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I want to comment as a Chinese. All the facts presented in the film are solid and true, but the problems lie in the interpretations and implications. Lack of l
by yange 9y ago
I want to comment as a Chinese. All the facts presented in the film are solid and true, but the problems lie in the interpretations and implications.
Lack of law enforcement doesn't mean there's no rule of doing business in China. In fact like an old saying in China, 'no rules, no shapes.' Rules aren't necessarily laws, as mentioned in the film, 'Guanxi' is something you have to build up if you want to do business in China. Larger your 'Guanxi' network, faster and easier you can do things than others. And there's 'Koubei' come into play. It means the trustworthy of an entity, not defined by some auditing companies, but complimented by other fellows in the field. A decent 'Koubei' worth more than any auditing report. Like in the film where a company can buy auditing reports to fraud investors, but a company with decent 'Koubei' but no auditing reports would never do that (at least not to local investors). So the rule here is you have to build your 'Guanxi' network with people of decent 'Koubei', meanwhile maintaining your own decent 'Koubei' so others want to build 'Guanxi' with you.
This is something even Chinese kids would know, but just appears to be difficult for the West to get a grasp of it.
Can't trust the government doesn't mean you can't trust anyone. At least we trust in common interests. There's another saying in China, 'only kids talk justice, adults talk interests.' In a market where you can basically do anything with your 'Guanxi', there's no right or wrong in doing things, what only matter is your profits. (Of course there are red lines you should never cross and none of these were written in the law neither. They are the 'unspoken rules'.)
This is where things get funny when foreign investment firms like Roth Capital entered the market. They know nothing about the rules here, and neither these hungry American investors who wanted so hard to take a bite on the largest pie in the century. And they don't even know how to protect their selves in China. No surprise they will be fooled.
But seriously, who can you blame for? There's another old saying in China, 'you came to the town, you play by the rules.' You should do your research before betting your pensions on some random factories oversea.
The last part of the film made me laugh. They were implying that since these crappy factories are frauds, all Chinese companies including Alibaba and Sinopec are lairs. This just shows how ignorant they are and they still don't understand the Chinese rules. Sinopec is the second largest SOC in China. Their don't even need to have 'Guanxi', they ARE the 'Guanxi'. And Alibaba is like Amazon, YouTube, eBay, PayPal, Yahoo etc. all combined. It's the monopoly in this field in China. It's simply too large to fail. If you are comparing companies like these with random crappy factories out of nowhere, you just don't seem to understand how powerful these companies are in China, and clearly you don't understand how the Chinese market works.
The last part is mainly pathos-based, and full of logical mistakes. But I don't know, since this is basically what they've always been doing, getting people worked up against the companies so they can make money from shorting.
Here are some short reviews from Chinese viewers [1], and I think they represent the mainstream opinion of Chinese people.
[1]: https://movie.douban.com/subject/27115571/comments https://movie.douban.com/subject/27115571/comments