Båda har ju börser. Ungefär där slutar likheterna. Här är min rapport från ett veckoslut i båda städerna. Den blev dock på engelska för jag ville testa den på en del kännare.
Shenzhen –
model for China
After
arguing a lot for Shanghai over the years I visited Shanghai and Shenzhen over
one extended weekend.
Shanghai
seems to have lost some steam. Not much is going on. Foreigners now tend slowly
to leave the city in favour of Hong Kong and Singapore (pollution + more and
more severe internet restrictions) but I had no statistics.
Shenzhen on
the other hand is proud to continue to grow and being home for many Chinese
high-tech companies. The city is clean and no house is older than 20 years.
Pollution seems to be low, no traffic jams and the shopping areas are full, but
not overfull, with nicely dressed customers.
The
proximity to Hong Kong is an asset but I also heard thinly veiled criticism of
Hong Kong and everything Hong Kong represents in China. People in Shenzhen are
fed up being looked upon by Hong Kong sales people as second class citizens.
They now prefer to go shopping in Japan instead. “Hong Kong has to face up to
realities” was one comment. As Shenzhen today has more than 10 million
inhabitants, compared to Hong Kong’s 7, I felt they might be on the look-out
for what will happen 2047 when the SAR model might be scrapped.
I had a
long meeting with the leading think tank China Development Institute (CDI) in order
to talk about CSR. This is what came out:
CSR was very much on people’s minds
10 years ago and has now been integrated in the normal thinking. I know that people
in China like the most recent fads and old ideas are not of much interest but
this argument was not to my liking even if I can give it some credit regarding
for example the reporting requirements of the stock exchanges. My
counterargument to this was:
Yes if you google CSR +
China/Shenzhen/Guangdong or whatever you come to a lot of papers and events
during the years 2005-08. That is a pity as what is not spoken about is often
forgotten. In Sweden we have CSR events every month and new people turn up to
listen and learn. Also the CSR thinking is developing every year. China has not
grasped this as they do not take part in the international debate.
China has mostly seen CSR as a tool
to facilitate sales to MNCs. China has not understood the domestic need to
improve. I took examples of environment and anti-corruption, which cannot be
addressed if companies do not have an advanced CSR strategy, but got the
feeling we were not quite understanding each others.
When foreign demand now has
decreased China has to send more companies out to export. The CSR issue is more
important than ever. I am not sure Chinese officials understand how big
problems Chinese companies are meeting abroad.
I mentioned SASAC as the leading
instrument for state owned companies in China and their interest in CSR. To my
surprise they had problems in understanding which organization I talked about!
Obviously the SOEs are not dominating Shenzhen.
2. China needs innovation. This is what
everybody is craving for now. Anybody who has good ideas how to improve
innovation is welcome. My answer to this was: yes innovation is crucial but its
nature is that you cannot plan it from above, deep changes has to be done inside
the society. I then got a strange argument. “An example of a company that has
not been successful in modernizing itself is Volvo that turns out the same
style car year after year”. When I “admitted” that Volvo is from my country
they apologized for their sincerity.
3. Shenzhen has a lot of famous
companies. We all know the successful ones like Huawei, ZTE, Tencent, BYD but
what about Foxconn? Foxconn is a
Taiwanese company manufacturing laptops, mobiles etc. for large international
companies. The answer was that yes, Foxconn like some other Taiwanese and South
Korean companies have Japanese inspired military organisation and it is not to
the liking of everybody, but they had done a good job an employed many people.
This was the second time I heard that top Chinese thinkers refrain from
criticizing Foxconn.
4. Will the Guangdong model survive
when foreign companies withdrew following the economic crises in 2008? The
answer was that Guangdong is not one system, it is a ladder of different models
where Shenzhen is on the top. Some cities have relied on migrant labour for low
end production. They will have a problem. The migrant labour is not about to
come back, the pay difference has decreased and China is not going to allow
whole families to resettle. Therefore these cities have to move up the value
chain.
5. I had to go back to the car
industry. Can BYD (Beyond Your Dreams) really compete with the international giants
in the area of electric cars? Toyota and others are spending billions in
developing new batteries! The answer was that BYD has been successful on
several export markets (they had forgotten which) and batteries is their
speciality so no worries there.
Conclusions.
We have overlooked Shenzhen as we
don’t go there and Shenzhen itself has a weak external profile as they have
limited exposure and few international contacts. This is after all the 22nd
largest financial centre in the world (Stockholm is 36 according to WEF).
It is hard to get meeting with
people in Shenzhen, as in other cities in China. If you are not an organisation
that is well known you have to fight for every contact. This works very much to
Shenzhen’s disadvantage. Hong Kong is in this case the extreme opposite.
To discuss in a way that can yield
understanding requires rather long and deep meetings. Panel debates when you
deliver a couple of punch lines are less efficient. The think tank I visited
had few international contacts and none with Sweden. It is a pity.
Needless to say the relations with
Hong Kong were rather tense. For a Shenzhen person Hong Kong is clinging back
to old ways of thinking. To a Hong Kong person Shenzhen people are laid-back
and do not work what amount of hard labor you must put in to be competitive.
