China is way ahead of Europe when it comes to its digital transformation, says Zhejiang University professor Mark Greeven, author of Business Ecosystems in China: Alibaba and Competing Baidu, Tencent, Xiaomi and LeEco to the NRC. Europe is way over-regulated compared to China, he says, and companies get in China much more leeway to experiment.

Only last month the China Speakers Bureau started to make a cluster of its experts on the US-China trade war, although many did not realize that war had already been started. It did trigger off some requests from our clients.

Internet giants Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba increasingly buy into innovative companies to stay ahead of the competition. They have become dominant investment vehicles, says business analyst Shaun Rein, author of The War for China’s Wallet: Profiting from the New World Order, to the South China Morning Post.

European companies are running behind in defining a good strategy in catching up with China, writes Mark Greeven, professor at the Zhejiang University,  in the LSE Business Review. “The reality is that Chinese companies have no choice but to innovate and upgrade in global value chains.”

For a long time, working around the clock – from 9 to 9, six days a week known as the 996-rule – was common in China’s startup working culture. But those times are changing, says SOSV managing director William Bao Bean, a leading voice in China’s startup scene to the BBC. “China has moved from a society that was told what to do, to one that is doing what it wants to, and that’s also a millennial thing,” he says.

Zhang Ying, professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at RSM Erasmus University and founder and head of Erasmus-Huawei Collaboration Program, has started as head of the Erasmus China Business Centre on May 1. 

China’s financial authorities might be wary of Bitcoins and other digital currencies, but the country is embracing the underlying blockchain technology. Self-driving cars, agriculture, retail and other industries use the deep pockets of the government to introduce the new technology.
At the China Speakers Bureau, we offer a range of speakers who can help you to make sense out of this new direction China is taking, leading the way for global innovation.

WeChat, Tencent’s mobile platform, is now reaching 900 million users in China, and in four year time it has become an indispensable tool for anybody living in the country, says WeChat expert Matthew Brennan at InTheBlack. “WeChat is not a social media. Think of it as an operating system for your life in China’,” says Brennan.

The US is moving from a trade war on commodities towards tech firms like ZTE and Huawei, trying to get a foothold with for example 5G into the US, says economist Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® in the Nikkei Asian Review. “I think there probably is a desire to try and do what can be done to retard the progress of the Chinese firms in that.”

The trade war, triggered off by US president Donald Trump, is about much more than trading commodities. The real struggle is about technical leadership between China and the US, says leading economist Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® to the Los Angeles Times.