Chinese for Business Blog

If you are looking for a job in China, having a Mandarin version of your resume (简历 jiǎnlì) will increase the chances your resume will be read all the way through. Cover letters (求职信 qiúzhí xìn) are less common in China, so a resume might be your only opportunity to target your human resources specialists and headhunters, who may come across you through a keyword search or by skimming a stack of resume copies. A Chinese resume can be up to two pages long and contain as many as six different sections if you have enough relevant information. Information should be clearly demarcated by either text boxes, or bold horizontal lines separating sections, and labels, headers, and subheaders. Even if your Chinese is at the beginner level, adjusting your resume to Chinese formatting standards brings you one step closer to an interview.

China has no shortage of jobs opportunities for foreigners, but the best opportunities aren't always forthcoming via a conventional job search. Part of the reason the job search in China is more complicated is that while "guanxi," (关系 guānxì) or relationships, are a fundamental part of the business culture, it takes time to develop such connections. While you should never give up on building guanxi, diversifying your job search will give you the best options for employment. Fortunately, many Chinese companies, especially tech companies, are looking outside their networks to fill positions requiring foreign expertise. Your future employer might be trying to find you through network referrals, job fairs, or by keyword searching for your niche skillset, possibly on a job site you haven’t heard of yet. 

Baidu is described as “the Google of China” so often that it has become a cliché. However, Baidu may have actually surpassed Google in the realm of speech-recognition technology. If you’ve ever asked your smartphone or PC’s “virtual assistant” a question, you’ve interacted with speech recognition (or intelligent voice) technology). Baidu’s nurturing of exceptional talent has certainly played a role in their being discussed as a potential industry “game-changer”: Chief Scientist Andrew Ng created the algorithms that still power the Android OS voice search functionality. He also helped to found the online learning platform Coursera, and currently splits his time between Baidu’s Beijing campus and Stanford University. Baidu’s investment in its Deep Learning Institute has also paid significant dividends, and they have made great strides in truly useable (rather than merely entertaining) augmented reality (AR). 

“Guanxi”(关系 guānxì) cannot be directly translated as "connections" or "networking" because of its deeper implications in the Chinese business world, as well as in Chinese society as a whole. While "guanxi" is an ancient and complex aspect of Chinese society that makes doing business in China seem intimidating, forming "guanxi" relations can be as simple as spending the time to get to know your business partners on a personal level. Having good "guanxi" is essential to doing long-term, profitable business or having a good career in China. In consideration of the importance of "guanxi" to business relations, let's look at six key aspects of "guanxi" that will help you understand how to intuitively feel your way through relations in China. 

The Chinese government has invested much more than any other country in solar, making its top solar companies the dominant players in the market. Although China is also the world’s worst carbon polluter, last year it became the world’s biggest solar power consumer and producer, surpassing Germany’s 38.4 gigawatts by generating 43.2 gigawatts of solar capacity (one gigawatt can power 300-700 thousand homes). Those 43 gigawatts accounted for a quarter of global solar capacity, and China is continuing to expand its renewable energy infrastructure at blistering pace. While it remains to be seen if it can be done efficiently, Chinese government officials have set their sights on an international network of Chinese renewable energy infrastructure, which would eventually generate enough power to literally run the world. 

 The Chinese basketball star and former NBA icon Yao Ming was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on September 9^th, 2016.