarmed that “someday, eBay would come in our direction.” He knew too well that there was no clear distinction between small businesses and individual consumers in China. As a defensive strategy, Ma decided to launch a competing consumer-to-consumer (C2C) auction site, not to make money, but to fend off eBay from taking away Alibaba’s customers.

A new Web site named Taobao—meaning “digging for treasure”—was launched free of charge for individuals buying and selling virtually any consumer goods, from cosmetics to electronic parts.

In 2004, I visited Alibaba at its headquarters in Hangzhou. It is located on a campus of three ten-story buildings in the northeastern part of Hangzhou, about a ten-minute taxi drive from West Lake. In the lobby, a flat panel TV was streaming video clips of Jack Ma speaking at various public events where his admirers, most of them in their twenties, were cheering him like a rock star. While visiting Alibaba’s headquarters in Hangzhou, I felt the same “insanely great” energy of entrepreneurship as I felt in Silicon Valley. When I asked a senior manager at Alibaba whether the company was worried that it would be bought by eBay, I was blown away by the answer: “We will buy eBay!”

EBay, on the other hand, began its most aggressive campaigns to dominate the market and thwart competitors. Soon after Taobao was launched, eBay signed exclusive advertising rights with major portals Sina, Sohu, and Netease with the intention of blocking advertisements from Taobao. In addition, eBay injected another $100 million to build its China operation, now renamed “eBay EachNet,” and was spreading its ads on buses, subway platforms, and everywhere else.

Ma fought back cleverly. Knowing that most small business people would rather watch TV than log on to the Internet, Ma secured advertisements for Taobao on major TV channels. In 2004, one could easily feel the heat of fierce competition between eBay EachNet and Taobao. When I was taking a taxi in Shanghai, I noticed the ads of eBay EachNet on the back of the driver’s seat; when I checked into my hotel, I heard the ads for Taobao popping up on TV almost every half hour. Since its name means “digging for treasure” in Chinese, it attracted a lot of attention by a smart play on words. While most people in the West had never heard of Taobao, its name was heard loud and strong in China.

Nevertheless, most industry observers were suspicious about Taobao’s future, particularly its sustainability. Unlike eBay EachNet, which charged its sellers for listing and transaction fees, Taobao was free to use. Neither Ma nor any members from the management team gave a definite timeline as to how long this “free period” was going to last. “Free is not a business model,” the doubters said. Some thought Ma was crazy and nicknamed him “Crazy Ma.”

No doubt Crazy Ma was changing the game. Taobao got a quick start with its free listings and continued to gain momentum as more and more users switched from eBay EachNet to Taobao. According to a Morgan Stanley report, Taobao was more customer focused and user friendly than eBay EachNet. With most users not sophisticated about auctions, the majority of Taobao’s listings were for sales. Only 10 percent of its listings were for auctions, while eBay EachNet had about 40 percent of its listings for auctions. Taobao had also better terms for its customers: it offered longer listing periods (fourteen days) and let customers extend for one more period automatically. EBay EachNet did not have this flexibility.

Taobao’s listings appeared to be more customer-centric while eBay EachNet’s listings more product-centric. For example, Taobao’s listings were organized into several categories, such as “Men,” “Women,” and so on, while eBay EachNet stuck to its global platform, grouping users into “Buyers” and “Sellers.” At that time, China had about three hundred million cell phone users versus ninety million Internet users. Taobao offered instant messaging and voice mail to mobile phones for buyers and sellers because Chinese users were cell-phone savvy rather than computer savvy.

It was clear that Taobao had an upper hand against its global counterpart because it really understood Chinese customers. As a result, Taobao had higher customer satisfaction than eBay EachNet. According to iResearch, a Beijing-based research firm, the user satisfaction level was 77 percent for Taobao versus 62 percent for eBay EachNet. The experience of competing with eBay gave Ma tremendous confidence. He was determined to win: “eBay may be a shark in the ocean, but I am a crocodile in the Yangtze River. If we fight in the ocean, we lose—but if we fight in the river, we win.”

By March 2006, Taobao had outpaced eBay EachNet and became the leader in China’s consumer-to-consumer (C2C) market, with 67 percent market share in terms of users, while eBay EachNet had only 29 percent market share. “The competition is over,” Ma exclaimed. “It’s time to claim the battlefield.”

On December 20, 2006, Meg Whitman, eBay’s then CEO, flew to Shanghai to take part in a press conference to announce a new joint venture with Beijing-based Internet portal Tom Online, which provides wireless value-added multimedia services. It was, in reality, a formal announcement of eBay’s withdrawal from the online auction market in China. EBay shut down its China site, eBay EachNet, and took a back seat to a company with only $173 million in revenue and no experience in the online auction business.

Jack Ma represents a new generation of savvy Chinese competitors who should not be underestimated. They study their markets and bring to bear their local knowledge. They learn from their competition and from their own mistakes as they move up the competitive landscape.The case of Alibaba provides an invaluable lesson for multinationals to succeed in China market:
First, eBay failed to recognize that the Chinese market and the business environment are very different from that of the West. EBay sent a German manager to lead the China operation and brought in a chief technology officer from the United States. Neither one spoke Chinese or understood the local market. It was eBay’s biggest mistake.
Second, because the top management team didn’t understand the local market, they spent a lot of money doing the wrong things, such as advertising on the Internet in a country where small businesses didn’t use the Internet. The fact that eBay had a strong brand in the United States didn’t mean it would be a strong brand in China.
Third, rather than adapt products and services to local customers, eBay stuck to its “global platform,” which again did not fit local customers’ tastes and preferences.
  /Written by  Helen H. Wang for Forbes/